B2
Worst Week inWashington
The Fix’s
to agree.While a handful of conservative members backed her, GOP leaders sided almost unanimously with Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) for the No. 4 leadership role. Sensing that the tea was—ahem—cooling, Bachmann ended things
By Chris Cillizza R
epublican establishment 1, tea party 0. That’s the post-midterm score after tea party darling Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) dropped her candidacy for a spot in the House
Republican leadership roughly one week after announcing it. Earlier in the week, Bachmann, who founded the tea party caucus in the
House, was making bold proclamations about the power she wielded. She went so far as to tell Politico that she helped to “put that gavel in John Boehner’s hand.” Her colleagues—at least some of the more influential ones—didn’t seem
Wednesday, touting Hensarling as a “strong voice” for the tea party movement. (He has long been an outspoken conservative, an ideological position that had made Bachmann’s challenge to him a bit of a head-scratcher.) Bachmann’s quick exit from the leadership race signals that while the tea
party may have seized control from the GOP establishment outside Washington, the powers that be still have, well, power in the halls of Congress. And with Hensarling’s victory now assured, there won’t be a single challenge
to any member of the Republican leadership team—a sign that tea party might not have changed things within the party as much as people thought it had. Michele Bachmann, for underestimating the (still) potent power of the party establishment, you had theWorstWeek inWashington. Congrats, or something.
Have a candidate for theWorstWeek inWashington? E-mail
chris.cillizza@
wpost.comwith your nominees.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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KLMNO
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2010
Actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio (far right) helps PradeepKhanal of theWorld Wildlife Fund set up a camera trap in a tiger habitat on a recent trip toNepal.
Wildlife officials (left) at the Chitwan National Park in Nepal show a fresh tiger skin recovered from poachers.
LEE POSTON/WORLD WILDLIFE FUND JAN VERTEFEUILLE/WORLD WILDLIFE FUND
If we save the tigers, we’ll save the planet T
BY LEONARDO DICAPRIO AND CARTER S. ROBERTS
igers have long provoked awe in the human imagination, be- coming symbols of untamed nature whose “fearful symme- try,” in the words of William
Blake, has inspired everything from art to advertising. In the wild, however, tigers are on the verge of disappearing. A century ago, some 100,000 tigers
roamed the wilderness across much of Asia. But 100 years of human overhunt- ing of tigers’ prey, such as deer and wild pigs, and of poaching driven by demand for tigers’ skins and other body parts has been catastrophic. As few as 3,200 tigers remain, living in only 7 percent of their original natural habitat. As the Year of the Tiger draws to a
close on the Chinese lunar calendar, world leaders are gathering in St. Peters- burg later this month for an unprece- dented event: a tiger summit hosted by
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, convened for the sole purpose of saving the species from extinction. Heads of government — recognizing that the lim- ited resources devoted to tiger conserva- tion have not slowed deforestation or deterred the criminal syndicates that traffic in wildlife parts — will seek to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2022 (the next Year of the Tiger). The 13 Asian countries that tigers call home have already agreed in principle to this goal.
But good intentions are not enough.
The $350 million, five-year Global Tiger Recovery Program these countries are proposing will battle deforestation, poaching and the market for tiger parts. The money will come from both govern- ment and private sources.We are person- ally committed to raising funds to sup- port these efforts. Multilateral agencies such as theWorldBankare alsoonboard, funding pre-summit negotiations in Ne- pal, Thailand and Indonesia. But there is one country outside Asia
whose cooperation is crucial: the United States. Of course, the United States has no
wild tigers. Our big cats are animated in films, sell us cereal or stare at us from zoo cages.Why should we care? Because saving tigers is a compelling
and cost-effective means of preserving so much more that is essential to life on Earth. The tiger is what conservationists call an “umbrella” species. By rescuing them, we save everything beneath their ecological umbrella — everything con- nected to them — including the world’s last great forests, whose carbon storage mitigates climate change. For example, Indonesia’s 18 million-
acre peat forests, home to the Sumatran tiger, contain 36 percent of the world’s tropical carbon stores. So if we protect tigers by stopping deforestation, we also salvage the carbon storage these forests provide.Aforest that can’t support tigers isn’t of much use to us, either. What can the Obama administration do? The United States has been a leader
in tiger conservation, providing critical funding for anti-poaching efforts throughout Asia and using the threat of sanctions to persuade countries such as ChinaandSouthKorea tobantiger trade. But the upcoming summit will not suc- ceed without U.S. support — financial and political.Washington must signal its commitment by sending its top diplomat to St. Petersburg: Secretary of State Hil- lary Rodham Clinton. Pressing challenges such as the war in
Afghanistan and Middle East peace rightly dominate Clinton’s attention, but the crime syndicates that dominate the multibillion-dollar wildlife-trafficking industry demand her consideration as well. If Clinton sits beside other heads of government and high-level diplomats from the 13 tiger-range nations in St. Petersburg, the Obama administration will demonstrate global environmental leadership. Tiger conservation can also happen at
