I read two articles this weekend in National Geographic that filled me with both despair and hope.
I want to talk about hope first because sometimes good news assuages the pain of constantly reading about another species on the verge of extinction. The story - which I’m summarizing here - is about the return of the humback whales to the waters around Southern Africa. The whales which have been migrating from the icy feeding grounds in the Antarctic to their breeding areas near Mozambique had been hunted for over 200 years until in 1979 South Africa banned commercial whaling. At that point there were roughly between 300 and 600 of these majestic leviathans in the Western Indian Ocean. Ten years later Ken Findlay, a biologist at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology began to survey the whales that migrated past Cape Vidal. His first survey reported 46 humpback groups - about 360 whales. His next survey in 2002 recorded 323 groups or around 1,670 whales. In 2018, Chris Wilkinson of the Mammal Research Institute, estimated that there were now more than 30,000 whales in the Western Indian Ocean.
This, despite Japan’s decision to renew commercial whaling (and the fact that they’re the world’s largest legal market in ivory), is an incredible success story in the return of a species. But alas not an ecosystem as the article soberly points out.
The second article, also summarized here from National Geographic, is a less happy story.
Today, the article reports, there are half as many African lions than there were 25 years ago. In fact there are 14 times more elephants, 15 times as many lowland gorillas and even more rhinos - regardless of what you’ve read - than lions. The frightening decline in numbers can be attributed to a number of threatening situations. The increasing desire for bushmeat, the lion’s natural prey, has forced them to attack livestock and brought them into dangerous and fatal contact with humans. Then of course there’s poaching for skin, teeth, bones and paws used in traditional medicine in China and other far eastern countries. The reason for this is lion parts have replaced tiger parts because there are so few tigers left to poach. And then of course there is trophy hunting. Just writing the words “trophy hunting” fills me with rage because I picture Don Jr and Eric Trump, Rebecca Francis and Jacine Jadresko posing with their shit-eating grins and morbidly narcissistic expressions over the dead animals they’ve so generously shot to feed starving villagers.
The little bit of good news comes from Peter Lindsey, director of the Lion Recovery Fund (something worth supporting) who talks about the efforts to compensate villagers whose live stock is threatened so that they won’t poison the lions. The Fund which was founded by the WCN and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation is also sponsored in part by Disney which hopefully will put in some of the profits from their new “Lion King” movie
I suppose hope and despair are really two sides of the same coin. All I wish is that this fickle coin starts to land more on hope and less on despair.
Well that’s what I think anyway.
