Disappointingly the striped mouse, Rhabdomys pumilio, does not return for a second breakfast. It is, apparently and surprisingly, the most common wild animal in southern Africa – a fact one must take entirely on trust. On the evidence of Ol Pejeta you could easily believe it was the zebra, of which I see uncountable numbers against just the single mouse. They are equals in beauty, though. Rhabdomys is about twice the size of a house-mouse and is named for the four dark stripes on its back. It is mostly vegetarian but not above eating insects. At home, my own regular breakfast is muesli, though at Kicheche I find I am not above sausage, bacon and eggs. In colonial times Kenya was British East Africa, so the appearance of a frying pan is no great surprise. Common as it may be, seeing Rhabdomys pumilio was pure luck. Not even Andrew could have found one to order. It cements my conviction that I shall never see a living golden mole. Even if they were here, right now, burrowing beneath my feet, how could I bring one to light? My English garden seethes with life – moles, voles, mice, shrews – which, I now reflect, I see only when they are caught by cats. I realise, too, that my knowledge of golden moles remains embarrassingly slight. People ask simple questions and I am stumped for an answer. But you’re supposed to be writing a book! In my defence I say that no one ever seems to have written very much about them. Later, looking for help, I will return yet again to the nineteenth century, to the portentously titled British Cyclopaedia of Natural History: combining a scientific classification of animals, plants, & minerals. By authors eminent in their particular department. Arranged and ed. by Charles F. Partington. This great work was published in three volumes from 1835 to 1837. On page forty of Volume Two (1836), I find this:
This species is a very small animal, considerably less than the common mole of Europe; in consequence of its subterranean habits it is not very frequently seen; and in respect of its colour it is as perplexing as the cameleon [sic]. We believe that the real colour, that is the colour as seen in the light which is not refracted, is brown; but, different from all the other mammalia, this small animal has the same metallic reflections in its fur which are observable in the feathers of many birds, the range of these colours being from a deep golden yellow, or rather a sort of bronze red, to a bronze green; and as all animals which have the metallic reflections lose them when dead and dried, the stuffed skin of this one conveys no idea of what the living animal is like . . .
From this I deduce it is most unlikely that the ‘authors eminent in their department’ ever saw a living golden mole themselves. But it usefully reminds me that the object of my quest is not a live animal at all, just a minuscule hint at a species that might not even have existed. Somewhere in Florence, surely, must repose the crumbled remains of Professor Simonetta’s Specimen No. MF4181, the only physical record of Calcochloris tytonis anywhere in the world. Even if I don’t find it, I am substantially in its debt. The unseen little creature has made me think. I realise, despite the Latin binomials littering my text, that I understand little more about the classification of species than could be gained by looking up Linnaeus in an encyclopaedia. What does it mean to say that aardvarks are related to cetaceans, or bats to primates, or golden moles to the marsupials of Australia? How might the evolutionary process respond to an epoch so altered by man that scientists are calling it the Anthropocene (from the Greek anthropo-, meaning ‘human’, and -cene, meaning ‘new’)? For how many species will it be survivable? What is the value of a species? I know that a lot of very big brains have travelled the ground ahead of me, but I know also that ignorance puts me in good company. Leafing through the scientific literature, the layman is as much struck by the holes in it as by the erudition. What sparked my curiosity was not some believe-it-or-not detail of animal behaviour or adaptation. It was turning the pages of Mammal Species of the World and finding that an entire species was ‘known only from a partially complete specimen in an owl-pellet’. Fragment would have been a better word.
The entry for the black rhinoceros allows no such equivocation. Rhinoceros bicornis was first classified in 1758 by Linnaeus himself. No doubt he would have thought it as secure in its niche as its relative the horse, though by identifying its homeland as ‘Habitat in India’ he was somewhat errant in his geography. Mammal Species of the World now rather forlornly defines its range as ‘formerly’ in Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Given such a litany, even empirical, unemotional science can’t keep the sorrow out of its voice.
No one in Linnaeus’s day would have known how many black rhinos there were, and no one would have seen any need to count them. You might as well have counted starlings. Whether by hand of God or through the twists of evolution, Nature had done an excellent job and species had settled into a harmonious if sometimes bloody state of equilibrium. The local ‘carrying capacity’ for a species was determined by the amount of space each animal needed, and by the balance between predator and prey. From microbe to elephant, everything was safe in its niche. Everything, that is, save for one bipedal rogue which, through God-given dominion, counted itself superior to all the others. The equilibrium of the wilderness was shattered by human intervention. One species after another was driven to a last redoubt. Many simply perished, to be forgotten like the long-tailed hopping mouse, or vainly sought by anguished resurrectionists like the thylacine. Without a determined rescue effort the black rhinoceros would have gone the same way. By 2001 only 3,000 were left in the whole of Africa. In Kenya they fell from 20,000 to fewer than 300, a rate of loss equivalent to 4.5 rhinos every day for ten years. Now Kenya is back up to 620, of which eighty-seven, roughly 15 per cent of the total, are at Ol Pejeta, the biggest single population in East Africa. As the theoretical carrying capacity here is 120, the time cannot be far away when they will spread out beyond the fence. Inspired by Ol Pejeta, twenty-two more conservancies have been established in the northern rangelands, and twenty-eight others intend to follow suit. But harbouring rhinos is expensive. The security has to be tight, and capable of fighting fire with fire. Ol Pejeta itself has a hard core of thirty-two SAS-trained police reservists to back up the daily ranger patrols, which themselves are costly. Richard Vigne calculates that rhinos double or even triple the expense of managing wildlife.
