While I agree with much of what Ivo Vegter says regarding the High Level Panel (HLP) Report and Barbara Creecy’s response to it, I do take issue with the idea that Creecy has been captured by animal-rights purists.
My extensive personal experience is that this community – which now dominates conservation thinking in this country and elsewhere – and environmental officials are working together to achieve their common goal of nationalising all wildlife.
The innate authoritarian attitude of these conservation purists finds common cause in this instance with the communists in the ANC and their desire to reduce all South Africans to the status of labour tenants of an ANC government.
The irony of urban elites supporting conservation measures that work hand in glove with the very policies they complain about around the dinner table is an exquisite one. But the irony does not end there. The conservation purism that the ANC government is seeking to implement promotes the preservation of the racial purity of geographic races or subspecies through a policy of separate development. This thinking, championed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is the beating heart of biodiversity conservation.
Vegter is correct when he says that this is not what our Constitution says. The opinions of Tim Bruinders SC, which are attached to the HLP Report, confirm this. But he was not asked crucial questions, which in turn enabled the majority of the panel to ignore much of his advice.
The government is constitutionally mandated to provide South Africans with an environment that is not harmful to their health and wellbeing. This requires an integrated approach that promotes sustainable development while at the same time preventing pollution and conserving South Africa’s natural resources. The rules that determine how this is done are based on the principles laid down in the Rio Declaration. Those, in turn, were encapsulated in the environmental principles laid down in Section 2 of the umbrella environmental law that is the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA).
Principal among those is that all environmental management, including conservation, must put human beings and their needs uppermost. This is consistent with the constitutional meaning of the environment, which is a biophysical state that supports human health and wellbeing.
The authors of the HLP Report fatally misdirected themselves in failing to apply the NEMA principles in their deliberations. They prefer a ‘conservation first’ approach based upon a separate development model of preserving the racial purity of what are often the depleted gene pools of game herds in state-owned game reserves.
This is nothing new. They have been doing it for years and it has been a total failure. Attempts to implement the unworkable alien and invasive species regulations and the bioprospecting regulations have also failed.
This brings me to what I see as a major positive in the HLP Report; the acknowledgment that the National Environmental Management Biodiversity Act (NEMBA) was brought into law without the government adopting a biodiversity policy.
This failure to adopt a policy was not accidental. The policy that conservation purists and their communist friends in government wanted and what they have tried to implement is fundamentally at odds with the Constitution and the environmental principles set out in NEMA.
This is constitutionally illegitimate, as is NEMBA and attempts to implement it. South Africans have a proud tradition of ignoring illegitimate laws.
The HLP Report recommends that this oversight is addressed by next year. The majority of the panel probably hopes that Creecy will railroad home a policy that seeks to legitimise what they have done and want to continue to do. But it is not as simple as that.
Proper public participation is a lengthy process that requires the government to engage with those they disagree with as well as the usual group of praise singers they normally engage with. Moreover, the policy must rationally connect with the mandated purpose of species protection which is limited to that which is necessary to protect a listed species in the wild.
It is very easy to show that game that is farmed for purely agricultural purposes has no impact on these wild species at all.
It is early days, yet it is likely that the Minister’s stated intention to ban the farming of certain protected species is going to prove easier said than done. There is after all case law that says you can only discriminate at a particular group of people in terms of a policy that fairly addresses a legitimate purpose. But, as I said, we presently have no policy.
The problem we face is that the ANC government and conservation purists are actively engaged in undermining the Constitution and the rights it guarantees.
It is every citizen’s duty to defend our rights – if we want to have rights at all.
So this is not about persuading the government to rein in the animal rights community. It is about exercising people’s power to defend our rights against the combined attack of the ANC government and the animal-rights thinking that has come to dominate conservation in South Africa.
This involves issues that go way beyond whether you like canned hunting or the lion bone trade. It is the thin edge of a particularly nasty wedge.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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