The Independent

Netflix’s ‘Our Planet’: ‘Planet Earth’ revisited, but with a stronger, clearer eco-voice.

April 04, 2019

Politics is inescapable these days, it seems. Take something as seemingly benevolent and benign — and beautiful to behold — as Our Planet, the new, eye-filling nature series from Netflix, narrated by the ubiquitous Sir David Attenborough.

At the time of Netflix’s original announcement, Our Planet was to be similar and yet different to such distinctive, ground-breaking natural history programs as Planet Earth and Blue Planet. And, as the great unwashed are about to learn Friday, it has largely succeeded. There are moments of real, eye-filling majesty and genuine grandeur, backed by the swelling symphonic score of film composer Steven Price. Overbearing, yes, but it fits this kind of program. It’s easy to forget now but when the original Planet Earth came out, the loud, overblown music was by George Fenton, fresh off an Academy Award for Gandhi and its follow-up Cry Freedom, both films directed by Attenborough’s brother, the late Sir Richard “Dickie” Attenborough.

The familiar visual paean to nature and the natural world that made Planet Earth and Blue Planet must-see viewing in countless households around the world is there for all to see in Our Planet, and on a Netflix budget to boot.

This time, though, there’s a noticeable difference, and not just the subtle shift in tone. Our Planet, eight episodes in all, is more eco-aware and socially conscious. It strikes a cautionary tone — a warning. Not alarm, exactly, but still. Our Planet is no longer nature programming that focuses on nature-for-nature’s-sake, to the exclusion of any environmental message beyond a polite, almost apologetic request that we be more careful with the Earth’s dwindling natural resources. Please remember to turn off the lights on your way out, and try not to wreck the climate during your drive home.
There’s a sadness, a feeling of regret tinged with genuine fear of an uncertain future as we’re reminded, time and time again, that polar bears and elephants might not be with us much longer.

And not just polar bears and elephants, either, but bees, hummingbirds, ocean-going reef sharks and everything in-between.

Our Planet opens with a close-up view from space — reminders of 2001: A Space Odyssey — of the moon, with the Earth rising gradually behind it. Since Neil Armstrong made his first step for man and giant leap for mankind, on July 20, 1969, Attenborough tells us, the human population has doubled, while wildlife numbers have dwindled some 60 percent during the same time.

Our Planet isn’t strident. It doesn’t harangue us with a lecture from the bully pulpit, though there are certainly those eco-crusaders out there who would prefer to shake every last one of us — not without reason — into waking up.

Attenborough has not left BBC for Netflix, as some in the media suggested at the time. (Looking at it from both sides of the media divide, these things are easy to misreport, especially given today’s frantic get-it-first-before-you-get-it-right climate of competition in information.)

Attenborough may be 92 (he turns 93 next month) but he’s committed to several more big projects for BBC, including Frozen Planet II, Blue Planet III and Planet Earth III.

Similarly, he has left the door open at Netflix. He was signed after-the-fact to narrate Our Planet as a one-off, to give the expensive — even by Netflix standards — program instant gravitas and global credibility. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the current TV landscape is such that Netflix can reach more viewers in a single week than BBC can over the course of an entire year.

That instant access to the global village is one reason Attenborough needed no convincing to exchange Broadcasting House in London for Netflix in Los Gatos, Calif.

In his later years, he has readily admitted to anyone who’ll listen that his raison d’être in later life is to convince anyone and everyone he can that our home world is in trouble and needs our help.

Netflix’s reach doesn’t exactly exceed its grasp, either: Our Planet could conceivably reach one billion people, something not even BBC can do.

Attenborough is the face and voice behind Our Planet, but not its primary inspiration and directing force. That would be veteran British producer Alastair Fothergill, who made Blue Planet and Planet Earth for BBC and has recently divided his time between BBC, Disney’s Disneynature film division (African Cats, Chimpanzee and the soon-to-be released Penguins, in theatres April 17) and now Netflix.

Fothergill, a Fellow of the British Royal Television Society and recipient of the Royal Geographical Society’s Cherry Keaton Medal, has been at the vanguard of socially conscious, environmentally aware nature filmmaking that seeks to be both entertaining and informative. Unlike Blue Planet, which touched only briefly on plastic’s effect on the world’s oceans, Our Planet’s entire focus is on the man-made threat to the natural world.