As it is the rhino that brought me here, so by extension it is the rhino that gives a class of neatly uniformed African schoolchildren the chance of a good laugh. It is not every day that a sun-reddened, white-bearded Englishman in dust-covered shorts is brought before them by the headmaster. As I struggle to explain my interest, they find my questions as hilarious as my appearance. Why on earth do I want to know about their exam results? What’s it got to do with rhinos? Kenyan schoolchildren are in every way remarkable. All are bilingual in Swahili and English, and most speak a tribal language too. In all, Kenya has sixty-nine spoken languages, though classroom teaching is in English. I bumble away, trying with increasing hopelessness to explain why I have come, and the teenage grins grow ever wider.
Like most schools, Endana Secondary stands at the centre of its catchment. But its catchment is not a town or city with definable streets and communities but a vast stretch of African wilderness. When asked to define it, Ol Pejeta’s Community Programme Manager Paul Leringato extends an arm and makes a 360-degree sweep of the horizon. Paul is tall, elegantly dressed, proud of his achievements but no waster of words, and so softly spoken that I have struggled to hear him on our long drive to the school. We have come way beyond the conservancy’s boundaries, past some Maasai living in mud-walled shanties and then juddering across a camel-coloured landscape of pluming dust (which the rains will turn to liquid mud). Herds of sheep and goats, apocalyptically thin, wander far and wide in their day-long search for something to nibble. The distances seem huge, and yet this is the way the children come to school, and there are no bus-routes on the plains. This is why it has a dormitory – a boarding school for village children on the equator! After an hour or so we have turned in through a gate, then bucked and yawed past a well-stamped patch of earth which rickety goalposts identify as a football pitch, to reach a huddle of single-storey breeze-block buildings with corrugated roofs.
The headmaster is Adam Elmoge. He tells me his school has six classrooms, nine teachers and 224 students organised in five streams. They range in age from around fourteen to nineteenish, but the classes are not as rigidly age-structured as they are in other parts of the world. Primary education in Kenya is free, but there is no fixed age at which children must report to school. A couple of days later at a chimpanzee sanctuary I will meet a coach-load of primary schoolchildren in the widest imaginable range of sizes. In fact, I hear them before I see them. They are shrieking with pretended terror as an irascible male chimp pelts them with stones from behind the wire. Some of the boys look like men, but they wear their sharply pressed grey uniform shorts with every appearance of pride. It would be a strange thing in Europe or America to see primary schoolchildren looking older than their secondary-school cousins, but here it is all part of the miracle.
Secondary education is not free. Day pupils pay 9,500 Kenyan shillings a year (at the time of my visit, equivalent to £72.12 or $114.39); and boarders 23,627 shillings (£178.92 or $284.49). The compulsory uniform – blue shirt, green pullover, brown trousers or skirt – adds another 4,500 shillings. To a Kenyan farmer these sums do not seem as small as they might to a European or an American. It is an expenditure that has to be thought about, especially when the pupil is a girl for whom no future is envisaged beyond the bearing of children. Even when girls do go to school, says Adam Elmoge, their academic careers can be cut short by pregnancy. This is no surprise. In Mozambique I saw teenage girls at school with babies in their arms. Teachers assured me that the infants were younger siblings being cared for while their parents were in the fields. It might have been true, but the frankly lascivious attitudes of polygamous village men to pubescent girls gave me cause to wonder (I met a witch doctor who believably gave his age as eighty, and whose latest wife was fifteen).
The fees at Endana may be daunting to herdsmen, but – albeit for the opposite reason – they are daunting for the headmaster, too. The boarding fees, he explains, barely cover the students’ upkeep, particularly when the country’s 18 per cent inflation rate is factored in. They live mostly on maize and beans, and don’t have enough books. In the context of a miracle, however, such things are minor nuisances. Miracle is the word. In 2008 Endana had twelve pupils. By January 2010 it had146, and now (March 2012) it has 224 including sixty-two girls. What has made it possible – what built five of the six classrooms and will soon provide a laboratory – is the rhinoceros. Not the rhino alone, I confess, but the whole living bestiary of Ol Pejeta and the cash it earns from visitors. Every day we pass 4x4s and open-top minibuses glinting with optical arsenals ranging from reflective sunglasses to telephoto lenses the size of rocket-launchers. The drivers stop to quiz each other – who has seen what, where? – but it’s not like some national parks (or even the birdwatching hot-spots of North Norfolk), where the bush telegraph gathers a throng for anything rare or iconic. The number of beds on the conservancy is limited to 200, so visitors melt into the landscape like specks of dust. Only once, when a pair of lionesses display themselves on a bluff, do we have to share wild animals with other vehicles. But the visitors are a valuable commodity. Each pays a conservation fee ($68 or £42.87 for a day-trip; less for Kenyan residents and students) and each camp or lodge pays a levy for every night a visitor stays. (If you book a holiday, all this will be included in the price.) The result is what we all see framed in our binoculars – teeming wildlife, with some of the densest concentrations of predators ever recorded in Kenya – and what I now see at Endana School. It is well worth being laughed at. It will not be long before some child of this dusty plain wins a place at university.
