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.
Travelers and investors alike are going to have shift the way big game safaris are enjoyed and operated as a result of indisputable climate change over the equator. And this, of course, is actually incidental to the disruption caused millions of equatorial African residents.
I’ve seen first hand the melting of the glaciers in Alaska, and now I’ve seen first hand where some of that water falls: onto the equator and it’s unbelievable.
It’s hard to come home after being in Africa for two months in ways it never was before. All my life I’ve gone and come, often for long periods of time. Coming home was always the screenplay of happiness, refreshing yourself in everything familiar and wonderful.
Now when I return the airports, the grocery stores, the gas stations, the monthly board meetings for organizations, the weekend events – they are all frighteningly different. The people who make them have grown inwards and weary. Resignation is everywhere.
The recent, great deaths of two public ladies tells us something very important about our time. In these terrible moments of human history, death attracts more civility than life.
America’s Barbara Bush and South Africa’s Winnie Mandela are being treated like saints, and that’s wonderful and refreshing. The fact is that practically every person is worth celebrating for the good things they’ve done in their life, and literally every human being has done something worthy of our praise and admiration.
But as in death, they were not in life.
We ended our Namibian trip with two game drives in Etosha National Park. You’ll find it odd that we were not particularly excited that we saw three black rhino, two cheetah, four lion and several families of elephant. My personal exception: real excitement at finding a rare pair of blue cranes.
Why no jubilation? If we see one rhino at 700 yards in the crater we celebrate for days! One of the three rhino we saw in Etosha practically bumped the car. So what’s going on?
When Africa recovered from the millennia of drought that caused a small band of homo sapiens to migrate to Europe, the southern half of the continent flourished, again. Great grasslands and increasing forests nurtured enormous numbers of animals.
Then around 2000 years ago the climate in the south changed again, growing much hotter and drier. Many animals went extinct and those that remained were thinned out considerably.
For the endless generations that preceded Jao, the fertile valleys and hills of Damaraland filled his people’s pots with nutritious meats: too much oryx, springbok, kudu and sometimes even elephant. Damaraland was a paradise for hunter-gatherers. The climate was warm but not hot, the rains were good, and the great grasslands supported an enormous amount of wild game.
Only giraffe hadn’t experienced the quick death that Jao’s spear inflicted, its tip laced with the white toxin of the White Bush euphorbia. Giraffe were not hunted. It was known that with their necks outstretched, they could touch the clouds. Killing them might jeopardize the rains.
Each evening of unbelievable color was followed by a vast darkness illuminated by an universe crowded with stars and planets and meteors and ashy galaxies. But its absolute quiet was disingenuous, like a thick blanket tucked over you in the dead of winter that doesn’t keep out the cold.
We might not have heard the nuclear blasts, but they were all around us. We saw out of our world every time we looked up into the night sky.
Most of the time I fly on safari from place to place. Today we flew backwards, nearly 138 million years.
The Namib-Naukluft is the oldest desert in the world and it has changed little over that enormous span of time. Modern man’s interest, though, has resuscitated long dormant forms of life that quite naturally had ceased to exist here when the rain stopped falling. Now, some are back. And, the rain’s started falling, again. It’s all kind of creepy.
South Africa is a hiker’s paradise. Today I hiked the Highmoor Drakensberg Park for almost the entire morning, from sunrise to just before noon. I was the only hiker here at the top of the little Berg.
One of the great treats of mountain hiking is so many wild flowers, even now in the late fall. Most are quite small, but they are of every color imaginable. I even found a spiny leaf whose underside was blue!
The river just below my front patio roars with unusually strong, late summer rains. Tons of fresh sparkling water crashes onto the ancient dolomite boulders that haven’t moved since the beginning of time. The gushing is so loud I can’t hear her when she arrives.
She walks 15k from her small village of high mountain people who were displaced centuries ago from the verdant grasslands of the coast by the great Zulu warrior, Shaka. Her large, weathered face carriers that history, and ages of injustice that followed.
No one likes a braggart, a swashbuckler, a hotshot. But would you prefer instead a bootlicker, someone whose meekness is frighteningly unreal?
I’m sitting at my dining table typing this in a remote stone cottage just under the Little Berg of South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains. Except for the wild brown trout stream gushing over large rocks just below my patio the night was still and cold. I slept long and hard and was awaken by mountain bird chirping hidden in the heavy mists draped off the Berg. This is the perfect place to reflect on such questions.
For the contrasts between South Africa and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa are harsh and bewildering.
I suppose every “big” event, whether NASCAR or a high school spelling bee, has a baseline everyone knows: Winners and losers are known and handicapped, so the drama often comes in the unexpected. That for sure has been the Great Migration ever since global warming.
But not this year!
No zebra. No wildebeest. A handful of gazelle. Just a handful of giraffe. Everyone was ecstatic, because there were 25 lion and a leopard, but I was worried.
Jim will post on Wednesday.