Early reviews in the UK — in the Daily Telegraph and Independent, for example — have grumbled that, beautiful as Our Planet is to watch, the overall effect is scattered and unfocused as a result. Fothergill would argue that, unlike Dynasties with its Shakespearean tales of kings and matriarchs facing rebellion and revenge from within, Our Planet is unified by a single, overpowering message: that everything is connected, that what affects the ice fields in Canada’s frozen north also affects the semi-arid deserts in Africa’s sun-parched south, not just Arctic bears and savannah elephants myriad microorganisms, smaller animals and pollinating insects that lie between.

“From every region of the world there are stories that reveal nature’s resilience and show how restoration is possible,” Attenborough says in his voice-over — a reminder once again how, over time, his soothing, reverential tones have a calming effect on this crazy world we live in.

There’s something joyful — and joyous — in the way Attenborough reads out loud. It’s one of the reasons, I suspect, why Blue Planet and Planet Earth have reached such a wide audience. He’s a born storyteller. It’s not hard to imagine that programs like Blue Planet and now Our Planet wouldn’t reach nearly as many people without Attenborough as their verbal guide and shepherd.

Our Planet is important because, while it doesn’t harangue and harass us at home the way a TED Talk might, it focuses on the most important threat to humanity — arguably the most important threat of our generation — in ways that both move and inspire.

Attenborough is the star but the last word, by rights, belongs to Fothergill.

“When Huw (Cordrey) and I both made Planet Earth, that series was about amazing scenery,” Fothergill recalled a number of years back at a Television Critics Association press session in Pasadena, Calif. for the then new BBC nature program The Hunt. “It was about taking the audience on a journey around the planet that they could never do in their lifetime.”

What he’s tried to do with Our Planet is combine that epic cinematic poetry with a potent, topical message about climate change, species diversity and the perilous balance of nature, and why all those things matter to our collective future on planet Earth, and to the planet itself.

Only time will tell if Our Planet — and we ourselves — succeed.

There are no good years or bad years anymore at Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards.

September 09, 2018

There are no longer good years or bad years at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards. The prestigious contest — half a century in the making — sponsored by London’s Natural History Museum, has never seemed more important.

This past weekend, some 14 commended images in this year’s edition — the 54th overall — were announced to the public.

One of those images, South African nature photographer Isak Pretorius’ stirring image of a lion drinking from a reed-covered riverbank, has already been selected as the cover shot for Wildlife Photographer of the Year Portfolio 28. The overall competition winners will be announced on Oct. 16, and a full exhibition of winners and finalists will go on display at the Natural History Museum three days later, on Oct. 19.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/wpy/gallery/2017/images/wildlife-photographer-of-the-year/5281/memorial-to-a-species.html

https://www.naturettl.com/yes-shocking-rhino-photo-deserve-win-wpoty/

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/wildlife-photographer-year-winner-disqualified-competition-judges-stuffed-anteater-a8325691.html

Submissions for next year’s 2019 WPOTY Awards open Oct. 22 and close on Dec. 13. The window is short, in other words — just eight weeks.

The past year has seen its fair share of controversy, from photojournalist Brent Stirton’s competition-winning 2017 image of a slaughtered rhino, its horn hacked off with a chainsaw by poachers — many viewers found the image to be disturbing and inappropriate for a competition supposedly designed to celebrate nature in all its beauty — to the disqualification of Brazilian photographer Marcio Cabral’s award-winning night image of an anteater moving towards termite mound that was later found to be staged. (The anteater turned out to be stuffed, arguably making it the most famous stuffed animal in the history of taxidermy.)

It will be instructive to see what image wins this year’s competition, because by focusing on a hard-hitting “message” picture last year, award judges were signalling that the most urgent issue facing wildlife today is environmental ruin, everything from habitat destruction to poaching and looming species extinction. It’s no longer enough, in other words, to celebrate natural beauty just for nature and beauty’s sake.

With no further ado, then, here’s a look at a few of this year’s commended images.

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“Thirty years of climate hysterics being proved wrong time and time again.” Oh, balls. Seriously, now — balls.

July 17, 2018

The headline was one of the most stupid declaratives I have seen in quite some time, but it’s worth mentioning because it shows, better than anything I can think of, the scale of the problem facing climatologists, environmentalists and anyone concerned about the future health of Planet Earth. Thirty years of climate hysterics being proven wrong over and over again.

