Why “Our Environment”?

Our Environment e-Newsletter, Winter 2012, Volume 1, Issue 1

Interconnectedness is the most important concept in wildlife conservation. It’s hardly obvious that ordering seafood for dinner in Germany, for example, might directly result in the death of African wildlife until Professor Justin Brashares unveiled the connection a few years ago. Justin showed that European fishery policies exploited traditional marine resources in coastal Africa, forcing local populations to substitute wildlife for fish as a protein source. In his brief career, Justin bridged the science and policy divide by unveiling the hard truth that food security and equity must underlie successful efforts to maintain the emblematic large game of Africa.

For our inaugural Our Environment newsletter, we interrupt Justin’s sabbatical to ask him a few questions about his passion for research and his concerns for the world’s biodiversity.

Did you know that when you Google your name, one of the related searches that appears is “Justin Brashares bushmeat trade”? How did you end up studying this topic?

I try to lay off the self-Googling, so it’s a relief to hear my name is not associated with far more embarrassing things! I was a PhD student studying a species of small antelope called oribi in West Africa. My research required long, hot days searching for oribi and sitting for hours to record their behavior. Picture Jane Goodall and her chimps except replace the charismatic chimps with small, tan antelopes that spend their days sitting in the shade, regurgitating grass.

I spent months searching for oribi in remote areas of Ghana and at many sites I’d find that someone had shot or snared my hard-earned study animals within days of my discovering them. I set out to determine why people were hunting the innocent oribi and soon found myself walking and talking through wildlife markets (aka bushmeat markets) throughout West Africa.

I began to appreciate that wildlife consumption is one part of a highly complex and dynamic process by which people, most of them living in poverty, endeavor to put money in their pocket and food on their table. I became convinced that understanding the social, economic, geographic and other factors that drove people to use and rely on wildlife was the key to achieving sustainability of wildlife harvests and thereby ensuring a future for wildlife in West Africa.

I had no idea at the time that the bushmeat trade is a global phenomenon that annually provides billions of dollars of revenue, and is a critical source of calories and nutrients to hundreds of millions of people. But it is also among the greatest threats to biodiversity on our planet. [Read more...]