Monday we spent touring what many South Africans consider the most beautiful part of their country, the “Panoramic Route.”
The route covers a part of the northern Drakensberg Mountain Range in the eastern part of the country. These are very small mountains by North American standards. The highest point, Thabana Ntlenyana, is just under 11,500′ on the border with Lesotho.
As I continue my journey through Cape’s paradise of Springtime, it becomes increasingly difficult to write instead of just show you pictures!
And I’m no photographer. Nothing but my old Android phone that’s now my “African phone.” Poorly focused, no sensitivity to settings, I just click away, endlessly.
The beauty is exceptional. This is The Cape’s Spring Flower Show, probably the greatest on earth, even better than western Australia. I’m in Piketberg, about 150 miles north of Cape Town near Citrusdal and the Cederberg Mountains. Very poor internet. Will do my best. Stay tuned!
The evisceration or even outright repeal of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is one of the best illustrations of what’s going on in America, today.
The ESA is a socialist policy initiated by Richard Nixon and enacted because of proactive Republican support in the face of considerable Democratic resistance. This exact mirror image of today proves that politics, not ideas, generate American policy.
Our universe is composed of the natural world and our human imprint on it. Rarely the twain shall meet in a modern world. But from time to time they do: look at northern Kenya, today.
Conservationists who believe Kenya is moving too recklessly to develop oil in its northern deserts, and the neglected people who live there who stood to benefit, are today allied in opposing the development.
Recently on a local birdwalk with some neophytes my colleague guide and I knew that we had to find something big quick. Then as luck would have it in swept a turkey vulture and with great enthusiasm we began explaining all the marvelous things about it.
“Ugh! A Vulture!” was the response.
Well, that’s not what Princess Anne just said.
I spotted the first group of bison for a half-second before we continued sailing along the paved road and a ridge obscured the valley in which I glimpsed them. No problem. A gravel track headed out that way.
The “Wildlife Loop” road that runs around the periphery of the park is a nicely paved circuit. There are so many bison in the park you’ll certainly see many of the big, old bulls sitting near the paved road chewing their cud.
But to see the larger herds and the calves, you’ve got to leave the paved road and head to a southern plains area appropriately called “Buffalo Corrals.”
A young African Sudanese man seen riding a truck carrying bananas in Juba, the capital of the Republic of South Sudan. South Sudan became an independent state on July 09, 2011, and soon thereafter also a United Nations member state. South Sudan is one of the poorest countries in the world.
August 20, 2011. Photo by Moshe Shai/FLASH90
**MAARIV OUT**
Food security is now threatened by something far more onerous than Mother Nature: a debate about whether to tinker with Mother Nature, because many scientists believe there is a reasonable defense: GMO. But will Africans starve before embracing GM foods?
In this topsy turvy world developing countries with huge social needs like Kenya are much more aggressively pursuing organic farming and containing climate change than the U.S. Do they know something we don’t?
Yes, or stated more correctly, they know something we stubbornly refuse to see at the tip of our nose.
There’s a lot in common between South Africa and the U.S. Among the very most important and very least spoken is their shared agricultural power.
South Africa outperforms the U.S. producing oranges and performs about two-thirds as well for barley. South Africa outperforms China and India in corn, barley, oranges and fresh milk as well.
So agricultural companies pay a lot of attention to South Africa, and especially after last weekend’s seed conference at the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) which focused on defeating a proposed South African law heavily favoring GM seed companies like Monsanto.
Clarity on how badly elephants may be declining is at hand. Wednesday scientists began the “2017 Selous-Mikumi Large Mammal Census” which will be conducted over a huge area of nearly 43,000 sq. miles in central Tanzania.
It will be the first such careful animal census of the area since 2014 but more importantly will help determine the much debated viability of the “Great Elephant Census (GEC)”, which tore through the continent a year ago. One of the great criticisms of that inflammatory report was precisely that it ignored areas that the current census will now sample.
Why believe this one?
Yesterday Kenya joined 40 other countries doing something the whole world — except Michigan — will likely soon be doing: ban plastic bags.
Significantly, Kenya’s law is the most wide-ranging and punitive of them all. Violators can be fined up to $38,000 and jailed for four years. Visitors to emerging nations are not surprised at the move, but they are often surprised when they understand the reasons.
There are 65 world treaties governing such things as conduct in war, rights of the child and trade of endangered species (CITES). The first was in 1865 (governing the breakthrough telegraph) and the latest in 2006 (governing the rights of the disabled).
Getting the whole wide world to agree on something isn’t easy. It represents man’s greatest achievement: These treaties define mankind. Friday, one man in South Africa will defy one of these treaties with the blessings of a misguided South African court.
Attitudes towards hunting are changing in the same way that they’ve already changed with regards to the LGBT communities. In remarkably short order hunting of all kinds may be curtailed.
This is a very widespread and expansive cultural change. It applies almost equally to sports hunting as to native society subsistence hunting and even to scientific culling. It is, in fact, the scientific community evincing the most dramatic change. The driver is climate change.
Africa is growing darker than ever.
Recently Kenya joined Rwanda and Morocco in banning plastic bags. The Ministry’s announcement cited numerous reasons, including the UN “Clean Seas’ initiative. But while this strikes a westerner as environmentally revolutionary, it’s little more than window dressing a far more serious problem.