Envisioning the future: Will South Africa's protected areas survive in a changing world?

A buffalo bull awaits sale in the game capture bomas in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal. (Photo: Tony Carnie)

20 Jan 2025

Wild spaces are shrinking steadily across the world, raising fears about their long-term future. Three new publications provide some insight into Africa’s conservation high points and potholes.

What might South Africa’s public “game parks” look like in 50 or 100 years?

Should they be enlarged considerably - as recommended by global biology experts charting the rapid spiral towards extinction by so many natural species? Or will wild spaces just slowly shrivel away?

Will protected areas even exist in their present form in a continent characterised by poverty, land hunger and one of the fastest-growing human populations in the world?

Global travellers peering from aircraft windows will have noticed the probable trajectory.

The great bison herds have gone from North America, mostly replaced by corn farms and oil derricks. Europe also looks pretty much like an enormous crop farm, while China and India are home to the largest chunk of the 8.2 billion-strong human population.

Quite simply, space for non-human forms of life is running out fast and most people born in big cities have never been exposed to the natural world.

And if they have never seen or experienced this old world, will the new children and adults still value our global, natural heritage? Will they show any excitement about visiting or protecting Africa’s famous Big Five, never mind the less glamorous components of the natural world?

Thankfully, there are still large areas of mostly intact natural spaces that have yet to be plundered and which are likely to persist because they are still inaccessible, unsuited to agriculture or devoid of mineral wealth.

Returning to the question of the future of wild spaces in Africa and South Africa, making any intelligent predictions is fraught with imponderables.

The very term “game reserves” is an anachronism, reminiscent of a time when animal species were hunted for their venison or for sport trophies by the nobility of European society. The era of “Out of Africa”, “Daktari” and “Operation Noah” has also passed.

Reflecting on his lengthy career, veteran conservation manager and scientist Dr George Hughes (85) looks mainly backwards — but also towards potential solutions for those who will follow in his footsteps as conservation leaders of the future.

Hughes, who aspired towards a career in nature conservation as a 12-year-old student at Estcourt High School, eventually became chief executive of the Natal Parks Board – or the “Varke Raad” (Pigs Board), the disparaging term used by several farmers and hunters who felt threatened by the board’s strict game protection mandate.

Dr George Hughes (right) congratulates Lapalala Wilderness founders Dale Parker and Clive Walker after they bought the first black rhinos at the annual Natal Game Auction in 1990. (Photo: Supplied)

Established in 1947 as the Natal Parks, Game and Fish Preservation Board, the new organisation was something of a maverick, shaped by the politics of that era — just one year before the National Party took power and began to institutionalise apartheid.

Politicians in the former British colony did not take kindly to central government proposals that Natal should hand over some of its flagship conservation areas to the National Parks Board. So they set up their own provincial board, an organisation that would endure for half a century and become an internationally respected conservation leader.

Hughes’ new book “The Natal Parks Board – A Conservation Adventure”, provides a detailed history of the organisation and pays tribute to the many staff who helped shape it — including the back-room staff who performed less glamorous tasks than the rangers and guards at the sharp end of game capture and anti-poaching patrols.

His comprehensive chronicle of almost every aspect of the board — including policy formulation, finance, administration, and trade union negotiations — does not always make for easy reading.

Nevertheless, he provides some critical insights into the many achievements — and potholes — of the organisation before it was disbanded in 1998 and amalgamated to form its successor, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife.

Wilderness trail visitors take in the scenery above the Mfolozi River. (Photo: Wilderness Leadership School)

Hughes has always been a firm advocate of the “sustainable use” of wildlife, a concept that encompasses culling, hunting or selling “surplus” animals or natural resources. He also helped to drive the expansion and modernisation of several tourist camps to raise money for conservation and reduce reliance on the state fiscus,

He makes no apology for these positions, and lambasts some of the non-government organisations (NGOs) focused on animal rights, arguing that: “If the most extreme convictions, as espoused by many global NGOs (that it is not acceptable to kill or trade any wildlife for the benefit of humankind) is accepted as a global policy, then we shall see the ultimate disappearance of all Africa’s large mammal species.”

