I am always encouraged when I discover how much rural communities are doing, with meager resources for the conservation of biodiversity. Today I would like to welcome The Water Hole an appropriately named blog run by the East African Wildlife Society, the Cousin Island and the Giraffe Sanctuary blogs. All three new blogs represent important conservation activities in the region. The EAWLS has been at the forefront of conservation in East Africa since 1961 - this advocacy group is something of a watchdog keeping our government policies in check by engaging the population. Their magazine SWARA is perhaps the most informative wildlife journal in the region. The coming issue focuses on one of our greatest concerns, mountain gorillas in the eastern Congo.
I’d also like to introduce a unique project in Garissa, north eastern Kenya. This semi arid area is populated by semi nomadic people who have voluntarily decided to protect the herds of giraffe that are highly threatened here. I am inspired by the warden and his scouts who patrol and do snare removal in the area, educate the population and stop the habitat destruction. These people living in an extremely dry harsh environment, are doing it as volunteers.
Finally, Cousin Island in the Seychelles is home to many endemic species of frogs, birds, fish and plants. This unique island is managed by a local NGO Nature Seychelles, another example of local conservation. All these organizations are successful because they have developed a community of people who care. I hope you will take time to find out more about them and support them with your comments and donations.
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.
It’s not that there’s nothing of concern to discuss. In fact, I am deeply worried about recent reports in one of Kenya’s most precious forests. But I will not trouble you with details until my team has verified the allegations in the next few days.
Today I leave you with an impression of the wide open spaces of Kenya that inspire me. This is at the Lewa Conservancy, one of the few really successful privately managed conservation areas. I strongly believe that there is enormous potential for successful stories like this to lend lessons to other parts of the world.
No doubt many of you are following the climate change discussions – it’s impossible to ignore isn’t it? It infuriates me that it has taken us this long to start talking seriously. We have known about the risks for decades. I’m convinced that climate change is the most serious threat facing our planet today, it’s already affecting us in ways we can’t ignore. I’ve noticed changes at the Kenyan coast where the high tide is at the doorsteps of houses that were built beyond the 30m tidal limit. Our coastal people will suffer in the short term.
This is Nairobi at 6pm. Don’t be tricked by this dazzling beauty of the sunset, it’s the consequence of pollution, from thousands of second hand cars imported from Dubai every year…..It saddens me that though we’ve now finally accepted the full impact of climate change on our futures, we are being asked to rely on as-yet undeveloped technologies to solve our problems, rather than taking responsibility for our emissions NOW. African mountains are particularly at risk, it’s not rocket science, global warming will not only melt the glaciers and affect downstream watersheds, but I’m worried about what will happen to montane habitats - and the animals that they support like mountain gorillas. I am absolutely convinced that we at WildlifeDirect must make climate issues an important theme for our conservation community, we need to support initiatives on the ground to secure existing habitats and restore those that have already been degraded.
After spending many years struggling to achieve wildlife conservation in Kenya, I decided to start WildlifeDirect to solve a very real problem in Africa, the lack of adequate funds to protect the continents unique wildlife heritage. A cash endowment was the obvious solution, but nobody would give us the amounts of money that we required. Persuading individual donors to give support was not easy because most people are unaware of what is going on in conservation until there is a crisis. I needed to find another way to raise awareness and funds on a continuous basis. WildlifeDirect was conceived as a way of facilitating exchanges between the front lines of conservation and the rest of the world, to create a community of people concerned about conservation and to allow for direct interaction with and support to the conservationists on the ground. Our website is a set of tools to make this happen – and I’m very proud of the success so far. Not only have we enabled a number of interesting and courageous conservationists to write blogs from the frontlines, but I am encouraged that the world is reading, listening, and taking action.
What’s unique about WildlifeDirect is that donors can select what they want to send a donation for, monitor how their donation worked, and learn about the day to day activities on the ground. All of this with the knowledge that the donations are transferred to the field, net only of bank fees. For some projects this has been a godsend, especially in times of critical need. Gorilla protection for example is our oldest blog started in January this year and it has already earned tens of thousands of dollars for emergency response following the attacks on the Rugendo family in July.
The early success of wildlifedirect.org has made us realize the potential of using the internet to create an online global conservation community. Our goal is to reach 250,000 people each month by the end of 2008 as this will enable us to generate the funds we need to support our partners on the ground. My team and I will be using this blog to tell you how you can help us, how we are doing and to give you my personal opinions about conservation in general. I sincerely hope you will use this space to share and exchange your views too.
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