Category: Ecology

Tit for That

Tit for That

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

The Obama Administration may have hastened rhino extinction in order to achieve political capital in Wisconsin.

Charity begins at home, and there’s no more powerful example of this than for Americans interested in saving rhinos and no greater reversal in my life time than what the Obama Administration has just done.

For the first time since U.S. laws then international treaties prohibited international commerce of rhino, the Obama Administration has issued a waiver to David Reinke, a big-game hunter from Wisconsin allowing him to import the rhino he shot in Namibia in 2009.

This is the first ever waiver issued by any administration since America’s Endangered Species Act became law in 1973, and may in fact put America in violation of the world-wide CITES treaty of which America was so instrumental in creating.

The action by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has raised numerous eyebrows and not only among wildlife advocates, and occurred right when the European Union enacted even tougher bans on the trade of rhino within EU country borders.

Fish & Wildlife’s explanation is pitiful. It invokes a moral platitude that sport hunting can support conservation, which while sometimes true is absolutely not in the case of any endangered species. And it cites as a positive reason for issuing the waiver the more than quarter million dollars Reinke spent on his rhino hunt in Namibia.

To many of us, this action is patently political: Trade rhino for political capital in the contentious arena of Wisconsin by wooing over a major Republican supporter. This time I’m not only joined by the Huffington Post that suggests as much. So does Scientific American.

Tuesday’s blog about the American Wade Steffen and today’s blog about the American David Reinke and the Obama Administration illustrate how misplaced American support for saving the rhino may be.

Every single save-the-rhino (or save-the-elephant, or save-the-groundhog) group on earth presumes, and correctly so, that commerce of any kind in that animal increases exponentially its black market thereby massively increasing the threat of its extinction.

If Fish & Wildlife argues that Reinke’s quarter million dollars will save the rhino, why not just issue hundreds of waivers each for a quarter million dollars? Or thousands of waivers?

It’s a child’s tease while the Obama Administration plays god with politics. Once a single international transaction of commerce has occurred — as it now has — subsequent transactions become easier and easier.

As my own experience in Africa developed over the years, “charity begins at home” grew increasingly important to me, but in an usually straight-forward manner: Yes, there’s horrible poverty in Africa, but there’s also horrible poverty in America.

What’s worse is that poverty in Africa is declining; poverty in America is growing. I’m an American, not an African. Ought whatever talents or skills I have to mitigate poverty be directed first at home?

But what about saving big-game wilderness, a concern much more African than American?

You have your answer in this blog and my last one, “Dumb Roper Nabbed.”

It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve sent to rhino-saving charities, or how much time or other resources your zoo or conservation society has allocated to rhino protection, your political leader has just reversed much of what you thought you were doing.

Charity begins at home.

Elephant in a Texas Circus

Elephant in a Texas Circus

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It’s likely there is a greater percentage of Chinese who wish to end the ivory trade and save elephants than there are Texans who believe in evolution.

Think about that, please.

Yesterday, the Chinese actress Li Bingbing – who has 20 million followers and counting on her social media – made a highly public visit to an elephant orphanage in Nairobi and then called on her fellow Chinese to stop buying ivory.

She joins a growing list of Chinese celebrities aggressively supporting conservation issues, and it makes me so damn mad the way current media again and again is blaming the Chinese for a crisis they’ve also made up: elephant decline.

The same organization for which Bingbing is an honorary ambassador is also one of the few to use realistic numbers regarding elephants. You might have heard of this organization: the United Nations.

The press statement released with Bingbing’s conference referred to “data [that] shows that 17,000 elephants were illegally killed in 2011.”

Contrast that with CNN that described the “slaughter of elephants” at an “alarming rate” and blamed it on the Chinese.

As I’ve pointed out again and again in this blog, animal poaching is horrible. Using the UN’s numbers (see link to the report, below) there are probably a half million or more elephant in Africa, today, and a low estimate of their annual reproductive rate increases that population automatically by 25-35,000 annually.

There are too many elephant. Elephant/human conflict is Africa’s single-largest conservation problem. So even with the illegal poaching, the troublesome population is growing larger and larger every year.

And the notion that it is all due to the Chinese is racist.

Yes, most of the illegal ivory goes to Asia, but Asia is not China. There is huge market in Thailand almost equal to all of China, and another huge market in South Korea. Anyone ever talk about those countries? And a huge portion of the Chinese market comes in through Hong Kong, which is as little Chinese as possible. The next conduits are Indonesia and the Philippines.

But do we ever hear negative things about those capitalist ally mean guys?

This whole made-up story about the imminent doom of elephants is horrible enough in itself. The elephant problem is not with its likely demise, but with the demise of our entire conservation efforts in Africa as young populations of modern Africans get sick and tired of being stepped on by animals preserved for rich foreigners.

Go ahead and let the beast bulldoze your child’s primary school at night and decimate your watermelon crop, so that South African tourism chains can charge $800 per American per night to see them picking their teeth and wagging their tails the next morning.

Look folks, we’ve got to climb down from inaccurate media that’s turning real world conflicts into soap operas. I’m so exasperated not just with CNN, but a whole range of media, each one feeding on the American public’s craven need for apocalypse.

The best factual report about the elephant situation you can read by clicking here. Be patient and refresh your viewer often, because it’s a huge report with many charts and tables and it’s created for CITES by CITES and the UN. Unfortunately it’s skewed towards the apocalyptic angle, for political reasons anticipating the upcoming CITES battle about sales of regulated ivory. But its numbers are solid and absolutely support my ranting and raving.

It’s a real problem, but we aren’t thinking about it correctly or working to resolve it. We’re just using it to titillate us.

Get real. Thank you, Bingbing and UN.

Killing Two Birds with A Bird

Killing Two Birds with A Bird

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The great rice fields of western Kenya are ready for harvest. But the battle that will determine who eats the rice is only now playing out. It’s man versus bird, and the rules of engagement are not pretty.

This is such a perfect example of the folly of man trying to tinker with nature. I’ve seen it play out time and again in America mostly by campaigns against “invasive species” which have essentially proved laughably unsuccessful.