That heading appeared in a national newspaper I shall not dignify by naming. It was accompanied by a column written by a bellicose newspaper magnate and unapologetic climate denier, who I shall also not dignify by naming.

Every sane person is opposed to the pollution of the environment, it continued — an exercise in distraction if ever there was one, considering the words to follow — but there is no justification for the self-punitive nonsense of the Paris climate accord.

Said national newspaper is a tireless advocate of fossil fuels, Big Oil and, specifically, the Alberta tar sands, the filthiest, dirtiest, most ruinous-to-the-environment form of extracting fossil fuel there is. Jobs — or, more importantly, the quarterly profit statements of mining companies and Big Oil matter more than the future health of the planet, to cut to the chase.

Never mind that, though. Take another look at that comment: Thirty years of climate hysterics being proven wrong over and over again.

Never mind the past 30 years. Let’s look at the last 30 days.

The past month has seen power shortages across California as record temperatures — 47.2°C one recent weekend in Los Angeles — drove a surge in the use of air conditioners. A prolonged heatwave across the UK melted the roof of a science centre in Glasgow, Scotland, a nation state more renowned for its damp and drizzle damp than blistering heat. Ouargla, a remote desert town in Algeria’s Sahara, experienced the hottest temperature ever recorded on the entire continent of Africa: 51.3°C on July 5th.

Night-time provides little relief — in itself an anomaly — in some hot spots around the globe: Quriyat, on the gulf coast of Oman, recorded minimum overnight temperatures of 42.6°, set a new mark for the highest “low” temperatures ever recorded on Planet Earth.

A “heat dome” over much of Eurasia culminated in dramatic higher-than-average heat-wave temperatures throughout Russia during the World Cup; the post-match ceremony at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow was interrupted by a sudden deluge of near Biblical proportions. French president Emmanuel Macron was forced to wring the rainwater out of his suit jacket after the World Cup trophy was presented to Les Bleus; Russian president Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, was allowed to retain his dignity after a minder present a black umbrella to shield him from the torrential downpour of a Moscow monsoon. (Note to climate deniers: Moscow is not particularly renowned for its monsoon rains, not even in July.)

But wait, there’s more. Torrential flooding across Japan, four times the monthly average, led to more than 150 deaths in one of the most technologically advanced, climate-aware nations on the planet. A lethal heat wave across southern Quebec, prompting dozens more deaths (54 to be exact , as of July 14th). Montreal set a new record high temperature of 36.6°C on July 2nd.

Western Siberia, which noted climate denier Sarah Palin can see from her living room, recorded five straight days of temperatures rising to more than 30°C this past month.

That’s a big deal because climate scientists, environmentalists and field biologists worry this will accelerate the melting of permafrost, which — science again — will release vast amounts of methane, a more problematic and potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

The issue is not just wild fluctuations in hot and cold but rather that weather fronts — both hot and cold — are stalling or being blocked by shifts in the jet-stream. That causes droughts and storms to linger longer in one place, which exacerbates the damage. Recent high temperatures, intense rains and slow-moving fronts are becoming the rule, not the exception. And scientists — those wieners — warn these weather changes are in line with their predictions of how increased, and constantly rising, gas emissions are likely to affect the climate.

Weather is not the same as climate, of course, but the two are related. One is short-term, the other is long-term. The expression “global warming,” now out of favour with most climate scientists, is misleading because it implies that heat is the primary indicator of Planet Earth’s deteriorating health, when it’s climate extremes — wild, unpredictable swings between extreme heat and extreme cold — that is the more serious and hard-to-isolate problem.

Every issue, especially one as complex and (unnecessarily) controversial as climate change, needs a snappy picture or viral video to bring the message to the public. Just such a video emerged this past week from western Greenland, where a huge iceberg that drifted close to the coastal town of Innaarsuit, prompted a mass evacuation, in case the iceberg calved in such a way that the resulting wave, likened to a tsunami, would swamp people’s homes.

This is not a joke: Last summer, four people died after waves swamped houses in northwestern Greenland, following a seaquake.

Climate scientists have coined a new term, “extreme iceberg risks,” which they say are becoming more frequent, because of climate change.

