ImagineFor1Minute what a better future looks like. Is it a world where we respect and honor nature? Where no more species go extinct because of humanity's i...
CITES
©Gerhard G./Pixabay
Happy World Rhino Day
“The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there’s a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.”
Cheat sheet: The first World Rhinoceros Day was celebrated throughout the world in 2010. The day was initiated by the World Wildlife Fund, as WWF was then called; the organizational body is now called the Worldwide Fund for Nature. For a time the acronym WWF was more closely associated in most people’s minds as the World Wrestling Federation. As the real WWF predated the wrestling federation, the wildlife conservation organization took the wrestling group to court for copyright/name infringement, aka misrepresentation. The wildlife group argued in court that, as fundraising is a crucial part of the WWF’s role in animal conservation, any association with a pro wrestling body could harm it in fundraising efforts. People are easily confused. Besides, the wildlife group got there first.
In the end, the wildlife body won its court case, surprising more than a few observers. The wrestling group has been rebranded as WWE — World Wrestling Entertainment — though, where entertainment is concerned, that’s a matter of opinion, is it not?
Of the various rhino species, Javan rhinos, Sumatran rhinos and black rhinos are classified as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). That’s why recent news reports of a pair of Javan rhino calves in the wild made news headlines around the world.
Realists know, however, that a pair of calves — while welcome news — is hardly a turning point in the species’ survival.
Other facts: Rhinos have poor eyesight, it is true.
That is compensated for by other senses: Rhinos can hear and smell over distances of up to 30 metres.
Rhinos enjoy a symbiotic relationship with oxpeckers. The oxpeckers stand on rhinos’ backs and feed on parasitic ticks. In exchange for a safe place to rest, not to mention the occasional light snack, oxpeckers raise the alarm when they sense danger, alerting their host to possible trouble. Rhinos do not have any natural enemies in the wild but, as with people, some species are known to be thoroughly unpleasant and are best avoided.
Rhino horn is not ivory; it is made of keratin. Keratin is the same substance of which human hair and fingernails are made. Many people in China and Southeast Asia haven’t grasped that yet.
Rhinos mark their territory by defecating around themselves. Now you know.
A group of rhinos is called a crash, which is silly and absurd. Male rhinos are called bulls, while females are called cows. Calling a group of rhinos a crash is bullshit, as most people know, deep down.
The world is full of problems right now. Rhino survival is probably not at the top of many people’s lists of priorities. As with anything that old and majestic and fascinating, though, the world is better off with them than without them.
Happy World Rhino Day.
©CITES-Twitter
CITES warns: Regulate the Illegal Wildlife Trade, Or Expect More Covid-19s
“Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It is a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over, leading to unnecessary suffering and death.”
Ivonne Higuero is an environmental economist — or, in Trumper terms, a loser — with a decades-long career with international organizations that specialize in sustainable development.
She has been Secretary General of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, since October, 2018, around the time Trumpers decided that while they had never liked environmentalists much, now was the the time to get positively medieval on what’s left of Earth’s precious — and precarious — wilderness resources.
Trumpers look at the name “Higuero” — never mind the outré spelling of her Christian name “Ivonne” — and no doubt write her off as yet another uppity Mexican, leaving aside the fact that she’s actually from Panama and her post-secondary bona fides include Duke University (Durham, North Carolina) and Missouri University of Science and Technology — which, oddly enough, is based in the US midwest state of Missouri.
Since the unwelcome arrival of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic earlier this year, she has repeatedly gone on record as pointing out that the illegal trade in wildlife — everything from the bushmeat trade to so-called wet markets, where wild animals are served up as human food — has encouraged the spread of pathogens into the human population, directly, through the food chain, and indirectly, by eroding wildlife habitats which — crazily! — act as a natural barrier between zoonotic viruses and spillovers from animals to people. Who knew?
Trumpers equate her to a loud, obnoxious bully who goes out of her way to terrorize the delicate sensibilities of the fossil fuel industry, at the same time questioning the manly fragility of trophy hunters. After all, what is Don Jr. to do if not cost US taxpayers $75,000 for Secret Service protection just so he could fly all the way to Mongolia to gun down a rare and endangered mountain sheep for the trophy wall? The Argali sheep, the largest of sheep species and renowned for their large horns, is listed as “near threatened” on the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, which is another way of saying there are not that many of them.