The Ol Pejeta Conservancy is ‘not for profit’ only in the economic sense. The profits are everywhere visible, manifested in gains for the communities of southern Laikipia. The school is one example but there are many more. In a sense what I’m writing is a mea culpa. When environmental journalism was in its infancy, some of us, the newly converted, were more inclined to sanctimony than to hard analysis. We were too keen on banning things, and provided an uncritical mouthpiece for campaign groups whose rectitude we took for granted. Carried along by their propaganda and by our own altitudinous rhetoric, we saw every issue as a struggle between man and nature. Wrong and right were as clear as night and day. Wherever such conflicts occurred, it was axiomatic that nature should win. Up with newts! Down with horrible humans! It took too long for many of us to realise the scientific and economic illiteracy of our cause – the knee-jerk opposition, for example, to well-designed and environmentally beneficial applications of GM technology or nuclear power. The perpetual doom-mongering that turned conservationists into technophobes and put environmental politics beyond the electoral pale. The hijacking of the environment movement by the political left, the tendency to submit every issue to trial by ideology, has done immeasurable harm. Rather than destroying the arguments of the free-marketeering libertarian right, they have succeeded only in locking themselves into an unwinnable war of propaganda and misinformation. Until they can acknowledge the benefits, as well as the costs, of GM technology and nuclear power, and recognise the costs as well as the benefits of organics and wind-power, then they will go on shooting themselves in the foot.
On my earlier visits to Mozambique I spent much of my time observing a community forest project at N’hambita in the buffer zone of the Gorongosa National Park. I have already described how civil war had stripped the area of trees and wildlife. At N’hambita another not-for-profit company, part-funded by the European Union, was trying to repair the damage. It was doing this by encouraging farmers to plant trees rather than cut them down, and to abandon slash-and-burn in favour of less exhausting and wasteful methods of agriculture. These had nothing to do with mechanisation, agri-chemicals or anything else that would expose subsistence farmers to risk. They were simply encouraged to intermix their traditional crops – sorghum, maize, cashew, rice, bananas – with pigeon peas. This was soil science at its simplest. Pigeon peas are one of the most useful plants in Africa. They provide an edible crop rich in protein and vitamin B, foliage that can be dug in as compost, and roots that feed the soil with nitrogen. This means the soil stays healthy, the farmers get bigger crops and can go on using the same land year after year without hacking new fields out of the forest.
As a further incentive, they were paid to plant new trees. It was a runaway success. The looming corn grown by the pioneers was a powerful encouragement to their neighbours, and the scheme soon spread to involve more than 1,500 farmers cultivating 2,500 fields in several different communities. In forest clearings I saw pot-grown saplings lined up by the hundred, as neat as a Home Counties garden centre, and tidy rows of vegetable plants being trickle-hosed into plumpness. Soon the farmers were able to produce a bit of surplus, which they could sell for cash. The old mud-hut or outdoor sit-on-a-log schools were replaced with proper buildings. A small clinic appeared, able to offer basic medicines and beds where women could give birth more safely than on the mud floors of their huts, and where the authority of the witch doctor was decisively challenged. Who would not applaud such enterprise?
A girl walks to school at N’hambita in Mozambique. The plant is for the school garden
The answer was Friends of the Earth. On my third visit I was accompanied by a camera crew making a film for BBC World, in which I gave as enthusiastic an account of the project as the director would allow. Back in London, for the sake of balance, an opportunity had to be given for a representative of FoE to tell the camera why none of this should be happening. The reason, inevitably, was ideological. Behind N’hambita stood a non-profit company that brokered carbon credits. Imperfections of the Kyoto Protocol meant that it could not be part of any official compliance scheme and so had to be voluntary, but it worked in a similar way. Concerned or image-conscious corporations, organisations and individuals could buy credits from the company to offset their carbon output against tree-planting. Quite apart from its benefits to biodiversity and the carbon economy, this seemed a pretty good way to transfer wealth from the northern rich to the African poor. A bush secondary school with a computer on every desk? Not an impossible dream. Here it had already happened.
