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In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla speaks with Nicholas Magliocca about jaguars, Central American conservation, and the drug war.
Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Jaguar conservation is caught in the crossfire of America’s ‘War on Drugs’
Where to find Nicolas: Website
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Transcript (AI-Generated)
Kayla Fratt 00:01
Hey all, I’m just dropping in to the start of this episode with an ask. K9Conservationists is a nonprofit, and we are heading into the holiday fundraising season. I know there are so many worthwhile causes to support, and times are tough, but we do have to ask. So this year, our goal is to raise just under $5,000 which would get us a new GPS collar to make sure that all of our dogs have their own GPS collars for our surveys and to cover my travel to South Africa for the African Canines in Conservation conference, which is hosted by the Endangered Wildlife Trust. I’ve been invited to be one of the keynote speakers, and I’m so so so excited, but it’s going to be really expensive to get me there, and we want to make sure that I can do this for free, rather than charging Endangered Wildlife Trust or raising the prices of this conference, which is aimed to help African canine handlers get together and learn. We don’t want to be charging them for my, you know, very expensive plane tickets. So if you find the content that we put together on these episodes valuable, I really hope that you’ll consider donating, which you can do at k9conservationists.org. Your donations are tax deductible and will make it possible for me to travel to South Africa, again at no cost to our hosts. And then, aside from being a keynote speaker at this conference, I would also be able to provide some one on one mentoring and shadowing for several different teams that we’ve worked with remotely for the past several years, which is really, really invaluable. I am so excited about this opportunity to provide free capacity building and support to these programs, but we do need your help to pull it off again, you can donate using the big green donate button on our website, k9onservationists.org. Thank you so much, and here’s the episode.
Kayla Fratt 01:53
Hello and welcome to the K9Conservationists podcast, where we are positively obsessed with conservation detection dogs. Join us every other Tuesday to talk about detection training, canine welfare, conservation biology and everything in between. I’m Kayla Fratt, one of the three co-founders of K9Conservationists. We train dogs to detect data for researchers, NGOs and agencies. Today’s student shout out goes to our student, Jacob, who is part of our most recent online conservation dog handler course. Jacob has been helping out with running our book club group, which is an immense help to me, and honestly, even more importantly, Jacob is much better at it than I am. He’s been preparing lovely questions and reads the material thoroughly before every meeting, and it really makes for a lovely learning experience and collaborative get together for everyone. Jacob and his dog Darwin are just so kind and thoughtful and dedicated to conservation and dogdom, and it’s just been so fun to have them around. So thanks for being part of the crew, Jacob.
Kayla Fratt 02:47
Today I am super excited because I’m talking to Nicholas Magliocca about jaguars, Central American conservation, and the drug war, which are all things that are kind of pet topics for me. I think y’all are gonna find this episode really interesting. It’s a little different from some of our kind of meat and potatoes topics, and I’m really, really excited for how kind of intersectional this episode is. But again, there might be fewer dogs than we’re used to in this story. So, Nicholas has broad research interests that investigate human environmental interactions and land use change through a complex adaptive systems lens. Specifically, he’s interested in how people make land use decisions, how these decisions modify the functioning of natural systems, and how those modification feedback, modifications feedback on human well being, livelihood and subsequent land use decisions. He’s an associate professor at the University of Alabama in the Department of Geography and the Environment, and is a member of the scientific steering committee for the Global Land Program. He has a BS in Ecology and Evolution from UC San Diego, a Master’s of Environmental Management at Duke and a PhD of Geography at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County. So welcome to the podcast, Nicholas. I’m so excited to talk to you.
Nicholas Magliocca 03:56
Well, thanks Kayla for inviting me. I’m looking forward to it.
Kayla Fratt 03:59
Yeah, so I think we’re gonna have to start out with kind of a very basic and broad question, just for kind of some listener understanding we’re talking about jaguars and the drug war and conservation, how those all interact? So why don’t we start out with, like, how does narco trafficking work on the ground, particularly kind of through Central America?
Nicholas Magliocca 04:19
Yeah, right. So you know, keeping in mind the time limit of this podcast, I can, I can try to give a high level overview. So it’s a little different phenomenon than what comes to mind, usually, particularly when we talk about how the drug war and the drug trade might impact the environment. People tend to think of like cultivation of coca, for example, for cocaine. So we’ve focused particularly on cocaine trafficking. I should be clear about that and, and, yes, that is part of it impacts on the environment that happens mostly in South America, right? Although it is starting to expand in Central America, we actually have a publication coming about, coming out about that soon. But. But mostly we’re focused on what happens, you know, once those drugs leave South America and are either destined for North American markets or increasingly European markets and Asian markets, and they pass through Central America, right? And those shipments then exchange hands multiple times. And these can be not the big centralized cartels, you know, things that are like in the Netflix series and Narcos like that, that doesn’t really exist anymore, that big centralized cartel, but they’re much more like smaller regional cartels that are involved. And so those cartels are involved in arranging these shipments, receiving them, finding the next like downstream buyer and distributor and getting them to their final destination. But in order to do that, they have to have some control of territory, right? And this is where the intersection with the the drum trade and the Environment and Conservation occurs because one of the easiest ways to establish ownership of land or control of land, particularly throughout Latin America, is by using that land right, clearing the forest, right, putting cattle on it, you know, establishing commodity plantations as a way to launder money, for example, or as a way to have cover for planes that are flying in. So you see a lot of oil palm plantations that are totally legitimate, but have airstrips, right? So it’s a very useful cover. And so that land gets used very much for logistical purposes and moving drugs through those spaces. And the consequence then is you have a lot of illicit capital kind of building up in these very rural, remote spaces, and then that just fuels further land use change, right? More clearing a forest and expanding that footprint, right? And so what we’re really thinking about, when we talk about cocaine trafficking, or narco trafficking through Central America, really looking at this kind of trans shipment part of the process, right? Of how it’s moving through, and how that capital then gets deposited in Central America and then spread out, and kind of catalyzing further landscape change.
Kayla Fratt 07:18
Yeah, yeah. That makes that makes sense. And I guess our next question is, then, kind of, what does this have to do with US policy like, how? How does, how does our government cause like lead to more and more? You know, I learned the term rather recently, Narco deforestation in relation to the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, where we did some work, like, how are those things related? Because hypothetically, the US, you know, it’s not our territory technically,
Nicholas Magliocca 07:51
Yeah, very, another very good question, and you know, has a lot to do with what we’re gonna talk about today, right, with the impact of jaguar conservation. And so there’s a couple of different ways to answer this question, and one is that there is this kind of overall effect of, you know, for a long time, US Drug Policy focused mostly on supply side and right, the philosophy was to intercept those drug shipments In the transit space before they actually get to the consumer market. Because once they do, once they enter into the US, and they start, you know, the shipments get broken up, and they go to smaller scale distributors, and it’s really hard to track and stop that. So the logic was, you know, stop it in the supply side, in the in the transit zone when there’s still, you know, large aggregate shipments, and that’ll be the most, you know, bang for your buck, essentially, for counter drug interdiction. And that approach then, so it’s, you know, it’s been called, kind of the the Americanization of global drug policy, right? Is like, this is now a very popular way of doing this. And it, it, you know, not to get too abstract here, but it, it fits really well in kind of the military industrial approach to this of, yeah, you know, more resources to intercept those drug shipments, more surveillance, more law enforcement, and that’s the answer, and we can take more of the drugs out of the supply, and that will the logic then is increase the operating costs for cartels and traffickers. It will then subsequently raise the retail price of drugs, and that will discourage consumption. But of course, we’ve been doing this for 40 years the same way, ever since Reagan declared war on drugs, and it’s only gotten worse. What used to be a Western Hemisphere problem is now a global trade right? The way that US Drug Policy is then driving a lot of the dynamics that we see in drug trafficking in Latin America is the natural response. Is, you know, to that increased law enforcement pressure is that traffickers just move. They go somewhere else, they establish new routes. And so this has been referred to as the cockroach effect, or the balloon effect, right? The idea is, you shine a light in a dark kitchen, and all of a sudden the cockroaches scatter, push down on balloon in one spot, it pops up somewhere else. So those metaphors have been helpful to kind of describe the dynamic that you see. And so there’s this kind of, you know, to use another cliche, cat and mouse kind of game and happening and a bit of an arms race between law enforcement and traffickers and and frankly, traffickers are infinitely better resourced than the government and and pretty innovative and adaptive. And so this, this idea of being reactive and and trying to apply pressure to the supply side, is really what we’ve seen, is it just ends up kind of spreading the traffic around, pushing it into new spaces. And this is when you start to see the interactions with environmental degradation, destruction, impacts of conservation, because traffic is being pushed into these spaces that otherwise they wouldn’t be in response to counter drug interdiction.
Kayla Fratt 11:12
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I mean, if you can’t safely move your product through Panama City, I can see how one would choose to go through. I used to live in Changi Nola in Panama, which is near the BOGO Del Toro archipelago, which, back in 2011 was kind of the boonies. It’s been kind of discovered as a lovely tourist spot now, but like the Smithsonian, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute was out there. And you also would get, like, shipments of drugs that would just like, wash up on shore. Yeah, because, you know, as a smart business person, you wouldn’t take your product through more populist parts of Panama at the time. And I have no idea if that’s relevant now, as far as those actual routes go, so don’t like not go to Bocas because of that. Do your actual research on what’s going on there. But yeah, so then, how does this relate to Jaguars in particular?