But a time comes when human society gets itself properly organized and funded, to do such things as eradicating malaria, and then the consequences are considerable:

The eradication of malaria, typhus and other mosquito vector human diseases was successfully accomplished in America by the end of World War II through the use of DDT. The ramifications of that continue.

We all know about the near extinction of the bald eagle, and how DDT so weakened the outer shells of bird eggs that many species were threatened. But the effect on the environment was much greater than just an effect on avifauna. Scientists continue to argue, today, that DDT is a carcinogen that effects a wide range of species, and will do so for centuries.

But it did succeed in accomplishing its mission. Although there’s some concern malaria could reappear in America, today, because of global warming, certainly we can conclude that America has been essentially malaria-free since the 1950s.

So it is a cost-benefit argument. Today, most African governments argue that DDT should be allowed greater use than current world treaties allow. Today the use of DDT in Africa “within confined buildings” is allowed, but the widespread spraying that effectively ended malaria in the U.S. outdoors is prohibited.

This weekend a conservation organization working in western Kenya reported that the raptors it works to protect were being poached then preserved as scarecrows in order to protect rice fields from a pestilent bird, the quelea.

An important UN agency calls quelea “Africa’s most hated bird.”

The small, sparrow-like creature lives in enormous flocks. On my last safari about a month ago we encountered them just as they began to nest in Tarangire National Park. It’s as thrilling a sight as spotting a leopard in a tree.

The “mumuration“ of quelea is not unique. Many birds do this, though most simply as a precursor to mass migration. The quelea does it … to eat.

The dark clouds of quelea descend on farmer’s fields more powerfully than locusts, and a 10-acre rice field can be laid bare in an hour.

Consistent with nature’s laws, as more and more farms in Africa concentrate grain production like rice and wheat, and as the equatorial regions of Africa get wetter with global warming and these fields grow larger…

…so do the flocks of quelea.

Farmers in western Kenya have found a deterrent they like. Poach a raptor that eats quelea, and hang it in the field preserved.

A live raptor makes a kill and is satisfied for a whole day. Its effect on mumuration is short. A scarecrow raptor – at least so far – produces a longer effect.

Of course there’s no reason not to believe the quelea will pretty quickly learn how they’ve been tricked. But for the time being, it seems to work.

And so … raptors are now threatened. And the easiest way to kill a raptor today in western Kenya is with the easily obtained, relatively inexpensive and terrifying pesticide, Furadan. I’ve written about this scourge in western Kenya, before.

It’s particularly aggravating because the drug is American made and marketed, but banned here in the U.S. That’s a global disconnect I feel verges on racism.

Because we’re using Kenya as an experiment, again. Just as we do for human medical drugs. As if this is a dispensable part of god’s kingdom.

My greater point, though, is that it won’t work. Nature can’t be bullied. We can’t tinker with nature, whether it’s trying to remove garlic mustard from prairies or kudzu from highways or curing bees of a virus or massacring deer to end CWD.

It doesn’t work. It never has.

We must learn in this world to accommodate nature not try to control it. I don’t for a minute suggest we shouldn’t battle locusts over millet fields in Senegal or quelea over rice fields in Bunyala.

But the battle must be with nature’s own. An organic battle, if you will. Or at the very least a much more highly regulated pesticide industry: Pesticide use today is out of control and dangerous to humankind. Furadan is devil’s brew.

And Bunyala is no less important than Iowa.

On Safari: Never Discount Junior

On Safari: Never Discount Junior

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There are few true big game reserves so close to large metropolitan cities as Arusha National Park, and it’s holding its own against an onslaught of peripheral farms and shops.

The park was exceptionally green and beautiful and lived up to its reputation for us as “Giraffic Park.” We probably saw 100 giraffe in the course of the afternoon game drive.

There are no cats, and elephants use it strictly as a corridor. We saw evidence of elephant but no animals. What we did see was the usual and beautiful groups of zebra, waterbuck and warthog, with the frequent peppering of lovely bushbuck in the sides of the forested hills.

But we also had a stroke of incredible luck and saw quite a few smaller forest creatures, including the spectacular colobus monkey with its gigantic white flowing tail. We saw a family of 20 grouped in a single tall tree in the distance – in the middle of a low bushland that I’m sure was of little interest to these strictly arboreal monkeys.

But perhaps they were enjoying afternoon tourist sightseeing!

And the grand find of the day was the red-flanked duiker. I personally haven’t seen one of these in Arusha for over ten years, and it’s just the type of species that is threatened both by elephants destroying the forest and human development on the outskirts.

We caught only a glimpse of it, but everyone in my car did see it, and it was really a joyous event recognizing that the forest is still holding its own. We also saw quite a few suni, another smaller but less endangered rodent/antelope and of course, the ubiquitous dik-dik.

But the farms are encroaching, and we literally drove on the edge of a corn farm on one side of the road and a meadow with giraffe and waterbuck on the other. There were regularly spaced new blue tents throughout the field, with machete armed lookouts to protect the crops.

That’s the challenge of Africa’s wilderness, today, to become relevant, meaningful and productive to African populations. Arusha’s holding its own, and it was a lovely first game drive in Africa for my clients.

And what’s more: never discount the little bits of wilderness that remain, either because the pressure to develop them is so large or because their size jeopardizes their being able to sustain real biodiversity.

The pressures on Arusha are enormous. And with extreme weather, like last year’s drought, I become certain that it won’t survive. Then the rains return and the wilderness flexes its muscle and shows us animals (the duiker) we haven’t seen for years.

Nature is resilient. That shouldn’t make us less vigilant, but we should respect and admire its own healing itself.

Arusha National Park is the perfect example of this.

Techtonic in Nature

Techtonic in Nature

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Separate but Equal: A chilling phrase used throughout history to justify such barbaric ideas as apartheid and reenforce the power of the status quo has now been applied to African wilderness in an attempt to save lions. It’s more naive than offensive.

