One night in 1589, the survivors of a shipwrecked Portuguese caravel camping on the beach, were woken by eerie, unearthly sounds. Someone was wailing in the dark, weeping at the top of their lungs. Looking around in the black night, they saw, to their horror, eyes glaring at. The Portuguese sailors believed that these were the ghosts of their drowned companions. Shaken to the core in their catholic belief, they named them after the restless sprites of ancient Rome, lemures. Or so goes the lore of how Madagascar’s iconic lemurs got their name.
There must be something supernatural about lemurs. For the local Malagasy people, who had been living on the island for about 2000 years before the Portuguese supposedly discovered it, also called them ghosts, gidro, and revered them as reincarnations of passed away family members. It was therefore a fahdy – a taboo – to hunt, let alone eat a lemur. According to other Malagasy legends, lemurs are our human ancestors who had become lost in the rainforest and turned into lemurs to survive. Despite their fox-like faces and monkey-like bodies, their demeanour is indeed humanesque.
sifaka
Like humans, lemurs have opposable thumbs. They cast meaningful glances like humans do, especially since they are only other primates in which blue eyes occur naturally; and, like humans, they smile as a sign of sympathy or submission. Other than that, they follow their own idiosyncratic habits. Most lemur species – there are more than a hundred – organize in matriarchal troops. When cold or frightened, or when in need of some TLC, ring-tailed lemurs cuddle up in one furry lemur ball, interlacing their long tails. Male ring-tailed lemurs settle their disputes in non-violent ‘stink-fights,’ in which they wave their tales to overwhelm each other with their scent. But things get stranger still. While the Indri lemur grows to 70cm in height, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur reaches only 9cm, and is therefore the smallest primate in the world. The slightly bigger Northern giant mouse lemur has testicles that make up 5.5 per cent of its body mass – imagine a man with testicles the size of cantaloupes. Or, rather, don’t. The Aya-aye, a solitary, nocturnal lemur, has teeth that never stop growing and a third finger that is double the size of the rest of its ten fingers. The white-furred sifakas, excellent tree climbers, have lost their ability to move on the ground and once down from their lofty treehouses, they leap only sideways – a strange way of locomotion, but impressive nonetheless, given that lemurs jump the length of ten meters in one single bounce. Perhaps the most astonishing fact about lemurs, though, is that they are still around. Lemurs are critically endangered.
Ring-tailed lemurs
Lemur eccentricity is the result of having evolved in the isolation of a remote island for tens of millions of years. The island of Madagascar began breaking off the supercontinent Gondwanaland and drifting east 180 million years ago. The oldest lemur-fossils date from around 60 million years ago, but, strangely, were found on mainland Africa. How the lemurs crossed the Mozambique channel is still a mystery. But crossing the channel was what saved lemurs from their direct competitors with whom they and we humans share a common ancestor. Apes were much more adaptable than lemurs, but also much more aggressive. Madagascar became the lemurs’ safe haven and their paradise: an entire tropical island covered in forest. Rain forests. Dry forests. Spiny forests. Alongside other strange creatures like giant and tiny chameleons and giant and tiny birds and long necked beetles and transparent frogs (90% of all species are endemic to Madagascar and occur no where else in the world), lemurs not only thrived. As mammal pollinators they became quintessential to the island’s ecosystem. Then humans arrived. The Indri that haunted the Portuguese back in the 16th century knew why they were crying.
If Madagascar was a paradise for lemurs, it was so for humans as well. But it could not be a paradise for both. The fertile volcanic soils offered themselves for the cultivation of rice, and as grasslands for the large cattle herds. However, the traditional slash-and-burn-method led to imminent deforestation. By 1600, the arrival of the Portuguese, Madagascar’s central highland forests had to the biggest part already disappeared. French colonialization exacerbated deforestation, a process that hasn’t stopped since the independence of Madagascar in 1960, and, even though slash and burn became illegal in 1987, still goes on, undisturbed by changing governments, the bloody coup of 2009, and the political upheavals of the past years. Today 80% of Madagascar’s original forests are gone. And with them, the lemurs.
If Madagascar is not the poorest country in the world, then one of the poorest. The island’s population has doubled since the year 2000 to 30million people, of which 80% are currently living in extreme poverty (less than $2 USD per day). The pandemic brought tourism, the country’s main source of foreign currency, to a complete halt, and it still hasn’t fully picked up. On top, climate change and deforestation have made cyclones more frequent, more unpredictable, and more devastating. Many Malagasy, long suffering from poverty’s usual side effects – malnutrition, poor health, crime, corruption, prostitution, and lack of education – are now threatened by starvation, if not for a tiny rice field to feed a scrawny zebu cow. Where that doesn’t yield enough, the fahdy of not eating lemurs is ignored. If one can find a lemur.
Millions of years ago, lemurs crossed the Mozambique channel to survive. Now they are one of Madagascar’s main tourist attractions – especially since the movie Madagascar turned them into pop icons of the natural world. Ecotourism could indeed be one way out of the misery, when done sustainably, and in combination with conservation and educational programs: Nature can provide for the locals, for every player in the ecosystem, as it did for millions of years. If lemurs can provide for the Malagasy they will be more important than zebus to the locals, and original forest more important than rice fields. And if lemurs can pollinate the trees again, they can re-create their own habitat, and make sure that children don’t starve, don’t work the rice fields, but go to school. That way, to some extent, they will provide for all us, by helping us in our joint effort to stop climate catastrophe.
