Maps Can't Talk... and Are We Listening Anyway?

I like maps.  They show boundaries, describe limits to resource use and classify land types according to their protected status.  They give you a sense of security that someone out there is protecting the land.  I wish that were true.  Today’s world is filled with uncertainty.  If maps could talk and tell us what is really taking place, we might be able to react and build a safer tomorrow.  Too often, the reaction comes late.  Maps can’t talk, nor the trees, nor the land… and are we listening anyway?

The bitter sweet smell of charcoal-making fills the air as you pass one pile of charcoal after another, ready for market to motorists passing through many of Zambia’s game management areas – areas where wildlife protection is given special status.  People need charcoal, need to cook, raise a family and build a future… and charcoal is cheap.  No one counts the trees and no one counts those patches of woodland turned to tree stumps.  Perhaps the wild animals of these forests do and the math is not in their favor.  

Some of us can’t sit back and watch and we search for a better way to find a balance, some kind of reconciliation between man and nature. Perhaps we too are wild animals and have done the math, and we become conservationists.  Such an impulse should be in our blood if there is a gene for looking out for our future.  For the poor farmer who makes charcoal to sell, the future does not really exist; it is today’s survival that matters.  

Further down the road, you see funny-shaped structures built of mud, poles and thatch grass – taller than the traditional homes with no windows but with vents instead for releasing smoke.  Scattered here and there you find them.  They are tobacco curing sheds.  Big companies reach out to farmers with seeds and technologies to grow a crop that makes people sick and destroys more trees to cure their golden leaf.  The final product is eventually exported to markets far away.  Labour is cheap, land is expendable and commerce prospers, while nature suffers.

Unless there is a better way to help people live with the land, the powers of conventional commerce will pursue their game, because the rural poor will have no option.  In the end, no one really wins.  COMACO is all about a better way.  It promotes alternative farming practices and commodities through value chains that help keep trees and wildlife safe.  The staff of COMACO and the farmers who partner with it are helping build an example for what conservation can and should be.  There is determination, passion and wisdom in COMACO, but it is the markets it seeks to grow that will give farmers the alternative they need to help them live more peacefully with their land.  Conservation and business must be allies and COMACO is helping to lead the way in Zambia.