Beautiful Beasts, Beautiful Lands is a refreshingly honest, practical account of some common challenges and misperceptions that arise when working with local communities in protected areas conservation. The book is based on the author’s lifelong experience as a working conservationist, especially at Lake Mburo National Park in Uganda, where there is a history of conflict between the Park and local people. His experiences are interwoven with an account of evolving international conservation policy over several decades, showing how it rests on generalized assumptions about what local people think, or want, or value. He shows clearly how local people’s relationship with the land rests on cultural and aesthetic values rather than economic need—just as it does for the vast majority of conservationists—and that economic incentive-based approaches to conservation can backfire, undermining these much more resilient value systems.

Lake Mburo National Park was created in 1983 following Obote’s election to the Presidency. Its management followed the conventional ‘fortress’ model of conservation involving the eviction of local people—which in this case was apparently in retaliation for their lack of votes during the presidential election. When the Presidency changed hands a few years later, two-thirds of the Park were degazetted and the rest was opened up again, in an act of counter-retaliation. The author emphasizes that this kind of politicization of protected areas is not unique to Mburo, but is depressingly common across the world.

In 1991, against this uneasy background, the author started the Lake Mburo Community Conservation Project together with Ugandan colleagues Arthur Mugisha and Moses Turyaho. In line with contemporary thinking in conservation, the project aimed to defuse tensions by opening dialogue and responding to community needs alongside more top-down measures (strengthening the Park infrastructure, compensating and relocating farmers, and running conservation education programmes). It included income generation projects, agroforestry and farm improvements, road-building, and measures to address human–wildlife conflict. The author’s analysis of the successes and failures of these different kinds of activities will strike a chord with conservation managers elsewhere and offers many valuable lessons. For example, why did local women suddenly abandon a lucrative handicrafts project? Why did conservation education make no headway? And above all, why did the Bahima pastoralists remain unremittingly hostile to the Park even when the project was bringing them genuine benefits?

In 1996, the author started a PhD at the University of East Anglia to explore some of these issues in depth. Using ethnographic methods, he showed how the significance of the land for the Bahima pastoralists was mediated through their Ankole cattle—magnificent animals with long, white, lyre-shaped horns and deep brown coats. Traditionally, Mburo had been a special preserve set aside for the royal herds, and for them, Mburo without cattle was an abomination. Yet with the creation of the Park, the cattle were banned, impounded, even shot and speared.

Based on this insight, the Ankole Cow Conservation Association was formed with support from Mark and Arthur to establish a herd of ‘beautiful cultural cows’ and negotiate with the park authorities for the herd to graze in the National Park. However, after a promising start, it ran up against fundamental opposition from conservation staff to the presence of any cattle in the Park—opposition which, he argues, was based not on science but on their own cultural biases and value systems.

As part of his PhD, the author carried out biodiversity surveys in areas inside and outside the Park, with or without recent grazing; he designed tests to determine the characteristics that Bahima used to select their most favoured animals, and he carried out ranking exercises separately with conservationists, tourists and pastoralists based on a set of photographs representing a range of habitat types. The results of these experiments are surprising. His conclusion? Naturalness, as well as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and while science can tell us how to conserve, it is our own cultural values that determine what we choose to conserve.

I found Beautiful Beasts, Beautiful Lands to be practical, accessible, down to earth, and full of insights that have value for conservation practice across the world. I strongly recommend it. In fact, if every conservation planner and manager were to read this book, we might finally stop repeating some of the most common errors and misunderstandings that have plagued conservation for the past hundred years or so.