Lemurs aren’t the ghosts of our ancestors, but they might have the super powers to save us. Indeed, they are supernatural.
An young elephant dies in Zimbabwe during the drought of 2019
When the UN Convention on Biological Diversity ended last week, a pledge was made: By 2030, thirty percent of the world’s water and land shall be turned into protected areas. This comes as a final attempt to stop the alarming loss of species worldwide (30% to 50% of known species are estimated to go extinct in the next few decades), and thereby save the one species that’s dearest to our hearts: the human species.
A lonely Eurasian kingfisher. Last of his kind Austria.
The idea of setting aside parts of the world to let them regenerate from human influence goes back to the late American biologist E.O. Wilson, who, in his book Half Earth demanded fifty percent of the world to be turned into protected areas in order for our ecosystem and us to survive. Thirty percent appears a realistic interim goal – given that currently a rough 17% are already under protection. This downsized goal plus the highly alluring image of having a third of our planet restored into pure, pristine nature, in other words a Garden Eden as our front yard, should find acclaim from all sides. Yet, it doesn’t. Most surprisingly, the Thirty by Thirty-goal was met with resistance from the representatives of indigenous people.
Why doesn’t the idea of doubling the amount national parks worldwide appeal to those whose lives seem most immersed in nature? To understand their sceptisim, the discussion of environmental protection cannot be led in bio-geographical terms only, but conservation must be addressed against the background of imperialism and racial discrimination. Maybe it’s time to tackle the most fundamental questions: why in order to save our own habitat it needs to be protected from us, and who we, the human species, really are.
Dubbed by the New York Times “the most important global meeting you haven’t heard of”, the Convention on Biodiversity didn’t get much media coverage, unlike its sister, the UN climate convention which drew an international Who Is Who to Glasgow this year. Yet, in impact and urgency the loss of biodiversity equals the climate catastrophe. A functioning ecosystem is crucial to meeting the single goal defined at the climate convention this year: a maximum global warming of 1.5C of pre-industrial levels.
Danube swamps in Austria are under threat due to excessive floor sealing.
Nature is an intricate network of interacting species living in complex habitats. In this recicprocal system called biodiversity, everything is equally important, a field hamster weighs in as much as a bison or a ladybird. The eleven bird species that got declared irreversibly extinct in 2021 alone – among them the beautiful ivory-billed woodbecker and the spectacular Hawaiin Kauai O’o – are eleven more dropped stitches in a once tight fabric called our eco-system.
No species and no individual can survive on its own: Tiny birds morph into giant celestial creatures, little fish clean humpback whales, and savanna plants rely on elephants and migrating mammals to spread their seeds, and cherry trees on bees. Collaboration between species is as crucial to our ecosystem as competition –even in the most competitive field of all: mating, as ornithologist Richard O. Prum in his new interpretation of Darwin’s teachings proved.
Wild Carneolean honey-bees are endangered, as is the Alpine rose, growing exclusively in highest altitudes.
We might not be aware of it, staring at the screens of our phones in our air-conditioned apartment, but we are still embedded in a network of living creatures. Forgotten, that until as few as fifty years ago it was field hamsters that held mice in check, and wolves the grazing deer. Forgotten the birds of Venice whose morning songs inspired Antonio Vivaldi to his Four Seasons, and a falling apple Newton’s law of gravity. Forgotten that it was birds who emboldened Leonardo to engeneer the first flying machines, and bats taught us echolocation, and termites how to ventilate multi-story buildings.
After 10,000 years of agriculture, and almost 250 years since the industrial revolution and industrialized farming, our technoligized lives still depend on the lives of honey bees and other insects, who pollinate 87% of the worlds’ plants. We still rely on elephants to keep planting the trees that store our CO2, and on trees to prevent the soil from eroding and the wind from growing into a hurricane, and the evening tide into a tsunami.
The physical and emotional distance from our own beginnings in the African savannah, this rift we have created between what we call nature and culture, has made it nearly impossible to raise awareness to the extent and urgency of the impending disaster. Species conservation is still regarded a first world problem, a thesis for ornithologists, a post-doc research-grant maybe, and not a question of survival. Because it’s hard to imagine our immense ecosystem collapsing because of the loss of a tiny creature like a honey bee, while we are flying to Mars.
A glimpse of eternity. Snails evolved 350 million years ago. Their shells are endlessly fascinating, spirally coiled and chiral.
For two weeks, representatives of governments, NGOs, and ethnic tribes convened in Geneva, tackling in specialized assemblies each of the main contributors to the loss of biodiversity: agriculture and food systems, climate change, invasive species, pollution, and unsustainable production and consumption. They came up with twenty-one different targets to be rediscussed in China, when they will meet again this year. The one catchy concept of 30 by 30 was concocted in 2020 already at that year’s Convention, but since none of the targets set in 2020 have since been reached, the pledge simply was repeated. However, things were moved a step farther this time by addressing the question of where these protected areas are to be established.