So why did FoE decry it? Simple. It had a policy of opposition to carbon trading, and so was constitutionally disbarred from acknowledging any benefit derived from it. Equally predictably, I soon found myself being vilified from the opposite wing of the belief-spectrum by a climate-sceptic blog which implied that I was a paid stooge of the company that founded the project. This is a pretty good example of the debased condition into which ‘debate’ has fallen. The same blog chose to see something sinister in the fact that The Sunday Times had asked me to interview Professor Phil Jones, the man at the centre of the so-called Climategate scandal (when emails leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia seemed to suggest that data had been withheld or fiddled with). As it happened, the interview had been fixed by arrangement between the Sunday Times news editor and a media consultant hired by the university. This man, who was unknown to me, was a former executive of the now defunct News of the World who later would be arrested over allegations of phone hacking (though he was subsequently released without charge). The blogger purported to think that this proved an ‘illicit relationship’ between myself and the man’s PR firm – further reason, if any were needed, to disbelieve every word I wrote. There was nothing unusual in this. Anyone who enters the climate-change arena can expect to be smeared, and compared with others I got off lightly. My regret is that by over-simplification in the past, and by promoting a doctrine of absolute truth, for all our good intentions we may ourselves have contributed to the moral and intellectual implosion that makes such nonsense possible.
For far too long, the natural and human worlds have been perceived as warring entities whose interests are irreconcilable. In their different ways, both N’hambita and Ol Pejeta have shown this to be false. Ol Pejeta’s chief executive Richard Vigne puts it like this: ‘We are moving away from the idea of fortress conservation that takes place behind fences in the absence of any other human activity. We’re saying that if conservation is going to continue on a landscape scale, then we’re going to have to accommodate people and their activities in some way or another. We are opening up more opportunities for conservation by overcoming the mindset that you can only do it where there are no humans.’ This is what’s in my mind when headmaster Elmoge describes the Endana curriculum. All pupils at the school are taught English, Swahili, maths, chemistry and religion, and may choose between biology and physics, history and geography, business studies and agriculture.
‘Crop science,’ says Adam Elmoge when I ask what is taught in the agriculture classes. On the evidence of what I’ve seen, this could sound like a joke – lessons in cake-making in a land with no bread. But it could not be more apposite. The lights that begin to glow as twilight falls across the lower slopes of Mount Kenya are from nurseries growing vegetables that will find their way to British supermarkets. I am always irritated by green evangelists who bang on about ‘localism’ and ‘food miles’, as if there were something un-green about eating African beans. If ‘green’ means a co-operative and sustainable sharing of the world’s resources, then what could be greener than supporting Kenyan farmworkers?
Of course this is not the issue at Ol Pejeta. The priority here is subsistence, not exports, but this doesn’t alter the message. As sons and daughters are being taught in the classroom, so their parents are learning in the fields. At the conservancy headquarters I meet Josphat Kiama, Ol Pejeta’s Agricultural Extension Officer. He is young, energetic and persuasive, at once idealistic and pragmatic, driven by outcomes rather than ideologies. The keyword is productivity. This doesn’t mean telling traditional farmers to radically change their ways. As at N’hambita, it means showing them how to make the old ways work more efficiently. Example: it takes eight men four days to weed an acre by hand. With Roundup weedkiller one man can do it in an hour. This is much cheaper, especially when farmers combine to bulk-buy the weedkiller (and let the organo-fascists fulminate as they may). The same is true of seed and fertiliser. This is about life, not lifestyle. And it is about cooperation. Example: one farmer owns a drilling machine and lets others borrow it for the price of the diesel.
Josphat is high on practicality, low on cant. ‘Sustainability’ is not some gaseous extrusion of environmental Newspeak, pace Gro Harlem Brundtland, but the very lifeline by which families cling to the soil. The landscape asks brutal questions; Josphat provides uncomplicated answers. To keep the soil healthy he prescribes a simple crop rotation – maize, beans, potatoes – and mulching to retain the moisture. Soil disturbance is minimised by bio-friendly ‘no-till’ techniques that require no ploughing. This ensures the survival of worms and micro-organisms, and keeps carbon locked in the earth. The ground is disturbed only as far as it is necessary to implant the seed, which is watered by a drip irrigation system that delivers what the crop needs and not a cupful more. It uses only a sixth of the water consumed by haphazard sloshing. The no-till method is also parsimonious with fuel. Petrol consumption per acre is down to half a litre a week – previously it was six.
Livestock, too, is being improved by selective breeding. The arrival of Dorper sheep from South Africa means that animals now reach market weight in six months instead of three years. This may not delight the European welfare lobby but it’s good news in equatorial Africa. For milk, Josphat favours the goat – much more likely than a cow to withstand drought. He also encourages farmers to grow and store hay rather than expect their animals to survive on the desiccated scraps that nature provides in the dry season. No one has to take his word for it. He can talk the hind legs off a giraffe, and reduce to jelly the writing arm of a visiting note-taker (having made a point, he will not move on until I have written it down), but he knows it’s example that counts, not explication. As it was at N’hambita, so it is here. It is the early-adopters, the emboldened pioneers enjoying their heavier crops and healthier animals, who are the best recruiters. So it is that in a single season the human benefit from Ol Pejeta passes from classroom into field.