Nicholas Magliocca 12:08
Well, jaguars in particular, yeah, because you know, jaguars, being a large range species you know, are going to be very vulnerable to this and and really, they’re going to thrive on places that are much more remote, where the prey population is there and is sustainable and and frankly, jaguars in particular, you know, very elusive, and, you know, are easily disrupted by human presence. So, you know, the this paper that we did, that that analysis was really looking at, you know, it started with some previous work where we were trying to understand and quantify, like, what is the spatial response to kind of drug and addiction by traffickers. And so what we did was we looked at, we used a kind of landscape suitability type approach and describe suitability in the sense of places that are attractive to traffickers to operate. So, you know, being remote, being close to international borders, having access to ports, access to river and road infrastructure, those are all things that that are, you know, important for logistical reasons, for traffickers. And so we then looked at each department, and it’s kind of an administrative boundary in Latin America, equivalent to kind of a US state, because this is where we have some estimates of cocaine flows, not only seizures, but the total amount that might have been moving through that space at a certain time. And then looked, you know, identified the year in each of those departments when we saw the most cocaine seized as kind of this indicator of kind of maximum interdiction pressure. And then looked at how the suitability of those spaces changed before and after that that maximum interdiction pressure, and it was, it was a revealing study, because we saw that, like some places that are very strategic, are going to remain attractive for for traffickers, even in the face of increased law enforcement pressure. But then I think the more revealing one was the common impact we saw was a shift away from more, you know, accessible infrastructure areas to protected areas and indigenous territories. In particular, a direct consequence of the interdiction pressure was pushing it to these more vulnerable spaces, and we saw that repeatedly in, you know, multiple countries throughout Central America. So you know, if these these large, intact protected areas that make up the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, and then the connecting spaces of the habitat corridors, you. And you know, if those are the places that are being targeted most, you know, in direct response to interdiction, then this is putting jaguars, you know, and many other species obviously, kind of in direct line of disturbance from from traffickers as they go to remove those spaces, even if they’re not clearing forests. So some of the work we’re doing recently is in Costa Rica and looking at the Oso Peninsula and Osa conservation area, where there are, there are some Jaguars. And, you know, we’ve talked to folks on the ground there in the conservation space, and they’re saying, Well, yeah, you know, we’re not, we’re not seeing Narco deforestation, but the effect is that you now have these spaces being opened up and made more accessible through informal and illicit infrastructure that traffickers are using to access those spaces. And so then other people are coming in, and it’s become a whole this is anecdotal, but it’s become this little local economy of finding those, those drug shipments that wash up on the outside of Osa Peninsula. And so these are locals that are, you know, making their way through the forest. And so they’ve set up camps, and they’re, you know, hunting bush meat, and, you know, they’re, they’re out there. There was a lot of illegal gold mining historically there as well. So interesting. There’s some overlap with those, those kind of listed economies, but it’s all about access to these spaces, right? And so traffickers are, you know, pretty adaptable and pretty adept at building infrastructure to get to to spaces that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible and used. And so this is a, this is a phenomenon we’ve seen across Central America, and it’s particularly pronounced in Honduras and Guatemala, but we’re seeing it even in these spaces like Costa Rica as well.
Kayla Fratt 16:50
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, I mean, so kind of going back, I guess I should have set up top, but we’ll see now. Right now we connected because I have a couple key alerts set up on Google Scholar, and your paper came across my inbox, which is titled Jaguar conservation is caught in the crossfire of America’s war on drugs. So it was like one of those, like, okay, immediately I need to read this. Because again, as our listeners know, I’ve got a big soft spot for Central America and jaguars and so just to kind of recap and make sure I’m understanding, and remembering your paper correctly. Basically the first step was a lot basically GIS and looking at like, what sort of landscapes and landscape features are going to be attracted to traffickers, and then kind of comparing that with protected areas and Jaguar areas, and doesn’t the MES American biodiversity corridor, or maybe it’s a separate thing. Also have some, like, high priority Jaguar specific areas.
Nicholas Magliocca 17:46
Yes, it does. There’s a lot of overlap. There is a separate like Jaguar habitat and corridor map out there, but yet, they highly overlap.
Kayla Fratt 17:56
I would imagine so and yeah, so for our, you know, our conservation students out there, like, when you’ve got a big, wide ranging apex predator that I think jaguars are pretty territorial. They’re not gonna, you know, it’s not like wolves, where you can have a bunch that are all sharing and collaborating in a small area. They are particularly vulnerable to that sort of fragmentation. And then one of the other things that your paper mentioned, and I think we were just hinting at is kind of how drug trafficking and wildlife trafficking can come together. So can we talk a little bit about, kind of, maybe that really direct and kind of most intense conflict can happen in the actual trafficking and killing of Jaguars?
Nicholas Magliocca 18:40
Yeah. So this is a, this is a question that I’ve been asked before, and it’s something that’s been an area of interest, both in the research realm, but also, you know, obviously the conservation community. And, you know, unfortunately, there’s not, there’s not a general statement that can be made about this. You know, there’s been some research that’s tried to get at this connection and these kind of convergence of these, these criminal networks in particular, and frankly, there’s just not a lot of evidence for that, because, you know, traffickers make a ton of money in drugs. Yeah, and moving wildlife is often logistically complicated, particularly if you’re dealing with live species. But I think there is this interaction, like I mentioned, of opening up these spaces and making them more accessible, and so then, so then people who are actually in that illegal wildlife trade can access these spaces, and do access these spaces. Now there is some overlap, and you know, anecdotal evidence for, you know, these traffickers being pushed into these more remote spaces and these protected areas, and as a consequence, yeah, doing some opportunistic poaching and killing of not only jaguars, but other like, prey species.
