In 1998, my friend Karl Hess invited several people to take a tour of southern Africa to see how wildlife was managed in other parts of the world. Among the people who joined the tour were National Wildlife Federation attorney Tom France (who was also part of the Forest Options Group); Earth First! Co-founder Dave Foreman; economist Bob Nelson, who had worked as a policy analyst in the Department of the Interior and later as a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland; and Brent Haglund, director of the Sand County Foundation, which manages Aldo Leopold’s land in Wisconsin and teaches corporate executives how they can improve their bottom lines by being more sensitive to the environment.
We were also joined on various parts of the tour by a Peace Corps volunteer named Stephanie Jayne. Unusual for Peace Corps volunteers, she had taken the trouble to learn the local languages and insisted on living with the villagers she was helping, rather than in quarters maintained by the Peace Corps. Apparently, she had invited Karl to help with some institutional issues, which was how he got involved in the region.
I had already been exposed to the political institutions of a few other countries during my years studying forest planning. In the early 1980s, some environmentalists in British Columbia invited me to Victoria to study the B.C. Ministry of Forests. In the late 1980s, a member of the Tasmanian parliament, Bob Brown, invited me to Australia to study the Tasmanian forest ministry. Continue reading
