Jurassic Park where tourists eat the dinosaurs
Indonesia is building a real-life “Jurassic Park” on Rinca Island in the Flores Sea. Well, it almost is. Instead of dinosaurs, the place will be built around komodo dragons, the giant, carnivorous lizards you’ve probably seen tearing at one another in some David Attenborough clip.
Naturally, environmental campaigners don’t like it. A group called Save Komodo Now stirred up opposition to the development this week after posting a photo of a construction lorry facing a komodo dragon on a muddy plain. The group wants the whole plan binned. For its part, the government argues that the park won’t harm the dragons. It is scaling down tourism on nearby Komodo Island and concentrating visitors on Rinca, in a kind of dragon zoo.
If you want to preserve rare creatures, you are better off ensuring that the people who live near them profit from their conservation more than their destruction. Jurassic Park is surely better than shore-to-shore palm oil plantations. I can understand the worries, though. I’ve travelled in the region and seen good and bad examples of wildlife tourism. I’ve seen a tiger held in a tiny cage and thousands of rare butterflies pinned for tourist displays. But I’ve also visited a hotel that had managed to stop locals selling turtle eggs for food by offering to pay more. They reburied the eggs on their private beach, where well-timed guests could witness the baby turtles
shatching and scrabbling out to sea (sadly, my timing was off). If the hotel shut, I’m sure the turtle population would fall rather than rise.
The question is not whether Indonesia should trade off tourist interest in the komodos, but how to do it well. Unfortunately, its record is pretty abysmal. If the next Jurassic movie were really on point, the tourists would eat the dinosaurs, rather than vice versa.
At last, I understand the term “mushrooming”. This year seems to be the most fruitful for wild fungi I can remember. I’ve seen little white ones growing up through the grass like tiny church domes; wispy, silver-stalked ones with black caps like oriental parasols; brown, ankleheight discs that almost look edible; a putrid, mustardyellow variety tucked in the moss; small, dusky pink hemispheres nestled at the edge of flowerbeds; and a row of huge, fairy-tale toadstools in a wood, bright red with white spots. One day, after carefully flattening a forest of them in a playground, I returned the next day to find most had regrown. Admiring the phenomenon would almost be an unalloyed pleasure, if it weren’t for the need to stop my toddler from eating something deadly when I’m not looking.