When Nature Speaks …. by “wildlife”

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🌍 The Elephant Has a Viewpoint Too

Listening to Nature in the CBNRM 2025 Debate

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I. When Nature Speaks, Do We Hear Her?

In traditional cultures like those of the San, nature is indivisible. Humans were never “users” of nature—they were custodians. They didn’t live nomadic lives merely for convenience, but out of deep respect for the sacred balance of ecosystems. Nature, in this view, is not composed of separate, extractable elements—air, water, land, or minerals—but an interwoven whole.

And when nature speaks, it is often not in ways we recognize. But nature does speak. It speaks through floods and droughts, through collapsing bee populations and shifting animal migrations. And, most poetically and urgently, it speaks through the elephants.

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II. Reflections on the CBNRM 2025 Bill: What’s Missing?

We acknowledge and appreciate Dr. Douglas Rasbash for his detailed analysis titled “Debating CBNRM 2025: Trophy Hunting, Community Benefits, and the Illusion of Transformation”, published in The Botswana Gazette on 30 July 2025. His reflections interrogate the bill’s limited scope and challenge its claims to transformation. His work opens space for deeper discussion on how Botswana should approach resource governance with deeper layers to consider:

1. Token Transformation Without Structural Change

The bill tweaks the 2007 framework but does not challenge entrenched hierarchies. Central authorities retain control. Communities are treated as recipients—not stakeholders.

2. Trophy Hunting Revenue vs. Real Benefit

Year after year, trophy hunting revenue flows fail to trickle down to local villages. Communities bear the burden of wildlife conflict, yet remain impoverished.

3. Absence of Ecological or Economic Vision

There is no mention of carbon markets, eco-tourism models, or sustainable enterprises. Innovation is absent. Nature is still commodified, not regenerated. This is a good point and we concur.

4. Fragmented Implementation Across Ministries

Lack of cross-ministerial planning weakens delivery. The vision is still sectoral, not systemic. This is a further good point and we concur.

5. Lack of Rights-Based Framing

The bill does not position nature or communities as rights-bearing participants in governance. It lacks empathy, imagination, and transformative ambition.

In short, the bill “enshrines procedure but sidesteps power.”

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III. Poaching, Elephant Gender Skew & Evolutionary Response Leading to Human-Wildlife Conflicts

What if nature could speak—not through human proxies, but through its own lived response?

Elephants, among the most sentient of Earth’s species, do exactly that. In the face of man-made threats, they don’t protest or petition. Instead, they adapt—through demographic shifts, reproductive changes, and even evolutionary transformation.

Scientific studies reveal that heavy poaching disproportionately removes adult tusked males first, driven by the ivory trade. Initially, this creates a skew toward male-biased herds. But as mature males become scarce, poachers begin targeting matriarchs as well. Over time, sex ratios tip in the opposite direction. In some regions, female elephants now outnumber males significantly.

Nature recalibrates.

Under sustained threat, elephant populations respond with what researchers call “baby boom” behavior. Birth rates increase. Female calves begin to dominate the cohorts. In time, nature goes further—selecting for tusklessness in females, genetically altering the population to survive human violence. Nature literally reshapes itself to stay alive.

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🧬 A Note on Reproductive Signaling in Nature

But nature doesn’t only respond at the level of population structure or visible behavior. It encodes survival at the reproductive level, too.

In mammals—including elephants and humans—offspring sex is determined by the sperm: males produce both X- and Y-chromosome-carrying sperm, while females provide only the X. Some researchers suggest that ecological pressure and heightened sexual activity in males may shift sperm composition over time—initially favoring Y-bearing sperm, then increasingly favoring the slower moving X-bearing sperm as reproductive frequency rises. Simultaneously, females may adjust the timing and frequency of conception in ways that amplify population regrowth.

Whether or not the chromosomal shift is scientifically settled, the broader truth holds: when under threat, nature increases reproductive output. It often responds with female-biased cohorts. This is not a random pattern. It is a feedback loop—woven through biology, behavior, and ecological memory.

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🐘 Nature’s Rebound Is Misread as a Problem

Yet here is the paradox: when elephants reproduce in this way—swiftly, strategically, in response to loss—it appears, to the outside observer, as an inexplicable boom. The herds grow. Their presence expands. They encroach on grazing pastures and forage across fields of crops.