Back to that screed in a right-wing national newspaper in Canada.

Alongside that declaration about how Thirty years of climate hysterics (are) being proven wrong over and over again came this what newspaper people call “nut graph:” “No ice has been lost by Greenland, other than what melts every summer and then forms again, and water levels have not moved appreciably.”

Yes, indeed! And here’s the video to prove it.

Not all right-leaning media outlets believe climate change is simply the fevered dream of hand-wringing hysterics and unrepentant lefties.

The UK’s Daily Mail, not exactly a bastion of Guardian or Independent-style progressive thinking, warned in no uncertain terms on July 4th that global warming — climate change by any other name — is to blame for all-time heat record being set worldwide, even as the experts — those wieners — warn that these already stifling temperatures will continue to soar.

I don’t know about you, but I’m with the climate hysterics.

Hunting the hunters — when animals bite back.

July 08, 2018

Karma.

The philosophy of action, no less an authority than the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi famously said, is that no one else is the giver of peace or happiness. One’s own actions are responsible to come to bring either happiness or success or whatever.

The answer in this case, as it turned out, was “whatever.”

Suspected rhino poachers broke into a South African game reserve late at night this past week — hoping, no doubt, to bag themselves a couple of rhinos. Rhino horn fetches more than its weight in gold or cocaine on today’s black market, and that has led to a thriving illegal trade in the horn.

The poachers no doubt expected to make an easy killing — rhinos, after all, are near-sighted, none too bright and make a tempting target. The poachers were looking to make a quick buck — but lions got them instead.

Karma.

It sounds like one of those apocryphal tales the African wilds are famous for, but anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of bushcraft knows that truth is often stranger than fiction where lions are concerned.

The story was first reported by local news outlets near Sibuya Game Reserve in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, but anyone assuming it was just another case of fake news was quickly disabused of the notion. The reserve’s on-duty veterinarian darted the offending lions so that police forensic investigators could isolate the evidence — this, after human remains were found last Tuesday, alongside discarded wire cutters, a high-powered rifle, three pairs of boots and three pairs of gloves.

A pride of half a dozen lions was found to be resting nearby — one likes to think well fed and sunning themselves under the winter sun.

Sibuya is a private reserve; owner Nick Fox told local media that one of his security staff heard a loud commotion coming from the lions sometime late last Sunday night or in the early hours of Monday morning.

Fox concluded the poachers must have stumbled onto the lions in the dark, never to be seen or heard from again. Lions, unlike humans, can see well in the dark — their night vision is six times sharper than that of humans — and do most of their hunting under cover of darkness. Daylight is for sleeping, where lions are concerned.

Once police confirmed the evidence and entered the incident into the official record, the story was quickly picked up by the international news agencies Associated Press and Agence France-Presse, and from there to BBC, CNN International and al-Jazeera, among other cable-news outlets. (

https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/05/world/south-africa-poachers-killed-trnd/index.html )

This isn’t the first time hunted animals have had their Day of the Triffids moment, of course, nor will it be the last.

In May of this year, South African big game hunter and prototypical fat man Theunis Botha, 51, died after being crushed by an elephant that had been shot on a private reserve in Zimbabwe. Botha cashed in his chips — and I am not making this up — at the aptly named Good Luck Farm, near Zimbabwe’s world-famous — and now infamous — Hwange National Park.

Hwange was where Cecil the lion met his end at the hands of a fat American dentist, Walter Palmer, in July, 2015.

In February of this past year, a poacher hunting big cats was mauled to death by lions at a private gamed reserve in South Africa. The unidentified poacher was killed at the 3,000-hectare Ingwelala Nature Reserve, an hour’s drive outside Hoedspruit, in South Africa’s Limpopo province.

The incident happened just months after a poacher in Namibia, identified as Luteni Muhararakua, was charged and killed by a rhino he was hunting for its horn.

This past January, a Russian man was shot dead by his own dog during a winter hunting trip on the banks of the Volga River in southwestern Russia. Sergei Terekhov, 64, died after letting his two hunting hounds out of his car. As the dogs began to frolic, one of the dog’s paws caught the trigger of Terekhov’s hunting rifle, which was on the ground at the time, with the barrel pointed toward his chest.