Since loss of biodiversity is, like anything else, not equally distributed on this planet, a Map of Life was designed to pinpoint the most promising regions: those who still offer the greatest abundance of species, like the rainforests of the Amazonas and the Congo basin, or the mopane forests of Namibia. Little surprisingly, Tokyo, New York, or London were not on the map. In short, for the lives of bankers to remain unchanged, the world’s indigenous people should give up their hunting grounds, most likely their settlements; for sure their culture, life styles, their livelihoods. Not again.
Fishermen at the Kilombero River in Tanzania, their mokoro carved from a local sausage tree.
In his seminal book “Ecology and Equity” (1991) the Indian writer and historian Ramachandra Guha called indigenous tribes who live in rural subsistence-communities the eco-system people. Submerged in their environment they are the planet’s top conservationists. While they make up only 5% of the world population, or 476 million people, they share their homes with 80% of the species (according to IPBES)
“Europe has long lost their wildlife, has founded its wealth on exploitation,“ an indigenous representative in Geneva was quoted. “What alternatives do they offer us, if we cannot continue living from our lands?”
History has taught indigenous tribes to be apprehensive of National Parks. Before Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first National Park, was established in 1872 it had been home to various Native American tribes for more than 10,000 years. They had hunted, fished, and gathered plants in what to European settlers appeared untouched nature. When the German colonialists turned the Etosha-pan in nowadays Namibia into a game reserve in 1907, they expelled the native Hai//om people. To this day the Hai//om live at the outskirts of Etosha National Park in impoverished townships, having to pay admission fee to enter the park.
Wattled Cranes in Botswana, near extinct.
The Concept of the National Park rests on the romantic ideal of nature as untouched by civilization. Whenever colonialists entered unchartered land, they took the absence of fields or permanent structures as a sign of desolation, failing to recognize the sustainable life style of the native people. A nomadic lifestyle like that of the Khoisan in Southern Africa, or the Native American tribes was an unimaginable impossibility. What was perceived as natural or untouched was in fact vernacular landscape: sites filled with meaning, memories and spirituality for the locals. Indigenous culture was overlooked. This first form of ghosting – the silencing, blocking out, the active un-imagining of a group, a tribe, a minority – is what historically predates expulsions when ever land was usurped: to build dams, train tracks, industrial plants, or, if nature was deemed sufficiently beautiful, National Parks.
In the late 19thcentury two kinds of reserves simultaneously came into existence: Game reserves were established to protect wildlife for the use (hunting) or pleasure of a single privileged group, and Native Reserves to push indigenous people out of the way, and out of sight. Private or company-owned wildlife or nature reserves were often turned into National Parks in the late 19th and early 20th century, at a time of rising international nationalism and nation building. The romantic Zeitgeist of the time, instilled with the writings of Goethe or Thoreau, bestowed qualities on nature which should reflect the nation: pure and God-given, resilient, strong and graceful, as Jane Carruthers highlighted in her history of the Kruger National Park:
National parks fulfil an important cultural function in that they are the tangible embodiment of those elements of the natural environment which citizens consider worthy of state protection. … Thus a national park is not merely a physical entity, a geographical area, or a suite of ecosystems and species, but a mirror of society and a vigorous symbol.
Nationalpark Hohe Tauern in Austria. Sublime nature as representation of an idealized nation. The high Alpes are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet due to climate change.
The history of the world’s second oldest national Park, the Kruger in South Africa, serves as a prime example of how the establishment of a national park often disguised imperialistic, economic, and racist goals.
Kruger Nationalpark, in the Northeastern corner of nowadays South Africa, is situated in a region inhabited by the nomadic Khoisan since the Stone Age, and by sedentary Bantu tribes since the Iron Age. When the European settlers, the Vortrekkers, and the British colonialists arrived in the 19th century, the area was abundant with wildlife. Due to the novel use of firearms, the Vortrekker’s growing need of meat, and the British lust for hunting, animals were killed to near extinction.
Blue Roller, once abundant, is now extinct in Western Europe. It’s Eastern European cousin migrates to South Africa and back each year.
Game reserves were hence established by the administration to protect and manage the remaining herds of antilopes. Contrary to the Vortrekkers, the British didn’t hunt for sustenance. Rather, hunting was regarded a noble, elistist sport, and sport hunting as the only morally acceptable form of killing wildlife. It was in this vein that predators like lions, hyenas, wild dogs, or leopards were destroyed as vermin. Their killing was even rewarded by local administration. As predators, they were competitors to the British sportsmen.
The African residents were either evicted from the game reserve to Native reserves, or made to pay rent. Officially, this happened to protect the wildlife from sustenance hunters – the Africans and the poor Afrikaaners. In reality, their impact on the reduction of wildlife was minor. Rather, they were deprived from their livelihoods as the diamond mines and agricultural plants of the emerging nation were in dire need of cheap workforce.
Persona non grata – animalium non gratum. After excessive hunting, the once abundant painted wolf or wild dog is now a threatened species. Less than 5,000 Painted Wolves are left worldwide.
