Wandering in a Paper Park By: Mikayla Flanz

Okay, so things in the news have outright been awful for well a very very long time now. Whether it be that measles are back, tornadoes are sweeping the West, or the government is shut down. Anyway, life is sad enough without stuff like that making it worse, so it took awhile until I stumbled upon the ONLY thing that could've made me smile in the news.

Elephants.

Since the turn of the Industrial Revolution we have been living through the sixth mass extinction of Earth, where specifically in Africa there had been a 59% decline in large mammals (zebras, lions, giraffes, and of course elephants). And more specifically between 1970 and 2005, national parks in Africa saw an average decline of 59% in the populations. Now more recently these national parks such as the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique are becoming less of a a rare success story and more of a phenomenon. For years the parks have struggled with poachers and preserving the land for the wildlife that inhabits it, all due to low funding and the end of a 16 year civil war leaving parks in shambles by the war finished in 1992. Untouched for another decade, more than 95 percent of its large mammals had been wiped out, slaughtered for food and the purchase of arms. Meanwhile, the land was left to be used for mining or cropland.

But in October of 2018, researchers traveled to the park to find a 700 percent increase in figures on the African landscape, proof in the eyes of journalists that with "adequate funding and committed leadership" these sanctuaries can exist anywhere. Relying on paltry tax revenues in countries with pressing social needs, these parks struggle to cover their basic operating costs with sources claiming that 90% of parks are under budget, thus are nothing more than lines on a paper map aka "paper parks". But then, "If African wildlife can’t pay its own way, who will?", the answer lies in private funding through collaborative management and philanthropy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/opinion/africa-national-parks.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FAnimals&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection