The Big Conservation Lie' is a wake up call focused on a field that has been 'front and centre' of many people's hearts and minds in recent years; The conservation of Africa's wildlife. It is a pursuit whose power to inspire is only rivalled by it's ability to blind it's audience to reality. This book takes the reader through Kenya's conservation 'industry' and the players therein with all their prejudices, weaknesses and commitment to causes, many of which are indistinguishable from their personalities. It is a call to indigenous Africans to claim their place at the table where the management of their natural resources is being discussed and invites well-meaning donors to look beyond the romantic images and detect the possible role of their money in the disenfranchisement of a people.
About the Author: John Mbaria is a trained spatial planner and an award-winning Kenyan journalist who has investigated and written on wildlife conservation since August 2000. Mbaria started off as a physical planner before detouring to journalism. He has written for several national newspapers in Kenya-the Daily Nation and The EastAfrican-and was an occasional contributor for the Greenpeace Magazine of Germany, as well as a visiting writer with InvestigateWest, a US-based online investigative journal. Dr. Mordecai Ogada is a carnivore ecologist who has been involved in conservation work for the last sixteen years in Kenya and other parts of Africa, mainly in human-wildlife conflict mitigation and carnivore conservation. His biological work includes studies on lions, hyenas, cheetah, African wild dogs, and otters. Dr. Ogada's professional work has included research and teaching conservation leadership at Colorado State University. Much of his energy has been devoted to the area of community-based conservation, wildlife policy, and wetlands ecology. From 2009 to 2011 Dr. Ogada developed cheetah conservation strategies for Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda as the regional coordinator for the WCS cheetah conservation program. He was the Executive Director of the Laikipia Wildlife Forum from 2011 to 2014, where his work focused on the perceptions of conservation and how these influence communities and practitioners in the field of natural resource management. In 2015, Dr. Ogada coordinated a partnership project between the African Conservation Centre and McGill University that seeks to strengthen conservation linkages between institutions and habitats in Kenya and northern Tanzania. He is also a co-author of a chapter on the management of wildlife and fisheries in Kenya in the book Developments in Earth Surface Processes (Vol 16) published by Elsevier, Netherlands, as well as several articles on conservation. Mordecai lives in Nanyuki, Kenya, where he works as a consultant on wildlife and natural resource conservation.