According to a story in the UK newspaper The Independent at the time, investigators told the Russian Vzglyad-Info news agency, and I quote, “An experienced hunter was killed. He was sober. There was a permit for weapons. Everything was OK. There was an accident.”

Also in January, a Croatian hunter, Pero Jelenic, 75, was killed by a stray bullet while hunting lions during a so-called canned hunt at South Africa’s Leeubosch Lodge, a four-hour drive from Johannesburg about 50 kms. from the Botswana border. A friend of Jelenic’s told Croatia’s Jutarnji List newspaper that Jelenic, “died doing what he loved — his office, a hunting hall, was full of trophies, deer and bear specimens and everything that could be hunted in Croatia and Europe.”

Clearly, Africa proved too big for him.

Then there was the young bull elephant that crushed professional hunter and Ian Gibson to death after Gibson, 55, tried to shoot it in Zimbabwe’s Zambezi Valley little more than a year ago, in June, 2017.

Would it surprise you to learn Gibson was a little on the heavy side?

Think of it as a recurring theme.

As late-night comedian Bill Maher said at the time, “You know the elephant is the nobler of the two because, when the hunter wins, it’s the greatest moment of his life, and when the elephant wins, it’s, ‘Eww, what did I step in?”

These karmic moments are few and far between, of course, given the scale of the destruction being wreaked against the natural world today.

Still, every little moment counts. There’s always room for hope.

https://www.livescience.com/62998-lions-kill-rhino-poachers.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/10/high-price-of-rhino-horn-leaves-bloody-trail-across-the-globe

‘The World’s Most Wanted Animal’ eye-opening, heart-rending — and urgent.

May 20, 2018

Cute — but doomed. That, at least, was the gist of a cranky review in The Independent of the BBC Two TV special Pangolins: The World’s Most Animal last week. “I’m not sure how many more wildlife documentaries along the lines of World’s Most Wanted I can cope with,” The Independent’s Sean O’Grady wrote, no doubt keeping in tune with his publication’s stated penchant for, erm, independent thinking.

“This sub-genre conforms to a template roughly as follows,” O’Grady continued: “Sir David Attenborough narrates; attention is focused on an endearing critically endangered creature; but also on some plucky humans trying to save them from extinction; heart-rending scenes of the human conservationist encountering the bagged-up corpses of their smuggled favourite creature at some airport terminal, usually in East Asia; plus, at the end, some scant hope represented by the work of the hopelessly underfunded endangered species reserve.”

But wait, there’s more.

“I was sort of ready for the pangolin to get the usual moving treatment, and sympathetically so, but, as I say, it’s just so overwhelmingly depressing and the battle to save these creatures so plainly unwinnable I feel like just letting the poachers get on with it and save us all more upset.”

Alrighty, then! Plainly, this is not the kind of program where a grinning, exquisitely coifed Jim Carrey is going to pop up as Ace Ventura, animal detective, pulling Courteney Cox, Sean Young and former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino in tow behind him. (For the record, it’s worth noting that the movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective received “generally unfavourable reviews” from the critics when it was released in theatres in midwinter in 1994; made for $15 million, it went on to gross $107 million worldwide, proving that, while critics talk a good game, their opinion is often worthless.)

This is instructive because Pangolins: The Most Wanted Animal gets its North American debut this week, Wednesday on PBS, as the season finale of Nature — now in its, and I’m not making this up, 36th season. Nature’s 500-plus episodes puts it in the same league as The Simpsons, where longevity is concerned. Nature bowed in 1982; The Simpsons bowed in 1989. Pangolins may be doomed, but if they are, they’re not about to pass by unnoticed.

And when a writer for The Independent ends by saying, “Sorry, pangolins, elephants, rhinos, orang-utans, gorillas, pandas, sea cows, sh=now leopards, butterflies and bees, but I reckon you’ve all had it,” it’s hard to know whether he’s being deliberately facetious or whether he’s plugging for a leading role in the new Lars Von Trier movie.

“We’ll miss you, though,” O’Grady admits, “if only for all the nice footage.”

Alrighty, then! Why not give up altogether — just stand idly by while pangolins and everything else marches off planet Earth into oblivion, shortly to be followed by the 91-year-old Attenborough and all hopes of a future, greener, better world.