Kayla Fratt 20:00
Yeah, I could imagine particularly bush meat, yeah, making sense,
Nicholas Magliocca 20:04
Yeah, yeah, totally. And, and, so, so there are instances in which they overlap, but, you know, a broader, kind of more systemic convergence that there’s not, there’s not a ton of evidence for that,
Kayla Fratt 20:18
Okay, well, yeah, yeah. I don’t know if I even really want to say that’s good news. So, yeah, one of the things that, again, I think your paper highlighted that I found interesting and a little depressing, was kind of this idea of, you know, we call these areas protected areas, but obviously, if there are airstrips being involved, there’s, you know, I know Ellen, my my roommate, slash lab mate, who does a lot of work in pretend in Guatemala, has talked about forest fires and being set intentionally to clear land, and then, you know, cattle and everything. Like, how protected are these areas? Because, I think particularly if you’re in a study, when you then say, like, you’re listening to this and thinking like, how on earth could this be happening in a place like Yellowstone or Yosemite or something like that. And maybe, maybe we need to clear, clear up kind of the level of protection that involves its involvement in these countries. And again, we’re talking about at least 567, countries. So I’m sure it varies quite a bit from country to country.
Nicholas Magliocca 21:19
Yeah, indeed, indeed it does. It does vary, but this is a good point. I mean, we really should question how protective these spaces actually are, particularly if, if they are, you know, especially attractive for traffickers in response to law enforcement like this is just one of these unintended consequences. Yeah, so a lot of it comes down to enforcement, right? And many of these traffickers, you know, it’s one, should not underestimate the economic power that comes with this trade. I mean, the scale of capital is mind blowing. So they can afford to, you know, they can afford to build single person submarines that go from South America to North America, right? So they like the resources are not a constraint. And so, you know, essentially buying access through coercive means and political means is not a problem, particularly if you’re in situations in which the economic health of that country is not not great, and it’s easy to enroll a rural population that feels marginalized or ignored by the state As one of the only viable livelihood opportunities. So that’s a long way of saying, of like many of these traffickers just operate with impunity, right? No one’s going to go and enforce their violation of these predicted area boundaries and the verbal destruction that they’re creating, because there is so much power associated with that and the case, the example of this, that is probably the clearest illustration, and of course, was in Honduras, right, with with former President Orlando Hernandez, who is a drug trafficker, right? Convicted drug trafficker, and his administration, you know, facilitated that trade. And you know, there’s many examples in the court testimony as well, of coordination and collusion with military and police and government to not only allow access, but to facilitate access and allowing that trade to happen. And so when you have that, you know, the Protected Area is just a line on the map, yeah. So, yeah, they’re very much compromised in some places. And you know, some of our work in Costa Rica is showing that, you know, even in Costa Rica, that where rule of law is still pretty strong, and they have a great reputation for, for good reason of conservation and kind of environmental ethic, you know, we’re seeing high levels of government administration being compromised, yeah, and so it’s the the influence of of the solicit economy is, You know, it’s in everything in these countries, unfortunately, and it’s really hard to root out.
Kayla Fratt 24:25
Yeah, definitely. And I think it’s interesting that, like, this paper came out at a time that I was already, again, kind of on this train of thought. One of the books that I read over the summer while I was on a boat in Alaska, a whole lot, was on the School of the Americas, and one of the countries that and programs that was kind of followed through this is Bolivia and the COVID growers in Bolivia and talking about how, when that was criminalized, there were all of these incentive structures put in place to try to convince the coca growers to swap over to some other crop that really wasn’t actually suitable for where they were. Sure it wasn’t nearly as profitable. And then these huge fumigation campaigns, and one of the rather few photos in the book, it’s a dense book, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for casual breeding, but very important stuff, if you’re interested in the region, is shows just a forest before and after a fumigation trying to kill coca and I think that was one of the first times that I was really putting together, like, the war on drugs and conservation, and then your paper came out and said, Oh my gosh, we’ve got an expert like, so let’s talk a little bit more. I mean, we are, the entire topic of this conversation is, like, the conservation cost of the war on drugs. But are there any other costs or factors or ways that this happens that this happens that we haven’t talked about, or other things you want to, like, expand on or dig into right now.