Sorry to be such a drag on your week, but when the world’s greatest carnivore scientists conclude that the only way to maintain healthy populations of wild lions is to fence them, somebody’s got to remind them that then they’re no longer wild.

One of the greatest field researchers ever, Dr. Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota, led a team of 46 researchers that published this succinct and piercing recommendation earlier this month.

Lion populations have been declining for some time, and the study confirmed many earlier studies and reports that the decline is directly linked to lion/human population conflicts.

(There are, by the way, too many big cats in zoos.)

The March publication in Ecology Letters Online will become the definitive treatise on lion declines. Its cram-packed data is perfectly if masterfully compiled leading to a vastly understated conclusion that is tectonic in nature:

Fences.

The study acknowledges “fencing has so far only been widely employed in a few African countries because of aesthetic objections, financial costs and the impracticality of enclosing large-scale migratory ungulate populations.”

Presuming the local African has serious “aesthetic objections” to fencing strikes me if not racist patently patronizing, so let’s move on:

Packer et al conclude that it would cost $2000 per square km to preserve lion at about half their potential densities in the wild unfenced, as compared to about $500 per square km to sustain populations at 80% of their “wild” potential fenced.

This means it would cost about $30 million to fence Tanzania’s largest reserve, The Selous, and then an additional $22 million annually to manage that fencing.

In a cash strapped and aid-dependent economy, these numbers are mind boggling. I don’t doubt their veracity but when compared with the needs of human villages in the same areas in which lions now thrive, there is no chance this will be embraced locally.

That defaults the solution to foreign donors.

How do lions rank in the following list of priorities?

Water, Food, Electricity, Sanitation, Health, Education not to mention anti-poverty.

Finally, it isn’t just wildebeest or elephant migrations that are essential to the wild as we know it. It’s less dramatic and more subtle elephant and buffalo migrations, which need massive corridors to maintain healthy populations.

You might, indeed, fence lions and wildebeest and zebra. In fact Botswana did so, and it crashed their wilderness in the mid 1980s, leaving today a nice place to visit but hardly the wild that existed back then, with possibly a third of the animal populations deciminated.

But you can’t fence elephants, and buffalo are problematic. So are we talking about a “wild ecosystem” for lions that excludes anything over, say, two tons? Is this not as dramatic an alteration in what the “wild is” as one without lion?

An equally powerful if nuanced conclusion from this study is that social policies by governments like Tanzania and Mozambique which have struggled to allow indigenous populations to coexist with the wild, is a bad idea … (at least for the animals):

“Negative conservation impacts of human land use can often be [read: “should be”] minimized by restricting conflicting activities to separate areas rather than by encouraging their co-existence.”

A third of the Serengeti/Mara/Ngorongoro ecosystem is the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, which allows traditional Maasai to continue living and using the land. Similar policies exist in Mozambique and Uganda on wide tracts of wilderness.

These are not recent policies generated in any way as a response to human/wildlife conflicts. Rather, they were policies forced by the reality that humans with a right to ownership of the “wilderness” have been living there for eons.

Adopting Packer et al’s policy in this regards heralds back to the Trail of Tears, the justification at the time for which was much more noble than protecting a wild beast.

As Packer said with not but a bit of irritation to the New York Times:

“Let’s get real, here.” (Although in quite a different connotation.)

Packer is an outstanding scientist. But he’s a rather poor humanist, and with this study, either nihilistic or simply frustrated. By the way, he’s likely right, too.

What this means simply is that the wild is ending. Zoos are as capable of guarding a species’ survival as the wild can. Biodiversity on typical macro levels is in grave danger, and that may indeed bode ill for the world.

But the wild is ending. And ending the wild cannot be stopped if mankind doesn’t rev up into high gear, first, its own human development.

And that, Johnny, is the real story. There is no separate but equal. There is only togetherness.

The only possible solution to fixing lions’ lives is to fix people’s lives, if not first at least at the same time.

On Safari: Dead Elephant Walking

On Safari: Dead Elephant Walking

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Chobe’s elephants are legendary, but what I saw this time is disconcerting. They are tame, inbred, their many broken tusks are like toothpicks, their family behaviors have broken down and they are destroying the Chobe forests. Is it time to cull?

There is a growing consensus in the affirmative. Even the conservation organization Elephants Without Borders, which can hardly be blamed for skirting the issues of culling, has come round to accepting it at least when human tragedies are caused.

These ‘problem elephants’ should be culled, according to a September, 2007, white paper written by EWB researcher, Dr. Michael Chase. Chase’s argument at that time was that a culled elephant would discourage other elephants from repeating the offense.

But that has proved untrue. And elephants causing injuring a person or destroying a small farm is hardly the major problem; it’s simply the one that gets the most attention. It’s the easiest to understand.

But there are far more serious consequences of too many elephant. It starts with the elephant itself. And the problem isn’t and wasn’t the elephant; it’s us.

Today we watched spectacular displays of multitudes of elephants in Chobe, playing in the water (actually swimming!), young adolescents sparring harmlessly, and at least three newborns just discovering the world. How can we not but simply sit back and enjoy this?

Chobe's toothpick elephants.
Because when looking a little closer, the scene ain’t so cute. It’s absolutely remarkable how many of Chobe’s elephants have broken tusks, an obvious reflection that if not eating themselves out of house-and-home, they’re at least so far eating themselves out of calcium.

And the tusks which remain are pitiful. We know that smaller tusked elephants throughout the continent are a result of the years of cataclysmic poaching in the 1970s and 1980s, when “small tusks” become a survival mechanism. Only big-tusked elephants were wanted by the poachers.

But large, healthy tusks are essential to a sustainable elephant population, which uses them for all sorts of things, like digging for salt and in dry times, water. So throughout the rest of Africa we’ve seen the slow improvement in the size of tusks.

But not in Chobe. Quite the reverse, and whatever makes for strong, healthy tusks is now jeopardized.

And then there’s the elephant’s important family behavior. Males that reach puberty are kicked out of the family unit. Females remain with the unit forever with their children, and a grand matriarch leads the family. In Chobe, that seems to have disappeared almost altogether, simply because there are so many elephant they can’t separate themselves into any type of grouping.