Despite the crabby review in the UK Independent, The World’s Most Wanted Animal struck a chord with viewers across Britain. As the reaction to Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II showed, natural, history programs do better with a UK TV audience than they do in the US and Canada, but that’s not to say they don’t have an effect.

Anyone who reads this space already knows about Maria Diekmann’s Rare and Endangered Species Trust (REST, website www.restnamibia.org) and the crisis facing pangolins, scaly anteaters, the world’s only scaly mammal, who are now being trafficked at a faster rate than elephants, rhinos and tigers combined, for quasi-medicinal use in China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, and because their scales

Pangolins are often labelled, “the most endangered animal you’ve never heard of,” but — crabby reviews in The Independent aside — that’s exactly why programs like The World’s Most Wanted Animal serve a purpose, quite apart from filling empty hours on BBC Two and PBS’s prime-time schedules.

Years ago, while at a Television Critics Association get-together in Pasadena, Calif., I asked long-time Nature executive-producer Fred Kaufman what he looks for in a Nature documentary, considering his program has been a staple for public broadcasting in the US for nearly four decades now.

Kaufman replied that he’s always looking for new stories, stories that haven’t been told before — or, if they have been told, told in a new way. The World’s Most Wanted Animal fills the bill in both respects.

The crisis facing the world’s endangered animals — climate scientists and wildlife biologists are now talking about our present time as being the latest and potentially most serious in a series of mass extinctions — is an old, all-too-familiar story, but Most Wanted throws a new spin on it, despite The Independent’s gripe about it following a time-tested template of endearing, critically endangered animals and plucky humans, voiced-over by the sonorous tones of the great Sir David Attenborough.

A quick look at REST’s Facebook page, in the hours and days after The World’s Most Wanted Animal aired in the UK,

shows that, in actual fact, many people don’t know what a pangolin is — or at least they didn’t, until they watched the program.

Now you know.

Pangolins: The World's Most Wanted Animal premieres in the the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, May 23, on PBS Nature at 8E/7C.

The “Moth Man” prophecies: Why wild population declines matter more than mass extinctions.

April 09, 2018

Extinctions are not good for the planet, I think we can all agree, but there’s a growing belief that wildlife population declines — the slow but steady degradation of the environment, the deterioration and erosion of ecosystems, coupled with habitat loss — are the more pressing concern.

A recent thoughtful, reasoned, finely researched article by Slate staff writer Henry Grabar noted that, between the loss in 1914 of Martha, the last passenger pigeon known to science, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo, and the death last month of Sudan, the last known surviving male northern white rhino, at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy, extinction crises have always been quick to grab the headlines.

The steady but inexorable decline of environmental ecosystems is a harder sell with the news media, however, where the news is always defined by what is happening right now — there are no male northern white rhinos left, anywhere — and not what might happen months, years and generations down the road: i.e. if grasslands vanish across East Africa, there will not be much of anything left, let alone northern white rhinos.

Wildlife populations are crashing, Grabar noted, and we barely notice.

https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/rhinos-are-charismatic-but-fish-bugs-and-birds-are-dying-too.html

This may be as good a time as any, then, to revisit Michael McCarthy’s 2015 book The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, “an urgent, rhapsodic book full of joy, grief and rage,” according to Cambridge University naturalist and research scholar Helen Macdonald. McCarthy, veteran nature writer and environmental columnist for some 20 years for The Independent newspaper in the UK, focused on the joy that nature gives us in our everyday lives, and how the “Great Thinning” is cheating future generations — and the planet — of a hopeful future.

“One problem we have with abundance,” Grabar writes — whether it’s so many passenger pigeons that it’s inconceivable that they might one day all disappear or a wide, open landscape of untrammelled wilderness that’s impossible to comprehend in a single glance — “is that we’re not very good with numbers. And the larger the numbers get, the more trouble we have telling the difference between them.”

That may explain at least in part why the Great Thinning is going largely unnoticed.

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Zoological Society of London’s (ZSL) Living Planet Index, which monitors some 14,000 populations of roughly 3,500 species of vertebrates worldwide, recorded average population declines of 60 percent, species by species, over a 40-year period between 1970 and 2010, the last year for which official numbers were measured, tabulated and published.

It seems obvious, but some things bear repeating. Nature, McCarthy writes in The Moth Snowstorm, has many gifts for us, but perhaps the greatest of these is joy; the delight we take in the natural world, in the wonder it can offer us, the peace it can provide.

