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This could be Sudan’s last gambit in the time of space science and death of species

Thursday March 15 2018
By ELSIE EYAKUZE

Sudan, the last male northern white rhino living at the Ol Pejeta Ranch in northern Kenya, got ill last week.

In spite of the very best efforts of in vitro fertilisation attempts, it looks like our big guy is going to pass on without leaving any viable progeny behind, despite having two “wives.”

Folks, the world is down to three Northern White Rhinos. We are literally going to witness, in real-time, the death of a species. What a time to be alive, eh?

We all know about him because Sudan is a big old mammal and that is endearing compared to the assortment of weirdo creepy crawlies that inhabit the Amazon, or the ocean, most of which are nightmare material.

The sensational film of 2018, Black Panther, featured superb battle rhinos... not battle Kihansi Spray Toads. Or, what could have been a very interesting twist they might have included “Africanised” bee squads... imagine the commentary that would have generated.

And yet extinctions are happening at an alarming rate all over the world. We’re in the middle of a period of mass extinction so severe that biologists and ecologists the world over have sunk into a pessimism that is generally uncommon in scientists.

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Unfortunately for us all, the opportunity to do anything about this loss of biodiversity is narrow. But it is a cost of development that we maybe don’t talk about nearly enough in our public dialogues on what the future looks like.

We are lucky, especially in East Africa, to have been able to keep so much of our wildlife. It is true that the format is very particular — how “natural” are game reserves and national parks, all things considered.

Still, they have worked not only to shelter animals and the landscape but we have also managed to exploit it rather nicely to generate massive amounts of revenue.

Yet there are in all our countries stories of conflict between human needs and those of the protected landscape.

Usually they are framed in terms of how humans are encroaching on land they shouldn’t be to farm or to get firewood, make charcoal, hunt and poach.

All the human needs we carefully have to keep out of our tourist brochures to maintain the idea that pristine nature is nature that is devoid of people. And that development is big and hard and generally devoid of nature, a concrete jungle.

Considering the projections for population growth on the continent, there is no way that the so-called competition for resources with “nature” is not going to intensify immensely in the next few years.

Every so often someone speaks up and asks if national parks are a good idea and how can we “privilege” animals over human beings.

It is a fair question, if you look at nature as something we need to either exploit or compete against. I find it very hard, however, to imagine that it makes sense: How can we be independent of “nature” when we are simply part of the biosphere?

The exploitation/competition mindset has led us to where we are — no more Northern White Rhinos. No more lots of creatures, and landscapes, et cetera. To give credit where credit is due, this is absolutely the fault of the overconsuming “developed” world.

The ecological footprint of the United States alone extends so far beyond its borders that it is hard not to make obesity jokes about it. It makes the very idea of building a useless wall to keep Mexicans out ironic on so many levels.

Surely we can learn from their mistakes. Surely we can aggressively adopt green technology and integrate nature in our development plans while thinking of a future that decidedly rejects the overly-urbanised western model of what prosperity looks like.

Its not like we haven’t got a head start- we still have plenty of nature, room to expand, a sense of rural life, countries like Rwanda which are pioneering green techs, Nairobi which literally has a game park right inside it, et cetera. If anywhere in the world was designed to embrace solar power, it is Africa.

Realistically, just to be on the safe side, we should probably consider collecting as much genetic material from what nature we still have left in case we do make the same mistakes the developed world did.

We might be able to recreate Northern White Rhinos and everything else that we extinguished pursuing this strange future we are trying to build.

Elsie Eyakuze is a consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: [email protected]

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