Back in the conservancy, still thinking about the mole and what it represents, I recall another childhood visit to London Zoo. In a shady corner, away from all the big attractions – which in those days included elephants, rhinos, big cats, bears and wolves – a crowd was gathering. Cameras were clicking. Parents were shouting for their children (including me) to come and look. Ooh, we went, and, aah! The object of our admiration paused for a moment – I would guess now in bewildered fright, but at the time I imagined it was playing to the gallery – before vanishing suddenly skywards up a tree. It was an ordinary grey squirrel, a mundane but suddenly unignorable anomaly in the company of lions. On the plains of Ol Pejeta I experience a similar moment of disconnection. The circumstances are different, and there is a vastly different scale of magnitude, but the sense of displaced ordinariness, of the mundane made exotic, is weirdly alike. Often during our game drives we would see distant clusters of tour vehicles, flashing like diamonds in the sun. It was not the plains game that drew them. Not big cats. Not rhinos, giraffes or elephants. Not even anything small and cute like a squirrel.
It was cows. Ranch-scale herds of domestic cattle, sharing the land with lions. These are not, it must be admitted, the Herefords and Friesian-Holsteins of the English lowlands. They are spectacular Ankole, whose curved horns can reach 8 feet from tip to tip, and humped Borans like the sacred cattle of India. Both are exotic to western eyes, but they are cattle all the same, with the same needs and vulnerabilities as any herd in the Cotswolds, but here with the added spice of the world’s top predators – a somewhat more exciting risk than badger-borne bovine TB. In a very direct way, though unconnected with this apparent supply of easy meat, the lions are beneficiaries of the cattle. So too are the impala, the zebras, the rhinos, giraffes, leopards and hyenas . . . So is everything that lives here, from the raptors overhead to the subterranean confrères of the elusive golden mole. Even the schoolchildren in their classrooms and laboratories, at least in part, owe their improving exam grades to Ol Pejeta beef.
This duality is not something you will see in Kenya’s National Parks, where a purist philosophy deems ranching and wildlife to be incompatible. Neither is it something you would have seen years ago in the ranch-lands. ‘In the old days,’ says Richard Vigne, ‘the feeling was that if you wanted to succeed as a cattle rancher, one thing you had to do was eliminate wildlife from your land. And that’s what they did.’ So Ol Pejeta is different. It refutes the old idea that a gain for wildlife is a loss for humans, and it recognises that it’s not enough simply to rewrite the law in favour of conservation. For millennia, people on this continent lived by hunting. At sea, aboriginal fishermen have been allowed a quota for subsistence, but on land the ban on most traditionally hunted species is absolute. Anyone caught poaching – provided they are not corrupt officials protected by their peers – should be caught and punished. Flesh from wild animals, once just plain ‘meat’, is now illegal ‘bushmeat’. I think yet again of the Chitengo Two, held for killing a warthog. I think, too, of the injustices of English nineteenth-century poaching laws, when poor village men snaring rabbits to feed their families were viciously man-trapped, shot at and transported to penal colonies in Australia. Whatever word you might choose to describe this, it is unlikely to be ‘justice’.
Ranching at Ol Pejeta is important for the very same reasons that tourism is. It creates the income the conservancy needs to protect wild animals; it reduces the reliance on charitable donations (though these remain important); it demonstrates to other landowners the viability of managing their hectares for wildlife, and it gives the local communities something in return for their cooperation. That ‘something’ is substantial. It includes road improvements and piped fresh water as well as agricultural improvements, support for a hospital, three health clinics and the schools. It’s not just Endana. In all, the conservancy supports twenty local schools. On average at any time, forty secondary school students will be maintained on full-time bursaries (awarded in consultation with local leaders and community groups), and some 250 on part-time bursaries given in periods of hardship such as drought, when resources are stretched. There are gifts of books, desks, chairs, laboratory equipment, water tanks and computers. Five schools will be given a couple of cows each, so that they can be self-sufficient in biogas and milk. The camps within the conservancy also play their part – Kicheche sponsors bursaries and has helped to set up a chicken project providing eggs for the local orphanage, to which it also gives blankets. Most importantly Ol Pejeta creates jobs – 700 of them altogether, of which 80 per cent are filled by local people who otherwise would have no prospect of employment. All that would be open to them, says Richard Vigne, would be ‘scratching around on sub-economic plots of land’.
In a way this is a dangerous argument. Emphasising the community benefits of projects such as Ol Pejeta is to invite the conclusion that conservation alone is not enough. It is not easy to make a business case for saving wildlife – economists can always find more intensive ways of using land – but Ol Pejeta strikes me as the model answer. Philosophers such as Peter Singer have argued the case for universal rights, extending to all species the utilitarian principle that the only ethical standard by which behaviour can be judged is, as Jeremy Bentham put it, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Singer and others specifically reject ‘speciesism’ – the inherent belief that Homo sapiens has a special entitlement and should enjoy rights denied to others. As they see it, all exploitation of animals by humans should cease. No rhino horn, no ivory, no food animals, no hunting, no pets. The case is morally perfect, smooth as an egg, but no likelier than an egg to survive hard impacts with an imperfect reality. Charred animal bones provide some of the earliest evidence of human settlement, and there is very little in all the millennia to encourage the view that every ‘possessor of a life’ is equal in the eyes of the world.
