Conservationist Grant Fowlds lives to save and protect Africa's
rhinos, elephants and other iconic wildlife, to preserve their
habitats, to increase their range and bring back the animals where
they have been decimated by decades of war, as in Angola,
Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This vivid
account of his work tells of a fellow conservationist tragically
killed by the elephants he was seeking to save and a face-off with
poachers, impoverished rural people exploited by rapacious local
businessmen. Fowlds describes the impact of the Covid pandemic on
conservation efforts, the vital wildlife tourism that sustains
these and rural communities; and tells of conservationists' efforts
to support people through the crisis. Lockdowns may have brought a
welcome lull in rhino and other poaching, but also brought precious
tourism to a standstill. He shows how the pandemic has highlighted
the danger to the world of the illicit trade in endangered
wildlife, some of it sold in 'wet markets', where pathogens
incubate and spread. He describes a restoration project of
apartheid-era, ex-South African soldiers seeking to make
reparations in Angola, engulfed for many years in a profoundly
damaging civil war, which drew in outside forces, from Cuba, Russia
and South Africa, with a catastophic impact on that country's
wildlife. Those who fund conservation, whether in the US, Zambia or
South Africa itself, are of vital importance to efforts to conserve
and rewild: some supposed angel-investors turn out to be not what
they had appeared, some are thwarted in their efforts, but others
are open-hearted and generous in the extreme, which makes their
sudden, unexpected death an even greater tragedy. A passionate
desire to conserve nature has also brought conservationists
previously active in far-off Venezuela to southern Africa. Fowlds
describes fraught meetings to negotiate the coexistence of wildlife
and rural communities. There are vivid accounts of the skilled and
dangerous work of using helicopters to keep wildebeest, carrying
disease, and cattle apart, and to keep elephants from damaging
communal land and eating crops such as sugar cane. He tells of a
project to restore Africa's previously vast herds of elephants,
particularly the famed 'tuskers', with their unusually large tusks,
once prized and hunted almost to extinction. The range expansion
that this entails is key to enabling Africa's iconic wildlife to
survive, to preserving its wilderness and, in turn, helping
humankind to survive. There is a heartening look at conservation
efforts in Mozambique, a country scarred by years of war, which are
starting to bear fruit, though just as a new ISIS insurgency
creates havoc in the north of the country. What will humanity's
relationship with nature be post-pandemic? Will we have begun to
learn that by conserving iconic wildlife and their habitats we help
to preserve and restore precious pockets of wilderness, which are
so vital not only the survival of wildlife, but to our own survival
on our one precious planet.
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