Leopold Gukiya Ngbekusa. Patrick Kisembo N’singa. Sudi Koko. Antopo Selemani. Lokana Tingiti. Joël Meriko Ari. Gertomoe Bolimola Afokao. Jonas Paluku Malyani.

Not household names.

In their own way, though, they made the ultimate sacrifice for what remains of the natural world in the heart of Africa. And their memory is especially poignant today, on Earth Day.

A game ranger’s pay is not significant by any means, especially in a country like Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where — and this is true — one million people died in civil conflict between 1998 and 2003 alone, according to the respected NGO the Norwegian Refugee Council. That’s a low figure. Higher estimates put that figure closer to five million, according to the Norwegian agency — who, unlike major news organizations like CNN and BBC, actually have boots on the ground. The actual figure, as so often turns out to be the case, is probably somewhere in the middle.

Either way, it’s too many.

And while it’s easy to say the lives of a handful of park rangers don’t add up to a lot when contrasted against the sheer carnage of a civil war that — and, once again, this is true — threatens to ignite all over again, right now, as you’re reading this, the hard truth on this Earth Day is that, in so many instances, these park rangers are all that stand between the mountain gorilla and species extinction.

https://www.nrc.no/expert-deployment/2016/2018/we-are-failing-dr-congo---again/

Once again, it’s down to the Scandinavian countries, it seems, to report on the health of the planet, even though Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland don’t exactly have a history of colonialism to answer to — at least, not in this part of the world.

There are two surviving groups of wild mountain gorillas remaining on the planet. One is in Virunga National Park, in DRC; the other is in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in neighbouring Uganda. Neither country is particularly stable politically, though, even for a region that inspired Joseph Conrad’s dystopian classic Heart of Darkness, DRC is a law unto itself — an impossible-to-govern territory that sprawls over 2,300,00 square kilometres (900,00 square miles). Or, to put it in simpler, easier-to-understand terms, larger than the size of Spain, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden combined.

That’s why, when anyone with a heart and soul learns there are just 900 mountain gorillas left in the world — if that — it’s hard for the brain to comprehend, let alone make sense of it all. (Interestingly, that figure counts as a success story to some experts, who point out that when pioneering primatologist Dian Fossey first arrived in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park in 1967, there were just 240 gorillas remaining in the wild — this, according to a census taken the following year.

https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/29/us/iyw-dian-fossey-gorilla-fund/index.html

The reality is harsh, but important to remember on this Earth Day.

Just two weeks ago, five park rangers and a driver were killed in an ambush in Virunga. The loss of life was the worst in a single incident in the history of the park, where some 170 rangers have died in the past 20 years while protecting animals — all for a salary that’s a pittance by western standards, though enough to keep their families clothed and fed. Barely.

Official statements are often bland boilerplate, standard-issue press releases that pay lip service to the dead while assuaging the concerns of outside observers and reassuring stakeholders — read: corporate investors and tourism officials — that the situation is under control and not as bad as it sounds.

There was an edge to this one, though, from Virunga chief warden Emmanuel de Merode.

“Virunga has lost some extraordinarily brave rangers who were deeply committed to working in the service of their communities,” Merode said in his statement. “It is unacceptable that Virunga’s rangers continue to pay the highest price in defence of our common heritage.”

Park officials, speaking off the record and unnamed, told the UK Guardian newspaper, that they believe the perpetrators of the ambush were the “Mai Mai,” a local self-defence militia, but the reality is that the gorillas in Virunga — and the rangers who protect them — are victimized by any number of armed groups, from poachers, illegal hunters and wildlife traffickers to bandits, thieves and rogue militias from neighbouring states still fighting the Hutu-Tsutsi wars that sparked the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and threaten today to spill over the border all over again, this time from neighbouring Burundi.

Virunga isn’t just some obscurely named park off-the-beaten track of wildlife tourism in Africa, either. It’s the continent’s oldest national park — in historical terms, Africa’s equivalent of Yellowstone National Park.