The natural world is ever more threatened, and it’s happening right now, on our watch.

The Moth Snowstorm was published three years ago, but it has never seemed more timely than it is right now.

“Hyperbole?” McCarthy wrote then. “You could say so, I suppose. But what can I do, other than speak of my experience? Once, on a May morning a few years ago, I cam out on to the banks of the Upper Itchen, at Ovington in Hampshire, and the river with its flowers and willows and the serenity of its flow and its dimpling tout in its matchless, limpid water, all gilded by the sunshine, seemed to possess a loveliness which was not part of this world at all.,

“Yet it was part of it; and there, once again, was the joy.”

Meet ‘Pongo tapanuliensis,’ the first new great ape to be identified in nearly 100 years.

November 03, 2017

The news that a new species of orangutan has been discovered — if “discovered” is quite the right word — is both wondrous and troubling.

Wondrous, because it reminds us that, even in 2017, seeming miracles can and do happen. It’s a reminder of both the resilience of nature and the fallibility of science and humankind, in that such a large mammal — and a primate species at that — can elude detection for so long.

Troubling, though, because yet another creature has been added to the IUCN list of Critically Endangered species, the official designation for animals that are not just in trouble but in serious trouble. Just 800 remain of the Tapanuli orangutan, as it’s being called. Tapanuli is the central rainforest region in Sumatra where those remaining apes cling to life, even as Indonesian developers — legal and illegal — are hidebound determined to burn their forest to the ground, all in the name of palm oil plantations.

But wait, it gets worse. Acting on the notion that what the world really needs is more hydroelectric power dams, Indonesia is in the process of constructing a monster dam that will finish the job the land developers have started, if they have their way.

Naturally, conservation groups, advocates for nature and assorted NGO’s are scrambling to save the rainforest by any means possible, but as the Amazon Basin has shown, petitions and public protests are no match for armed militias willing to burn, loot and murder to do their paymasters’ bidding. Corrupt politicians and land developers get their way every time, and so the Tapanuli orangutan faces uphill odds, even though it’s only now been identified as a separate species.

What constitutes a specific species, as opposed to a subspecies or distant cousin, is a technical branch of zoology, ably explained by National Geographic’s Jason Goldman in a story posted earlier this week. (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/new-orangutan-species-sumatra-borneo-indonesia-animals/)

The accompanying photos, by the way — a couple of which appear here — were taken by veteran primate photographer Tim Laman for National Geographic Creative, a digital branch of the National Geographic Society’s tree-of-life. Laman is not new to this: He won last year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award for his image of an orangutan climbing a tree towards his remote-controlled camera placed high in the sky, the rainforest spreading out below.

Scientists are cautious by nature. They’re not inclined to jump to conclusions until a new find has been subjected to peer review. The “discovery” is not technically new; the orangutans in question where first reported to exist following an expedition into the remote mountain forests of Sumatra in 1997. A research project devoted the intervening years to unlocking the apes’ genetic code, to determine whether or not the species was genetically different from the two species already known to exist, the Sumatran and Bornean orangutan.

This is unglamorous work, involving long hours of poring over electron microscopes and DNA-testing computers — not like tramping through virgin jungle in person, like a latter-day Professor Challenger in a post-modern update on Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lord World. The discovery is only coming to light now because the study, authored by researchers from University of Zurich and Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, in conjunction with the wildlife NGO Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (https://sumatranorangutan.org), published their work in the latest issue of the scientific journal Current Biology.

If the find is still determined to be true years and decades from now, the Tapanuli orangutan will go down in history as the first new great ape to be identified as such in nearly a century.

In the shorter term, though, the Tapanuli orangutan’s greatest contribution to conservation and the fight to preserve what remains of nature, will be that it has forced the plight of Indonesia’s rainforest — and rainforests in general — into the mainstream media, however briefly, from BBC World News to USA Today, from Radio New Zealand to the Hindustan Times, from The Independent to India Today.

In this case, all publicity is good publicity, where survival of a species is concerned.

As the study’s co-author, Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool’s John Moores University since 2012, told the BBC: “It’s . . . worrying, to discover something new and then immediately also realize that we have to focus all our efforts before we lose it.”