Nicholas Magliocca 25:46
Wow, yeah. So this is only an hour long podcast. I know we can have it back. I mean, so, so there are, there are consequences of current drug policy that extend beyond just the dynamic I’m talking about. But, you know, one can, one can look into and we have, and I’ll, in a moment here, I’ll come back to this is, you know, I’m part of a larger research group that’s been doing this for for over a decade now, and there are a lot of questions to be explored about, you know, how this influences land consolidation, how, in you know, land sovereignty and land rights, and how those programs initiatives have been co opted by by traffickers. There’s, you know, we’re seeing an evolution, for example, with increase in the transAtlantic cocaine trade, of reshaping and reorienting some of these supply chains, and that’s going to have consequences upstream, right? So, you know, this used to be a very much a North American oriented supply chain, and now, you know it’s, it’s much more globalized, and so that’s gonna that’s gonna move these operations, and now we’re starting to see targeting more of what were formerly legitimate businesses. And for example, the agro commodities, agricultural commodities, infrastructure is being co opted by traffickers, right? So you’re seeing an increased amount of cocaine being smuggled in containers and going on Container ships and going across to Europe. So any of this fresh produce that’s coming from Central America and to Europe is a easy target for traffickers to get cocaine. And so that’s, you know, one of the projects we have right now that’s funded by the NASA land cover and land use change program is trying to understand how this, how this evolving trade is, is kind of reshaping land use and land tenure relationships throughout, throughout the area. And so this, this eye towards conservation, is something we’ve always had, and now we’re starting to amass the evidence that we can say, Yeah, this is this area right here. We know is being influenced by by narco traffickers. It’s being used by them. And so let’s look at some of the land use change consequences, and then some of those potential impacts on conservation. And yeah, and so I should just say here too that, you know, I have, I have many colleagues that have have been working on this for a long time. And so one of the original papers was a 2014 paper and science that was led by Kendra McSweeney, who was the lead author that was talking about, yeah, the drug war is a conservation issue. And was really to kind of link those two. And, you know, other colleagues, Jennifer Devine and Beth Tillman and see sesni and Eric Nielsen and those folks have been working on this for quite a long time. We have, you know, we’ve started to compile enough information and knowledge about this that we’re, you know, the connections to, you know, conservation and land tenure and land consolidation dynamics are are starting to become more evident. And so there, there are a lot of questions still to be asked, but this is a, it’s a it’s a difficult topic to study. It does keep us challenged and motivated and not sure we’ll ever come up with a solution. Now to stop it, we at least need to, you know, shine the light on it,
Kayla Fratt 29:21
Yeah, yeah. And I think that, I mean, yeah, it kind of segues right into like, okay, so it seems like the war on drugs and like, suppressing the supply chains is having all of these knock on effects for conservation that we don’t like. What could work, what you know, even you know, we can talk both like, realistically, what might actually be something that we could get through the governments that exist in our world, and maybe what would also be like if we could imagine something better, and maybe like, it’s a complicated thing, so I don’t expect you to solve this in 10 min. That’s a mess.
Nicholas Magliocca 30:01
That’s good. I appreciate that. Yeah, so this is a question that we get a lot too, right? It’s like, okay, well, so, so what? What do you do? And, and, yeah, there’s, there’s no easy answer. You know, there are some good things happening, like we’re seeing in recent US. Administrations, more emphasis on harm reduction, really trying to address the consumption side. Because, I mean, that’s, that’s just a fact, right? Is that the US, it’s still a huge market for and, increasingly, now Europe as well, right? So, like, definitely, something needs to be done on the harm reduction side to address demand. You know, it’s, it could be a whole separate hour long podcast about whether legalization is the Bible. I don’t really want to dip into that, sure, yeah. But just to say, like the logic is, you know, kind of intuitive there. You know, one of the reasons why traffickers are able to operate and create all of these unintended consequences of judges because they have so much economic power, and so if you take away some of the economic power, you know, logically, you might be able to address the issue at a root cause, you know, short of all that You know, one reason, one reason we’ve focused on conservation, actually, I’ll say two reasons that we focused on conservation is that many of the people we talk to who are regularly on the ground working conservation see this all the time, right? And and there’s a reason why the traffickers are in these spaces, right? And that’s what we’re trying to document and and we have, we have put this information in front of law enforcement entities. We’ve, we’ve gone and spoken to the people who coordinate are in charge of counter drug interdiction efforts throughout all of Southern southern hemisphere and in Central America as well, and and they know these things are happening, there are a lot of reasons, a lot of incentives, for them to keep doing it the way they’re doing it. You know, the way DoD funding and budget structures work has a lot to do with that. But I think, you know, one of the things that what we’ve tried to do is, you know, the law enforcement operation is very much focused on, and pardon the jargon here, I’ll elaborate here in a second, but it’s very much tactical thinking, right? It’s day to day operations, right? We had, we had people tell us that, like your information on, you know, modeling spatial dynamics of trafficker movements is not useful for us, because we operate on a, you know, six to, you know, 24 hour time span, wow, that’s our operational scale. It’s very tactical. We’re responsive, right? And so what we’re trying to do is say, Well, what you need to do is shift a little bit more towards strategic thinking and some of the longer term consequences of this, and part of the motivation for this paper is to more fully account for those, those costs right if the costs right now are, You know, drug overdose deaths, allocating resources and deploying resources for counter drug and addiction. Those are kind of the official costs, but costs of the drug war more broadly are huge, right? There’s so much more wide reaching and so we’re just trying to document that and reaching out to the conservation community in particular. It’s been a very intentional move, because the, you know, the law enforcement community doesn’t really want to hear this. Yeah, I’m being a little harsh, but I’m also being realistic. They don’t really want to hear this. But, you know, the conservation community, many in that community, know this is happening, but also are afraid to talk about it, right? Because they’re, they’re in the field, and they don’t want to be putting themselves in danger, or their or their community contacts or collaborators. They want to put them in danger either, which is totally understandable. But, you know, we’re trying to shine the light on and say, Well, you know, there’s a reason why they’re in these spaces all the time. Yeah. And we’re trying to make that connection and mobilize the conservation community to, you know, apply pressure from another direction.