Nature is all about power, and in the Anthropocene the power is all ours. Viruses apart, there is literally nothing we can’t find a way to kill. Somewhere within us, however, is something felt rather than reasoned, a well of sentiment that persuades even the simplest mind to travel at least part-way with Jeremy Bentham. Animals earned their right to humane treatment, Bentham argued, not through their capacity for reason but through their ability to suffer. From whatever source it may come – evolution, religion, education – we have a revulsion to cruelty, which we commonly describe as ‘inhuman’. This is not quite universal. Disregard for others’ feelings – human as well as animal – is likeliest where survival is hardest. In extremis we would eat our neighbours. But most of us are not in extremis. Tim Flannery speaks of a ‘commonwealth of virtue’ in which people of all cultural, racial and economic backgrounds recognise each other’s goodness. In his book Here on Earth: a new beginning, he writes movingly of the ‘natural magic’ of an encounter, in a remote part of New Guinea, with local people whose ancestors and his own had parted ways not long after the dawn of civilisation. ‘Yet when we met, after fifty millennia of separation, I understood immediately the meaning of the shy smile on the face of the young boy looking at me, and he understood my motion for him to step closer to better observe what I was doing.’
Charles Darwin left us with a question to ponder. Does evolution tend towards increasingly stable ecosystems that bind together every living thing in a Gaian mesh of symbiotic relationships? Or must it lead catastrophically to an all-powerful ‘Genghis Khan species’ whose unquenchable greed will exhaust the planet? Flannery inclines optimistically to the former, trusting in the capacity of human genius to take us beyond the ‘civilised imbecility’ of the early Anthropocene. There are times and places where it is easier to be carried along by his optimism. One of these is Ol Pejeta, where, somewhat over-fortified by a good supper and a generous quantity of South African red wine, I scribble the bare bones of this paragraph by torchlight on the veranda of my bungalow-tent. The night sounds would be frightening if, like Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, I were bivouacked in the open. Birds over the water – cranes, I think – are whooping like drunken oboists in an orchestra of improvisation. There are deep mammalian grunts, coughs, splashings and a long, choking wail that must surely signal the letting of blood. The darkness seethes with teeth, claws and padded feet. Watching a raft of pelicans sailing on the moonlight, I submit to the rush of sentiment. In the end it’s not about philosophy or economics. It’s about the way we respond to the world around us. Either we feel enriched by the presence of other species, and will honour their right to exist, or we don’t.
Next day I visit the cattle. One of the most encouraging features of Ol Pejeta is the absence from the management team of white faces. Most of the specialists – in conservation, agriculture, education, community development, wildlife management and research – are black Kenyans. The only conspicuous whites are the chief executive Richard Vigne, the security adviser Batian Craig, both of whom are Kenyan-born, and the livestock manager Giles Prettejohn, a fourth-generation Kenyan cattle rancher. To find Prettejohn, Andrew has to drive us – Richard Lamprey and me – far across the plain to a cluster of farm buildings. From a distance it could be mistaken for a transport depot in the Fens. Behind one of the buildings we meet a throng of enormous Marabou storks, whose popular name, ‘undertaker birds’, is an apt description both of their sinister aspect and of their morbid habits. I ask Andrew what has attracted them. He points. The building is Ol Pejeta’s slaughterhouse, and they are gathered by the drain.
Giles Prettejohn is a bluff, weather-beaten man of the outdoors whose impeccable Home Counties accent would blend him into any gathering of gentlemen farmers at an agricultural show in England. With his boots on the equator, however, he is somewhat more conspicuous. What could be more unlikely, in an area dedicated to African big game, than a beef farmer? Surely, I say, you might as well try to raise seabass in a shark tank as graze cattle in full sight of lions. But Giles is no fantasist. I don’t have the statistics to prove it, but I suspect he is one of the biggest beef producers in Kenya. I do have stats to show that he runs the biggest herd of pure-bred Boran cattle in the world. Across Ol Pejeta’s plains are spread 6,000 – yes, 6,000 – of them, including 2,000 breeding cows. It is a fact that the number of lions in the conservancy has quadrupled in the last six years and has already exceeded their theoretical carrying capacity, but this has little to do with preying on Giles’s cattle. Small wonder that visitors come from all over Africa to see in action this remarkable twinning of opposites, which in most parts of the continent, including South Africa, would be anathema for reasons both ideological (the natural sanctity of wildlife reserves) and commonsensical (the exposure of cows to predators). Everything here is counter-intuitive. The cattle not only thrive and make good money, but they have turned out to be powerful allies of the wildlife.
The Borans with their fatty humps have a primitive look about them. This is not misleading, for they are antiquity on the hoof. Giles, who knows as much about the breed as any man alive, tells me that they arrived in Africa from India some 2,000 years ago, and were kept by the tribe of the same name – the Boran of north-east Kenya and southern Ethiopia. Given the hostility of the equatorial environment – scrappy forage, drought, disease – the animals were necessarily small and hardy. Recently they have been beefed up by cross-breeding – a bit of shorthorn here, a bit of Hereford there – but not so much as to change their appearance or character, and certainly not their attraction for predators.
As lions hunt by stealth and not speed, much of their killing is done in the dark. Compared to the ill-tempered, muscular aggression of buffalo and the agile speed of gazelles, the docile, slow-moving cattle look like the world’s biggest free picnic. But Giles has a simple and ingenious answer to the Borans’ nocturnal vulnerability. It also explains some puzzling brown circular patches which I noticed from the air. He takes me first to see a 500-strong herd of pregnant cows, grazing freely on the plain and watched over by herdsmen. Then he shows me the magic ingredient.
