Finding light in the darkness: An elephants’ tale for Christmas.

December 24, 2018

Christmas. An uncertain ending to a bleak year. And, to those who pay attention to such things, signs of more bleakness to come. Hurricanes, cyclones. Droughts, forest fires. Dying oceans. Shrinking glaciers, melting polar ice caps. A climate emergency in the present, and a looming mass extinction in the future. Feckless leadership. Unquestioning followers. In the kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King.

Christmas is traditionally a time of hope and spiritual renewal, regardless of one’s social, political and religious affiliations, but this Christmas seems empty somehow — a throwback to Dickensian times, perhaps, this time with the added distraction of frenzied technology and the ever-present threat of Big Brother, looming over us, driven and enflamed by social media.

And yet.

There are still good, kind people out there. Science and technology is still capable of producing surprises. And miracles. There have been scientific advances in the past year that take the breath away.

Earlier this month, a 15-year-old, Greta Thunberg of Sweden, and a 92-year-old, Sir David Attenborough, stood and delivered before an international conference on climate change, and the world listened.

NASA landed a space probe on a predetermined, precise spot on the red planet, Mars, after a journey that lasted seven months, over 300 million miles.

The true wonder, which would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago, was that NASA’s InSight probe beamed pictures from a neighbouring planet, in real time, in such a way that you could watch them on a screen the size of your hand, on your phone.

And in an early Christmas present for anyone who cares about elephants and the health of the world’s remaining wild creatures, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the African country of Zambia, together with the conservation NGO Elephant Connection Research Project ( ECR), provided long-awaited proof of the viability of “wildlife corridors” that connect far-flung populations of wild animals across national, political boundaries. Wildlife corridors for animals such as elephants are essential for the revitalization of threatened and endangered species.

In the case of the Zambia elephant, the pleasure lies in the details. An elephant bull was fitted with a remote tracking collar in 2017. In the past year, he was shown to have walked a long, circuitous route from his original home in in Zambia’s Sioma Ngwezi National Park to neighbouring Kafue National Park, a distance of 390 kilometres, in 14 days, accompanied by six other elephants, through another country.

In moving to Kafue from Sioma Ngwezi through the broader Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA), this elephant and his companions demonstrated that restless tuskers wander in and out of neighbouring countries whenever the mood suits them.

Elephants have been known to wander back and forth between Namibia, Zambia, Angola, Botswana and even neighbouring Zimbabwe and South Africa. The regional transfrontier park system, as represented by the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, recognizes the right of wild animals to travel across national boundaries in protected areas, regardless of any political tensions that may exist between countries. The transfrontier park system was originally proposed in part, co-developed, established and enforced by one of the region’s great elder statesmen. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. His name was Nelson Mandela.

Information and knowledge are vital not just to existing wildlife populations, but for future populations as well. WWF Zambia’s communications officer, Nchimunya Kasongo, noted in a press statement that this isn’t just about elephants. Information gleaned from the satellite-collaring of elephants in Zambia — 15 collared to date — is crucial to understanding the right and wrong way to use land in such a way that subsistence farmers won’t be terrorized by seven-ton elephants, and the elephants in turn won’t be shot by angry farmers. It’s all about lessening the chances for human-wildlife conflict.

The future of the world’s large endangered wild animals, not just elephants but also rhinos, lions, gorillas, jaguars and polar bears wildlife is not only tied to climate change and habitat loss but also making sure the animals who call the wilderness home and the people who live there don’t come into conflict.

Why does this matter? We’ve trashed the planet in recent decades, in thrall to the demands a miserable, insecure society, even as the language of environmental protest has changed. A new, younger generation is involved, and they are engaged in ways we never were. Many of them know, even if we have forgotten, that economics and the environment are inextricably interwoven, in the same way an elephant from Kafue, Zambia is connected to another elephant from Khaudom National Park in Namibia.

Here’s one final thought to leave you with, on this Christmas Day 2018, this one brought to you by Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green party in Wales and England, writing in The Guardian:

“History is not pre-written, or destined to repeat itself. Offering the hope that with political, economic, social, educational and environmental transformation we can build a society that works for the common good, within the physical limits of this one fragile planet, is politically essential. The politics of the far right is built on fear and we must not feed that.

“Business as usual isn’t an option. But then that is one thing that certainly is not going to happen. That’s good news, for our planet and for its people.”

Merry Christmas, good people of Planet Earth.

World Elephant Day: a day of remembrance for the animal that never forgets.

August 12, 2018

“The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress,” the late naturalist Peter Matthiessen once wrote. “We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.”

Matthiessen, as might be expected, was an admirer of elephants.

That’s worth remembering on this World Elephant Day — today, more than most days.

“Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with, yet its passing — if this must come — seems the most tragic of all,” Matthiessen wrote in his 1972 classic of Africa, The Tree Where Man Was Born.

“I can watch elephants, and elephants alone, for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and carry them off into the bush. There is mystery behind that masked grey visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.”

It is one of my favourite quotes, of which there are many, and others of which Matthiessen can claim pride of place.

“This world is painted on a wild dark metal,” he wrote in Shadow Country.

And this, from The Snow Leopard, but which can just as easily apply to elephants and their facility for memory:

“Only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped:

“Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders.”

“The equatorial monsoons which brought a rainy season to the coasts had small effect here in the highlands, from moon to moon, the rainfall varied little,” Matthiessen wrote in Under the Mountain Wall. “Winter, summer, autumn, spring were involuted, turning in upon themselves, a slow circling of time.”

Only time will tell how many more years elephants will live in the wild to see World Elephant Day.