I hesitate to quote numbers, because elephant population studies are notoriously wrong, skewed by the bias of the organization making them, and official government conservation numbers can be even worse.

Moreover, elephant are difficult to count, because they travel such enormous distances so quickly and do not necessarily repeat travel routes. But suffice it to say there are lots of elephant in northern Botswana and similar habitats in surrounding Zambia, Angola and Namibia.

I have been visiting Chobe since 1978. Hardly is my analysis scientific, but my photos speak volumes. Most of Chobe was a forest in 1978. Today, every excursion from Kasane into the park that was once a dense forest will encounter meadows and eroded cavities with fibrous grasses.

Chobe is a resilient ecosystem, sitting along the rich river systems that eventually form the Zambezi, and in an area with relatively high rainfall. But while it may be true that ecosystem recovery is more possible here than in other places in Africa, it is clear the degradation of the ecosystem in the last 30 years has been severe.

What we can see is only the tip of the iceberg. The loss of biodiversity in grasses, trees and other plants leads to a loss of biodiversity in avifauna and much more.

Why will no organization undertake a definitive biomass study?

Because everyone knows the outcome, and no one wants to author it.

Even the official government site for Chobe National Park concedes, “Damage caused by the high numbers of elephants is rife in some areas of the Chobe National Park. In fact, concentration is so high throughout Chobe that culls have been considered, but are too controversial and have thus far been rejected.”

I think we’ll have to leave it to the younger and less prejudicial scientists yet unencumbered by worries about funding and tenure from a public obsessed with the “little bunny” syndrome. But for better or worse, young scientists taking the issue head on are concluding that culling is now not a viable option.

Benjamin Golas of the 2013 class of graduates of the University of Pennsylvania veterinarian school is one of them. He writes about Chobe:

“Too many elephants…”

“I would hardly be a good conservationist if I did not bring up [the fact that] the region, which can happily and sustainably hold a few thousand pachyderms, is home to upwards of an estimated 140,000… and it shows.

“Trees become scarce… Baobab that remain… look sick and scarred.”

Golas sees the most terrible situation looming. He believes that we have avoided culling for so long that now “the sheer numbers of elephants have made responsible culling impracticable” and there is no viable alternative.

No viable alternative? So then, what?

Perhaps the natural crashing of the population, a Biology 101 phenomenon that every college student learns: Left to nature’s devices, too many of one species will ultimately result in its cataclysmic decline, suddenly and often without warning.

It could be a virus that spreads like wildfire. It could be a syncing of estrus cycles caused by unusual weather. It could be a a new political shift in local human populations that just get fed up with the problem. But something will ultimately cull the elephant, now that we haven’t.

For years I espoused this position: let nature take its own course: Hand’s off. But now I see the danger of so doing, that as the elephant takes itself down, it may take much of the biomass with it.

Is it time to cull?

It’s too late.

What a Valentine’s Bouquet!

What a Valentine’s Bouquet!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

The floral biodiversity of The Cape is greater than the Amazon; in fact it is the most diverse floral system in the world, even though it’s the smallest.

Today and tomorrow we experience this amazing Valentine’s Day bouquet, first by visiting the famous Kirstenbosch botanical gardens as it celebrates its 100th birthday, and tomorrow, by visiting the tip of Africa, The Cape of Good Hope.

In the special care of one of Kirstenbosch’s most famous guides, Andrew Jacobs, we piled into an elongated golf cart and began a comprehensive tour of one of the seven richest and most beautiful gardens in the world.

The day was gorgeous, Table Mountain loomed above us, the Cape Francolin barely moved out of our way and despite the fact this is not a heavy blooming season, we saw an amazing display of our planet’s evolutionary ingenuity.

The Cape is one of the world’s six floral kingdoms. (The other are the Northern Hemisphere, South America, Antarctica, Australia and Africa other than The Cape.)

There are about 8800 unique plant species in an area about the size of the State of Maine, and 69% of the endemic! Both facts are amazing. The density of species diversity is 3 times greater than the next highest kingdom, the Amazon portion of South America.

The reason for this remarkable and concentrated biodiversity has to do with where The Cape is: at the confluence of the world’s coldest and warmest oceans, where jetstreams and ocean currents collide ferociously.

The result is a climate that is mostly dry, but when it rain it rains hard. The result is a plant kingdom that thrives because of considerable moisture but had to learn how to conserve water over very long periods of dryness.

It is mostly a leafless kingdom, with photosynthesis occurring in the stems. What looks like leaves are stemmy reeds, waxy or hairy and almost always pointed and sticky. Butterflies are still needed for pollination, but because there are no leaves for the caterpillars to eat, these butterflies’ caterpillars are carnivorous, eating ants!

Protea and red bush tea are the two stars of the kingdom, both fynbos which is the single largest plant grouping in the kingdom.

One of the best places to see the greatest variety of this kingdom is atop Table Mountain.

Whitney & Ada Addington in front of the manor house at Groot Constantia.

After our great tour we went to nearby Groot Constantia, South Africa’s first vineyard, and tasted the Sauvignon that has been cultivated here since 1679! The restored houses and stable and excellent orientation center depict the life of Simon van der Stel, one of the first governors of the Cape and generally considered the father of the Boer culture.

It rained this morning! It’s not supposed to rain, now. (How often have you heard your tour guide say this?) But the climate is changing, and fortunately for us, the afternoon was bright and beautiful!

Ripped Off Paradise

Ripped Off Paradise

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Paradise is being abandoned. Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, its greatest single tourist attraction and one of the most pristine areas on earth, is in the midst of a political crisis that threatens normal tourism there.

Officialdom in Tanzania is rarely much more than organized crime, but even that can be better than the mayhem currently being reported in and around the crater.

Tuesday one of the “good” committees in Tanzania’s mostly corrupt parliament called on the government for “urgent action” to resolve a crisis that jeopardizes tourism and the environment in ways we’ve seen before, and in ways that are getting tiring and tedious.