It is called a boma. In principle it’s like a native kraal, a circular enclosure within which cattle are kept secure at night, but unlike a kraal it doesn’t involve mud walls or palisades, and – this is the essential difference – it is movable. Sections of tubular aluminium fencing are driven into the ground and pinned together in a circle, enclosing an area about the size of a tennis court. Into this small area at night, 500 cattle will be packed so tightly that they cannot move. Their immobility is essential. It means that if lions visit the boma at night, the Borans are unable to stampede. If they did, the boma would be knocked over and the lions would have an orgy. It also mimics the Borans’ natural behaviour. At night on open pasture, for comfort and protection, they will instinctively form a huddle. The fencing is not proof against incursion by lions – they could jump over it if they wanted to – but their innate wariness of buffaloes inhibits them from leaping into a mass of cattle. Even if they did make a kill within the boma, they would be unable to escape over the fence with it.
This does not mean an end to all predation. Thwarted at night, the lions turn their attention to daytime when the sheer weight of numbers means that cattle and cats are bound to meet at some point. Giles loses about sixty-five animals a year, which from a 6,000-strong herd he reckons is acceptable. If a particular lion makes too much of a nuisance of itself, then it can be darted and moved away. The cattle themselves are constantly shifting to new grazing, and the bomas are moved every three weeks. Something magical then happens. You get a clue just by looking at an empty boma. The ground inside is entirely bare of grass, not a blade anywhere, just a deep dark churn of well-watered manure. You can smell it, the distilled and well-ripened essence of cow. Insects ping off your skin like hail. Pumped full of nitrates and phosphates, the ground is a brimming reservoir of pent-up energy. At the first slick of rain, due any day now, it will explode into life. And here’s the magic. The new growth will not be the same rank old bamboo grass that was there before. It will be of a wholly different kind. In a sudden flood of emerald green there will appear star grass (of the species Cynodon), which is much more palatable and nutritious for the animals. Why this happens, no one seems to know. What matters is that it does happen, and that it is yet another link in Ol Pejeta’s virtuous circle. What’s good for the Borans is good for the plains game that moves in behind them. What’s good for the plains game is good for the predators. What’s good for the predators is good for the tourists and hence for everything that depends on their money.
Nor is that the only gain. Wild buffalo carry East Coast fever, a tick-borne disease which even an indigenous breed like the Borans cannot survive. For this reason the cattle have to be sprayed regularly with insecticide, which has not only the desired effect of keeping the cattle healthy but also prevents the transfer of ticks to other species. All this is well and good, but there is more to the story than its incidental benefits. Giles is first and foremost a stock farmer, and it matters that the herd makes sense economically. Back at the farm he shows me the slaughterhouse. The day’s work is over and a thicket of cream-coloured carcasses hangs from hooks, giving off that odour of freshly killed meat that you either love or hate. Each side shows a layer of fat and well-marbled flesh, just the way a good butcher likes it. Every week Giles sends between fifty and sixty carcasses to the Nairobi meat market, where they fetch premium prices. Because I’ve never seen one butchered before, I’m interested in the hump. At 50 per cent fat it is the richest cut on the carcass, particularly prized, Giles tells me, by Nairobi’s Asian community, who like to boil and slice it very thin. My one regret about the sumptuous meals at Kicheche Camp is that hump never appears on the menu (though I do enjoy a plateful of stir-fried Boran steak).
In a hungry pan-African market, none of this passes unnoticed. Demand is high, especially from South Africa, which imports Boran embryos direct from Ol Pejeta (embryos only, because it is illegal to move live animals across national borders). Though ranching in South Africa is kept separate from wildlife management, visitors from elsewhere – Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia – are showing interest in the full Ol Pejeta model. For Fauna & Flora International it is a spectacularly powerful testament to the viability of what might have seemed a most improbable kind of investment. It’s not quite the lion lying down with the lamb, but standing up with the Boran runs it close. Yet you never forget where you are. The wilderness may be managed, but it is wilderness all the same. In all the many miles that Andrew drives me, I never see an empty landscape. When the time comes for Richard Lamprey to depart, we find his Cessna is sharing the airstrip with zebras, warthogs, Grant’s gazelles, a Jackson’s hartebeest and a giraffe. Wherever flyers in Africa gather, there is gallows talk – remembrances of this old acquaintance or that coming down in the bush, or of a pilot of long experience finally copping the Big One, often as a result of wildlife on the strip. Richard, who has survived his share of incidents, takes his time checking the aircraft over. Not even the fuel gauge is taken on trust – he checks the level with a dipstick. It brings home to me how remote, how wild, this place really is. Take away the aeroplane and the Land Cruiser, and there’s nothing here that would strike a Gordon-Cumming or a Selous as remotely untypical of the nineteenth century. In all important respects, and despite all the care lavished upon it, this is quintessential Africa, exactly as nature meant it to be, and it’s humans who must adapt. Flying from here demands a technique not taught to pilots at Heathrow. Taxiing is as much about clearing animals from the track as it is about lining up for take-off. Then there can be no hanging about. Quick as you can, you have to turn and make your run before the moment passes. Only the giraffe doesn’t move. It stands at the end of the strip, head like a windsock. As much as the mountains and trees, it seems to belong to the solid fabric of the place, part of the landscape. It doesn’t flinch even as the Cessna, suddenly tiny, flashes over its head. The plane climbs rapidly, turns south and dissolves into silence.