Kayla Fratt 34:24
Yeah, yeah. And I wonder, I mean, how much of this is also related to, like, law enforcement’s very specific mandate, you know, again, kind of going back to what you’re talking about with tactics, where it’s like, well, my job is to try to catch as many guys as I can in like, this period of time and again. The other not necessarily thinking long term, I just came off of, this is different, but I think related, as far as kind of this mandate question, I just came off of a weekend of volunteering at the border, doing humanitarian aid. And you know, we had people that were in very serious distress from. Crossed the desert and border patrols, you know responses like, well, if you help them, then you’re facilitating. So, yeah, you know, it’s, they’re they’re not. Their mandate is very narrow, and I could go off without that. I will privately forget anything with me elsewhere. But like, yeah, it’s, it’s just law enforcement needs some pushing in order to really take this sort of stuff seriously and not just think about, like, how many people can they get into the back of a truck and call, call it a day?
Nicholas Magliocca 35:34
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if we’re not, you know, for the immigration issue and this conservation issue as well, like, if we’re not taking a full counting of the costs and what these unintended consequences are, and making the case effectively that, you know, more strategic thinking is needed here, then nothing will change.
Kayla Fratt 35:57
Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of conservationists, you know, maybe not so much people who identify as conservationists, but maybe more the ecologists like we are kind of taught to stay in our lane and focus on what we are actually experts in. And that’s one of the things I appreciate about the work that you all are doing. And like really trying to zoom out and say, Hey, actually jaguars and deforestation and America’s drug policies like these are all actually really related, and it’s not stepping out of your lane in order to be thinking about these things. Because, yeah, we like our conservation areas are study species, whatever, like, they don’t exist in a vacuum at all. Right?
Nicholas Magliocca 36:41
Yeah, that’s a very important lesson, I think, from this work, and we’ve also made this argument too, when we think about climate change mitigation adaptation interventions. And you know, a lot of these, these governments are making, you know, commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And it’s like you can make all those commission commitments that you want, but as long as someone else is controlling and governing the space, as traffickers are, then there’s, there’s no way that you’re ever going to reach that because they operate outside of that formal system. And you know, same thing with conservation interventions, like, if you want to save these species in this biodiversity, just what you said, it’s embedded in this larger system, and and that larger system is not all formal, right? A lot of it’s informal. It’s elicited. And we really need to start taking that more seriously and take it into account in the research that we’re doing.
Kayla Fratt 37:40
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean. And again, I’m just kind of bringing in all of these other stories that are kind of like conservation, Latin America, whatever related like the work that I am hoping to be doing in El Salvador with Puma is a huge part of what they believe is causing Pumas to return to El Salvador is the emigration from people from El Salvador to the US, because one in six Salvadorans left in the 80s and 90s, and that has left a lot of empty land, particularly along a Honduran border that has basically been gradually rewilding, and then remittances sent from the US has led to a reduction in farming, and like once I started kind of putting all of that together, then it was like, Okay, I need to be spending a lot more time reading my history, reading my political science, like reading on this sort of stuff. Because, frankly, there’s no there’s nothing to read about Pumas in El Salvador because they haven’t been there for so long. And reading about other countries nearby is still useful. But the political and human story and how, like, you can trace, like, this story of Puma and El Salvador back to the collapse of the Indigo market in the early 1900s and like, I think as conservationists are starting to get better at thinking that way, at least what I feel like I’ve been seeing in my career, but there’s still a lot of room for growth measure. And then there’s the question of power. You know, conservation is already so massively underfunded, and we already have 5000 ideas that we would love to do that we can’t, right?
Nicholas Magliocca 39:16
You’re starting to sound like a political ecologist.
Kayla Fratt 39:19
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I’ve never heard that term before. I will have to look that up and see if there’s anyone at Oregon State who does that.
Nicholas Magliocca 39:28
Yeah. Another colleague out there who’s worked with this project in the past is David Wrathall, and he’s doing this work as well, and he worked with some some of our early articles on, you know how trafficking is undermining conservation governance, and he’s also done some work looking at fisheries as well, and sort of the darker trafficking influence on fisheries, and how, again, that that massive surge of illicit capital, how does that get translated into a more front facing legitimate and. Prize and and, of course, you get a lot of over extraction and fisheries that’s that’s related to this. So, so I encourage you to check out his work as well.
