Saving the wilderness can be good for your health

Why save South Africa's black rhino, India's tiger, the American wolf and the lemurs of Madagascar when so many millions of people live with poverty, disease and war?

Why save South Africa's black rhino, India's tiger, the American wolf and the lemurs of Madagascar when so many millions of people live with poverty, disease and war?

Who cares about a lesser-spotted bird, the Knysna seahorse or a rare species of moss? And why do we need land and marine wilderness areas in which these animals can thrive, undisturbed?

Seven hundred delegates at the 7th World Wilderness Congress are grappling with such questions this week. Previous sessions of the congress, first established by the South African conservationist Ian Player in 1977, led to environmental protection areas such as the World Heritage Site of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, and the Cairngorm plateau in Scotland, as well as the reintroduction of cheetahs in India.

Bittu Saghal, a conservationist, says a healthy species means a healthy planet. "Why save the Great Indian bustard? Because it is a symbol of the health of grassland ecosystems. If it exists, your grasslands are OK. Similarly, the Siberian crane, which feeds on wetlands."

The Indian conservationist was involved in Project Tiger, launched in 1973 to save the beast from extinction. "Now the problem is simple. It's one of space. When we launched Project Tiger we had 300,000 sq km in which it could live. Today this has dwindled to 100,000 sq km. What good is a king without a kingdom? If we are not able to save the tiger, we are not able to save the glass lizard or a little scorpion. If we lose the tiger, we lose the wilderness. And there are fewer than 2,500 tigers left."

In America, the National Wilderness Preservation System included almost 105,800,000 acres in 644 areas in 44 states, said Bruce Hamilton of the Sierra Club. But at least 200 million additional acres of wildlands needed defenders and deserved full statutory protection.

Michael Soule of The Wildlands Project explained that ecologists had realised larger areas had more species and that small isolated nature reserves were the equivalent of the walking dead.

"The risk of extinction of species is proportional to the size of the park. We are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction and, unlike any of the others, we are the cause of it. One third of all species will be extinct in 40 years; almost all primates will be extinct. We have lost 700 vertebrates and 200 plant species since 1980. This is a tragedy beyond tragedies. No wilderness battle is ever won but if we lose we lose for ever."

He is focusing on "keystone species" such as jaguars, wolves and grizzly bears. "The wolf is the consummate keystone species: without wolves, many ecosystems will collapse over the next 50 years."

Saving the wilderness could be therapeutic, said Ian McCallum, a Cape Town psychiatrist and former Springbok rugby player. "Wilderness is probably the finest anti- depressant anyone can have. Our sense of self is intimately associated with a deep sense of landscape."