Amazing GRACE

Animals are usually perfectly themselves, not the elaborately perverse psychological mysteries that people sometimes become. The genuineness ascribed to animals may apply equally to those who would protect them.

Enter the Gorilla Rehabilitation and Conservation Education (GRACE) Center and its general mission to promote the conservation of wild gorillas and their Congolese habitat. Our very own Tommi Wolfe, the director of GRACE, will be our lead participant as she outlines and we discuss what’s involved in the care and rehabilitation of the wild Grauer gorillas having been rescued from wildlife trafficking and poaching (GRACE).

As you are introduced to the rescue of Lulingu (Saving Lulingu), for example, keep in mind this species shares some 98% of its genetic code with humans. Anyone not moved by this clip must have a heart of stone that no facts and figures can penetrate.

The fact is GRACE is the world’s only sanctuary for the care, rehabilitation, and reintroduction into the wild of these rescued Grauer gorillas, the critically endangered subspecies endemic to the mountainous forests of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

GRACE also works with local communities on conservation education, forest protection, and sustainable livelihoods in furtherance of peaceful coexistence with these magnificent animals. Another initiative is to build wildlife corridors in some of the earth’s last unspoiled places.

Once again, we encounter the notion that, perhaps, we humans are only a part of the natural world in which there is a subtle balance of complex interrelationships within the ecosystem (MM 9/30/19 Deep Ecology/Tompkins Conservation). The philosophy of deep ecology has fostered a new system of environmental ethics that includes man's responsibility to undertake positive steps as a counterbalance to man’s previous wrongs e.g. poaching and habitat destruction.

GRACE certainly walks that walk.