Shooting defenceless mountain sheep partly on the taxpayers’ dime is one thing, and certainly worthy of CITES comment.
With the Covid-19 pandemic showing every sign of growing, though, and not slowing — hey, Trumpers, could we please just start accepting facts as, well, facts — the issue of how, where and why a deadly virus jumped
from animals to humans has taken on an added, worldwide urgency.
This past week Higuero penned an essay in the South China Morning Post headed, ‘How regulation of endangered wildlife trade can prevent the next pandemic’ which — spoiler alert! — points out that if Covid-19 was caused even in part by the unregulated trade in animal parts, regulatingsaid trade might, just might help prevent pandemics in future.
Conveniently, Higuero wrote her opinion piece in English, not Chinese, so Trumpers can’t use the excuse that they don’t read Chinese and so, like, who cares if it’s in Chinese, if it’s in China-language it doesn’t mean anything, and so it doesn’t exist.
The South China Morning Post is an English-language newspaper in any event, and based in Hong Kong, not China, but pointing that out would only confuse Trumpers even more.
“We know zoonotic diseases emerge when pathogens carried by animals — wild or domesticated — spill over to humans and subsequently adapt for human-to-human transmission,” Higuero wrote, describing something eerily similar to the Trump campaign, though science itself has yet to pin down whether Trump himself is either wild or domesticated.
CITES, Higuero noted, is the global regulatory body that oversees the international trade in more than 36,000 species of wild animals and plants; the organization has no say in domesticated animals, but it does have jurisdiction over trade in wild animals that are farmed, ranched and/or bred in captivity.
CITES supports efforts to ensure that the international wildlife trade is legal, sustainable, and traceable — three things that Trumpers rank somewhere between their disdain for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their obsessive hatred of Hillary Clinton.
Higuero supports the ‘One Health’ approach, which focuses on the links between human health and that of the planet. Through CITES, One Health envisions a world in which interactions between humans and wildlife are safe and sustainable, which in turn reduces the risks to nature, ecosystems, endangered species — and we human beings.
That’s a message even a Trumper can understand. Acceptance, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish.
©South China Morning Post
©Twitter - Ivonne Higuero
©Mark Jordahl-Pixabay
Mountain Gorillas: A Rare Conservation Success Story. Now Let’s Keep It That Way
“I learned long ago that conservation has no victories, that one must retain connections and remain involved with animals and places that have captured the heart, to prevent their destruction. I am sometimes asked why, given a world that is more wounded and scarred, I do not simply give up, burdened by pessimism. But conservation is my life, I must retain hope.”
And so, Covid-19, the climate crisis and the fracturing of civil society bring us to Garamba, Virunga, Mgahinga, Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, Parc National des Volcans and the mountain gorilla. The largest and arguably most charismatic of the great apes is down to no more than a few dozen family groups, confined to pockets of green — ecological hotspots — in the green-limned volcanic mountains Central Africa.
Mountain gorillas, it has been confirmed, are descendants of ancestral apes found throughout Africa and Arabia at the start of the Oligocene epoch, some 25-35 million years ago. The fossil record provides evidence of hominoid primates in East Africa about 20–30 million years ago. The fossil record of the area where mountain gorillas are found today is particularly poor and so the species’ evolutionary history is not clear. What is clear is that the mountain gorilla predates humankind, and so humankind — it would seem to me — has a special responsibility to its genetic antecedent.
By now, it’s clear the coronavirus crisis has thrown a wrecking ball through the entire concept of ecotourism, a major funding source of conservation efforts throughout the developing world, no more so than in countries like Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where corruption is rife, human conflict is the norm and the tax base was never much to begin with. Some governments are better run than others, and Central Africa has been graced with some of the best run parks in the African parks system — but as funding dwindles, conservation efforts can't help but follow.
That’s why recent reports last month from Garamba National Park, a 5,200 km² (2,000 square mile) protected area in northeastern DRC, have proved so encouraging. In these uncertain times, even the most modest glimmer of light is a beacon of hope.
Garamba is not as well known — or visited by tourists — as Volcans or Bwindi Impenetrable but it has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has been managed by the NGO African Parks together with the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) since 2005.