That should have been the end of the chapter. During the writing of it, however, I took a short holiday in Istanbul. We did all the usual things – a trip along the Bosporus, visits to the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, archaeology museum, spice market, the Topkapi Palace. In a far corner of the Topkapi stands the Baghdad Pavilion, built in the 1640s and used during the Ottoman Empire for Cabinet meetings. Descriptions of the decorative art at Topkapi tend to overwork the word ‘exquisite’. But what else can you say? Inside the Baghdad Pavilion you can’t see the walls for all the photographers taking close-ups of the detail. There is a famous classical fireplace, framed by ceramic tiles depicting birds; niches along the walls decorated with Iznik tiles older than the building; an ornate silver brazier given by Louis XIV. The whole thing stands as a monument to the absolute power of a Sultanate that was never more than a handclap away from anything it wanted. Human lives were cheap; animal lives worth only what could be made from their body parts. Truly, this often was exquisite. The pavilion’s dome is lined with floral patterns made from gazelle leather. Window shutters and cabinets are inlaid with mother-of-pearl, turtleshell and ivory. But this was all so long ago, long before it was understood that animals were a finite resource, that there is no sense of outrage that gazelles, elephants and turtles had to die for a decorator’s whim. You can’t blame a sultan for being a man of his time. The world is different now. No monarch of this time would indulge such lethal ostentation.
But then we go back to our hotel and switch on the news. There is a royal scandal. King Juan Carlos of Spain – honorary president of the Spanish WWF – has been caught elephant-shooting in Botswana, and has made a grovelling apology to his people. I am very sorry. I made a mistake. It won’t happen again. The mistake, it turns out, was to have tripped in a hunting lodge and broken his hip. News of the mishap dominated the Spanish headlines for days, arousing the kind of passionate anger for which that country is unrivalled. Politicians across the spectrum at last had something they could agree about – the king would have to eat crow. When he did, however, it was not for killing elephants that he apologised. It was for having taken such an expensive holiday at a time when his subjects were suffering hardship and the economy had holes in its shoes. Killing elephants was wrong because poor people could not afford it.
Worse was to follow. Back in England I find an email from Brian Jackman telling me that Ol Pejeta’s near neighbour, the Lewa conservancy (a favourite, apparently, of young British royals, where William proposed to Kate), has lost a pregnant black rhino, shot by poachers despite one of the tightest security operations in Africa. He reminds me that more African ivory was intercepted in 2011 than in any year of the last two decades. Cameroon’s Bouba N’Djida reserve alone had lost more than 450 elephants. In South Africa, the number of rhinos lost since the beginning of the year (I am writing this in mid April 2012) had already reached 170. I have enjoyed Ol Pejeta. It has been one of those rare and exalted things that might be called an experience of a lifetime. Briefly I have been intoxicated by optimism. I have seen how life for animals can mean livelihoods for people; how good people can make a difference. But there is no hiding from the bad. Brian quotes a friend of his, centrally involved in the conservation of rhinos, who speaks unemotionally of ‘an unfolding disaster for Africa’. I know now why the mole matters. Conservationists in soapbox mode tend too easily to slip into eco-jargon, as if words like biomass, sustainability and biodiversity carried some unquestionable authority, like edicts from the Vatican. Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project and as much a champion of plain speaking as he is of the environment, tells me of a survey at the Natural History Museum which revealed that 85 per cent of its visitors didn’t know what biodiversity meant. ‘That tells you two things,’ he says. ‘It tells you first of all, Ouch!, in terms of our education system. But it also tells you what a bunch of arrogant tosspots we all are, using a phrase that 85 per cent of people don’t understand, when we could say variety of life.’
Absolutely this is what matters. We understand, more or less, that varieties of life connect to each other in complex webs of inter-dependent relationships that we call ecosystems. The survival of a large predator at the top of the system depends on linkages that reach all the way down to micro-organisms at the bottom. You can’t have one without all the others. There is some flexibility. A species may die or be expelled and another will move into its niche. But there will come a breaking point. The biologist Paul Ehrlich likens it to the piecemeal disassembly of an aircraft. You can go on removing some of its tiniest components – rivets from the wings, say – and for a while it will go on flying. One day, however, you will remove one too many and the system will crash. Conservation is about saving the rivets; fixing the ones that are working loose; catching some even as they fall. Maybe the Somali golden mole is still part of a working mechanism; maybe it is a missing rivet. If it has fallen, then the world is in some small way poorer for its loss. As a proxy for every other unseen or unheard-of subterranean toiler, it deserves, at the very least, a pilgrimage and a decent obituary.