When, in 1926, shortly after the foundation of the Afrikaaner Union of South Africa, the Kruger National Park was established by merging two private game reserves, it was in a spirit of nascent Afrikaaner nationalism. The National park was a tool to promote and romanticize the Vortrekker heritage: the land as it was when the Vortrekker arrived, and the dangers they had to overcome, voracious lions and ferocious buffaloes. With the creation of a national myth, the white population of South Africa was to be glued into a nation, one valiant, heroic people which the wildlife represented. While the rest of the country was industrialized, filled with dumps from the diamond miles, and flattened for endless fruit plants, inside the electrified fences that surrounded the Kruger, a Garden Eden was preserved. Pristine nature as God had created was to serve the spiritual regeneration of paying visitors. The Africans were fenced out, made into Un-inhabitants of South Africa.
The Waldrapp, extinct from overhunting in the 18th century, was bred at the Vienna Zoo and reintroduced into its Alpine habitat.
From an indigenous point of view, national parks, in South Africa and elsewhere, were not established to conserve, but to destroy: their livelihood, their tradition, their culture. Naturally, and politically, we have come a long way. The days of apartheid and racial segregation are long gone, and National Parks have indeed become refuges for conservation and protection, for scientific research and reintroduction programs. As tourism hot spots they employ well trained rangers, thereby offering perspective, job opportunities and ensuing wealth to the surrounding communities. Yet, inside the African National Parks, the old imperialist ideas have often survived. Game Lodges cater to affluent tourists from Europe or the US, conjuring up the once glorious past with colonial style tents and candlelight dinners under the Milky Way, and solemn African waiters that discreetly withdraw into the night. The African townships dwellers never get to see a rhinoceros, a lion, or an elephant. Their habitat is the overcrowded cities.
Children playing in downtown Johannesburg, 2015
Ramachandra Guha, who minced the term eco-system people, also had a name for us, the Westerners: omnivores. We are the wealthy consumers who overstrain the planet. Insatiably, we eat everything. In lack of competitors, we have thrown the ecosystem off balance. Like an unstoppable comet, we are causing the planet’s 6th extinction.
It is not humanity, human kind, from whom the nature needs to be protected, fenced off in National Parks, but the omnivores: Jeff Bezos and wanna-be Jeff Bezos of this planet. We urgently need the ecosystem people to protect us, and our planet.
In this sense it is important to redefine the concept of a nationalpark as a region protected from human exploitation, but not devoid of humans. A space to live in, not an entertainment park for the wealthy. If thirty or fifty percent of the world are turned into protected areas, they must be returned to the eco-system people for them to hunt and fish, to fertilize the soil with controlled fires, to grow their traditional vegetables, to thank and venerate their Earth Gods and spirits. And thereby, hopefully, they will teach us, or refresh our memories of how to live enmeshed in a network of collaborating species, how not to exploit but to give and take, to become the ecosystem people we once were. Then no part of the world will need to be protected, but the planet will be our habitat again. A place for all of us, fellow species and ethnicities.
The Okavango Delta, the world’s largest wetlands is under threat from oil drilling by the Canadian ReckonAfrica
Humanity arose from the African savannas. As frequent lightning struck and set the grasslands in flames, homo erectus, a split-off from the ape lineage, learned how to control fire. The easily digestible calories from cooked meat were a tremendous advantage over competing species, like the chimpanzees and bonobos. Homo erectus started walking on their hind legs, which freed their front legs to carry weapons, and bounty, and their off-spring on the run. With their brain size enlarged, around 200,000 years ago, homo erectus evolved into homo sapiens. Into humans. Us. a lucky accident of primate evolution.
Like other large mammals of the savanna, the apes, wild dogs, elephants, and lions, early humans lived in highly organized societies marked by collaboration and division of labour. But at night, only the humans sat around the fire, and talked, and told each other stories. We know all this, because there are still some around who live very much like the first humans in Southern Africa: the /Xam, the Ju/’hoansi, the !Ko, the Nharo, the Heixom, the G/wi and other nomadic tribes more commonly known as San, or Bushmen. Hunters and gatherers who once travelled long distances, they are now confined to a small territory in the Kalahari desert of Namibia and Botswana, struggling to hold on to their ancient lifestyle, in tightly knit communities without chiefs or religious leaders, with a view of the world where everything is possessed by divine spirit. The San are what we once were, in the Garden Of Eden, before the Fall.
Northern Namibia
But of course, the savanna with its fierce competition among predators, with bushfires and torrential rains, never was a biblical garden Eden. And of course the San didn’t live in constant enchantment by the sprites of nature. Rather, they have been living in a state of respectfulness – granting animals the same rights as themselves, valuing nature as much as their culture; outsmarting predators and prey, knowledgeable of roots and grasses, savants of the changing skies. Quite unsentimentally, theirs was, or is, a lifestyle perfectly adapted to their environment, to the circumstance and age that age that brought about us humans: the Holocene, the Age of Mammals, which followed the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs. If ever there was a Garden of Eden, it was not a place, but a manner of living.