In a May 13 op-ed piece in the UK Independent, former CITES Secretary General and present-day African Parks special envoy John Scanlon noted that Garamba — several hundred miles north of a dwindling Ebola outbreak and well off the tourist circuit — is a model story of how low and middle-income countries in the developing world with limited ability to invest in nature conservation can survive, if not thrive exactly, despite the odds. Garamba, which will probably never appeal to free-spending, well-to-do travellers from the Americas, has clung to life instead by relying on grants from donor countries and individual philanthropists.
Survival in this case is decidedly unsexy: The funds go toward community outreach and enforcement of park regulations.
With an ever-growing world population — pandemic or no pandemic — most of the world's remaining wilderness areas will only survive if they find a way to pay for themselves, which means people who live in the area, on the outskirts of parks like Garamba, Bwindi and Virunga, must be given a reason not to hunt and trap endangered animals to feed their own families.
The results of a hands-on approach to park management in Garamba without the benefit of paying tourists have been striking, Scanlon reports: Elephant poaching is down 90% in four years (yes, you read that right) and the number of critically endangered Kordofan giraffes has stabilized. (Giraffes are hunted for their hide, meat and tails, which is why they’re vulnerable whenever area villages are victimized by conflict and people go hungry.)
Community outreach isn’t just a feel-good buzzphrase. More than 90% of Garamba’s paid employees are DRC Congo nationals; the park supports two local schools and a number of mobile health clinics. Clean drinking water has been provided to more than 20 villages, and 7,000 people.
A working national park that doesn’t have the cachet or name recognition of a Serengeti or Maasai Mara is about more than dramatic scenery and charismatic wildlife. To work properly, it also has to be about the health, development, safety and security — personal security and food security — of the people who live there.
Despite everything, Rwanda has already proven a success story in its own right. Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, Rwanda’s mountain gorilla populations were in recovery and even growing, one family group at a time. Tourist revenue in 2019 alone generated some $20 million USD; the government of Rwanda kicked in another $10 million to conservation efforts, a quarter of that to Volcans National Park. Tourism — and good parks management — in turn create jobs, Scanlon noted. And not just any jobs. Decent jobs.
The revenue stream will not hold steady in 2020, Scanlon notes: The gorilla population can only continue its recovery after decades of decline if the protected areas are maintained and conservation programmes continue to be adequately funded during and after the pandemic. This will require a collective effort by businesses, government oversight and foreign donors. The tourists and the jobs will not return if the gorillas disappear, not even in Rwanda.
There are more gorillas in the mist, today. It’s a rare conservation success story. Let’s keep it that way.
©Gabriel Gach-Pixabay
©Dereck Joubert, Beverly Joubert
On Assignment: A Conversation with Dereck and Beverly Joubert
“Anybody who comes out into nature, whether it’s toward polar bears or elephants or the great apes or anything, and wishes to destroy it, is acting selfishly. They may say they want to do it for reasons they think can justify, like conservation, but really and truly it’s a selfish act. You go out to Africa to shoot an elephant, but not because you love elephants or otherwise you wouldn’t shoot them. You go out so that you can acquire it, so you can have it on the wall — your wall — rather than leave it there for other people, hundreds of other people, to see.”
Dereck Joubert, talking on the phone from New York’s Lincoln Center alongside his filmmaker wife Beverly Joubert, says the traffic in New York is brutal. HIs word.
”It’s the reason we’re late,” he says simply, and it’s not hard to imagine the traffic being a shock to the system after years living in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, filming, photographing and studying the vast ecosystem’s natural rhythms.
The Jouberts are talking to me for my day job: Their three-part, four-years-in-the-making nature film Okavango: River of Dreams is about to make its North American television debut, Wednesday on PBS’s Nature showcase, and while they don’t need the publicity exactly, it can’t hurt. (An account our conversation specific to the film can be found at TVWorthWatching.com, linked here: http://www.tvworthwatching.com/post/Life-and-Death-in-the-Long-Grass-PBS-Nature-Takes-Viewers-Into-the-Heart-of-the-African-Wilderness-in-Epic-Three-Part-Miniseries.aspx
They’re running late, owing to the kind of traffic that’s impossible to imagine from a wilderness area some 15,000 kms² (5,800 sq miles), but once they start talking about their life’s passion, it’s hard to let go. They have a meeting to get to, with executives of PBS’s New York affiliate WNET — part of the international consortium that financed River of Dreams — but more than 30 minutes later, Dereck and Beverly Joubert are still talking. The meeting will just have to wait.
