https://archive.ph/bBVWv
"The young tracker stopped abruptly, putting a finger to his lips to signal
that nobody should move. Through the half light of the thick forest, a small
herd of elephants appeared before gliding past.
Later, after wading through swamps and slipping on muddy banks, we came upon
gorillas eating fruit on a patch of marshland. A great silverback fixed us with
a glare, shrugged his shoulders and continued the feast.
Gabon’s equatorial rainforest, which covers 85 per cent of the country, boasts
the largest populations of gorillas and forest elephants in the world. It is a
rich environment where plants and animal species are still being discovered.
Barely a decade ago, it was feared this abundance, a crucial part of the much
larger Congo Basin rainforest, the second largest in the world after the
Amazon, would be destroyed by 2020.
Back then visitors would more likely have stumbled upon elephant carcasses with
great empty chasms where their fine ivory tusks — pinker and more valued than
those of plains elephants — had been gouged out with chainsaws.
Poaching, illegal logging, gold mining and bushmeat hunters all threatened its
future. But the forest found a timely, albeit unlikely, saviour in the form of
“playboy” President Ali Bongo Ondimba, an enigmatic figure who took over from
his father Omar Bongo who ruled for 42 years until 2009.
The Sorbonne and Harvard-educated president with a penchant for the good life,
particularly Rolls-Royce cars, boats and champagne, once told The Times that
his challenge was to convince “my people that a tree left living is more
valuable than a tree cut down; an animal left alive is more valuable than one
dead”.
Growing up as the son of one of Africa’s longest-serving dictators, he spent
many months alone in presidential retreats deep in the forest, he said. “I had
few friends except the animals. I thought everyone had them at the bottom of
the garden.”
The man he chose to help him was a British-born zoologist. Professor Lee White,
a soft-spoken Mancunian of Scottish ancestry, had come to Gabon as a student in
1989 and stayed on because it was a zoologist’s dream. First, he became
director of the national parks agency. Today, he is minister of the environment
and maritime affairs."
Via
Future Crunch Sep 12, 2022:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-measles-indonesia-conservation-us-solar-europe/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
