The local guardians protecting African lions | Resson Kantai Duff

TED Talks Daily

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2022

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

Conservation efforts in Africa have typically been led by “parachute conservationists” -- outsiders who drop in thinking they have all the answers, hire locals to implement them and then disappear. But conservationist Resson Kantai Duff has a better way to save wildlife in Africa: let locals lead these efforts themselves. She calls for a major shift in how conservation in Africa works, showing why the people closest to the land are the ones best fit to care for it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu.
0:06.7	It's staggering how much wildlife has disappeared just within the past 50 years.
0:12.9	Reison Canthai Duff is calling for a major shift in the way conservation works in Africa.
0:19.2	In her talk from TED Women in 2021, she makes the case for why
0:22.8	the people closest to the land that needs conserving should be the ones designing the best ways
0:28.6	to care for it. The world has lost 68% of its wildlife populations in under 50 years, and there are people around the world
0:40.1	working to protect and grow the wildlife that is left. In Africa, however, the approach to
0:47.1	conserving this wildlife has almost always involved a separation of people from nature,
0:52.7	the involvement, but never leadership from local people,
0:56.3	and a problem statement that has often come from outside our continent.
1:01.0	Basically, years ago, colonial governments decided that we, as Africans, were not fit to take care of our own wildlife.
1:07.6	And so people who had lived alongside wildlife for generations were removed from their
1:13.3	ancestral lands and called new names. Poachers, encroaches, squatters. The story of conservation as a result
1:23.6	has almost always then involved only a foreign scientist with a clipboard or a guy in green with a gun
1:30.6	there to protect that wildlife from everyone else. The rest of us have never existed in this story.
1:38.3	And those who came to save species came from the outside and when they came, they were labeled heroes there to
1:46.0	teach local people how to live alongside wildlife on the fringes of wild lands that they used to own.
1:54.1	This has created two distinct problems. One, because we don't often tell our own stories,
2:00.2	it means that those who are closest to the wildlife are not seen as as invested in conserving that wildlife compared to those who've come from the outside.
2:10.0	And because foreign conservationists have sometimes not taken into consideration the needs of local people, they are then seen as caring more for animal life than for human life.
2:22.7	If we do not change this approach to conservation in Africa,
2:26.5	we will lose all of our wildlife.
	...

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