Conservation in Africa

A new interdisciplinary look at the practices and policies of conservation in Africa is presented in this volume. For the first time social scientists anthropologists and historians have been brought together with biologists in order to illuminate previously neglected yet critically important social aspects of conservation thinking. The book is introduced by an overview of African conservation in the past present and future. There are sixteen papers on a wide range of topics from wildlife management to soil conservation and from the Cape in the nineteenth century to Ethiopia in the 1980s. These collectively show that conservation must form an integral part of future policies for human development. To date conservation has been largely the domain of the biologist but the current ecological crisis in Africa and the failure of orthodox conservation policies demand a radical new appraisal of conventional practices. This therefore is essential reading for all those concerned about people and conservation in Africa.