...the nature we share

n recent decades, conservation interests have succeeded in banishing Maasai from large areas of their traditional lands, including the Serengeti National Park. Confined with their herds into smaller areas, Maasai have begun turning to agriculture to supplement their diet. Leslie's team is studying the consequences — for Maasai families and for the environment.

"These parks and conservation areas, where all the fantastic wildlife is, can't really be treated as isolated systems because the animals don't know about the park boundaries, and some of them have to migrate in the dry season to other grazing areas," Leslie says. "Pastoralists can live in a place and intermingle with the wildlife, but sometimes they have to get out of the way. The wildebeest, for example, have huge migrations, and when the wildebeest calve, they spread, through nasal secretions and so on, a disease that's lethal to cattle. So Maasai herders have to stay away from the wildebeest during certain times of the year. But if you are planting fields in these wildlife corridors, what's going to happen? People don't want fifty thousand wildebeests or even a few elephants running through their fields."

.: This photo, which Leslie calls "Apalo dancing," captures the fluid grace of the Turkana people. For young women, dancing with 15-20 pounds of beads around the neck requires a special finesse. Photo by Paul Leslie; click to enlarge. :.

ne of Leslie's graduate students, Amy Cooke in the Ecology Curriculum, is working outside of Tarangire National Park, where Maasai are adopting agriculture. Cooke studies how people choose where to farm, and she examines farming's effects on the migration corridors of key wildlife species. "We really need to know a lot more about the ecology of these systems and, unfortunately, we've got to know yesterday," Leslie says. "This is happening right now, it's happening very fast, and it's a real race. If we want to have any sort of a rational response to human population growth and economic change and the desire to conserve, we've got to know a lot more."

In the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the government has attempted to ban agriculture or at least to limit it severely. Leslie's team is comparing the effects on people and the environment inside the conservation area with those outside it. The team is also studying the changes that result as more and more Maasai, especially young men, gravitate toward towns.

.: As they move into towns for employment, young Maasai encounter the night spots and lifestyles that challenge their values and expose them to HIV. Photo by Paul Leslie; click to enlarge. :.

"They find work especially as watchmen and guards because they have a reputation of being fierce warriors," Leslie says. "So they go there with the idea of earning some money, buying some animals, adding to the family herd, and getting married. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But in addition to bringing back animals, they are also bringing back new expectations and values, and maybe a source of income. So they are less dependent on the elders, and their social system is going to change. They are also bringing back microbes, and HIV is now just getting into this area."

eslie collaborates with Trude Bennett, associate professor of maternal and child health; with Ipas, a Chapel Hill-based organization that works with women's reproductive health; and with two Tanzanian hospitals that have mobile health-care units. The team gathers information from medical clinics in remote areas to study maternal mortality rates, to track pregnancies, and to test for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

In all of this work, Leslie adopts the perspective of a human ecologist — someone who studies people as a part of their environment. And he's been doing this kind of research much of his career. For 15 years, from 1980 to 1995, Leslie was part of a team of social scientists and ecologists studying people from the Turkana region of northwestern Kenya. The project, whose results have been published in part in Turkana Herders of the Dry Savanna (edited by Michael A. Little and Paul Leslie and published in 1999 by Oxford University Press), dispelled some long-held assumptions about the herders and their animals.

"For a long time, Western policy makers and scientists have had the picture that African pastoralists are not really rational herders," Leslie says. "The pastoralists keep as many animals as they can, and they have big herds with lots of scrawny animals that often look like they are just walking skeletons. So the development expert goes in there and says, 'Well, these guys don't know what they're doing. They're keeping too many animals, they're overgrazing, and they're causing desertification — spread of the deserts.' But in Turkana, we found no evidence of that, except in the few cases around towns or missions where wells have been drilled, and then people congregate, and you do get overgrazing."

.: A young woman from Turkana. Photo by Paul Leslie; click to enlarge. :.

y combining the tools of diverse fields, including biology, ecology, anthropology, hydrology, and medicine, the Turkana project could examine the people and their environment from multiple perspectives. For example, ecologists watched animals nibble bushes or built exclosures to keep animals away, studying the effects on vegetation. Anthropologists observed people day by day, asked them about their animals, their decisions, and their social arrangements. In combination, the studies yielded a comprehensive picture of life in Turkana.

This approach — to study people as a part of the ecosystem — was a new idea when the project began. Ecologists of the time tended to regard human beings as intruders and despoilers, and researchers typically sought out pristine systems undisturbed by people. But in Turkana, Leslie and his colleagues found a system in which people were inseparable from the natural order of things. As Leslie writes it in the first chapter of Turkana Herders, the landscape of northwest Kenya conveys "an image of linearity and sharpness. The people are tall and thin, the dogs are scrawny, the rocks are sharp, and the trees are covered with thorns." But in these harsh environs, where life seems precarious at best, Leslie and his colleagues found a logical system at work.