What is ‘Traps, Cages and Spells’ about?

It’s about the saola, which is a a Critically Endangered forest antelope, new to science in 1992 and endemic to the forests of Vietnam and Lao PDR.

OK, that might be a bit misleading. It’s more about my - for want of a better world - involvement with the saola and whether I went about it the right way.

In 2005, starting with a poster I saw at a conference in Cambridge, I left England with my wife for Vietnam. At that time, there was no effective program to conserve the species in the wild, no captive population, and no scientist had reported a sighting of a wild saola. Now, there is no effective program to conserve the species in the wild, no captive population, and no scientist, including me, has reported a sighting of a wild saola.

I mean, you’ve got to wonder what it takes to get something done around here.

When I went out to Vietnam, it was with the idea that I’d stop my idle dreaming and get down to work. However, I couldn’t get away from filling notebooks with fancies and dreams; and with descriptions of lakes and spiders and cafe tables and everything else. For some reason, I kept writing about goddesses too; occasionally about God. These notebooks went into one set of boxes and the notebooks full of notes on property rights, bioeconomic models and decision-making under uncertainty went into another set of boxes. One set helped me write my PhD. It was also supposed to help me save the saola but the saola isn’t saved and the number who think it can be is shrinking. That isn’t all somebody else’s fault.

So…

Metaphorically and, to a large extent literally, this substack is a record of me opening the other boxes and seeing what those dreams can say. Do they tell me what I really should have been doing all along, or have they just prevented me from being the effective professional who could have saved this beast?

Why is it called that?

Well traps have long been considered the main threat to saola and cages, for rather less time, have been considered the best short-term hope. A spell, as I understand it, is a trap made of words; or a weapon. There’s an idea that we’re all under a spell here, and that’s why we hunt species to extinction and that’s also why we try to save them. I don’t know….

Where am I going with this?

I believe that what I am doing is working on a book here. This is really a place for first drafts so they’re sometimes messy and always long. I have pretty much never written anything straight out. This feels like dragging up some big piece of driftwood our of the log-jam of my notebooks, accepting that some bits get broken off, and with the hope of taking a knife to it later. In other words, it’s wordy. The final book’s likely to be a lot more concise. I don’t know what’s part of the story yet.

This is the baroque version - that’s the polite way to say it.

Why subscribe?

Well if you subscribe, you get an email every week - usually on a Saturday - and occasionally it might be two. If you are a paid subscriber, you always to get to read the whole thing. If you’re a free subscriber then you get to read the beginning and, for somewhere between a quarter and a half of the posts, you also get to read the whole thing.

Most importantly, though, if you subscribe, you become one of The Watchers. Without your silent and steady gaze, I will only every write tomorrow and never today, that’s the painful fact of it.

Actually, no need to keep it silent! Write in the comments, send me an email, complain about typos, anything!

If you’re feeling super-generous, you can even join as a ‘Founder Member’ and pay me a higher rate of your choosing.