Obviously, we don’t live in this Garden of Eden anymore, but on a planet transformed by human activity, in a new age called Anthropocene. Why were we expelled from our garden Eden? Was it the original sin, as the bible says, or was it rather the combination of swift technological progress with the worst of human nature, as biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson said?
Grassland with Aloe Vera
Edward O. Wilson, regarded the greatest biologist and one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, has in his lifetime witnessed the so called sixth extinction, the alarming rate of extinction of species in the past fifty years. Half of the Earth’s living creatures, from animals and insects, are estimated to have been lost since 1971.
Biodiversity as a whole forms a shield protecting each of the species that together compose it, ourselves included. What will happen if, in addition to the species already extinguished by human activity, say, 10 percent of those remaining are taken away? Or 50 percent? Or 90 percent? As more and more species vanish or drop to near extinction, the rate of extinction of the survivors accelerates…. As extinction mounts, biodiversity reaches a dipping point at which the ecosystem collapses, Wilson wrote in 2016
Humanity as a species is perfectly adapted to excel in the Holocene, the biosphere and biodiversity of the past 200,000 years. In the Anthropocene, though, we find ourselves as vulnerable and helpless as we would have been in the Mesozoic period: an evolutionary cul-de-sac, easy to prey to a T.Rex called rising sea levels, or draughts and deluges, shortness of food, and water, and oxygen.
Endangered species: There are less than 6000 wild dogs living in the wild.
Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground, so the bible said. Consequently, there are very few places on this world left intact, free from human impact. Farmland and pastures displace natural forests and habitats. Oceans are void of fish, as air pollution blankets the planet, plastic swamps the waters, and debris lies scattered in the remotest places. It’s become an impossibility even to find a place free from human noise, or free from light pollution. Climate collapse, a direct consequence of extraction and burning of petroleum and carbon, has irreversibly altered temperature and weather patterns.“We thrash about, appallingly led, with no particular goal other than economic growth and unfettered consumption,” Wilson writes.
Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals. Farmed poultry makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The recently-updated Red List issued by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature classified 19,625 of the currently recognized 59,508 species as threatened.
“It’s only in the past fifty years or so that children have been brought up to think chickens come from the supermarket and Nature is a TV show. As with so many things, what we don’t know may kill us, and what we seem not to know right now is that without a functioning biosphere (clean air, clean water, clean earth, a variety of plant and animal life) we will starve, shrivel, and choke to death.” Wilson said in a talk with poet Robert Haas.
Edward O. Wilson fears we have already entered the next age, for which he has already coined a name: the Eremocine, the Age of Loneliness; a single species left in the world, having lost touch with nature.
elephant in the Okavango Delta
There are still a few intact places – not untouched, but habitats free from obvious signs of human activity. These places, such as remote forests in South America, the Congo Basin, or New Guinea make up less than five percent of the Earth’s land mass. In his book “Half Earth”, Wilson demands that half of the planet is restituted to nature as wildlands, for our own sake: to regenerate the biodiversity and biosphere we humans need to survive.
Only a major shift in reasoning, with greater commitment given to the rest of life, can meet this greatest challenge of the century. Wildlands are our birthplace. Our civilizations were built from them. Our food and most of our dwellings and vehicles were derived from them. Our gods lived in their midst. Nature in the wildlands is the birthright of everyone on Earth. The millions of species we have allowed to survive there, but continue to threaten, are our phylogenetic kin. Their long-term history is our long-term history. Despite all our pretensions and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world.
Okavango Delta
About 50,000 years ago, an earthquake caused the Okavango River in Southern Africa to crack up and spill into the Kalahari Desert. Thus, in the middle of one of the planet’s driest and loneliest regions, a lush fresh water oasis was created: The Okavango Delta, situated in nowadays Northern Botswana, is one of the world’s largest and last pristine ecosystems. The Delta is home to the Ba’Yei, descendants of the San, who have inhabited the Delta for centuries without impacting its ecological integrity, and to many endangered species according to IUCN, such as giraffes, Ground Hornbills, Wild Dogs, Rhinceros, Lions, to name but a few, and the world’s largest population of elephants. In 2013, the Okavango Delta was declared one of the Seven National Wonders of Africa, in the following years, 2014, UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognizing its “outstanding value to humanity.” It is in fact so naturally beautiful, it’s been dubbed the Garden Of Eden.
In January 2021, the Canadian oil and gas exploration company Reconnaissance Energy Africa started drilling inside a protected wildlife area in northeastern Namibia. ReconAfrica, has acquired exploration licenses valid until January 2023, which cover more than 21,000 square kilometers near the Okavango River. Although the Okavango Delta does not lie within the leased area, it will likely be affected. Pollution from oil and gas drilling – despite ReconAfrica’s contradicting claims – is inevitable, as experience has proven. Once the Okavango River is contaminated, pollution will accumulate in the Okavango Delta, as it has no outlet to the sea.
The drillings come on top of other threats. After years of scant rainfalls, and with commercial water use by farms in Namibia and Angola increasing, water has become scarce, and the Okavango’s water levels have fallen to an all-time low.
kingfisher caught a fish in the Okavango
As any pollution to the Okavango River would directly impact the ecosystem of the Okavango Delta, it would affect not only the Ba’Yei. The delta is the main source of water for the region. The livelihood of the San people of the entire Kalahari is under threat. Another paradise lost.
