Conservation’s Ripple Effects
Brett Jenks talked with two graduates of the Rare nature guide training course and shares their experiences.
Two graduates of the first course, Pancho Mayoral and Maldo Fisher, shared their stories with us. Pancho had been a young fisherman and hadn’t finished high school when he entered Rare’s program 10 years ago. He was a turtle poacher in the off-season, knowingly breaking the law in order to generate income for his family. Today, he has his own sea kayaking business and runs intensive trips for the National Outdoor Leadership School, NOLS. He hasn’t poached a turtle since 1995.
Pancho Mayoral, left, with Brett Jenks
Maldo was a fisherman and a boat driver for a new, expat-run whale watching operation in 1995. Today, Maldo runs his own business from the shores of San Ignacio. He has 10 cabanas on the beach, solar and wind power, and a central dining palapa that serves fantastic seafood and very cold beer. When Maldo joined the program 10 years ago, he made on average about $200-$300 per month as a boat driver during the whale watching season. This year, he expects 600 mostly North American visitors will let him gross nearly $200,000 in just three months from his own whale watching camp. Maldo also offers greatly reduced packages for school groups from Baja to ensure that Mexican children can also be inspired by the world’s largest mammalian migration.
Together, they described the role that local communities played in the international effort to stop the expansion of Mitsubishi’s Salt Works in the Lagoon. NRDC and IFAW and Grupo de Los Cien ran an international campaign to help stop the Salt Works, but it was the local fishermen and whale watching guides, entrepreneurs in search of a sustainable economy in ecotourism, that legitimized the campaign and gave credence to a homegrown vision of sustainable development. So, for about $200,000 in training and technical assistance, we leveraged a financial ROI that more than justifies the investment, not to mention a conservation constituency that’s already helped “save” the place once and will surely be there as long as the whales are.
These are just 2 of the 20 trained in El Vizcaíno, and just 2 of the 56 trained in Baja California, and just 2 of the more than 300 trained in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and South Africa in the past 10 years. I’ve asked our staff to invest in a more thorough and objective assessment of the ROI and will report back again sometime soon. But the point is: We need to make sure we don’t let the complexity and challenge of measuring conservation success get in the way of actually achieving it.