‘Tower of Babel’ - how four conflicting ‘languages' keep SA’s wildlife conservation debate deadlocked

Four articles. Seven weeks. And a recognisable controversy for those with an interest in wildlife conservation. After South Africa’s new environment minister gazetted fresh hunting export quotas for elephant, black rhinoceros and leopard in February, the country’s recurring public debate about its sustainable use approach to conservation returned, with characteristic intensity, to the pages of Daily Maverick.

The first piece laid out the controversy with various aspects. Ignorance of due process. Distrust in the legality of leopard quotas, given that no non-detriment finding has been completed since 2015. Condemnation on the move on ethical grounds. And defence of hunting as a conservation tool. Three further opinion pieces followed. Reading them in sequence, I felt two things simultaneously: recognition and a familiar kind of weariness.

Recognition, because I have spent the last eight years studying exactly this conflict about South Africa’s sustainable use approach to conservation, specifically as it plays out around leopards and the captive-bred lion sector.

The weariness is harder to explain because it is not directed at any of the participants. Everyone in this exchange is arguing sincerely and, in their own terms, carefully. And yet the exchange generates more heat than resolution, more entrenchment than progress.

At the national level, the court cases, as laid out in the most recent piece. At the provincial level, an inability to implement new management policies or an inertia to decide on permits for damage-causing animals. And at the local level, where I have spent much of my fieldwork, something quieter and more troubling: stories of how leopards and people are harmed when the stalemate holds. Damages to people are unacknowledged. Leopards “triple S-ed” — shot, shovelled, and shut up. Problems are managed in the shadows because the official channels have calcified. Each time this debate surfaces, I find myself thinking of Babel: not the punishment, but the confusion.

The different languages being spoken

I want to offer a different way of looking at what is happening. Not a verdict, but a map.

In my research on this conflict, I have been working to understand the structural sources of this recurring impasse. Using psychometric methods to measure conservation world-views empirically across a range of stakeholders, I found that what looks like a dichotomy between proponents and opponents of sustainable use conservation is actually grounded in four distinct world-views. Each is internally coherent. Each rests on a genuine ethical foundation. And each produces a different, largely incompatible, reading of what good conservation looks like. These are not impressions from listening alone; they are measurable, distinguishable patterns.

Selier and Ferreira, in their 23 March piece, are working within what I call a “supervised use” world-view. It is founded on precautionary principles based on foundational personal values of prudence and vigilance to avoid irreversible mistakes. Conservation success thereby relies on expert decision-making and the monitoring and control of conservation targets to safeguard population numbers and trends. Sustainable use, including export quotas, is framed as permitted surplus off-take to manage large areas for conservation.

The response that followed, across Adam Cruise’s 25 March piece and, most comprehensively, in Bool Smuts’ articles of 31 March and 8 April, is working from what I coined a “no use” world-view. Here, the moral status of the individual animal based on values of care and equal treatment of the vulnerable is the starting point, unconnected to human decision-making.

As such, conservation rests on a principles-based approach to animal rights and welfare. The use of wild animals means that humans overstep their dominion and must be stopped. From this perspective, wildlife use and wildlife conservation are mutually exclusive. Conservation success rather rests on achieving justice for vulnerable individuals and has nothing to do with export quotas. This is equally coherent, equally ethical — and its underlying thought rules equally invisible to itself.

But these two world-views do not exhaust the dynamic. A third perspective was noticeable in this entire debate, most visibly in the comments of Minister Willie Aucamp, when he emphasised that attaching economic value to wildlife through private ownership and regulated use is a precondition for species persistence.

In this “individual use” world-view, the leopard survives because someone has bound their livelihood and reputation to its continuation, a stance deeply grounded in responsibility and dependability. Export quotas are seen as a call to become a custodian of the species. What is striking about this world-view is how rarely it speaks in philosophical terms. It tends to speak in the language of property rights, economic incentives and practical outcomes, which makes it easy to mistake for pragmatism rather than ethics. It is both.

And listening still more carefully, not to the recent opinion pieces, where it does not appear, but to the fieldwork I have been conducting for the past several years, I began to notice a fourth perspective altogether. The “harmless use” world-view does not feature in this debate at all, which is itself worth pausing on. From this viewpoint, based on a deep sense of interconnectedness, humans are one with nature. The use of wild animals cannot cause their decline if conducted according to the knowledge embedded in traditional rules and rituals, as they are mindful of the current and future needs of others. Western conservation frameworks — quotas, permits, protected areas, but also ownership or animal rights — are, from this perspective, alien architectures.

These conservation world-views function like the grammatical rules of a mother tongue. We apply them correctly and consistently without thinking about them or even being able to explain how they work. But when someone argues from a different world-view, we cannot recognise the different grammar, because we have never had to examine our own. We simply experience their argument as wrong. This is why the debate feels circular. The participants are not arguing badly. They are arguing in different languages, with no shared grammar and no common sense of what resolution would even look like.

And — this matters — every one of these world-views has a genuinely ethical foundation. The disagreements in Daily Maverick are not between the moral and the immoral. They are between different, equally sincere, moral architectures and genuine ways of making conservation work. That reframing does not resolve the argument. But it changes what kind of argument it is.

We can listen across the differing languages

So, where does this leave us?

I want to be careful about what I am claiming and what I am not. I am not proposing that all world-views are equally right in all circumstances — that would be a kind of cultural relativism that ignores the very real management failures each world-view can produce when applied without awareness of its limits. Nor am I suggesting that the solution is persuasion — that if only the right arguments were made, people would come around. The psychometric evidence and the pattern of the repeated debate suggest that world-views are not that responsive to argument. You do not talk someone out of their mother tongue.

What I am suggesting is something more modest, and I think more achievable: that genuine awareness of another’s grammar can change the quality of disagreement. Once you see why someone reaches the conclusions they do — not from bad faith, but from a different foundational thinking pattern, you stop experiencing them as unreasonable, mistaken, naïve, malicious or greedy. And that shift is, I believe, the precondition for productive dialogue.

In my research, I have encountered people I think of as “world-view wrestlers” — individuals who are genuinely open to tolerance and rapprochement without the urge to convert anyone to their own position. I found neighbours who had quietly negotiated landscape-level arrangements across incompatible world-views: sharing leopard data, exchanging land access, managing together; experiments that are not in the spotlight. These are not compromises. They show listening and courage. And when I encounter them, I draw genuine optimism.

Perhaps what South African conservation needs is not agreement, which is, honestly, unlikely, but deliberate accommodation: a willingness to develop enough familiarity with other grammatical rules to understand why others reach the conclusions they do, and to allow experiments that incorporate, in a spirit of genuine tolerance and innovation, aspects of different conservation world-view grammars.

The lesson of Babel is not that we should all speak one language. It is when we stopped listening that we stopped co-constructing. The question for South African conservation is not which world-view is correct. It is whether we can learn enough of each other’s grammar to keep working on something together, without losing our mother tongue. DM