The world ends twice, Wilson wrote in “Half Earth”, Humanity started with fire, with social gatherings around the campfire 200,000 years ago, with stories told and re-told. And it will end in deadly loneliness – with a second, a final expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Welcome to the Misanthropocene.
“We should forever bear in mind that the beautiful world our species inherited took the biosphere 3.8 billion years to build. The intricacy of its species we know only in part, and the way they work together to create a sustainable balance we have only recently begun to grasp. Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world. Our own ultimate future depends upon that understanding. We have come a very long way through the barbaric period in which we still live, and now I believe we’ve learned enough to adopt a transcendental moral precept concerning the rest of life. It is simple and easy to say: Do no further harm to the biosphere.”
Edward O. Wilson passed away on December 26th 2021 at the age of 92. You can join the call for a moratorium of ReconAfrica’s drillings here
I was born in Vienna, in a grey, treeless quarter close to the main train station. The parallel steel trails cut through the blocks of run-down, four-storey high apartment buildings like a wild ravine, lined with prickly shrubs that bore like berries the trash tossed from the whistling trains, and teeming with wildlife, with rats and martens, and fluttering pigeons. The cobbled streets were thronged with parking cars, and at night, when the street lights lit up like stars, in their yellow light columns I could see from my window the ladies in thigh-high boots smoking cigarettes between red-tipped fingers.
Naturally, when we were little, my sister and I weren’t allowed to play outside. We were confined to our apartment, which we only left for our short way to school, for a shopping trip to the fresh food market clutching my grandmother’s hand, and for the tramway ride to our ballet school in the city centre. But even in our urban seclusion, where the vast world was televised, but not experienced, seasons did not pass unnoticed.
Winters were humming radiators, and school commutes in the dark, and the constriction of winter coats and lined leather boots. Spring was the freedom of light clothing, the bouncy walk in ankle-free slippers, and the morning air soft and warm against our pale cheeks. Summer was the nauseating odour of dog turds baking in the midday sun, and light gauzy curtains flapping in the breeze. Autumn was chills and colds, and icy rain seeping in by the collar of my between-seasons coat. Seasons were a question of outfit.
Yet, I was always aware of this other world called nature, where there were trees and flowers, mountains and rivers, and wild African animals, where there were floods and avalanches, draughts and volcano eruptions. Nature was an abstract word, like war or hunger, which I had never experienced either. And even though nature had a beautiful connotation, something pristine and biblical, like the garden Eden, it was ultimately a place of danger. Nature was wilderness, like the world outside our windows, full of rats and cruising cars, and strange men I must never ever talk to. Safety was an apartment with central heating.
Since this was the only world I had learned to live in, I couldn’t imagine living any other way. As a teenager, I looked down on the country children, who didn’t have the privilege of cinemas, punk concerts and coffee shops. As an adult, my life, a dancer’s life, was strictly indoors.
It was only in my forties that my world changed. On a tour through South Africa, I decided to offer myself a short holiday, and booked, unknowingly, a cabin at a self-sustaining, permaculture farm in the endless, wind-beaten semi-desert of the Karoo. My cabin at the far end of a bumpy dirt road had no address, just GPS data. It had no electricity either. The nights, illuminated by the brilliant Milky Way, were filled with the bawling of baboons and giggling of jackals. The days I spent squatting at the door of my little cabin, staring at the bushes, where weavers were busy building their intricate nests, and koorhaans strutted in the dry grass, displaying their beauty under the yellow Southern sun. It was there, nibbling on a pomegranate, ignored by the weavers and the koorhaans, that I realized I was part of this world. I wasn’t barricading myself, I wasn’t invading anyone’s space. Nature, I felt, welcomed me.
If environment moulds a person, if landscape is imprinted on a child like a native language, then this is what I am: a creature of the urban jungle. The rattling as the tramway passed by below our window was my ocean surf. The light beams of cruising cars running across the ceiling were my meteorites. The flickering blue glow of the windows of the building across the street was my night sky.
Now, in the second half of my life, I redefined my world. I find in the bird song, in the whistling of the wind, in the immensity of the night sky unobscured by light pollution the peace of my child hood home, the night in wilderness as exciting and alluring as the streets below my window. Nature is not a place of good or evil. Nature is home.
High up, where clouds get caught at granite peaks and marmots whistle with the wind, where winters are brutally long and blinding, and summers dangerously close to the sun, there, in the dizzying heights of the Austrian Alps, grows a mythical flower: the flaming pink Alpine Rose.
Together with the better known Enzian and Edelweiss, the Alpine Rose is one of the three iconic flowers of the High Alps – a token of love and proof of bravery when plucked and delivered to a lover waiting down in the village.
The sturdy scrub-like plant exclusively grows between the tree-line and the rocky peak. It’s evergreen and therefore needs the thick protective layer of snow to withstand the freezing temperatures of winter. It flowers for the short period of Alpine summer only, from late June to beginning of August. But when its petals sparkle in the mountain sun like crimson dew, the Alpine Rose is mesmerizing.
