The primary reason that we are losing the fight to save Western gorillas is simply that not enough money is being spent. Conservation budgets in Central Africa are miniscule compared to what we are accustomed to paying for wildlife conservation in the developed world. The budget for a single large park in the US is larger than the annual conservation budget of an entire Central African nation. Unless public and private donors from the developed countries answer the call and substantially increase funding levels, Western gorillas and other large forest mammals will likely be driven to the brink of extinction over the next decade.
However, simply throwing more money around will not solve the problem. Saving Western gorillas will require a fundamental change in strategy. Many current strategies are either inappropriate for the conditions prevailing in Western gorilla range countries or operate on time scales that are too long to address the immediate crisis. What Western gorillas desperately need is a “Back to Basics” approach: a movement away from high flying conservation concepts and towards plain old, nuts and bolts natural resource management: particularly law enforcement and protected area management. Unfortunately, the conservation situation in Central Africa closely parallels developments in the “New Economy” over the last decade. Dotcoms became fabulously wealthy on the basis of innovative business plans and slick marketing but then crashed when they failed to deliver a product. Conservation in Central Africa has followed the same trajectory but the consequence of the crash is not a wave of bankruptcies but, rather, the devastation of Western gorillas and other large forest mammals. What we need at this point is a little less Dotcom thinking and a little more “Old Economy” action.
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