Changing

A new film highlights the plight of rhinos in Africa as it explores how two people from the same circumstances, community, and even the same family can end up on opposite sides of the war against poaching.

Humanity’s remarkable ability to self-destruct is one of the most inexplicable yet enduring paradoxes of life. We are perhaps the only species endowed with the capacity to understand nature yet so desperately poor at managing it.

The rapid expansion of small-scale farming in wildlife-rich and ecologically sensitive areas is one of the leading threats to biodiversity in the fertile wetlands of Tanzania’s southern breadbasket — and across the African continent.

“Ngarkuwa.” This was the title bestowed on Manfred Aimé Epanda by Cameroon’s Tchamba chiefdom. Epanda, African Wildlife Foundation’s Cameroon country coordinator, has devoted the last two decades of his career to community conservation in his native Cameroon.

Unlike the slaughter of elephants and rhinos by poachers, the collapse of Africa’s giraffes has been quiet and overlooked. In only 30 years, continental numbers have plummeted by 40 percent. Recent population and distribution assessments of some subspecies paint a grim picture. Both Kordofan and Nubian giraffes were just upgraded to a critically endangered status on IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species — altogether only approximately 4,650 mature individuals survive.

With fewer than 300 mountain gorillas remaining in the 1980s, the birth of a baby was a huge victory for the rangers and conservation experts dedicated to protecting this critically endangered great ape in its natural habitat. They bestowed the newborn mountain gorilla with a name inspired by the circumstances of the birth, mirroring an age-old naming tradition embedded in Rwanda’s cultural tapestry.

As the largest of all land mammals, African elephants play an important role in balancing natural ecosystems. They trample forests and dense grasslands, making room for smaller species to co-exist. Elephants also create water holes used by other wildlife as they dig dry riverbeds when rainfall is low. Herds travel over vast rangelands, and they disperse seeds in their dung, which helps generate new green growth.

Space to roam. It is a must for the world’s largest land animal, but across the transboundary Kilimanjaro landscape straddling Kenya’s southern border — known for its sizeable elephant population — that roaming space is becoming harder to find.