Elephant numbers are estimated to have dropped by 62% during the past decade. Roughly 400,000 remain — a very rough figure — and 100 a day killed each day, today and every day, by illegal hunters to feed the insatiable ivory trade.

“Days and months are the travellers of eternity,” Matthiessen once said. “So. . . .”

http://worldelephantday.org/about/elephants

Images courtesy of Pixabay/COO Creative Commons.

Botswana bites back: Trophy hunting boosts poaching, not other way round.

March 20, 2018

One of the perils of growing old, the respected novelist and essayist Paul Theroux wrote in his Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, is hearing the same old arguments over and over again from younger people who believe they were the first to think fo that argument.

To anyone on the ground with a working knowledge of the campaign to save endangered wildlife, a wearily familiar — and thoroughly discredited — old saw goes like this:

Trophy hunting is good for conservation, because it generates much-needed revenue to finance anti-poaching efforts.

It’s quite all right for a fat American dentist to shoot Cecil the Lion for the trophy wall, because the fee and costs he paid will go toward saving other lions.

Leaving aside the fact that in all probability not one Zimbabwe dollar — or American dollar for that matter — was ploughed back into lion conservation, it’s a bogus argument from top to bottom. The licence fee for a trophy bull elephant in Zimbabwe is USD $20,000; that same fee for an elephant in South Africa with tusks weighing over 50 lbs. is USD $50,000, not counting mandatory daily safari costs and the official daily rate per hunter and attendant trackers and camp staff.

Here’s where common sense trumps the financial-incentive argument, though — common sense over common cents, if you will.

An elephant shot for its ivory, or to be mounted on the wall of the family den back in the good state of Minnesota, or wherever, is a one-off in terms of revenue, even if that revenue was being put back into conservation, which it isn’t.

Tourism, though — much maligned by trophy hunters as a pastime for weaklings, losers and snowflakes — generates income, and jobs, day after day, for as long as the animal(s) in question stays alive in the wild.

That fat American dentist got his money’s worth out of Cecil the lion — arguably — but who knows how much money would still be generated today, right now, if Cecil were still alive, still there to show off his pride to tourists willing to pay USD $500 a night in some cases for the privilege of staying in a lodge within driving distance of lion territory. Botswana is the most expensive travel destination in Africa by far, in part because, unlike Kenya, Tanzania and even South Africa, Botswana’s national government made a conscious decision to cater to an elite few who can afford the exorbitant cost of a safari in the Okavango Delta, Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve. in the theory that small numbers of well-paying visitors leave less of an imprint on a fragile environment than a mob of backpackers flocking to the Amboseli, Maasai Mara and Serengeti on the cheap, in East Africa.

Even in the Mara, though, where many of the local area conservancies are owned, managed and maintained by local Maasai stakeholders, even high-volume tourism is preferable to letting fat American dentists shoot every lion they see, no matter how high a licence fee they may be willing to pay.

That’s why Botswana President Ian Khama’s announcement late last week that Donald Trump’s decision to reverse his proposed ban on the import of big-game trophies, such as lions and elephants, will encourage more poaching, not less.

The reason legal hunting encourages illegal hunting doesn’t have so much to do with hunting itself as it does the market. Legal trophy hunting boosts the demand for legitimate ivory and lion trophies, which in turn feeds the market for illegal hunting. Since hardly anyone — not even a forensic pathologist or wildlife biologist — can tell the difference between legal ivory and that which has been harvested illegally, it doesn’t much matter where it came from, since no one can prove it anyway.

Only by closing down the market can the demand be controlled and eventually eliminated entirely.

And there’s no better way to shut down a market than to ban the importation of whatever it is people are trying to import, where it’s a lion head, elephant tusks or Bolivian marching powder.

If a fat American dentist shoots a trophy lion, but is unable to take that trophy home to show off to his friends and brag about what a He-Man he is, he’s unlikely to want to shoot that lion in the first place, especially at those prices ($25,000+, not including travel costs and mandatory daily fees and camp costs, not to mention tips for the staff).

Khama, speaking this past weekend at an anti-poaching summit in Kasane, Botswana, pointed out that Botswana banned hunting entirely some time ago, but that it is still legal in countries like Tanzania, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. (Hunting has also been banned in Kenya, which has on occasion fed cross-border tensions between Kenya and neighbouring Tanzania,)

Khama said Trump’s overturning the US ban on the import of hunting trophies would only fuel poaching in his home country of Botswana. There has been a dramatic spike in poaching across Africa over the past 18 months, driven almost wholly by insatiable demand in Southeast Asia, China and, yes, the U.S. for elephant ivory and rhino horn.

Khama didn’t stop at trophy hunting, where Trump was concerned. He told the BBC that he was concerned about Trump’s “attitude toward the whole planet,” not just the import of hunting trophies.

The situation facing elephants is grave, despite the worldwide campaign by environmentalists, ecologists, conservationists, wildlife biologists and ordinary, everyday working people who want their children and grandchildren to possibly be able to see an elephant in the wild one day. Mike Chase, director of the conservation agency Elephants Without Borders, said at that same conference that he believes the worst of the poaching crisis is not yet over.

Botswana aside, Chase told delegates, “The political will to address these issues is not there, unfortunately.

“It has been in Botswana. And if our neighbours can learn from Botswana’s example, it will go a long way toward addressing this crisis.”

Despite the old, discredited argument that trophy hunting aids conservation efforts financially, the bottom line remains the bottom line: A lion or elephant is worth more alive, in terms of jobs, income and education opportunities to local communities in rural Africa, than it is dead.

Even a fat American dentist should be able to figure that out.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/campaigns/GiantsClub/donald-trump-encouraging-poachers-a8260776.html