There are no principal government officials left at Ngorongoro Crater National Park. The Director, Conservator of the National Park, the Chief of Security and many important chairman of various committees have all … left. This was prompted last month when the Tourism Minister basically told them to scram:

In a diatribe reminiscent of Mitt Romney’s disavowal of Massachusetts Heath Care, tourism minister Khamis Kagasheki warned last month that Ngorongoro officials would all be sacked.

So instead of waiting to get the boot, they left with the entire wardrobe.

Two immediate problems are likely. The first is that collection of fees is turning dirty. Many driver/guides will have more trouble getting in and out of the crater without excessive bribing. The second is that the local Maasai – stressed by a couple years of near drought – will flood the crater floor with cattle and the rangers – absent of a master – will do little about this illegal action.

If the trend isn’t stopped, then it will ultimately develop into a third more serious affront to this beautiful place: Poaching. Whenever the crater loses its shawl of organization, poaching skyrockets and often organized by the rangers.

This all started several years ago when Tanzania’s president organized several NGOs to look into helping the Maasai at the crater organize their cattle farming in a better way.

Suggesting something similar to a giant co-op, the President’s plan was grand on mission and scant on details. The mission was OK: vets and stockades and abattoirs and everything else that modern cattle farming needs.

And a ton of money was thrown at the project. And it has all evaporated.

This is nothing new in Tanzania, of course, and last month’s diatribe by Minister Kagasheki suggests there’s a still in his pocket. But it’s quite unusual that such an important tourist destination would be left completely rudderless, and this is Tanzania’s main tourist destination!

It’s another woeful sign that while many of Tanzania’s African neighbors are moving steadfastly towards more modern, transparent governments, that Tanzania is still stuck in the mud of a crater rainy season.

“Paradise Lost” is not something the casual tourists visiting Ngorongoro, today, will notice. Tanzania has been so corrupt for so long that somehow it moves on in spite of it, and tourist professionals know better than any how to manage the system.

But the need for careful ecological management of the crater is real and right now is MIA. This means over time the biomass will suffer.

It’s one thing when we conservationists in Africa deal with the daunting problems of human/wildlife and wilderness/development conflicts. These are tough, real issues. It’s quite another to have to deal with the Keystone Cops in control of Ft. Knox.

Death Becomes Them

Death Becomes Them

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There are many different kinds of poaching and some I actually sympathize with. But a particular type of child poaching in Kenya is uniquely tragic.

Poaching is hardly confined to Africa. The legendary boar poachers in my childhood home of Arkansas, or deer poachers in my neighboring state of Wisconsin have fed grand literature as much as poor folks. And it’s hard to jail a man who is trying to do nothing more than feed his family.

And much of African poaching fits into that category. Yes, it’s against the law. And without a corrupt-free justice system fledgling societies will themselves become poached by the rich and powerful.

And sometimes worse, it involves fragile species and ecosystems like mountain gorillas in Rwanda or a rapidly declining lion population in Kenya’s Mara.

But when the poaching is essentially the way a man feeds his family, it’s very hard to pursue the grander mission. A gorilla poacher on Sabyinyo is not going to eat the gorilla, and the single elephant poacher in The Selous is not going to barbecue elephant. But a market of the rich and powerful is eager to convert their loot into potatoes and mash.

Western Kenya is a diverse environment characterized mostly by dwindling wetlands and forests a part of the greater Lake Victoria ecosystem. It is a densely populated and still rural part of East Africa where some of Kenya’s greatest working poor live.

Historically farmed, there are now too many people competing for too little water and nutrient land.

Numerous aid organizations have been trying to lift rural western Kenya out of its abject poverty. A Netherlands NGO, ISCOM, has been working for a number of years to develop rice farming in the area and it’s working. The area’s rice production is increasing and its population is definitely benefitting.

But not quickly enough.

The area’s rich biomass is concentrated mostly in birds. Kenya’s nearby Kakamega Forest is only 17 square miles and has more than 300 species of birds and 400 species of butterflies. This is roughly twice as many species as found where I live in northern Illinois, which is 1500 times larger.

Many of the birds are endangered but more to the point, child poaching of birds is now near epidemic because of the use of easily acquired pesticides used for the area’s agriculture.

Children lay traps for the larger birds like the openbill and other large storks as well as raptors, by lacing the bird’s traditional food source with poison.

It’s like hunting turkey out of season by lacing berries with D-Con.

The new problem, of course, is that these very strong pesticides don’t only kill the bird, but can very easily kill the person who feasts on them, much less directly infect the hasty child that handles them.

The real culprit here is Furadan. I’ve written about Carbofuran, the proper chemical name, before. It’s a deadly and unnecessary American produced and marketed pesticide now banned in the U.S. but laying waste the developing world.

The latest tragedy was reported yesterday by a Kenyan researcher in the Bunyala rice area. It was nonconfrontational. The kid didn’t realize he was doing anything wrong. He carried a large sack with the poached bird and from the picture appears proud to readily display his catch.

The cheap pesticide marketed by American and European companies to Kenya because they can no longer sell it at home is used by the kids to lace rice that lures the birds. But with the openbill stork shown in the photo above, the bird doesn’t usually eat rice. It eats snails.

A 12-year old is not likely to carefully dust only the rice with Furadan. A 12-year old is not likely to make sure the rice doesn’t get wet or fall into the wetlands. Many types of birds are being poisoned in Bunyala by this Darth Vader chemical.

The researcher believes the kids are intentionally sent out by adults as a way for the adults to evade prosecution.

Perhaps. But it may also be a way the adults feed the kids.

Leaping out of The Wild

Leaping out of The Wild

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Yesterday eland was photographed in Nairobi National Park. It’s enough to make you believe the wilderness will be preserved!

There is hardly anything as anomalous in the wild as Nairobi National Park. Three of its four sides abut some of the highest low-rise human population densities on earth, including some of its most truculent slums. Its main water source, the Athi River, is fickle and destructive and often terribly polluted.

