Richard Leakey

Dear Friends,

Earlier this year we partnered with National Geographic to tell our story. We  hope you enjoy this video and will feel inspired to support conservaiton through WildlifeDirect. Let us know what you think.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZhwxqLzEtJs" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I’d like to thank you all for your comments about Mt Kenya and the fence. Fencing the Virungas – well, one of the terrible consequences of putting up fences in similar places is that the wire is stolen and converted into snares. Last year however, we did build a dry stone wall around some parts of the park. These are holding. The electric fence around Mt Kenya is a great idea, it’s the location of the new alignment that is worrying me and many many others. We’re still waiting to hear the official outcome of investigations.

Today I want to talk of war.

Whenever people think of war, they usually reflect on the tragic loss of human life, they rarely consider the loss and damage done to nature.

It is all over the news today that Oxfam had calculated the cost of wars in Africa on development. They estimate that the cost of the long lasting wars in Africa equal the sum of all the developmental aid over the same period.

They estimate that in 23 nations alone, the total cost of Africa’s 20 or more wars in recent decades have robbed the continent of 300 billion dollars a year! I can’t get my head around it, the figure is not digestible. What is most stomach churning about this is that the weapons used in these wars have almost all come from outside.

Although the authors admit that the cost of these wars is almost certainly an underestimate, they didn’t mean because they hadn’t worked out the cost of these wars on the environment. Nobody is really measuring that when the human toll is so great.

Take Sudan for example, the war lasted for over 30 years. During this time they lost much of their forests, large mammals like elephants, hippos and giraffe, as well as their great apes. Much of Sudan is still uninhabitable due to land mines. The same is true for Angola, Mozambique and other countries.

Most of the long term damage comes as a result of the very long duration of these wars. The devastation is caused in part by the war its self, in part because the human population is displaced, hungry, afraid and desperate – they cannot care for the land due to the immediacy of their problems.

My thoughts today are with the DR Congo where the resurgence of conflict by the renegade Laurent Nkunda has forced the rangers out of the forests preventing any monitoring since the end of August. We do not know how these gorillas are faring, we can hardly express our concern for gorillas when we know that the human population is in dire straits as a result of attacks and unbelievable acts of human atrocities. Hundreds of thousands of people are again on the move, many hundreds have been killed, more still have been injured, children conscripted into the armies and women raped and brutalized. It makes me feel helpless.

But I still can’t help wondering what the cost will be if the gorillas have been exterminated. These gorillas represent real economic value to the Congo. Tourism could generate 500$ per person per day – these animals could potentially generate 21 million dollars per year for the wildlife Authority from visitation to 15 groups of mountain gorillas alone. Of course the hotels, transport and agricultural sectors would also benefit tremendously as well, not to mention the communities who supply the hotels and trade their crafts along popular routes.

The war in eastern Congo has virtually prevented any tourism from taking place. Meanwhile, only a few kilometers across the border, Rwanda is still doing brisk gorilla tourism business. I wonder if the Oxfam report will have any effect on our African governments, on those trading weapons, on those fueling the conflicts….

I hope you’ll forgive me, I can’t post a photograph today, it’s not a good day for Africa.

Mr. Kaka updated me about the situation on the ground which remains quite sensitive. For now we only know that investigations are underway by a number of pressure groups and it may well ignite interest from the IUCN and World Heritage Commission. Until we have more facts we cannot take any action so I will keep you posted in the coming days.

Forests are amongst the most valuable renewable resource in Africa – millions of us are dependent on them. Climate change is a major long term threat, the charcoal industry supplying domestic fuel for countless people in Africa’s towns (see my article for the BBC about this). But there’s an even more sinister threat – land allocation.

I have invited my good friend and Colleague, Mr. Ali Kaka, the Executive Director of the East African Wildlife Society to brief us on what is happening.