home.TheUnited States has nearly twice as many tigers in captivity as there are in
Journey to the new center of the Earth monsoon from B1
plains history, determines economics and transcends politics. As he ranges across the region fromOmantoSumatra, taking in Zanzibar, Kolkata and Sri Lan- ka along the way, he gives us a curious and compelling volume, part travelogue, part potted history, part journalism and part strategic analysis. It’s a book that convinces the reader that what Kaplan callsMonsoon Asia is a profoundly inter- esting and complicated part of the world, but the chapters don’t add up to a coherent argument as to why the region should matter more to the United States than anywhere else. Yet if you don’t care about getting
there, you can have a lot of fun along the way, because Kaplan tells a good story— or rather, a series of good (if not always connected) stories. He converses with mysterious American expat soldiers with noms de guerre such as “Father of the White Monkey” and “the Bull That Swims,” busy plotting freelance insurrec- tions in Burma. A Pakistani dissident claims that India is “the role model for South Asia” and calls for open borders, while anotherdenounceshisownnation: “Pakistan is itself a breach of contract.” Amid fluent if bland prose, Kaplan
occasionally startles with a passage of astonishing lyricism (“a sweeping, bone- dry peninsula between long lines of soar- ing ashencliffs anda sea the color of rusty tap water”) or passionate polemic (“pov- erty isnot exotic, ithasnosavinggraces, it is just awful”). There are powerful de-
scriptions of global warming in Bangla- desh, of the intersection of environment, demography and Islamin Indonesia, and of thepeopleofBurma as “victim[s]of the evil confluence of totalitarianism, realpo- litik and corporate profits.” The reporter in Kaplan is well in
evidence when he visits the Pakistani port ofGwadaror SriLanka’sHambanto- ta, both being developed by the Chinese (the former, he thinks, for strategic rea- sons; the latter for commercial ones). Facts and quotes abound as he recounts the growth of Indian naval aspirations and China’s plans to be a two-ocean maritime power: Kaplan tells us that China will soon have more ships than the U.S.Navy and, by 2015, will be the world’s most prolific shipbuilder. Kaplan’s breadth of travel and learn-
ing leads to intriguing insights, such as his argument that “like the Serbs in the formerYugoslaviaandthe Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese [in Sri Lanka] are a demo- graphic majority with a dangerous mi- nority complex of persecution.” In his view, Indonesia reveals both a “clash” and a “merger of civilizations.” More contentiously, global capitalism as em- bodied by the Chinese “constitutes the real threat to Indonesian Islam.” These are all worthwhile ideas. But
Kaplan too often strains to justify his interests with portentous claims: Sri Lanka is “the ultimate register of geopo- litical trends in the Indian Ocean region,” Burma “provides a code for understand- ing the world to come,” Indonesia will be “a critical hub of world politics.” Shoe-
INDIAN OCEAN
the wild worldwide — tigers sleeping in American back yards, in private breeding facilities and at roadside zoos from New York toTexas.Weneeda federalagency to monitor these tiger “pets” and make sure they don’t find their way into the same black market for wildlife products that kills wild tigers around the world.We can close loopholes in the Endangered Spe- cies Act and the AnimalWelfare Act and give agencies such as the Fish and Wild- life Service and the Department of Agri- culture the financialsupport theyneedto vigorously enforce animal protection laws.
Wild tigers stand at a crossroads of
extinction and survival. The “burning bright” eyes that so inspired Blake will be forever extinguished unless we act now.
info@savetigersnow.org
Actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio andWorldWildlife Fund president and chief executive Carter S. Roberts recently launched the Save Tigers Now campaign.
BIGSTOCK PHOTO
horning his travels into the book makes for an uneven effect, with some surpris- ing inclusions and omissions. One can’t help feeling that a country has been deemed to be important because he traveled there. In addition, the geopolitical analysis is
sometimes erratic, as Kaplan hedges his bets. India and China could compete on the seas, providing an opening for the United States, or their “mutual depen- dence on the same sea lanes could also lead to an alliance between them that . . . might be implicitly hostile to the United
States.” A few pages later, “a global maritime system, loosely led by the Americans, with help from the Indians, and hopefully the Chinese” might evolve. By the end of the book, “leveraging allies must be part of a wider military strategy that seeks to draw in China as part of an Asia-centric alliance system.” Kaplan concludes that Washington,
“as the benevolent outside power,” must seize this “time of unprecedented oppor- tunity” because “only by seeking at every opportunity to identify its struggles with those of the larger Indian Ocean world
can American power finally be pre- served.” Struggles? Finally be preserved? This
is sketchy stuff at best, as if Kaplan felt the need to burden his reportage with an all-embracing thesis in order to justify putting a number of enjoyable but un- connected essays between hard covers. Memo to Washington policy-makers: “Monsoon” is a book to take on a long flight to the Far East. But it won’t substi- tute for your dossierswhenyou get there.
bookworld@washpost.com
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