Africa’s unsung wildlife heroes: Wayne Lotter did not die in vain.

September 10, 2017

Here’s the thing. Every day, thousands of park rangers and conservationists like the late Wayne Lotter, shot to death late last month by as-yet unidentified gunmen in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, risk their lives to fight against global wildlife trafficking. Too often, their lives end in tragedy. More than 1,000 rangers have been killed in the line of duty in just the past 10 years.

The killings are not meant to be taken in isolation. They’re designed to send a chilling message to anyone who vows to expose crime syndicates that traffic in animal skins, illegal trophies and body parts, from Chilean sea bass and shark fin soup to rhino horn and, in Lotter’s case, elephant ivory.

Violence rarely — if ever — deters committed crusaders for the environment from pursuing their goal, though it can have a chilling effect on potential whistleblowers, those people on the inside who can point law enforcement in the right direction, on those occasions law enforcement isn’t compromised by corruption in high places.

Neighbouring countries often take a different approach to the same problem, though. Despite Tanzania’s gift of a natural bounty unmatched in neighbouring countries — a thriving tourist industry based on the annual Serengeti wildebeest migration, the justifiably famous “Cradle of Humankind” in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and one of Africa’s largest surviving remnant populations of wild elephants — Tanzania is also home to endemic corruption on an almost epic scale. Here’s a harsh reality: Where there is corruption on an institutional, national level of governance, China is rarely far behind.

Kenya, Tanzania’s neighbour, has traditionally taken a radically different approach to wildlife conservation, though, just as Botswana routinely and consistently annoys its neighbours Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia with its own, forward-thinking conservation practices. Trophy hunting, for example, is part of the natural order of things in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia; Botswana has banned it outright, despite the loss in potential income and revenue. Big game hunting is de rigueur in Tanzania; Kenya has banned it outright, despite the loss to its economy.

Thanks to its natural bounty, Tanzania has managed to generate income from both hunting and tourism; Kenya, despite being more prone to droughts — much of northern Kenya is semi-arid desert as it is — and despite endemic street crime, a serious terrorist threat and its own share of government corruption, has gone all-in on wildlife tourism, even as it has mounted some of the toughest, most aggressive anti-poaching military campaigns on the entire continent.

Whistleblowers are key. Without ordinary, everyday citizens finding the courage to report trafficking activity, it’s hard for law enforcement to bringwildlife criminals to justice, let alone put a dent in the Asian crime syndicates.

Lotter, interestingly enough, was closely involved in equipping and training Tanzanian park rangers in how to defend themselves in a firefight and mete out justice of their own — based on the Kenyan model, in other words, instead of looking the other way and pretending nothing happened.

This is not simply a case of the great white man telling the black man what to do and how to do it. In Kenya, in Botswana and in the gorilla parks of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), it’s local — black — citizens who are donning automatic rifles and camouflage gear and putting their lives on the line, often for little more than what developed nations would regard as the minimum wage. Once again, as is so often the case in Africa, it is the most impoverished people who are the most incorruptible, and the monied class, often at minister level, who are most inclined to take kickbacks from crime syndicates.

If anything, Kenya is ramping up its anti-trafficking campaign, not scaling it back, despite recent setbacks in Tanzania. Kenya has announced it is about to “significantly” increase the number of specialist prosecutors who prosecute wildlife crime. The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) currently has two full-time prosecutors on call; that number will soon jump to 14. The conservation organization Space for Giants — Space for Giants’ patron is Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the UK Independent newspaper — is underwriting the training and mentoring of the new prosecutors.

KWS acting director general Julius Kimani told The Independent that while Kenya has experienced success in both intelligence and criminal investigations, they recognized there was a gap in the courts.

Lotter understood this. There is an argument to be made — as yet unproven — that this is why he was murdered.

Murdered, yes, but not silenced. It might not look like it now, but Lotter may well have been on the right side of history. As the heavily armed elephant and rhino rangers and a newly invigorated court system in Kenya show, and as the heavily armed gorilla rangers in Rwanda and Congo prove, ordinary, everyday people can and will stare down the international crime syndicates, given the chance, given the moral authority and the knowledge that doing the right thing almost invariably wins out in the end, despite the potential terrible personal cost.

No, Wayne Lotter did not die in vain. Kenya is showing the way.

http://spaceforgiants.org

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