To support his argument, Hughes contrasts conservation policy outcomes policies in Kenya and South Africa, noting that the East African nation took a strong stance against hunting and the commercial sale of wildlife in the mid 1970s.

At the time, Kenya had somewhere between half a million and two million large mammals, with a roughly equal number in South Africa.

But almost 50 years later, there had been dramatic declines in Kenya’s wildlife estate, whereas South Africa’s wild animal populations continued to expand. To back this up, he cites research by wildlife scholar Joseph Ogutu and colleagues, who found that Kenyan wildlife numbers had declined on average by 68% between 1977 and 2016.

The declines were widespread in most of Kenya’s rangeland counties, whereas the number of sheep and goats rose by more than 76%.

Back in South Africa, however, Hughes recalls that the Natal Parks Board was a pioneer in translocating and selling wildlife to expand their living range, by providing commercial incentives to landowners.

After rescuing the white rhino from global extinction (multiplying their numbers from about 400 in early 1960s to more than 20,000 just over a decade ago) the board started selling surplus rhinos in the early 1980s for about R1,000 each.

Dr George Hughes, 85, began his career as a ranger in the Drakensberg before being appointed head of the former Natal Parks Board. (Photo: Mnqobi Zuma)

But when it was discovered that buyers were selling them to trophy hunters at huge markups (nearly R20,000 each), the Natal Parks Board held its first public auction in 1989 and raised almost R2-million from the sale of nearly 500 animals (including several white rhinos).

In 1990, the board sold the first group of endangered black rhinos and, in the early 2000s, the board raised almost R22-million from wildlife sales at a single auction. Shortly before the Natal board was disbanded to become Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, it was generating more revenue than it received in state grant funding.

Much of this revenue also came from the expansion of tourism accommodation in local wildlife reserves, despite opposition from “purist” environmental NGOs opposed to any overnight accommodation in certain protected areas.

Hughes also touches on the board’s role in fighting off a bid by Rio Tinto to turn parts of the St Lucia/iSimangaliso Wetland Park into a heavy minerals dune mine. For political reasons, Hughes opted for a more pragmatic and “balanced position” in opposing the mining plans, eschewing associations with “raucous activists” such as Dr Ian Player, who had threatened to lie down in front of the mining bulldozers.

He concludes his book by praising the “sublime” and “magnificent endeavour” of staff of the former Natal Parks Board.

‘The post-1994 transformation process is incomplete’

Not everyone agrees with Hughes’ perspectives, however, especially on the issue of “sustainable use” of wildlife.

Writing in the latest edition of Frontiers in Conservation Science, some of his former conservation colleagues have adopted a somewhat different perspective about the future of South African conservation strategies.

In a review article entitled “The shifting philosophy behind the protected area concept and its applicability in the South African context”, Paul Cryer, Serban Proches and Dave Druce argue that “truly reformist thinking” has not gained traction over the past 70 years and that “exploitative and inherently unsustainable forms of environmentalism” have endured in local conservation policies.

Lead author Cryer, who spent nearly 15 years as a wilderness guide in the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Game Reserve, argues that the post-1994 transformation process in nature conservation is incomplete.

“While the initial focus was for staff complements within conservation agencies becoming racially and gender representative, the reprioritisation of the environment within the political agenda has resulted in many of the old policies being re-enacted by a different body of people.”

Cryer and his colleagues review the work of several political ecologists and thinkers including Thomas Berry, Cormac Cullinan or Johan Rockstrom, questioning whether modern protected areas policy is really serving the objectives of human sustainability and biodiversity protection, or simply the “perpetuation of wealth extraction”.

They recognise that the topic of mounting human population growth is “uncomfortable”, especially in the African context, with some political ecologists placing it front and centre of environmental challenges and others avoiding it as a political minefield.