Its folkloristic name in the German speaking Eastern Alps is “Almrausch”, which can be translated to: intoxicated by the Alps – an expression that equals the flower to the effect of alcohol or love. In other words: a mountain high. Like drunks or lovers, climbers charmed by the Alpine Rose lose their minds, their heads, and ultimately their lives. Village boys and tourists alike.
In 1871, an especially tragic incident was reported in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Beautiful 19 year-old Luisa Büchlerer fell to her death while plucking Alpine Roses: “She didn’t heed the warnings of the guides”, the paper stated, “nor the calls of strangers, as they implored her not to venture farther, but she moved on, closer to the steep decline, for it’s here that the most beautiful flowers are glowing.”
The Großglockner, Austria’s highest peak at 3800m, seen from behind an Alpine Rose scrub
Its deadly habitat is not the Alpine Rose’s only danger. Rhododendron hirsutum and rhododenron ferrugineum – so the scientific names of the two species found in the Eastern Alps – are considered poisonous. Acetylandromedol found in petals, leaves and stem causes nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, and leads to death as swiftly as a fall from a mountain peak.
Honey from Alpine Roses, on the contrary, is not toxic at all, but a sweet delicatessen. In summer beekeepers relocate their hives to the high alps, knowing that their bees are just as crazy for the blooming Alpine Roses. The honeybees ignore other Alpine flowers to feast on the pink blossoms. Although not wild like its favorite flower, the local Carniolan honeybee is known to be just as resilient in rough climate, but gentle towards the beekeeper.
Aside from lovedrunk boys, hapless tourists and greedy bees, most wanderers shy away from plucking the Alpine Rose. In the old days, the flower was believed to attract thunder and lightning – another deadly trap in high mountains. Not only was it advised to stay away from the pink blossoms, but by no means to bring them home, for the lightning will follow the flowers.
This belief has since been proven untrue – and wanderers are indeed welcome to pluck a few flowers to decorate their homes. Contrary to common belief is not under protection like the Edelweiss or the Enzian. Although differently regulated on a local basis, only its commercial use and trade are forbidden. There are in fact plenty of Alpine Roses in the Alps nowadays. For economic reasons, agriculture in high altitude has dramatically decreased in the past century, and so many alpine pastures have grown wild again and the habitat of Alpine roses again expanded.
As it turns out, the mythical Alpine Rose is neither scarce, nor attracting lightning or thunder, nor especially toxic. Despite being a member of the Rhododendron family – science has long discovered that the Alpine Roses aren’t posionous at all. But why are all these myths so widespread and persistent?
One reason surely lies in the ongoing romanticizing of the Alps. Once, the high mountain riff was inaccessible, a strange and horrid barrier divorcing North from South, and each crossing regarded an act of heroism. Only in the 19th century, with the modernization and industrial growth were the Alps regarded a place for spiritual retreat and recreation, a last enclave of pristine, divine nature in a fast secular world.
You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each assent.
So many are alive who don’t seem to care.
Casual, easy, they move in the world
as though untouched.
But you take pleasurein the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.
You are not dead yet, it’s not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about the Alps in his Book of Hours published in 1905. The Austrian poet found God in the high mountains. Before, in 1779 already, the German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe had found himself in the Alps, as he wrote in his Spirit Song Over the Waters
Down from the lofty rocky wall
Streams the bright flood
Then spreadeth gently in cloudy billows
O’er the smooth rock
Romanticism one way or the other, the Alps are in fact under threat – and it’s only owed to the sturdy resilient nature of its fauna and flora that the fatal effects of climate change are not evident there. Apart from the appalling results of more than 50 years of skiing industry that play a part in the destruction of the pristine Alpine ecosystem.
The Alps die in silence, and neither idealistic poetry nor meditative hiking will save them from climate change. Temperatures have risen by almost 2C within the last 100 years. Glaciers are melting away and permafrost soils of high altitude are thawing.
As for the Alpine creatures, the flowers and the marmots, they have silently moved upwards within the past decades. But for the Alpine Rose to climb any further up, the mountains aren’t high enough.
As of today it’s official: The Austrian Roller is extinct. According to the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research, there are no breeding couples of European Rollers in areas they thrived in only a few decades ago. The death of a species doesn’t come unannounced. For years, NGOs and even the EU have warned of the imminent loss of the strikingly beautiful bird. In vain.
Coracias garrullus was a gregarious bird, as its name suggest, and flamboyantly colored, its turquoise feathers glittering like emeralds. Together with its close relatives, the bee-eater and the kingfisher, it was one of the few birds that brightened up the otherwise monochrome Austrian bird world. The vibrant group’s evolution can be traced back to the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. Yet it took only thirty years to wipe them from their traditional breeding grounds in Eastern Austria.
A European Roller
European Rollers are loyal to their homes. They return from their South African wintering grounds with unbelievable exactitude – a field, a bush, or a tree the monogamous bird and their mating partner will defend as their territory. If they come back, that is, for this year only non-breeders made their way home.
Fallow grassland in Hungary, where rollers still are abundant.