Dear Friends, a controversy is brewing over the alignment of a section of electric fence intended to protect Mount Kenya – or should I say mis-alignment? You may already know from the Mount Kenya blog that this mountain is vital water catchment for the entire country, and site of special biodiversity that is a designated National Park and a World Heritage Site to boot. Clearly, this is so because it’s importance has been recognized internationally no less.

Conservationists are raising an alarm about the Waguziru/Karichota section of this forest which essentially has been re-aligned away from the Forest Reserve boundary leaving thousands of acres of forest unprotected and vulnerable to encroachment and destruction. This photograph below show the fence line from the air, one can clearly see how parts of the forest have been deliberately left out.

We don’t have all the facts yet, there seems to be a lot of confusion about why this fence was re-aligned. Some suggesting that it’s an attempt to hive off part of the Mt. Kenya National Forest Reserve illegally, what we call land grabbing in Kenya. Ironically, the fence was supposed to be a solution, not a cause of threats. Kenya just can’t afford to lose any more forest. I’ll be keeping you updated on this rather ominous development.

We estimate the area of forest that is being left out is about 3,000 acres. It is part of the original forest gazettment of the Mt Kenya World heritage site. Implications for conservation are primarily the loss of mature natural forest and threat to vital water catchment for this part of Mt Kenya – major river is the Burguret river with several tributaries that lead into the Burguret will be outside the new fence. For elephants it is important as important salt licks are also outside the fence. It is believed that the elephants on Mt Kenya are limited by nutrients hence their dependence on mineral deposits at various places around the mountain and if they loose access to these this is likely to limit population growth – the theory needs more research but it may explain why they are so dependent on these rich mineral areas.

I’ve been informed that the community were led to believe that there was no choice regarding the new alignment. And they fear that the realignment of the fence is just a preliminary to inevitable land-grabbing or degazettment of this part of the forest. I will keep you informed as to how you can help us to stop this unnecessary loss and destruction of our Mt. Kenya forests.

Ali Kaka

I have been serving as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University where we established the Stony Brook World Environmental Forum, and the Annual Human Evolution Symposium. As many of you are probably aware, I made my name in paleoanthropology, studying our long extinct human relatives. But I’m not locked in the past. In 1996, Roger Lewin and I wrote a book called The Sixth Extinction which collated a body of fossil evidence about past extinctions compared with the mass extinction of species which is currently under way. This time human fingerprints are all over the evidence. At that time we estimated that during the previous 500 years up to writing the book, human activity had forced over 800 species into extinction. In the 10 years prior to writing the book, the number of threatened animal species had increased from 5,205 to 7,266.

Now, a decade on, we woke up to the even more disheartening news that the number of species threatened with extinction had shot up to 15,000 species of plants and animals. Of these, one in four mammals are under threat, and one in eight birds. I am going to tell you about two success stories.

The cheetah, one of the most endangered mammals in the world may have a new lease of life as a result of a breakthrough in assisted cheetah reproduction using pioneering methodologies developed by the Cheetah Conservation Fund and two partner organizations. You can read more about it on the cheetah conservation blog.

Another success story is the Pemba Island Flying Fox which has been brought back from the brink of extinction. This enormous fruit bat which is endemic to the island of Pemba in Tanzania, was though to have declined to a mere handful of individuals 10 years ago and were placed on the critically endangered list of the IUCN. Today there are over 11,000 individuals thanks to the courageous activities of local communities on the island of Pemba. The species has been removed from the critically endangered list and is now on the vulnerable list. I’m proud to welcome this project to our website as I’m sure that the lessons from Pemba are relevant for many other threatened bat species. For both of these projects, donor support was critical to their success. This is why I believe that WildlifeDirect can contribute significantly to avert the crises that so many of our species face and I take this time to thank you all for your generous donations to our partners and for enabling our teams to identify and support good projects on the ground.

I leave you with a picture of a relaxed herd of elephants, an iconic species that has also been rescued by unprecedented conservation attention and action.