Park rangers are recruited from neighbouring villages. Nearly all are married, and many have young children. The rangers killed two weeks ago ranged in age from 22 to 30.

How much is a life worth? According to the Guardian’s longtime Africa correspondent Jason Burke, the rangers are paid the equivalent of USD $250 a month.

Even at that, much of the funding comes from NGOs and private donors; a partnership was formed just 10 years ago between the Howard G. Buffett Foundation (middle son of the billionaire investor Warren Buffet), the European Union (EU) and the Congolese government.

Earth Day initiatives include making micro loans available to local families and involving local communities in their park’s future.

That isn’t just lip service, either: One of the recent trends in the war against poachers has been the recruitment of women in a frontline role — as in, literally, fighting on the front lines of armed conflict.

“I was born into a ranger family,” park ranger Jolie Kavugho Songya explained to the US-UK and French news site Women’s Advancement, in August. “My father taught me you have to go out and try for what you want.”

Songya was just nine-years-old when she decided to follow in her ranger-father’s footsteps. She had never seen a gorilla, but she knew it was his job — and moral duty — to protect Congo’s population of endangered gorillas from militias and poachers.

©Jan Powell/Women's Advancement News Deeply

Today, Songya — age 27 — is one of 30 women who’ve passed the stringent requirements to become full-time park rangers.

She’s neither intimidated nor dissuaded by the constant threat of violence.

“It’s risky,” she told News Deeply’s Jan Powell, “but you just have to accept it. Commit, or get out.”

Earth Day, 2018, These are your heroes.

https://www.newsdeeply.com/womensadvancement/articles/2017/08/31/drc-women-rangers-fight-to-save-virungas-last-mountain-gorillas

There are two kinds of people who stand up for the world’s critically endangered animals, such as rhinos: Those who talk, and those who do.

“Doing” is preferable — no news flash there — but direct action has a way of provoking controversy, even at the best of times.

And not much is more controversial these days than the use of heavily armed guards, many of them U.S. army veterans recently emerged from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the bush war against poachers in private game reserves in South Africa, and a handful of other countries.

The public controversy has simmered since 2013, when an Animal Planet docuseries Battleground: Rhino Wars — the Discovery Communications-owned cable channel’sfollow-up to its popular Whale Wars series — introduced ordinary TV viewers to the concept of mercenaries in the service of wildlife conservation.

An expansive exposé in the UK Guardian newspaper last month briefly touched on the somewhat uncomfortable optics — uncomfortable to some, anyway, especially in post-apartheid South Africa — of heavily armed outsiders, mostly white, imported to combat the problem of poaching by local, mainly black Africans.

Like much of The Guardian’s journalism, the exposé — by veteran Guardian Africa correspondent Jason Burke — weighed different points-of-view, and raised issues the casual observer might not have realized. One unexpected factor, for example, is the reality that many of the U.S. army veterans involved are recovering emotionally and physically from post-traumatic stress. By fighting for a cause they believe in, by putting their lives on the line — once again, but this time for critically endangered animals — many of these veterans see the initiative as a way to ease back into civilian life after weeks, months and even years of intensive firefights in Afghanistan.

“Green militarization,” as it’s called, has its critics. The scale of the crisis facing Africa’s rhinos is clear to almost everyone, though, especially in a world where rhino horn, which is made primarily of keratin — the same substance as fingernails — is now worth $65,000 USD per kilo on the black market, according to recent conservative estimates.

In 2007, a mere 10 years ago, no more than a dozen rhinos were poached in South Africa. In 2015 alone, according to The Guardian, that number jumped to 1,200.

Given that a rhino’s gestation period is 16 months, and given that a rhino has just one baby at birth, one doesn’t need to be a mathematician to see that the numbers are untenable.

South Africa is critical to the species’ survival because the country is home to 80% of the world’s surviving wild rhinos.