The bird’s patriotism has not been reciprocated by Austria. Intensive agriculture has eaten away their habitat – there are hardly any shrubs left, bushes or fallow grasslands the rollers need as hunting grounds. Dramatic drop in insect population due to wide spread use of pesticides and the fierce weather condition of the past five to ten years has further reduced chances of survival for the young. Finally, add illegal bird hunting in the Mediterranean – their migration route – to the equation. Life was in deed tough on Rollers.
A lonely kingfisher – the last one of its kind in Vienna…
Despite their challenges, Austrian Rollers stayed picky when it came to mating. They didn’t mingle. DNA research suggests that Austrians never even interbred with their next cousins in neighboring Hungary. But as Austrians they should have known better. The history of Austria and Habsburg Empire has proved: incest leads to decreased adaptability and ultimately extinction. The Austrian royal family practically eliminated themselves by means of genetic deficiency.
Sadly, the current Austrian government not only denies a nation’s need for diversity, but climate change as a whole. European Rollers won’t be the last species we will loose.
To be fair, it is not only in Austria that European Rollers have gone extinct. The birds no longer breed in Scandinavia, Russia and Germany. While their numbers are declining in North Eastern Europe, in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria they are still very common, in countries like Italy or France even increasing – due to conservation efforts like the installation of nest boxes or collaborative programs with farmers.
In Eastern Austria. Rollers and farmers aren’t nemesis. The former actually needs the latter as farmers dig up the beetles for them. It’s industrialized agriculture and the use of pesticides that’s the problem.
In 2015, Birdlife Austria issued a statement demanding immediate action. Rollers, as well as the buntings and shrikes, are under imminent threat of extinction. The NGO pointed towards € 40million that were provided by the EU for Austrian conservation programs but were never put to action. No single politician found the strength to stand up against agricultural lobbies in Austria. The reasons for this lack of political will or courage lie in the conservative make up of Austrian society. Agriculture symbolizes traditional values that, especially in the rural communities, still go unchallenged in Austria.
The red-backed shrike, once common, is also near extinct in Austria.
In 2013, the Albertina, one of Vienna’s most prestigious museums, lent Albrecht Dürer’s highly acclaimed water color Wing of A European Roller to the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It is one of the major nature studies in Art History.
In 2012, Birdlife International called for political action as there are only six breeding pairs of Rollers in Austria left.
In 2010, because the bird was so beautiful and oh so rare – only breeding in one little community in Burgenland, Eastern Austria – the Republic issued a stamp celebrating the bird.
In 2008, the European Union issued the Species Action Plan with the goal to restore the European population of rollers to a favorable conservation status.
In 2005, Birdlife international changed the status of European Rollers from LC – least concern – to NT: near threatened.
In 1520, Albrecht Dürer painted the Wing Of A European Roller. The bird is abundant in Europe and the painter mesmerized by its beauty.
Epilogue:
Please visit the Albertina in 2019, when from September on, the Wing Of A European Roller will be back to Vienna and on display in a special exhibition about Albrecht Dürer’s nature studies. Can’t say Austria doesn’t value its treasures. It practically excels in the art of preservation.
The reason why the wanderwarbler is quite enraged by the extinction of the roller is not only but also that contrary to what the name suggests, the bird in the logo is actually a European Roller.
What a frenzy in the air! With flying colors, the gregarious bee-eaters have returned from their Southern African winter domiciles and are busy setting up shop in Austria. Using their beaks for digging and legs for kicking, they carve tunnels of up to two meter length in the soft sandstone near lake Neusiedl.
A bee-eater leaving home for the hunt. The bigger holes are bird’s nesting chambers, the smaller ones bees’. What neighborhood…
Bee-eaters are fast flyers. Spotting their insect prey from a distance of up to 60m they shoot like bullets through the air for the kill. Bees might be their preferred diet, but bee-eaters will do with any flying insect. They will however never eat from the floor. They have manners after all. They are social creatures.
taking a plunge
The divorce rate among bee-eaters is low. Once a bee-eater found their mate, they will most likely stay together for years to come. Traditionally courtship ends with the presentation of a gift – not surprisingly a bee, or even a dragonfly – and then the bride leaves her family to move in with her in-laws. This is when all the trouble begins.
Prey is presented as a gift – or robbed- some individuals speialize in kleptoparasitism.
In-laws rarely have an interest in grandchildren. Rather, they want to have more children themselves and – since hunting is so demanding a business – they are in need of baby sitters, not grandkids. The in-laws will harass the newly weds and keep them from procreating mainly by blocking them access to their nesting chamber. To keep the peace, the young couple often obeys, delaying their own egg-laying for a few years.
The bride however, will feel short-changed. She left her own family for the groom after all. So she comes up with a scheme: She sneaks in with a completely different family, trespassing territory lines, and demands intercourse with a male. Upon return, she secretly lays her own eggs into her mother-in-law’s nesting chamber. She’s not scrupulous – without a flinch she will discard of already laid eggs. Yet, she must time her actions well – if her off-spring hatches too early or too late, they are doomed as well. The mother in law will know no mercy. Family – can’t choose them.