Kayla Fratt 40:08
I just opened another another tab. It took me a couple attempts to get the spelling right, but yep, I’m I’ve got his tab open. Great. Yeah, yeah. So I know one of the other topics that was kind of mentioned in this paper is the concept. Of community based conservation, and I can see how this could be potentially hit and miss, you know, because you’ve got these vulnerable communities that may be, maybe not necessarily any more susceptible to just getting looped into Narco um activities, but, you know, also having people on the ground who have more of a stake in the land could be helpful. So why don’t we talk a little bit about whether or not that’s a model that might have some promise?
Nicholas Magliocca 40:49
Yeah, and, and I will, I will say up front too, that I’m not the expert in this. And there, there are many other folks part of our research team that are so I mentioned kentra McSweeney and Eric Nielsen and Jennifer divine, and they’ve done a lot of work on this, on the idea of communities and land rights and how this intersects with the pressure from market trafficking. But I, you know, I can, I can say that it’s a, it’s a narrative that we have to be careful with too, because, you know, many of these governments have had thrown this accusation out there of local communities being involved in the drug trade, as you know, a vehicle for removing them from the land and dispossessing them. So, you know, there is a distinction to be made between local communities that are essentially, you know, coerced, either because they have no other options or because they’re threatened with violence, both to be involved in this drug trade. And then, you know, the what we talked about in this paper as a way for, you know, external, international funding, in particular, the role that that can play by by funding these community based conservation efforts. Because not only, you know, they need they need resources, and they need support and protection and ways to, like, defend their territory, you know, very, very physically and directly to the threat and market trafficking. But I think it’s also, you know, the appearance of reputation is really important. It’s hard to be accused of being part of this if you are actively pushing back and organizing to try to keep traffickers out of your space. But yeah, I mean, it’s in some ways, it’s the local communities that you know are most directly affected by this and are most invested in finding a way to keep traffickers out of the spaces, yeah. And in some ways, you know, traffickers are going to make the calculation and like, well, that committee is probably more trouble than it’s worth, and we can always just go over here, right? Yeah. So there are some, you know, dynamics there that are tricky and need to be navigated, like, where else is it going to go? But, you know, if there can be enough support for this type of approach, I think you get a much more concerted effort to keep traffickers out of these spaces. I think there’s a lot of promise for that. And there’s, there’s, of course, a lot of other reasons to do this as well. Yeah, a lot of the the justice issues of many of these communities are marginalized anyway, and so, yeah, empowering them to do this is, you know, not only maybe the most effective thing, but it’s also the ethical thing to do as well.
Kayla Fratt 43:35
Yeah, yeah. And that’s, I haven’t seen quite as much, or I’m not as familiar with models of community based conservation in Latin America. Latin America, but you know, having seen some of the models that Kenya does like, it seems very cool, and it seems like a really cool way to have people be able to remain employed in their community and remain connected to the land, and also be able to balance the needs of the community. Like one of the big things in Kenya is managing pastoral lifestyle and livelihood with water resources and living with predators and keeping big, fancy megafauna that tourists love alive, but having the people who actually live there and have been there for many, many generations working on it did seem, I mean, a it was just kind of inspiring and cool to actually get to be part of that, instead of, again, going back to the example of like Yosemite, which John Muir thought was better without the people who had been there for time immemorial. Yeah, gosh. But again, it it just seems like it’s very varied from country to country. And then, as you said, Okay, so you’ve got one community that maybe has a couple really dedicated I imagine, probably the tias in the community doing a great job organizing and getting everyone into shape. And, you know, like I can imagine it, but then it’s not just push it down the road to some other community that’s less well organized, that.
Nicholas Magliocca 45:00
Yeah, I should also say too that there’s a really important role for for NGOs to play in the space well, and so there are several that we we’ve worked with in the past, and we are connected with that, you know, are giving a voice to, you know, a lot of the indigenous populations that are there as well that, you know, have have really suffered, maybe disproportionately from the the these effects of counter drug interdiction and drug policies, because they’re, you know, they were in vulnerable situations anyway, with land tenure and land control, and they were very Easy to exploit, yeah, and very easy to intimidate and but there are organizations that are dedicated to really supporting those communities, and they also have to be very careful, right of not only like the physical danger and threats that are involved with trying to push back against that, but but but also the political issues of doing that. And you know, if you happen to work in a country whose government is, you know, if not friendly to the drug trade, is at least like complicit or ambivalent to it, then yeah, you know, you don’t want to jeopardize your work with indigenous communities in those spaces. But, you know, by essentially being told you can’t work here anymore. So, you know, it’s there’s the whole political mess around navigate, but you know, you know, who is going to fill that gap and support the communities is evolving question, and you know, I think the answer that we come up with is it’s got to be a combination, right? It’s got the combination of kind of international support on the on the ground organization, and a role that NGOs can play in organizing and connecting funders with communities that that need that support. So it’s got to be a kind of multi level approach.