At the time Battleground: Rhino Wars debuted on U.S. television, Animal Planet president and general manager Marjorie Kaplan told an assembled group of reporters and TV critics in Pasadena, Calif. that more than 100 African park rangers were killed the previous year while trying to protect the continent’s wildlife reserves.

“Make no mistake, this is war,” Kaplan told the assembled reporters. “The men and women protecting rhinos on the ground in South Africa are outgunned and outmanned. This is not about threatened habitat. This is not about human encroachment. This is pure greed, and pure ignorance. There is absolutely no justification for these creatures to be dying. The people who are risking their lives to to protect them are heroes.”

Former US Navy SEAL Craig “Sawman” Sawyer, one of the original team leaders in the anti-poaching initiative and one of the leading voices behind Animal Planet’s Rhino Wars, said the poaching problem has many faces. It isn’t just about impoverished locals trying to make a living.

“It’s a mix,” Sawyer said. “It’s the locals. It’s an international problem. This is major money, a multibillion-dollar business going on. With each rhino horn being worth up to half a million dollars, it’s easy to see the lure there. So what we have to do is change the incentive. We need to come up with a multifaceted approach to address the problem. Because this species is on the brink of extinction. They’ve been around for 50 million years, and in the past 50 years alone, man has almost completely wiped them out. We’re at the redline crisis at this point.”

A number of poachers caught in the Rhino Wars net said they wanted to get out of the criminal life, but had a hard time finding jobs. Some of those same ex-poachers have since been hired by ranchers to help protect the dwindling rhino herds, as they have intimate, first-hand knowledge of how poaching is done and the most effective way to prevent it.

Sawyer said action beats words every time.

“In our role here, we have an opportunity to directly address the physical problem of poaching,” he said. “With our backgrounds, coming from the special operations community, that’s what we can contribute. Our fight is travelling halfway around the globe and risking our lives personally to join the South Africans in their fight to save not only a national resource but a global resource. We’re all losing our rhino, okay? We’re over there fighting this fight to try to save the rhino and also raise awareness. If we take it to them, maybe we can help spread the word. Maybe we can raise global awareness and bring some pressure against this threat to the rhino, and actually maybe even save the species.”

Outfits such as the US-based nonprofit organization Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife (Vetpaw) serve a two-fold purpose: to draw a line in the sand against the wholesale slaughter of rhinos, and to help former combat veterans in the US find a renewed purpose in life. The Guardian noted that many former servicemen suffer high levels of unemployment and mental illness — PTSD by any other name. Ex-servicemen often struggle to reclaim the sense of brotherhood they got from combat. Despite millions of dollars spent on training — billions of dollars, even — the US government doesn’t use them again. Helping protect wildlife affords them a renewed sense of meaning and self-worth.

Vetpaw founder and squad leader Ryan Tate, a former US Marine, told The Guardian that he selected combat veterans precisely because they are disciplined enough, experienced, battle-hardened and well trained enough not to use lethal force unless absolutely necessary. Poachers are apprehended in the act, and then turned over to local police. Alive.

Another Vetpaw commando, a British-born veteran who served 15 years in the US elite special forces until last year, told The Guardian that the rhino wars are textbook counterinsurgency — about winning hearts and minds on the ground, rather than actual firefights.

“Let’s not sugarcoat it,” Sawyer said, back when Rhino Wars first aired on US television. “We’ve got hardcore crime syndicates coming in from Mozambique, armed with AK-47s, not only slaughtering an entire species but anyone who gets in their way. More than 100 rangers have been killed trying to protect the rhino, whether they were armed or not. This war is on. And we can either sit back and go, ‘Isn’t that unfortunate? We don’t have the heart to deal with it.’ Or we can pick up arms and go and face the enemy and tell them, ‘Hell, no.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/30/us-army-veterans-find-peace-protecting-rhinos-poaching-south-africa

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen

High risk, low pay and the ultimate price: The real heroes of Earth Day.

“Hell no. This war is ON.” From the front lines in the rhino wars.

Journal

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