Page 42 - Local Voices, Local Choices Excerpt

40 local voices, local choices
of indigenous knowledge. “There is also a campaign where the retired Gombe field researchers are trying to stimulate casual conversations with the community members about the value of animals, that people in the past would use an animal species as a symbolic representation for a halo, or a totem. Similarly, trying to pass on information about the historical values of certain plants is also important because it’s being lost. For exam- ple, if your wife doesn’t get pregnant, you take her into the forest, there’s a tree that she must take that helps. This knowledge means they main- tain or increase the value of the forest. There are also cultural traditions from times past that should be remembered. For example, in some tribes, it was not allowed to cut certain trees. Women could only use the dry branches that have fallen. This indigenous knowledge helped to promote conservation.”
For Japhet, it’s clear where Tacare should be concentrating its efforts. The Tacare approach rests on five different pillars, he notes—Community Development, Health, Forestry, Agriculture, and Youth—but, no matter
how integrated the model, there should be a key pillar. “If you take the Jane Goodall Institute, the first thing people outside will think is chimp research,” he says. But for the Tacare model, Japhet believes forestry is key. Yet, at the same time, “with conservation in Africa, you cannot isolate agriculture, because it’s the driver for loss of biodiversity. In practice, look at Madagascar, look at Congo—in all the mega biodiverse countries, agri- culture is not separated from the conservation package. My advice is that we cannot divorce ourselves from agriculture. It must be compatible, but the question is how we want it to be done. For me, conservation agricul- ture needs to be the key pillar—it’s an integral part of the region in terms of livelihood.”
Japhet explains why he sees agriculture as a priority. “For example,” he says, “if you are looking at microcredit you can do Community Con- servation Banking (COCOBA), you can do education, you can do even village forest reserves. But the moment you drive your car back to town, these people are going to their farms. We need to look at their day-to-day