Ken Coe was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1964. He moved to the U.S. when he was eleven, spending his formative years in Southern California. He attended UCLA as an undergraduate, then later, The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania, for his graduate degree. He next spent nearly thirty years in investment banking and investment management in New York and Connecticut. In 1989, he caught the “travel bug” to Africa, and he has been to the continent on no fewer than 38 occasions (spanning 12 countries). He has been involved with The Nature Conservancy, serving as a trustee for its Africa Program. An avid photographer and naturalist, he is in the process of working on a few different book and internet projects focused on his experience in Africa. Ken lives with his wife Karla in Darien and has two young adult children who are presently living outside of CT.
Arranged by Bryan Hooper
Bryan’s notes on the talk:
DMA member Ken Coe, spoke about conserving wildlife in Africa. He made the point that lions and elephants – the two species we all tend to link to conservation in Africa – can survive in most of the fifteen biomes (ecological communities) in Africa, apart from the Sahara desert, and they both are actually ubiquitous, but dangerous, and need a lot of space. Ken gave the example of a tagged lion, CATaM1, that ranged in Zimbabwe in a circle 125 miles in diameter; he pointed out that there is no national park wider than 50 miles, so to accommodate wildlife there is a need to link up the major wilderness areas to increase accessible space. This has become increasingly difficult over the years because of competition for land from a rapidly growing human population. In 1950 the population of Africa was around 150 million, and it now stands at 1.36 billion, an almost tenfold increase in seventy years.
Ken illustrated his talk with photographs of various animals from several of the biomes to show their diversity, from mountain gorillas in Ethiopia’s Afrotropical area to springboks and meerkat in the Highveld and wildebeest in the Somali-Maasai region, before leading us in more detail through the challenges facing the conservation process.
Historically, conservation was initiated by the descendants of the European colonial powers, and followed through more recently by Americans, and an increasing number of Africans. At first, emphasis was on protecting the animals, and punishing infringements of the law with fines meted out to local populations for breaking the strict rules laid down for the parks: poor people were pushed out of their lands and central authorities took control of the revenue stream emerging from the parks. Inevitably, poverty and desperation resulted in poaching along with resentment of the system. Fortunately, the emphasis has been transformed over recent years to creating partnerships in responsibility with local communities to manage land resources to maintain wilderness areas and share in the wealth created from ecotourism, trophy hunting, forestry and fishing management, as well as limited ranching and game cropping. Ken noted that over the past 20-30 years this approach to managing common-pool resources has been successfully implemented in several countries, including Namibia, Botswana, Kenya and South Africa.
A video of Ken’s presentation can be found at: https://youtu.be/NDtmFdElkGw.