The Changing Face of Conservation

There in the middle of Aberdare National Park in central Kenya just east of the East Rift Valley is The Ark Lodge which overlooks a floodlit watering hole and saltlick from which one can observe a vast assortment of wildlife. A friend and I had the privilege some forty years ago to overnight there at the beginning of a ten-day private walking safari led by a Masai tribesman in traditional dress, complete with spear, and an Egyptian guide with a .357 magnum rifle to back him up.

The adventure highlighted wildlife conservationists' special role within the wider world of ecological consciousness. The animals were often largely hidden, almost mirages in the grasses. I recall feeling vaguely out of place, an intruder, within what Carl Jung once described Africa as being “the stillness of the eternal beginning.”

How long before the Mzungu – white men like me – would lay waste to this primal setting of lions, giraffes, zebras, impalas, Thompson’s gazelles, Cape buffalos, and wildebeests (for now) innumerable.

Or rhinos. I had been informed back then that of twenty thousand rhinos in Kenya back in 1970 there were at the time (1984) fewer than five hundred. For what? Our MM 9/10/18 What Is It Like To Be Human? Don't Ask featured “The Cove,” a documentary about the annual dolphin drive in Taiji, Japan, in which these dolphin killing fields were defended on grounds they were foodstuff just like cows were for the Westerner. Fair enough. But what if a Rhino kill is simply for some magical thinking about its horn?

Enter our lead participant, Grant Fowlds, a larger-than-life African Conservation hero, author of "The Changing Face of Conservation" and "Saving the Last Rhinos," as we penetrate the prominent and transformational role of conservation technology today. Among the changes is the rise of a more community-led conservation, in contrast to the colonial-driven predatory conservation marking much of the past, having led to the loss of sixty- to eighty-percent of the earth's biodiversity in just thirty years.

We look forward to discussing with Grant Fowlds this changing face of conservation as well as what calling drives this selfless determination in what appears to be daunting challenges.