A PREGNANT GIRAFFE lies dead as a distraught ranger looks on. She became entangled in a wire fence built to separate private parcels on what was once Maasai community land. The sight is especially painful to me and to zoologist Dusti Becker and colleagues on the ground in Kenya. Our conservation group has for over a decade helped local Maasai in a last ditch effort to create a wildlife conservancy along a section of the fast developing Siria Plateau.
Giraffe have long moved between the plateau and the Masai Mara-Serengeti ecosystem. From the plateau, one is treated to spectacular views of vast plains to the east, best known for the great migrations of wildebeest and zebra. Female giraffe find the eastern edge of the plateau ideal because of acacia thickets that provide safety for their young, and the relative rarity of lions and leopards due to the presence of local Maasai herders.
But times have dramatically changed, even within the span of a single decade. Agriculturalists offer enticing financial incentives for plowing land to grow maize and other crops. Tourist lodges now crowd the rim of the plateau, degrading movement corridors for giraffe and other wildlife. Grazing land is privatized and woodlands are cleared.
Only about 10% of the million or so giraffes that historically occurred in Africa exist there today. There are actually four different species of giraffe, all of them threatened by habitat loss linked to increased exploitation of natural resources and surging human numbers.
As a wildlife biologist since the 1970s, I’ve time and time again witnessed our species crowd out and stifle other life. I had an inkling of what was coming well before that. As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, I watched small patches of nature inhabited by box turtles, butterflies, garter snakes, and other critters disappear in the wake of parking lots and housing construction.
Half way around the world from Kenya, the endangered huemul deer struggles to survive in the Andes of south-central Chile. I know. Through a fortuitous set of circumstances, I pioneered a study of the huemul nearly 50 years ago.
Back then, hunting of the huemul was a major threat. Nevertheless, there was cause for optimism because of heightened public awareness and intolerance of the practice. One reason for that was the huemul’s special status. The animal is an important symbol of Chile, a familiar icon appearing on the nation’s coat of arms. Another reason was a surge throughout Chile in conservation awareness at the time.
Buoyed by the creation of two nature reserves a few years later, I was hopeful that, with added habitat protections, huemuls would grow from small, semi-isolated groups into a much larger and fully integrated population.
However, I grossly underestimated the amount of economic and population growth that was about to hit the region — and strike into the heart of huemul habitat. Where there were none, roads, homes, vacation cabins, and mesh-wired fences appeared. Exotic tree plantations replaced native forests. Oil and gas pipelines were built. Livestock numbers increased and penetrated prime deer habitat. Outdoor adventurers polluted high mountain lakes. The threat from free-running domestic dogs, notorious for attacking huemuls, worsened.
I became heartbroken as huemuls disappeared from all four of my research sites. Today, the population faces a precarious future with as few as 60 individuals surviving in pockets of protected habitat surrounded by a radically changed and uncertain landscape.
To this day, I have dreams of beautiful mountains and valleys, of southern beech woodlands and Valdivian evergreen forests, of grassy high ridges where I once roamed. But however I struggle, I cannot find those lost huemuls.
In autumn 1979, while writing my dissertation on the huemul, an office mate in the wildlife biology department at Colorado State University tapped me on the shoulder with some startling news: A grizzly bear, not seen in Colorado since 1951, had been killed by a hunter in the San Juan Mountains. She was an old female that genetic tests later proved her to be one of the original, now extinct grizzly bears of the U.S. Southwest.
Years later, I took undergraduate students with me to the San Juans to evaluate habitat for the grizzly and explore the possibility of restoring the species (the nearest surviving grizzlies occur in the Yellowstone area of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, were they are listed as a threatened species).
We discovered that the San Juan Mountains had some great habitat for grizzly bears, in terms of vegetation, topography, and foods. However, some areas had been severely degraded by human impacts such as logging roads and a high elevation reservoir that flooded a vast area of precious wetland habitat. Our big concern was the potential for direct conflict between bears and people, as both can be notoriously stubborn when their interests are at stake. Grizzly bears and people may coexist but there are limits to that arrangement.
Those limits became evident when Colorado wildlife authorities rejected our suggestion that they consider reestablishing grizzly bears. They argued that serious conflict with the livestock industry and with residential and recreational development was inevitable. The bears would also present an unwelcome risk to outdoor enthusiasts (not only hunters but hikers, many of whom opposed the idea). Simply put, grizzly bears would be a royal pain in the ass.
What are the prospects for conservation of Masai giraffe, huemul, and grizzly bear? Well, to be frank, not good. All three must flourish numerically and geographically so they can adapt to changing environments, hold on to or improve their genetic diversity, and ultimately fulfill their evolutionary potential. Yet all face enormous pressure from human population growth, exploitation of natural resources, and competition for living space. And all suffer injustice and neglect for not being human.
They are not alone. The United Nations warns of accelerating decline of wildlife globally, with one million species now threatened with extinction. Scientists won’t save the vast majority of them. Nor will government promises to protect biodiversity, talk of sustainability, or mere donations to conservation organizations. What has transpired over the past century offers ample evidence for that.
The United Nations has one thing right: “Negative trends in nature will continue to 2050 and beyond in all of the policy scenarios explored in the Report, except those that include transformative change (my emphasis) – due to the projected impacts of increasing land-use change, exploitation of organisms and climate change.”
If we really intend to save wildlife, we must scale down our presence, our resource consumption, and our exploitation of nature, and allow other life the opportunity to thrive. I’ve known a few wild animals that would appreciate that.
For the Siria Plateau, there’s still a sliver of hope for community leaders and conservation investors to piece together land parcels for a giraffe conservancy. For south-central Chile, the nation’s new government could create a world class national park of sufficient size to recover the huemul. And the San Juan Mountains might someday get the grizzly bear back if the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service set in motion plans to do so. These initiatives could yield lasting benefits if humanity were to resize and reinvent itself.
Thank you, Tony! Very well said and a moving appeal to scale down!
These are all important species to save, and the tools are available. It takes the will of the governments, the locals, and the international community. Of course, scaling down would be a primary solution overall for conservation. Thanks for helping increase awareness.