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AN AMBIVALENT QUEST FOR GOOD SCIENCE

From the Authority's inception, its field staff contained many talented in-dividuals who quickly attained considerable practical knowledge. Alon Galili still wears his NRA T-shirt, even though he is no longer formally on its staff. Galili's fame/notoriety comes largely from his work as head of the Green Patrol (see Chapter 10). At his home at Sdeh Boqer, it takes little to get him talking about nature preservation. His story is typical of the first generation of workers who joined Yoffe in the 1960s. A kibbutznik from Ein ha-Shofet, he began his conservation career at the SPNI. Galili would compensate for his lack of academic training by sheer proximity. When asked to draft a conservation strategy for wild boars, he literally lived with the pigs for six months—dyeing them, tagging them, marking hooves. The task completed, it was on to porcupines and gazelles.[123]

Yoffe often preferred the common-sense orientation that his field staff brought with them to the more ponderous deliberations of academics. Paz, whose own perspective was colored by his years as an SPNI inspector, was considered the senior scientific voice in the Authority. Yoffe also under-stood that this was not enough and cited “limited local experience” for his heavy reliance on foreign expertise. His workers remember his frequent trips abroad under the guise of selling Israel bonds. While “in the neigh-borhood,” he would drum up donations and scientific backing for his own preservation projects.[124]

In 1968 Yoffe brought a delegation headed by Sir Peter Scott and other leaders from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to Israel. Its mission was to offer advice about the management of open spaces; its recommendations provided the conceptual strategy for the


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Authority for the next two decades. The year before, he consulted Professor Bob Davis, a visiting limnology expert from South Africa, on the condition of Lake Kinneret. Davis argued that the Sea of Galilee was rap-idly eutrophying and that immediate measures were required to stall its demise. Yoffe immediately moved to create a Kinneret Basin Authority.

Part of the attraction of foreign scientists for Yoffe may have been that it freed him from the Israeli academic establishment. Although everyone remembers him as a good listener, he often found local scientists unrealis-tic. One of the results of Yoffe's ambivalence toward science was the lack of a systematic, empirical approach to internal decision making. For in-stance, the scientific community could not decide whether reintroduction of gazelles in the Golan Heights was a good idea (owing to high seasonal humidity). In 1968 rangers found an ibex skull in the mountains. It alone was taken as sufficient proof of past wildlife survival to move ahead with a major relocation project.[125]

The generation that came to the Nature Reserves Authority from the SPNI had tremendous practical knowledge about animals. The problem was that they rarely converted it into a scientifically usable form. Anecdotal information survived through a haphazard oral tradition.[126] When he became Director, Adir Shapira decided to change this.

When Uzi Paz decided to take a leave of absence to complete his doc-torate, Shapira took advantage of his departure to create a new department with Aviva Rabinovich at its head. Among the first things Rabinovich did was establish scientific criteria for the delineation of reserves, first in the Galilee and then on a national level. Dozens of graduate students were funded to generate the data from the field that would be required for de-tailed biological mapping. Rabinovich established professional advisory committees to assist the NRA in its work, and an extensive educational program was set up to give rangers advanced training to supplement their skills. Rabinovich established a controlled-grazing initiative based on eco-logical principles that for the first time allowed herds inside reserves in order to balance the flora of the area.

There were many practical reasons for upgrading the NRA's scientific capabilities. Advocacy was strengthened in all areas of activity if it was backed by even modest expert opinion. Rabinovich became the NRA's sci-entific “hired gun” in its arguments with Maatz (Israel's highway con-struction agency), the JNF, the Bedouin, and the Ministry of Agriculture.

Scientific self-reliance intensified the rift between the NRA on the one hand and the academic community on the other, as well as with the SPNI, which often felt shut out.[127] At the same time, the elevated influence of inhouse


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scientists strained relations between the rangers and the scientists. This tension became sharpened when Uri Baidatz succeeded Shapira as NRA Director. In 1988, at the recommendation of one of his former stu-dents, Baidatz approached Uriel Safriel, the original SPNI Eilat inspector and by now an eminent Hebrew University professor. Aviva Rabinovich was talking about retiring after almost two decades of commuting to work by bus, and Baidatz thought it was time to bring an ecology expert from academia on board.

Safriel embraced the challenge, but immediately encountered systemic problems. There was little follow-up in monitoring the success of manage-ment strategies. Safriel pressed the staff to frame its activities in a scientific context, with a null hypothesis that could be evaluated. This was not the way the pragmatic field staff was accustomed to working, and resistance was great. Inspectors became embittered and muttered about scientists who were only interested in their research findings. After she returned from a scientific mission to Guatemala, Rabinovich was unhappy with her succes-sor's new, academic orientation. She felt that Safriel was out of touch with the reality of the field and opposed his attempt to shift expertise and geo-graphic information system (GIS) databases from the NRA to the univer-sities. To this day she cannot forgive Safriel for dismissing several veteran NRA field scientists.[128] In the ensuing tensions, NRA Director Baidatz backed his Chief Scientist, along with his personnel and policy changes.

When Dan Perry took over as Authority Director from Baidatz, he re-verted to the more traditional, pragmatic approach. Perry had come through the system as an SPNI recruit from Shachal. Self-taught, with considerable field experience, Perry was quite knowledgeable. Safriel felt that Perry was not interested in consulting with a scientist at all. It did not take long for Safriel to tender his resignation.[129]

The process of enhanced technical sophistication at the Authority, how-ever, was unstoppable and probably had little to do with any given person-ality. By the 1990s, science was built into the fabric of the agency's culture. The computerized ecological databases that Aviva Rabinovich had pioneered during the early 1980s now contained hundreds of thousands of observa-tions of natural assets and resources, ranging from the genetic sources of grains and cultivated plants to plants in the wild and fungi. They are sup-plemented by a GIS, computerized-mapping department. The Authority also initiated long-term research ventures, receiving international funding for monitoring specific species, controlled-grazing programs in protected wood-lands, and predator-prey balance.[130] Each NRA region has a biologist who works alongside the rangers. The level of formal training among field staff


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continuously improves; arbitrary management decisions, with no firm basis in science, are harder to impose on a conscientious and competent staff.

The NRA annual gazelle count is instructive, for instance. Each year the Authority undertakes an inventory of the local stock of gazelles, checking the age and sex distribution of dorcas gazelles and a range of other wildlife. If the survey is done incompletely, results can be misleading. In 1991 Daphna Lavi, the southern region biologist, repeatedly asked that the count be discontinued until a more reliable protocol could be implemented.

When her request was denied, she fired off a scathing report to the NRA's Yedion circular: “All told, the count consumed 110 work days,” she railed. “It produced very few conclusions, and these are not useful at all. …I again rec-ommend presenting the problem of the Negev gazelles to a scientist who will address the subject in an intelligent fashion…”[131] In such an open and critical institutional culture, the days when a director could run things on in-tuition alone seemed as remote as ancient history.


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A General Launches a War for Wildlife
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