Yet this biggest of Nairobi’s parks still manages to sustain big game like lion, zebra, hartebeest, impala and eland, the biggest antelope on earth.

Imagine taking the narrowest side of New York’s Central Park and extending it over the Hudson, over (or under) I-90 and eventually into the Jersey forests. That’s what Nairobi National Park is like, a narrow southwest side gingerly extending towards the wilderness near Amboseli past concrete factories, giant warehouses and manicured ranches.

I think of eland as a real indicator species, but not in the traditional sense. Normally an indicator species is a fragile one, an animal or bird that is endangered by shifts in its ecosystem. The eland is different. It’s one of the most adaptable on the big game.

In the wild and seemingly endless plains of the southeast Serengeti, somewhere west of the big Lemuta Kopjes, hundreds of eland in family groups that size roam with the greatest timidity. Though each animal approaches 1600 pounds, they are extraordinary shy.

As we approach within a mile, they start running away, and they’re amazing runners. Almost without moving the rest of their bodies an inch, the legs start trotting as if the rest of the body is resting on a railway car. The feet go quicker and quicker moving the giant animal upwards of 30-35 kph.

Then, one – often the leader – leaps! This giant animal can leap 8-10′ into the air, creating this graceful arch over the plains. Soon they’re all leaping that from a distance looks like a line of boiling and popping cooking oil.

Rarely in the wild do we get within a mile or two.

Yet eland can be domesticated easier than any other antelope! In fact there was a period when Kenyans tried to farm them. The problem was that the meat wasn’t very tasty. But like a wild horse, once captured and fenced the eland becomes nearly a pet.

The eland in Nairobi National Park are very tame and according to one observer, now confined to the park, too weary to leave through the narrow corridor southwest. Technically, they haven’t been captured or fenced since the park is fenced on three sides only. But for all practical purposes they have been fenced by a rapidly growing human society.

So instead of leaping away, they are posing for pictures!

The Nairobi National Park is no San Diego Wild Animal Park. It’s much bigger; it has a much greater diversity of wildlife that benefits or suffers from the radical changes in climate, today; and it actually has far fewer visitors.

But it is absolutely the best, and surprisingly so, of the earlier wild. And the fact that we might have lost the eland’s leap for its presence might just not be so bad.

The Real Terror Within

The Real Terror Within

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Terror in travel is a wonderful way for us guides to get our clients into the car on time, and in Africa, snakes seems to be the trick!

In East Africa where I guide there are 42 venomous snakes and every single one is a killer! But now a wonderful assistant professor of biology at Whitman College threatens to diminish my terror trick, but who knows, maybe make snakes a tourist attraction?

Kate Jackson has built the only online database of the snakes of Western and Central Africa. Together with the book completed with venom expert Jean-Philippe Chippaux, it is one of the best field guide toolkits I’ve seen for Africa.

While snakes command the attention of most of us by playing on our abject fear of a miserable death, Jackson’s motivations are considerably more noble. To begin with she is a living example that even the so-called “deadliest” snakes are less so than thought. She herself, has survived cobra and other snake bites.

Snake venom, like honey bee or yellow jacket stings, have a huge variant effect in humans. Generally much more powerful than an insect bite, and always after an agonizing hospitalization, venomous snake bites immediately treated correctly generally don’t kill the victim.

But Jackson’s motivation for exploring the Congo goes way beyond the terror of a snake: “I went to the Congo to try and protect the amphibians and reptiles from the mining.” And in so doing, of course, she will protect humans and their virgin wilderness from mining as well.

The lust for Africa’s natural resources is becoming desperate. (See my blog, yesterday, about Zambian mine workers murdering their Chinese manager.)

In the “green issue” recently published by Whitman’s college online magazine Edward Weinman reported that the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) invited Jackson to The Congo to explore a huge area of the west near the Gabon border scheduled for massive mining.

This is something so hard for me to imagine. I was there nearly 20 years ago, looking for lowland gorillas. It was one of the hardest, most extensive expeditions I’ve ever undertaken, and the beauty and intensity of the forest was forever memorable. The notion that this area has so transformed, or will be so transformed, that it will be raped of this pristine character is mind-boggling.

Two mining consortiums, mostly British Zanaga, and Swiss Xtrata have formed a monopoly to mine this area. Both have directors closely linked to the world’s biggest mining company, Rio Tinto. This is clearly considered one of Africa’s most potential areas for mining, and the list of ore goes well beyond coal to diamonds and rare earths.

If left unchecked this mining consortium will wipe away some of the most virgin and pristine areas left in Africa.

Jackson’s work for the WCS is clever and very political. Many mining projects in Africa get their start from the World Bank. They don’t need to, because the mining consortium like the one described above can command capital larger than the Bank can for a given project.

But the Bank overseas so much more than just mineral extraction in developing countries like The Congo. It works closely with the IMF and other UN agencies for local development projects that specific industry companies have no interest in … like hospitals and schools and dams and sustainable agricultural and water projects.

The WCS has a long and successful history of delicately going into a given area designated for mining, doing what we would call here at home an EPA study, and then convincing the World Bank and IMF that wholescale development would be an environmental catastrophe.

The pressure that the Bank can then effect on the country, and its partnership with many other agencies necessary in that country’s development, can force the mining consortiums to compromise in vital ways.

In this particular case, Jackson explains, “We documented the myriad species thriving in this virgin wilderness, not as a means to stop all development, but to instead bargain for a land swap.”

It sounds like Jackson’s work, and those of other scientists, may be successful in protecting a huge area of the Congo from any future development whatever by designating it a national park, in return for a smaller piece given to the mining consortium.

The conflicts in Africa are often much more than just the wars you hear about, or the increasing effects of global warming. They are these more complex issues as well: the Congo will benefit enormously from the mining extraction. It’s hard to argue against this.

But with help from people like Jackson, we might simultaneously be able to preserve just a little bit more of natural Africa from the real terror confronting us: losing the wilderness.

Eat And/Or Die

Eat And/Or Die

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Published on jimbonham.com's blog.
Organic brats and burgers covered with organic lettuce as Nigeria berated our summer holiday grill obsessions and viciously debated a national law to accelerate the use of genetically modified crop seeds.

