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

Denmark has its first wild wolf pack in 200 years. After centuries of persecution throughout the well-peopled landscapes of northern and central Europe, the persecutors — some of them, anyway — have become protectors.
Why care? For one, Denmark’s last wolf is believed to have been killed in 1813.
For another, those who work both inside conservation and on the periphery, are hailing the sighting as a welcome bit of good news on the heels of a recent run of bad news.
Controversy has flared once again on the ranch-lands bordering Yellowstone National Park, where wolves have never been popular and ranchers fought a decision to reintroduce wolves into the park tooth-and-nail n the mid 1990s.

Wyoming is staging its first legal wolf hunt in two-and-a-half years. And although the Wyoming Game and Fish Department told the local newspaper in Jackson Hole that the hunt has started slowly, with not a single report of a wolf killed by a hunter in the hunt’s first few days — owing to “crummy weather,” according to one local outfitter — the future suddenly looks bleak for one of nature’s most maligned, least understood predators.
The new U.S. administration is turning back the clock on decades of wildlife research and legislation, much of it enacted under former U.S. President Barack Obama. The current presidential administration seems determined to lift protections on wilderness areas that have been in effect since Theodore Roosevelt established the national park system in 1905. “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune,” Roosevelt said at the time.

The Wyoming hunt has the potential to undo recent gains — modest gains, at that — in the state’s wild wolf population. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hasn’t released its annual estimate of wolf populations yet, but according to figures published late last month in the Jackson Hole Daily, the previous year’s tally — 382 wolves statewide — was the highest since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone little more than 10 years ago.
That’s telling because other research figures, printed in the Billings Gazette out of Billings, Montana, show that Yellowstone’s elk population is up, not down. The argument that reintroducing wolves would wipe out Yellowstone’s prey animals has been refuted, in other words. Advocates for wolf conservation have long argued that wolves help curb disease in elk, making the resultant population stronger — inasmuch facts matter in our present post-truth political climate.

Denmark is different, though.
Europe is an older, more mature society. Wolves have been an indelible part of folklore since the earliest children’s tales, and the persecution of wolves dates back centuries, not just years.
Word that a female wolf had trekked some 200 kms — 125 miles — into Denmark from Germany, to presumably link up with the male wolves already known to be there, means Denmark has its first viable wolf pack since George III sat on the throne of England and Mary Shelley penned her literary classic Frankenstein.
The wolf sightings aren’t idle conjecture, either. The wolf pack was filmed together as recently as January.

“We expect that they will have cubs this year or next,” Peter Sunde, a researcher at Denmark’s Aarhus University, told the UK Guardian earlier this month. “People were surprised when wolves (reappeared) in Denmark, but they are highly mobile and are just as adaptable to cultural landscapes as foxes are. The only problem is that historically we killed them.”
The Denmark wolves have settled in a patch of heathland and small pine forests surrounded by actively cultivated farmland. The pine groves are home to a growing population of red deer and roe deer, which the wolves have taken to for prey. The Danish government has established a compensation plan for area farmers who lose the occasional sheep or calf. The government is also backing a fund designed to help farmers erect wolf-proof fencing around their properties.
This shouldn’t come to anyone as a surprise, Sunde insisted.
“There is a tradition in Denmark of reaching compromises and solutions,” Sunde told the Guardian. “We can relatively easily manage the wolf population, but the challenge is the psychology of humans. There are so many feelings and opinions about wolves in Denmark, as everywhere.”
Interestingly enough, southern European countries have been more receptive to accepting new wolf populations than many of their northern neighbours. Finland and Norway, both with relatively small wolf populations, still stage annual wolf culls, although the practice has become increasingly controversial in recent years.
The recent reintroduction of wolves in Denmark is no children’s fairy tale. It’s real. It isn’t the stuff of made-up stories. As a scientist from Sweden told the Guardian: “It is not a myth that it is back. It’s just a natural part of European fauna.”

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/04/526937018/denmark-now-has-a-wild-wolf-pack-again-for-the-first-time-in-200-years

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.

Something old is new again in the state of Denmark.

Journal

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