Tourists embark on a game drive in the Kruger National Park. (Photo: Tony Carnie)

The sandy beaches at Bhanga Nek in northern KwaZulu-Natal are a crucial nesting area for marine turtles. (Photo: George Hughes Collection)

Former Natal Parks Board game capture head Mark Cooke (right) and fellow members of his team capture a white rhino. The board donated or sold nearly 4,600 rhinos to local parks or foreign safari parks and zoos between 1962 and 1999. (Photo: Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife Archives)

“While human population growth is curtailed in most developed-world countries and slowing down in many developing regions, in re-colonised Africa it continues unabated, and land-use change is also accelerating.”

Cryer and colleagues don’t offer any quick-fix solutions on how to address this issue, but suggest that the expansion of the global agri-industry — not to feed Africa but rather to increase dividends — is also contributing to human poverty, biodiversity loss and climate change.

“If, as the political ecologists purport, capitalism itself is the engine driving human and environmental exploitation to the point of collapse, then, by definition, mainstream conservation will be incapable of supplying corrective solutions, because they would be self-destructive.”

They further cite a book entitled “The Invention of Green Colonialism” by Guillaume Blanc, who argues that some Western-based NGOs have been responsible for “naturalising” large tracts of the African continent by turning indigenous territories into parks and forcibly evicting thousands of people from the lands where they had lived for centuries.

They further suggest that the post-1994 inclusion of human-centred environmental rights in the South African Constitution may, on balance, be counterproductive to environmental care.

Attempts to create a powerful Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism had also failed and the government had opted instead for a weakened environment department.

In their view, South Africa’s Draft National Biodiversity Economy Strategy still benefits special interest groups such as the trophy hunting industry, rhino horn, ivory and lion bone traders, or industrial bio-prospectors.

They suggest that indigenous knowledge systems and local community involvement are essential to future protected area planning and management — but with a caveat.

“To assume that local communities are automatically the best custodians may not be correct, especially under circumstances where leadership elements within communities have been lured by the rewards of exploitative methodologies.”

Cryer and his colleagues also call for fundamental changes to global legal systems, which they argue are founded on humanity’s paternal and exploitative dominion over the global community of life.

“While many indigenous knowledge systems address sustainability and the morality of environmental protection, the juggernaut of industrialisation and expansion has, intentionally and passively, undermined, eroded and assimilated many indigenous cultures, along with their philosophies of law.”

Time for more optimism, less focus on doom

Dr Simon Pooley, a London-based environmental science lecturer who grew up in the game reserves of KwaZulu-Natal, believes conservationists should be putting more thought into developing truly “transformational” and optimistic visions for the future — rather than new ways to catalogue the demise of nature.

In a journal article entitled Conservation and coexistence at a crossroads, Pooley observes that: “Biodiversity is crashing, and quite a lot is known about where and why.

An immobilised elephant is hoisted aboard a transporter truck in Mkhuze Game Reserve in 2018, prior to being relocated to Zinave National Park in Mozambique. (Photo: Tony Carnie)

A tourist dozes beneath the bubble of his mosquito net as the sun rises in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park wilderness area. (Photo: Tony Carnie)

A buffalo bull awaits sale in the game capture bomas in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal. (Photo: Tony Carnie)

“There seems to be an inevitable slide toward creating a map as big as the territory. This complexity cannot be wished away, but perhaps conservationists can consider how best to engage with it. What kinds of frameworks and engagements will be fruitful, and which will lead only deeper into describing complexity and cataloguing decline more completely?” he asks.

He notes that many of his students get depressed or switched off by the traditional approaches to studying and defending dwindling wildlife populations and protected areas.

“What is missing? Sometimes, conservation as a field seems to have, rather than a vision for a desirable future, instead an interim vision for the best ways to get there (better science informing better policy and management).

“The focus is on the rigours of preventing biodiversity loss, rather than on achieving clarity on the visions of what living well in nature might look like… There are no panaceas in conservation — the challenges are too complicated and diverse. However, acknowledging this diversity and complexity in nature and human societies requires neither giving in to anarchy nor trying to impose blueprints for saving the natural world,” Pooley concludes. DM

Hard copies of The Natal Parks Board – A Conservation Adventure can be ordered via email through the author: [email protected]

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Our Burning Planet

‘The post-1994 transformation process is incomplete’

Time for more optimism, less focus on doom