Andrew Balmford is a Cambridge professor and a big Camembert in conservation circles. He is a front runner in recommending that we should intensify the amount of crops produced on farmlands as a way of “sparing” wild places, has conducted research showing that primary school children better remember Pokemon than they do British wildlife species and is an avid advocate for spreading good news stories in conservation.
Wild Hope follows Andrew’s journey to every continent save Antarctica in search of stories where people and policies have succeeded in bucking the somewhat usual trend of environmental destruction and species declines.
In Assam, Andrew explores how India’s last remaining one-horned rhinos are being protected against mounting pressures for their ivory horns because of brave park rangers and local pride and awe of these animals. Here, Andrew shares a conversation with a local rhino poacher shunned by his community and promising to change his ways.
In North America, Andrew looks at how clever thinking helped resolve the Woodpecker Wars: an unfortunate state of affairs where policies put in place with the specific aim of helping a rare species of woodpecker actually managed the exact opposite (with some landowners even opting to illegally shoot the rare birds to avoid having to meet the costs of providing a home for them on their lands).
Popping into the Netherlands, Andrew examines how a whole country has stepped up to the challenge of restoring nature at an unprecedented scale, literally reworking its landscapes and wetlands to accommodate wild areas, and even building huge wildlife crossings across some of its busiest roads.
In Northern Ecuador, Andrew explores how one woman with an unconventional approach viewed forest loss through the eyes of local people. Instead of focusing on how deforestation was impacting birds, like many scientists had before her to little avail, this woman collected data showing how important forest patches were in catching rolling fogs during the dry season, that then watered local farmers’ croplands. In other words, she was able to demonstrate to local people the cost to their economy pf cutting forest down in the past and into the future, and use this information to find solutions both for nature and people.
Andrew visits California to see how a small band of fisherman were able to make sustainable fishing profitable and goes to Australia to see the one mining company that has done more than any other to allow nature to thrive once more after mining operations in action.
But as a zoology student, I was as shocked as a Jerboa sleeping on a jack-in-the-box to find that my favourite story of all was about invasive plants. The degree of havoc that invasive aliens are having in South Africa (who’s seen District 9?) boggles the noggin. By 2050 up to a fifth of the country’s entire landmass is likely to have been infested. Apart from the devastation this causes to native plants —South Africa is somewhat of botanist’s orgasm, hosting more flower species than the entirety of Europe—it has very real consequences to the country’s citizens. A subset of invasive species are so hardy and deep-rooted that they are literally sucking the lands and rivers dry.
I’ve not done a very good job of summing up Andrew Balmford’s case studies, and through the book you gain a much richer understanding of how even all these optimistic stories are subject to set-backs and complexities. The successful case of the Assam rhino, for instance, occurs amidst a backdrop of bodies- those of tens of poachers shot dead by rangers. But Wild Hope does a great job of showing that one size doesn’t fit all and there are many things we can be doing to combat wildlife declines. Glimmers of hope are out there, and it’s nice to have a good set of them all in one place.