The Okavango, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, faces many of the same issues — climate change, habitat loss, human encroachment — the rest of the natural world faces.
Lately, though, the Okavango has had to deal with a whole new challenge.
The government of Botswana has lifted a five-year ban on elephant hunting, owing to growing conflict between humans and the animals, which sometimes destroy crops, and the Jouberts are agitated and annoyed.
Dereck Joubert has actively campaigned against hunting at international symposiums chaired by big players CITES, IUCN, SADC and the UN, while Beverly Joubert has made numerous documentary programs about the subject. The pair are Explorers-in-Residence at National Geographic, and have devoted most of their working lives to studying and getting to know elephants in their natural habitat. Botswana is home to some 130,000 elephants — the world’s largest population — of an animal increasingly under threat around the world.
Dereck Joubert doesn’t pull any punches in his disdain for anyone who’d want to shoot an elephant for the trophy wall, and he’s unafraid to say so out loud. He’s long past the point of social niceties and diplomacy on the subject, even though, around the world, environmental activists are increasingly harassed, threatened and even murdered for speaking out, whether it’s against misuse of power or just old-fashioned greed.
Trophy hunting is just not on, as far as the Jouberts are concerned, regardless of any arguments against.
Joubert has heard the economic argument so often that it’s now like a red flag to a bull, as far as he’s concerned.
“The economics of it all don’t make any sense. People say, ‘Well, the money that I spend, that I give to go and act selfishly, protects the elephants from a broader, relatively intangible threat.’
©Beverly Joubert
That is not the motivation. The motivation is that you’re going out there to kill it for yourself. Nobody’s going out there to kill it because they hate killing and they want to do something for conservation. The core of this is a selfish act. And in my opinion, that’s morally bankrupt.”
Beverly Joubert — still recovering from serious injuries she sustained while filming buffalos in the middle of the night, ironically enough — is equally blunt in her own assessment.
“I really do believe we should all be living in harmony with nature,” she says simply. “Too often I think people forget that we’re just another species on the planet. I suspect that those who go out to kill are trying to be that superior ape. Well, we can be the superior ape. We have the intelligence. But we can live side-by-side with them, and respect them, without having to kill them. That’s what intelligence is.”
Beverly Joubert is worried what will happen now that the hunting ban has been lifted. The new rules come into effect in the new year.
“When the ban was originally enacted we had areas where life came back in a glorious way. We felt that this was what a paradise on earth should be like. And now it’s going to go through another change, and that’s concerning. The change will be man-made, and that’s something we need to be watching. The Okavango is, in almost every way, a wonderful base-line study area for nature. We’re going to be able to see if there is extreme damage.”
The larger picture — climate change — is creating its own problems, because everything is tied to habitat loss.
“We had a screening of the film last night, and
those questions came up from the audience as well.
“They were all wondering how the climate crisis is going to affect Africa. Well, it’s happening. It’s definitely there. We’ve seen it in the violent storms around the globe, and it’s very evident in Botswana. Temperatures are rising every year. Every year, we get the next record high. And now we’re in a drought again, in many parts of Africa.
“There are a lot or profound changes going on, and obviously the environment is one of them. Okavango is really one of the last pristine places left on the planet. We have seen it in a state of flux, through man, over the last 30 years. Areas of the Okavango that used to be hunted lost a huge population of wildlife, and that was very evident and really concerning. That’s why the former president stopped all hunting.”
The Jouberts’ stay in New York has coincided with a series of climate conferences and protests, from the UN to Wall Street. In Botswana, the Jouberts established the Great Plains Foundation which, as part of its remit, works with young people locally to help further the message of conservation. They have never met Greta Thunberg, but it’s only a matter of time before her name comes up in conversation.
“We’re big fans of Greta,” Dereck Joubert says. “What is interesting about that question is that, through Great Plains, we spend quite a bit of time and money and effort working with children around Greta’s age, funnily enough, in Botswana, looking for and nurturing that voice of, not innocence, but that voice of outrage in a child’s way to say that, no, this is not okay. The children have rights, too. They have a right to the future. More and more, we’re starting to hear that in the villages in Botswana.”
©Dereck Joubert, Beverly Joubert