Word: china
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...While the allergy is incurable, Tilson might yet see his first wild tiger, in a central Chinese wilderness he is playing an almost godlike role in creating. Thanks to a unique collaboration between Minnesota Zoo, China's State Forestry Administration (SFA), and a Bangkok-based environmental financier called International Consultancy Europe (ICE), a plan is under way to reintroduce the South China tiger, the rarest of the world's five surviving subspecies, back into its natural habitat. In this Year of the Tiger, the project has secured $3 million to restore a 250,000-acre (100,000 hectare) nature reserve...
...Half of this grant has been provided by the Chinese government, whose high-level interest in the project is easy to understand. Panthera tigris amoyensis is the progenitor of all modern tigers and the only subspecies unique to China. "You have a culture that reveres the tiger," says Tilson. "It's part of their fabric." By pulling a Chinese subspecies from the brink of extinction, China seeks not only to overturn an appalling record on conservation and the environment but also to gain a powerful new icon of national resurgence - not a cuddly giant panda this time but a formidable...
...resources are usually devoted to what Tilson calls "a failed strategy": protecting what few tiger habitats remain. "There needs to be a new paradigm," says Tilson. His answer? "Let's create wildernesses, as opposed to trying to protect the little fragments that are left." Hopes for resurrecting the South China subspecies rest largely on a captive population of 67 tigers, held in zoos across China. It will be challenging. Derived from just six animals - two male, four female - caught between 1958 and 1970, they are so inbred that they are virtually brothers and sisters. But, Tilson adds, "China...
...Back to the Future In half a century, the wild South China tiger population in China has been reduced from perhaps 4,000 to - Beijing disputes this - none. During Mao Zedong's time they were considered a pest and extermination campaigns were launched against them. Also taking a toll were loss of habitat, declining prey numbers and, as the economy took off, growing demand from traditional Chinese medicine for every part of the animal: whiskers, penis, bone, even feces...
...wants to recenter and strengthen these relations on economic and business ties in Africa - especially to counter China's big advances - and Rwanda is vital to that," says Pap Ndiaye, a specialist in black history in Europe, Africa and the U.S. at the School of Advanced Social Science Studies in Paris. "Despite his early promises to change France's relationships with Africa, he's mostly kept Françafrique intact. His very significant gesture to restore relations with Rwanda may prove the first real move towards change...