He was a man whose thinking — on wildlife conservation, paleontology, and more — was ahead of its time.
He was a man whose thinking — on wildlife conservation, paleontology, and more — was ahead of its time.
N ot long after the New Year was rung in, the Grim Reaper finally caught up with my old friend and collaborator, Richard Leakey — the son of the famous paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, a famous paleontologist in his own right, a pioneering conservationist, bon vivant, and so much more. While Leakey had been no stranger to close brushes with the Reaper, on January 2, 2022, he failed to escape.
I first met Leakey, and learned of his passion for wildlife conservation, back in the spring of 1972. It was then that the anthropologist Neville Dyson-Hudson, an expert on East African pastoral peoples, and I dined with Leakey at the Johns Hopkins Faculty Club in Baltimore. I anticipated plenty of paleontology and anthropology, but those weren’t on the menu. Our conversation quickly turned to the topic that most interested Leakey: the economics of wildlife resources.
Leakey had a vision of land use and wildlife resources in East Africa. His observation was that the East African savannahs and its wildlife were, for the most part, common-property resources. He concluded that unless property rights could be established, both the savannahs and wildlife would eventually be destroyed. For him, this would be a great tragedy, not only for wildlife but also for indigenous peoples living off the land in East Africa.
Leakey questioned whether the current system — burdened with its common-property problems and regulated by a very British-type system of hunting rules, e.g., charges for hunting licenses and penalties for unlicensed hunting, violations of closed seasons and the killing of protected species — was sustainable. He also doubted whether parks and game reserves — when coupled with restrictions on the trade of wildlife meat, skins, and trophies — would actually conserve wildlife. Leakey estimated that if private-property rights could be established in the savannahs and the wildlife resources that roamed over them, they could be properly managed to enhance land-use productivity. This, he concluded, would give wildlife economic value, save it from destruction, and enhance the economic well-being of those indigenous peoples who co-exist among the wildlife herds.
Leakey wanted to know what I thought of his ideas. Could good property rights cut down on poaching and corruption, save wildlife, and enhance the productivity of East Africa’s savannahs? Could well-managed game cropping, trophy hunting, tourism, and so forth, coupled with pastoral herding, generate more prosperity than the current land-use arrangements? Could such a wildlife-oriented economy co-exist with traditional herding? On and on the questions flowed.
My response was to say that I thought Leakey, in principle, was on the right track but that definitive answers as to how one would establish property rights in East Africa’s common-property resources — as well as the economic values involved — would require practical, empirical investigation. We needed to collect primary data, among other things, through field work.
Leakey, who was the director of the National Museums of Kenya at the time, responded positively. He invited me to prepare a research proposal, and, subject to his approval, join him as a research associate.
Soon after, I agreed and became a part of the team. In the summer of 1972, I arrived in Nairobi, where I took up residence at the Norfolk Hotel. In addition to spending hot days in Nairobi going over records of hunting licenses, ivory, and game-trophy export permits, I spent about a month in the field on safari. I have many remembrances of that. Two notable ones come to mind. While camping in the Masai Mara National Reserve, I observed a great deal of poaching, some of it by government employees. I also ran into Joy Adamson of Born Free fame out in the bush. It was in the middle of the afternoon when Adamson had her tracker and scout lay a fire, and we had tea. We spent an hour or so chatting about the economics of wildlife and conservation. She gave my research project a thumbs up, which was very encouraging.
What was not encouraging were some of the findings that I discovered back in Nairobi. When I added up the number of hunting licenses issued each year along with the number of export permits for ivory and the like, there was a huge gap. Legal exports of such items as wildlife trophies and ivory — which were recorded at the Customs Department — exceeded hunting licenses issued by the Game Department by a wide margin. All my arithmetic pointed to a massive amount of corruption at the highest levels of government. When the chief game warden figured out where my collection and analysis of what was considered rather obscure primary data were pointing, I became persona non grata. Shortly thereafter, I caught a flight from Nairobi to Switzerland, where the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is located.
Upon arriving at the WWF headquarters in Morges, Switzerland, I started to put some of my notes together. Eventually, many of my findings appeared in a piece I co-authored with Robert K. Davis and Frank Mitchell, “Conventional and Unconventional Approaches to Wildlife Exploitation,” which was published in 1973. We concluded that the system of parks, protection, prohibitions on trade, and traditional hunting rules and regulations — no matter how well intended — were destined to fail at generating prosperity and conserving wildlife. Only by establishing secure property rights for land and wildlife would these resources be rendered valuable. Markets for them would then develop, in which they would be wisely used, protected, and conserved. The prudent use of resources is, and always has been, all about property, prices, markets, and legitimate trade.
Leakey’s thinking back in 1972 turned out to have legs. And today, it has even stronger legs because the costs of establishing property rights in wildlife and reducing the problems associated with the commons have plunged thanks to the introduction of new technologies such as satellites and drones.
May Richard Leakey, a friend and visionary who was always ahead of his time, rest in peace.