People complain of destruction. Fields are trampled. Livelihoods threatened. And few connect the dots. That this “boom” is not excess—it is compensation. It is nature trying to fill the space we ourselves emptied. The link between the human decision to reduce elephant populations and the elephants’ drive to restore them is lost to most.

The boom is not the problem. It is the response. The real issue is that we forced nature into a corner, and now we are surprised when she tries to push back.

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🌿 A Final Feedback

There is one more signal nature sends: the speed of this regeneration grows with each cycle. As more females dominate the birth cohorts, the population’s capacity to rebound increases. Each generation accelerates the return. And the pressure that leads elephants into human settlements, crop fields, and grazing lands is not one of malice—but of necessity.

And here lies the core insight: when humans interfere less with elephants for economic gain, elephants interfere less with humans economically. The equation is ecological. The relationship is reciprocal.

References:

Science.org

ResearchGate

WIRED

Scientific American

Your Central View: Nature Must Speak for Itself

I argue that:

• Nature should not be merely “represented” by humans, but recognized as having its own agency—something traditional custodianship honored.
• Modern frameworks treat nature as divisible (air, water, minerals) and commodified for use, not preserved as an indivisible system.
• The state is held responsible for common good decisions; communities, unless guided by deeper ecological ethics, may not always act for broader collective outcomes.

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This diverges from dominant policy frameworks in the following ways:

IV. My View vs. Policy Orthodoxy: A Table of Dissonance

Aspect	Your View	Mainstream/ National View	Dissonance
Ontology of Nature	Nature has agency and voice; humans are custodians.	Nature is a resource for human use, managed by institutions.	Nature’s rights and feedbacks are ignored in governance.
Governance Responsibility	States must act for common good; local communities should also be accountable beyond their borders.	Empowering communities without clear responsibility to the broader system.	Policies risk parochial interests overriding ecological balance.
Species Intelligence (e.g., Elephant)	Elephants respond to unnatural threats by shifting reproduction—nature “speaks” through behavior.	Wildlife is managed based on human needs and economic models.	The ecological meaning of species behavior is not considered in policy.
Transformation Definition	Requires fundamentally new relationships with nature.	Often procedural—focused on revenue sharing or institutional realignment.	Technocratic approaches miss the relational and spiritual transformation.
Traditional Knowledge	Custodianship cultures respected the indivisible nature of ecosystems.	Traditional views are often not structurally embedded.	Modern policy tokenizes indigenous voices rather than re-rooting practice.

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V. Nature Is Not Divisible—and Never Was

In traditional worldviews, particularly those of the San and other nomadic or semi-nomadic communities, nature was never regarded as divisible. Land, water, flora, fauna, minerals, and the landscapes that shaped them were seen as one living system. To divide them—to draw borders through rivers, to build fences and walls, or to extract minerals without restoring the land—was unthinkable. It was not just about ethics; it was about survival.

These ecosystems were seen not only as resources but as regenerative companions. Forests thrived because the land was part of an unbroken ecological logic—air moved freely, seeds scattered, animals migrated, and water knew no boundaries.

Modern policy frameworks, however, fragment this logic. They assign ownership and utility, isolate resources from each other, and regulate nature in silos. Yet restoration—and indeed growth—is only possible when the system is whole. You cannot regenerate a forest by saving just the trees.

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VI. Why Humans Once Moved—and Why That Matters Now

Traditionally, humans did not remain in fixed settlements. Like elephant herds or migrating buffalo, they moved with the land’s rhythm—allowing grazed pastures and riverbanks to recover. It was not just mobility for survival—it was ecological consciousness.

When humans stayed too long in one place, the land could no longer replenish itself. Food sources dwindled, water became scarce, and diseases took hold. Nomadism was not a primitive lifestyle—it was an adaptive strategy rooted in ecological respect.

This logic, however, began to shift as human settlements expanded and infrastructure brought nature to people, rather than the other way around. As populations grew and natural resources were made artificially accessible through trade, infrastructure, or aid, the idea of indivisible nature gave way to commodified, divisible “resources.”

Today, the consequences of this shift are clear. Nature is less able to recover. Land that once supported thriving ecosystems is now drying up. Desertification—the slow, often irreversible loss of biodiversity and ecological function—is nature’s way of leaving the land. The air, the water, the microorganisms, the seeds—they move on.

