Conserving Afghan wildlife

While in Kabul, Peter Smallwood (l.) visited with Mohammad Hakimi, (c.) a forester and successful Kabul businessman who is helping with environmental work in Afghanistan, and Prof. Nuristani Kohestani, an ecologist from Kabul University who did scientific translating for WCS.

BY LINDA EVANS
Editor, RichmondNow

Peter Smallwood spent a year in Iraq helping Iraqi scientists find meaningful work so they would stay in the country. He intended to return to the University of Richmond to resume his research on squirrels and spiders.

He did return to campus, but another call left the local animals and insects waiting while he traveled once again to a war-ravaged part of the world.

Last summer, Smallwood, associate professor of biology, served as interim country director in Afghanistan for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which received a grant from U.S. AID to begin conservation biodiversity programs in the country. WCS had wanted him to serve a year as its deputy director, but commitments at Richmond prevented that. A summer stint to help the country with resource management and conservation seemed just right.

“I helped with programs to find out what resources the country has and how people are using them,” explained Smallwood. Programs he helped establish focused on using resources in a more sustainable manner.

Arriving in Afghanistan, he found a country that had suffered through almost a quarter century of war, including a Soviet invasion, civil war and the Taliban years. In addition to the toll on citizens, the environment suffered: losses included forests, grasslands, soil and wildlife. 

Smallwood says he “stepped into the middle of something that was already started and kept things going” in his job that involved more management than science.

He helped supervise and support teams that surveyed rangeland health and interviewed citizens of about 50 villages to understand how they were using their natural resources. He worked with three Indian biologists who trained a team of 10 Afghans to perform wildlife surveys and deployed them for a two-month trip to the Wakhan Corridor in the far northeastern part of the country.

He assisted an environmental lawyer from the United States in designing surveys of the local markets to gage the trade in wildlife products. Visiting the markets, he found many skins of wolves, fox, snow  leopards and other cats.

Unlike his time in Baghdad, where he had to strap on body armor and a helmet to venture outside the Green Zone, Smallwood felt safe in Kabul. “I was able to move around the city, visit the markets and go to restaurants,” he said. He never saw the American military or State Department  personnel in the city, “consistent with their policy of minimizing their impact as much as possible.”

Most people were friendly, he noted, exchanging a smile or nod as he walked through the city.

A couple of situations, however, reminded him that he was in a country that is undergoing tremendous change. One occurred during a walk with a colleague on the campus of Kabul University when two mullahs, or influential clerics, approached them. The encounter caused some tension, since some mullahs have renounced the United States and the new Afghan government.

Another sign that he was in a fledgling democracy came in his own office, where there was a female receptionist-translator. At first, the woman made no eye contact with Smallwood, but over the course of his time there, she became more relaxed—that is until someone walked by. Then she “tensed up and pulled her shawl over her head,” Smallwood said. Her actions told him that women in Afghanistan are still wary and nervous about living in a country where newly gained freedoms might easily be taken away. 

Overall, the experience was good. “It was a real privilege to get to know these people—both scientists from other countries and the Afghans,” he said.