If my relatives are any indication, America is turning neon green. We couldn’t even use non-organic salt for the July 4th barbecues. And the meat was hormone free and the veggies had to be certified non-bioengineered.

I can’t blame the younger generation. They are beset by pandemics of autism and allergies difficult to explain. And I’m the first to rate the taste of organic food as far superior to all that processed stuff.

But the world is starving and many of Africa’s leading advocates for increased food production are demanding rapid use of anything that can speed up food production and increase agricultural yields.

Last year both houses of Parliament in Nigeria passed a sweeping law allowing the use of any sort of seed whatever, even those not yet vetted as safe in developed countries.

“Nigeria should be feeding the rest of Africa,” Senator Ayo Adeseu explained at a food forum last week in Ibadan. “But we have been lagging behind due to non adoption of the latest in technologies. ….The urgent challenge before the nation is that we should imbibe biotechnology.”

President Goodluck Johnathan has refused to sign the bill. He has refused to comment specifically as to why, but the bill would allow farmers and their cooperatives to buy seeds from anywhere without the need for any government certification whatever.

The desperation to feed the starving of the world increases every year. This is because some headway is being made, and success breeds hope, and food policies and scientific advances occur more slowly than the death of a malnourished child.

The most critical areas are actually outside Africa. India ranks on top, and yet its economy is growing in leaps and bounds. Last month two scientists in “Tropical Medicine and International Heath” explained this in part because Indians were adopting western lifeways wholesale that, in fact, contribute rather than ameliorate hunger on a macro level.

Fast food, too much sugar, an unbalanced diet when overlaid a population that still has wanton starvation only increases it overall.

But the rapid adoption of western lifeways in places like India can also mean rapid adoption of many of our developed concerns about “being green.” India’s small farmers find themselves twisted into a dilemma about their own survival, the higher cost of genetically modified seed, the certainty of a higher yield but the questions about long-term safety.

So Goodluck Johnathan is not alone, and many in the developed world are impressed with the critics of genetically modified food. The principal criticism is of the increased use of pesticides that can be used against bioengineered crops. Dr. Michael Antoniou of King’s College London School of Medicine said last monththat most bioengineered foodstuffs were dangerous.

The pesticides themselves could kill if not handled correctly, they advanced the immunity of viruses and insects that could be massively harmful to crop yield, and finally Dr. Antoniou worries that the bioengineering itself will create a harmful food.

Everyone stipulates that bioengineering increases yields, and as I survey the area around which I live this year of a drought, it’s amazing to see how bioengineered corn seed has created crops that can survive at least marginally without water!

It’s a race to be sure. But is it a race to end hunger or life?

Better Visit The Selous Soon

Better Visit The Selous Soon

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Bruised but recovered from the embarrassing loss of the Serengeti Highway project, Tanzania looks truly set on creating one of Africa’s largest dams over currently one of its largest game parks.

Friday, Energy and Minerals minister William Ngeleja announced during a visit to the area that “This is not a ghost project…Tanzanians will see it kicking off this July.”

The visit was perfectly timed. Heavy rains throughout East Africa have been flooding large agricultural areas and destroying many smaller villages. Not only would the dam produce more than twice the electricity Tanzania projects needed within the country, it would control the devastating flooding that seems on the increase with global warming.

When first proposed in the 1980s the project had a price tag of a half billion dollars. Today the cost is $2 billion, and most of this will come from Brazilian banks.

Environmentalists seem resigned to the project finally happening. The huge outcry raised when the project was first proposed, equally as vociferous when rebirthed the first time in 2002, is today totally lacking.

The best environmental study for the area was conducted by FAO in 1981. At that time there was concern that the large project would seriously disturb the water ecology of the area.

Other studies focusing on the then developing Tanzanian tourist industry in The Selous Game Reserve in particular were more equivocal. The impact area is so large, and the tourist area so small, it’s very hard to predict how these will intersect.

But there’s no question that the area effected will be huge, greater than the Colorado river basin that was effected by the construction of the Hoover Dam. The flood lake itself could exceed 100 sq. miles. The controlled water flow that would absolutely benefit area agriculture and provide stability for dozens if not hundreds of area communities would likely drain another several thousand square miles of wetlands.

Such an impact in the 1980s was deemed too consequential, and the World Bank pulled out of the project in the 1990s. The Norwegians stepped in, then fretted over the impact for several years before also stepping aside after pouring about $25 million into environmental studies.

The uncertainty of how the project would impact Tanzania’s inland fishing industry was the basis for local political opposition that when then allied with environmentalists worldwide effectively eviscerated local support. But it seems now that even while there could be catastrophic impacts to freshwater fishing, local sentiment has swung in favor of more power and less flooding.

Although the World Bank and western agencies remain cautious about resupporting a project they once ditched, Brazil, China and South Africa (the new “BRAC” countries) have no such qualms. The money is there.

It remains unclear how the project would effect the relatively small area where nearly 80% of all tourists visit, the “Lower Selous.” It’s possible this area will see little change other than the greater fluctuation of the Rufiji River along which most of the camps are built. This is something camps in Zambia’s Lower Zambezi have been dealing with for years, as the great Kariba Dam performs similarly.

But the half dozen or so new camps in the “Upper Selous” near Stiegler’s Gorge will likely be drowned away. This includes Serena’s new and popular Mivumo River Lodge.

The world has changed considerably in the last 40 years since the Stiegler’s Dam was first proposed. Global warming was not well understood then and even though development has lagged last century’s predictions, growth is accelerating, today.

A project of this magnitude could have enormous local benefit. What concerns me is that the Tanzanian government and parastatal authorities managing electricity remain corrupt and unprofessional. Yes, there will be new power, but will anybody get it?

But if the Tanzanians can get their own disheveled house in order, then I think it would be unconscionable to trade off the social and economic benefits of the project to save the beautiful, wild and otherwise unmanageable Selous. Unlike with the Serengeti Highway, there is no alternative.