Kayla Fratt 46:59
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Gosh, yeah. So there’s, there’s so much more that, like, I would love to expand on every single one of the questions that we’ve had because but we are needing to wind down a little bit here. We both have places to go. Is there anything that you wanted to circle back on and expand, or anything that I didn’t ask you about that we need to talk about?
Nicholas Magliocca 47:21
Yeah, you know, I could, I could come back to this, what I mentioned about, like, shifting from tactical to strategic thinking. This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. And again, why? Why we’re trying to connect the conservation community to this issue? Right? Is, you know, there tends to be a much longer, I mean, inherently, a longer time scale of thinking in the conservation community, you know, we need to preserve these species for as long as we can. That, you know, we there just needs to be louder voices and more evidence on this side of like, if you continue to keep doing it this way and being responsive, you know, not responsive, sorry, reactive. Continue to be reactive in law enforcement, like this is what you’re going to get. We’ve had 40 years of this, and we continue to get this. Yeah, it’s just the the territorial space over which traffickers are operating has just continued to grow as a result. Yeah, so you know, voices of a few academics saying this, no matter how loud we shout it and how much evidence we compile is is not going to change it, right? So finding these kind of partnerships and alliances in other spaces, and we think conservation is really important one that needs to amplify the message, right? So we, yeah, we also just recently had a collaboration with Amanda roadwald at the ornithology lab at Cornell, and did a similar paper, you know, using that, that same kind of shifting suitability landscape, and then tying this to migratory birds, right, that are wintering in Central America and then migrate north into North America and the US. And because, you know, birders are very passionate people, right? And we see these birds –
Kayla Fratt 49:14
And some of them have money.
Nicholas Magliocca 49:17
Yeah. You know, we see these birds in our backyards at certain times of the year and and to then make that connection to people and say, Well, yeah, when you don’t see them, this is where they are, and this is what’s happening in those habitats. You know that that bird might disappear because of what’s happening in these spaces. And us, drug policy is complicit in doing this. So like trying to mobilize that, that support and just raise awareness. I think that’s the that’s the most important thing that we can do, yeah,
Kayla Fratt 49:48
Yeah. And I mean, and thank you for helping bring this topic up and bring it to like, our community. And I think again, a lot of our listeners are probably maybe aware of, like, the border wall. And the impact that might have on jaguars and also lots in the US, but that’s already at the fringes of at least their existing range, and there’s just so much more here than just like the wall at our southern border, like the again, yeah, like, Thank you for helping expand this and helping people think a little bit more intersectionally about how all of this relates and interacts well if people want to keep up with you, other than typing your name into Google Scholar and heading alert, is there any other way that they can keep in touch or hear more about you your lab? And we’ll also obviously have some links in the show notes, including this paper itself, which is worth a read and a pretty quick read.
Nicholas Magliocca 50:42
Oh, yeah. We tried to be we tried to be brief. Yeah, I appreciate well, and thank you again for inviting me on here and give me a chance to speak about this. And I’d say so we so my lab is the human environment, interactions, modeling and analysis lab, Hema, for short, and there’s a research project page on there, where we have links to all these papers and links to places where you can get a little bit more background. And you know, we’ve as a research group, we have not just my lab, but the other collaborators I mentioned. We have amassed quite a bit of evidence. Now what’s happening there? So you know, for for listeners and readers who are interested in learning more about this topic, like, I encourage you to go seek those out, because there’s, there’s a lot there.
Kayla Fratt 51:29
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And again, those links will all be in the show notes. So, Nicholas, thank you so much for coming on and for making this happen. I really appreciate it. And this has been, it’s, it’s been fun, it’s been eliminating, it’s, you know, hard and frustrating and depressing, but that’s the story of conservation a lot of the times, and a lot of other international policies as well. And for everyone at home, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you all being here and continuing to learn alongside us. I hope you’re feeling inspired to get outside and be a canine conservationist in whatever way suits your passions and skill set. We’re recording this on September 13. You all will probably be hearing this in like November or December, but if you have the chance, do consider looking more into these sorts of things, more into ways that you can volunteer and help out, if money is something that you can’t just donate to an org, as I mentioned, I was recently on the border doing humanitarian aid, and you know, every little bit helps, and particularly you all with your experience being outdoors and working with dogs and doing searches might be incredibly helpful in literally saving a life if you have the chance to go down and volunteer with some of these humanitarian groups. So do reach out to me if you want to be connected. And also, you know, as Nicholas said, you know, donating, finding NGOs to support all of that is really, really helpful. As always, as we’ve mentioned, you can find show notes, donate to K9Conservationists if you so choose, join our Patreon, sign up for a course, buy a t shirt, whatever you want, all at k9conservationists.org We’ll talk to you in two weeks.