Parked at a panacea
A RESEARCH paper published in Nature (see: Ineffective) suggests the only way to improve the efficacy of the protected areas (PA) network (sanctuaries and national parks) is to increase the area under their coverage in the tropics and envelope greater biodiversity. This is so, the researchers claim because the parks have failed to give sanctuary to the immense biodiversity that cohabits with human presence. Of more than 1,400 species studied, they find almost 12 per cent not covered by the PA network.
But they forget that the creation of a protected area is not an ecological concept. It is a political process of dispossession. It is about power over and access to resources. The endangered fruit bat might just get its niche protected because the nominal wildlife pallbearers, the tiger or the elephant, also roam the area but the individual who