Not so long ago, the gospel of conservation was that preservation must exist for its own sake, that vast pieces of wilderness must be set aside for animals and habitat protection simply because it needed to be done. But about thirty years ago the rather heretical idea emerged that conservation has to provide economic benefit to poor people. Animals and wilderness must earn their keep, otherwise there is no place for countryside that is not settled or cultivated. Game reserves were seen as playgrounds for the rich to sip sundowners and watch bokkies daintily nibble grass.  It’s a debate that ruffles feathers still. On the one hand, animals should not be commodified, they have as much right to exist as we do. On the other hand, with population pressures being what they are, animals don’t stand much of a chance in the general scheme of things unless they are useful. Unfortunately, philosophy doesn’t have much of a place in this debate.  Wildernesses and game reserves are surrounded by an ever-growing number of rural poor.  Therefore the villager doesn’t consider that the tree he is about to cut down for firewood is an endangered species; he doesn’t care if the buck he is eyeing is the last of its kind – all he knows is that a nasty fence stands between him and lunch.  Trespassers and poachers have always had the upper hand against a small force of conservationists:  if game reserves don’t justify their existence they will disappear, it’s as simple as that. This is where tourism has come to the rescue and it is encouraging to discover that there is a world-wide trend to place more and more land under conservation, and optimally to manage the land that has already been set aside. And so the good work of SANParks was highlighted again last week with the announcement that a fence dividing two sections of the Addo Elephant National Park was removed to allow animals free movement between two previously separated areas of the park.  This means more space for elephants, a greater variety of habitat for animals, more choice for tourists, more potential for tourism investment in the Addo region. The Addo Elephant Park has become the centre-piece for a thriving tourism industry in the Eastern Cape, which has done the dual job of creating a haven for indigenous elephants and creating jobs.  And what is emerging is not an us-and-them scenario where parks must perform or else, it is a situation where popular parks and the participation of the tourism industry can subsidise not-so-popular parks. The South African government has, within this scheme, created four new national parks in recent years.   The Tanqua Karoo National Park comprises the Succulent Karoo Biome (to us experts, this means a desert dotted with vygies).  It’s 137 thousand hectares of shimmering emptiness, with cliffs and moonscapes, clear air and silence thick enough to paint a room.  You need to be fairly dedicated to get there – it’s a four hour drive from Cape Town (turn left at Paarl and be prepared for bumpy dirt road), and is surrounded by towns like Vanwyksvlei and Tweefontein and Onder-Wadrif, places not largely regarded as centres of metropolitan attraction.  Hardy visitors will be treated to the brightest stars in Africa, and that astonishing feature of wilderness – the harsher and more precarious the conditions, the richer and more prolific the bird and animal life.  The park is not ready for hordes of visitors yet, but hardier individuals who like to camp in nothingness can make arrangements for the manager to open up for them. Another new park is the Agulhas National Park, which makes its virtue out of the fact that it already has a steady stream of visitors to the southernmost tip of Africa.  There is something compelling about gazing south from Agulhas and realising that the next stop is the ice shelf of Antarctica.   The park has a cultural significance as well as an environmental one:  archeological middens are remains of a successful hunter-gatherer civilisation that existed before time. The Richtersveld is only accessible by 4x4, and many people like it that way.  This park is managed jointly by the Nama people and SANParks.  It never rains in the Richtersveld, but every morning the fog rolls in from the cold Atlantic Ocean – the locals call it Ihuries or Malmokkies – and tiny water droplets settle on leaves and on the ground.  This is enough to sustain the most remarkable assortment of animals, birds and strange, otherworldly plants. The Mokala National Park is the latest of the bunch, just south of Kimberley. Mokala is the name for the umbrella thorn tree (the Camel Thorn) and the park is carpeted with these trees that are as much part of the African landscape as red dust and afternoon thunderclouds.  It is incumbent upon tourism professionals to promote these game reserves so that they can grow, become profitable, and encourage more national parks.  It is not only your own future at stake, but the future of the wilderness and the animals that live there.

To see all the 19 national parks, each with a very atmospheric write-up, go to the SANParks website www.sanparks.org.za