Food and jobs.

Land Grabs Really a
Proxy for Water Grabs

Land Grabs Really a
Proxy for Water Grabs

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By Conor Godfrey

Paolo Bacigalupi is a master science fiction writer, and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and any other Sci-fi award you can think of.

His blockbuster hit was entitled “The Windup Girl.”

The story imagined a world in the near-mid future where food-crop biodiversity had plunged due to constant genetic tampering in an effort to feed a growing planet with less available water.

Land, original seeds, and calories became the only currencies that mattered.

We are far from that, but sometimes I will read an article on “land grabs” in Africa and think that Mr. Bacigalupi was more of a slight exaggerator than an all-out lunatic.

Everyone wants a piece of the mother continent these days. Not- as you might have heard- just the Chinese.

Even South Africa recently bought tens of thousands of hectares in Guinea!

Other investors are Asian, European and American, as well as private pension funds and a number of Scandinavian and gulf state sovereign wealth funds.

Please read Professor Deborah Brautigam’s piece on some of the gross falsifications surrounding Chinese land grabs.

Anyway, who wouldn’t want in on African land?

First – there is a lot of it.

Africa’s approximately 200 million uncultivated hectares of arable land represent about 60% of the world’s total.

Second- its dirt cheap (pun somewhat intended).

In Europe, land costs about $22,000 per hectare (Germany) annually.

In the land rich United States, it costs about $7,000.

In most of Sub-Saharan Africa, land goes for about $800-1000 per hectare.

I could even afford some!

It also nicely diversifies a more traditional investment portfolio and promises to produce profitably as larger and larger players compete for fewer and fewer available commodities from here on out.

In many ways, the problem is not land; it’s water.

Map by Oakland Institute

Let me quote from a recent study by the Oakland Institute: “If all the 40 million hectares of land that were acquired on the [African] continent in 2009 come under cultivation, a staggering volume of water would be required for irrigation (…) approximately twice the volume of water that was used for agriculture in all of Africa in 2005.”

Yikes.

Some African countries have water to spare in the short term.

Others never had any.

Many pastoral and nomadic communities have negotiated (or fought over) water rights for centuries.

If their governments’ lease their land to commercial producers, they may find access to critical water sources blocked by barbwire plantation fences.

People do not suffer this lightly.

Foreign investors recently gained title to 544,567 hectares of land in Mali along the Niger river.

These new concessions will suck up about two times the entirety of Mali’s water consumption in 2000. As of today the level of the Niger river is already 30% less than in 1980. (source)

The Omo and Nile river systems are similarly fragile.

Modern capitalism still has trouble pricing in environmental externalities and some forms of risk.

Water table depletion poses obvious risks to the environment, but on the flip side, there are reputational and monetary risks for investment projects.

Draining water reserves leads more or less directly to acute political risk, and if the problem is widespread enough, sovereign risk.

Do these investors doubt for a second that a new administration facing acute domestic pressure to stop land grabs would not alter the terms of an existing contract?

Or, do foreign investors really want pictures of displaced villagers circulating among shareholders?

For example – in 2008 three people died in Uganda in riots protesting a land concession. Read this article on unrest in Guinea over an earlier land grab.

I wonder if investors are accurately assessing this types of socio-environmental risk when they sign 100 year leases.

Ironically, when the leases are for a full century, investor incentives align behind environmental and social stewardship, while the local politicians have a much shorter time horizon and might be willing to make fast cash at the expense of a small subset of their citizens.

The more I think about it the more I think our story teller Paolo Bacigalupi should apply for the empty seat at the World Bank.

Better Than Agent Orange

Better Than Agent Orange

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Today’s Nature article suggesting elephants be introduced to Australia to control gamba grass is not funny. It’s terrifying.

Sometimes today I think I’m living in a parallel universe where the main difference is the use of fact. It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore in my one cognizant world, and it gets harder and harder to cite a historical truth. Even self-created organizations like PoltiFact have lost credibility.

And for a scientist, a respected academic, to suggest … and then receive a distinguished platform from which to suggest that the world’s largest terrestrial beast should be imported as an invasive species to an island environment that is wracked to the core by problems of invasive species … oh, Charlie Brown, good grief.

David Bowman from the University of Tasmania in Hobart wants to “turn the system around” by thinking “outside of our current paradigm.”

And let’s not take Dr. Bowman out of context. He didn’t just ask that elephants be introduced to eat grass. He also asked that rhinoceroses and komodo dragons be introduced, too.

Basically by ignoring virtually every aspect of island ecology science, invasive species history, and his own country’s lengthy list of lousy ideas to control nature.

Bowman’s trigger for his bold suggestion is the three-year anniversary next week of “Black Saturday.” That massive bushfire in Australia’s outback killed 179 people, destroyed 2029 homes and was fueled by another invasive species, gamba grass.

Which Bowman thinks elephants will enjoy eating.

They probably will. They like to eat a lot of things. Like trees.

The impact of invasive species introductions does not have a very positive history. I’ve argued before in this blog that once introduced, we should basically leave them alone, and this uncomfortable association I make environmentally that allies me with current American politicians with regards to the mortgage crisis is unfortunate.

But just as we can’t undo the nature that we’ve done, we ought not in the beginning do anything with nature that it doesn’t want to do itself to begin with.

And that’s essentially where my ecological views diverge from American economics. Got that?

Man’s incessant belief that he can control or manage nature is above the ceiling of his natural selection. We can’t. We’ve tried. We’ve failed.

But it isn’t just that FACT that bothers me. It bothers me that a scientific journal like Nature will give a platform to this nonsense.

It bothers me that Republicans (most recently Mark Rubio) say that job creation in the last three years has been worse than the three preceding years. Just another misguided elephant.

And so forth. And so forth. Today, FACT doesn’t seem to matter. If it isn’t entertaining enough, drop it I guess.

It’s getting harder and harder to cite a historical truth, to keep facts in mind, because our intelligentsia is fooling around with them, treating fact as something preferential.

The Elephant will not stop the Bush Fire. But he might do something else.