Modern populations cannot return to nomadism. But this makes our responsibility greater, not less. Now more than ever, humans must become builders of ecosystems rather than users of resources. We must restore and unify what we have fragmented.

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VII. From Divide and Rule to Regenerate and Belong

The impulse to divide—land, water, people, responsibilities—is often a strategy born of scarcity. Where livelihoods are fragile and communities compete for dwindling opportunities, fragmentation becomes a means of control. The governance logic follows suit: divide to manage, divide to rule, divide to extract.

But this logic dissolves when people have meaningful, place-based work. When communities are rooted in dignified livelihoods—in regenerative agriculture, in value-adding manufacturing, in stewarding the lands they depend on—the pressure to extract weakens. The need to commodify nature, or to privatize what should remain whole, diminishes.

As communities gain employment in sectors that regenerate rather than exhaust, the old need to divide—to conquer nature, to compete with neighbors, to extract at the expense of ecosystems—begins to lose its grip. This is not just an economic transition. It is a political and moral one. A movement from exploitation to belonging.

Where people can build their futures, they no longer need to divide the commons. They can begin instead to rebuild the whole.

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VIII. Towards a New Imagination: Nature as Kin

To address the ecological and moral blind spots in current models, we must reframe:

Recognize Nature’s Agency
Introduce rights-of-nature frameworks—not to anthropomorphize nature, but to give legal standing to species, water bodies, and ecosystems.

Invest in Post-Wildlife Economies
As rural communities access agricultural and manufacturing opportunities, dependence on trophy hunting and extractive tourism will naturally subside.

Elevate Traditional Custodianship as Governance
The knowledge systems of the San and others are not heritage—they are governance blueprints. Embed them structurally.

Rebuild Inter-Ministerial Accountability Around Ecology
Align national planning around ecological zones and systems, not ministerial silos.

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IX. A Note on Inconsistencies

We accept that this position is a much harder line than that of Dr. Rasbash’s. While his article considers the bill potentially redeemable, this view challenges the foundation of its logic. Still, the divergence reflects the richness of the debate.

We also note one technical inconsistency requiring clarification: elephant sex ratios are said to skew male initially, then female. Clarification and timeline data will help deepen this important insight.

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X. Conclusion: The Elephant Is Speaking

CBNRM debates have treated nature as a background actor—something to be divided, allocated, and regulated. But nature is responding. Elephants are shifting their genetic makeup. Bees are disappearing. Rivers are drying.

We must learn to govern not just for nature, but with nature.

Transformation with a capital T means:

• Recognizing nature’s feedback.
• Rediscovering the governance ethics of traditional custodianship.
• Transitioning from extractive economies to regenerative systems.
• Letting the elephant have a seat at the table.

Let us not debate in silence. Let us not legislate blindly. Let us listen to those who have always lived with the land—and to the land itself.

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XI. A Final Note: Listening from the Other Side of the Pendulum

This article, while engaging with the CBNRM 2025 Bill, has deliberately chosen a different standpoint. It does not speak from the perspective of policy, nor from human interest alone. It takes the stand of nature—and of wildlife—and views the policy debates as part of a larger system in which humans are not the only actors.

The emphasis on elephants, on demographic shifts, and on nature’s feedback is intentional. It reflects a pendulum swing—a rebalancing of attention toward voices that are too often left out of our governance landscape. The voices of species, of land, of watersheds, of the quiet systems that hold our futures in place.

This is not the usual way we reason. Not in boardrooms. Not in legislative drafts. Not in community meetings. But it is a way we must begin to learn, if we are to govern with wisdom beyond self-interest.

So we leave you with this:

Supposing elephants could be in the room—and we can hear their voices—what do you think would change? What decisions might we reach if we treated them not as background, but as new members at the table?

(Although the elephants might argue they are not new at all—we are simply the latest arrivals.)

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Facts to Note:

Population.  At the turn of the 20th century, there were a few million African elephants and about 100,000 Asian elephants. Today, there are an estimated 450,000 – 700,000 African elephants and between 35,000 – 40,000 wild Asian elephants.

Most captives are endangered Asian elephants; African bush elephants and African forest elephants are less amenable to training (quite possibly testament to a historical hostile relationship between man and elephants).  Animal rights organizations estimate there are 15,000 to 20,000 elephants in captivity worldwide.

That brings the total number of elephants today to about 500,000.   Half a million.

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