In my enthiusiasm to bury this idea for publicly available plant mapping, I
forgot to add a few importanty comments in my article.
Plant mapping IS a good idea. It's the publication that is the problem. We
need to devise a solution that maps the plants and lets people know in a
controlled manner such that those who gain the knowledge from us can be
identified if they abuse the information.
Oh yes. We've seen several attempts at publishing names of offenders.
The correct procedure should be as follows. First, be sure youi can
identify the person you think committed the theft and document all known
details of the theft. Second, contact your country's local CITES group
and make your allegation in confidence. If the local CITES group are
any good (and the ones in the UK and Germany have been excellent, no
reason to assume others won't be), then CITES will take no action on the
particular theft in most cases, as it's almost impossible to prove
anything after the fact (unless you can supply evidence as well, to be
used in the theives own country). But CITES will then watch for when
that same theif next goes on holiday and they will ask Customs to
intercept the thief on return to check his/her bags for illegally
collected and undeclared plant material. If found with any, the theif
will be arrested and charged and CITES will work with Customs to attempt
to gain a nasty punishment from the Courts. Only AFTER any conviction
is it sensible to publish any names as to do so any earlier would risk
alerting the thief. Now you know how - consider being the one who
alerts CITES the next time you know someone stole significant numbers of
plants from the wild (significant is currently subjective, we each have
to decide what is right or wrong until guidelines are agreed and
published).
I mentioned that it was Germans in the Dominican Republic who had raped
and destroyed at least one entire site. First, The Dominican Republic
is an island favoured by germans rather than other nationalities.
Therefore it is logical that any damage will be more likely caused there
by germans. I'm sure other islands visited by other nationalities will
be destroyed by those nationalities and not germans. Sorry as I failed
to make this clear and it could be interpreted as bias against our
german colleagues. Secondly, I will make it very clear that german
members of this conference seem as upset as I am at the abuse of
locality information leading to damage of the environment. I am sure
that the particular germans involved are not representative of that
country's people in total. Third, in a future article, I point out that
American's are up to the same trick in the Dominican Republic and
elsewhere in the Caribbean, especially with regard to Bromeliads. Once
again, the comment is true but I do not mean to imply all americans are
so short on morals.
No one complained but I just wanted to be clear and not accidentally malign
entire nationalities! (Wouldn't it be interesting to see if the people who most
know - i.e. have facts - on plant theft from the wild could actually demonstrate
a ranking of which countries are responsible for most damage outside their own
borders?)
In response to Barry's suggestion, I'll attempt an article on mapping for CPN.
Regards
Paul (and I had two german great-grandparents!).