East African Game at Risk

Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times columnist, is in East Africa. In a recent column, he wrote of Kenya's Masai Mara, "Surely of all of God's creations, none is more beautiful than the Masai Mara grassland...The sun's ascent here is like a curtain going up on one of Mother Nature's richest ecosystems. Through the day you can be greeted by a bull elephant in hot pursuit of a cow, serenaded by tropical boubou birds, intimidated by two lionesses devouring a warthog, amused by the cattle egrets riding on the backs of African buffalos and impressed by how each small cluster of topi antelope 'assigns' one topi to watch for predators while the others graze. Everything seems in perfect balance."

I have never been to Kenya, but I have been to Tanzania's great national game parks: Serengeti, Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro Crater and Tarangiri and came away with the same impression. But that was nearly 11 years and, as Friedman notes, "behind the curtain" things were not so great -- and they haven't gotten any better.

He points to deforestation, wildlife poaching and "now climate change [that] present a trio of threats" to the Mara and also to the Tanzanian parks that my family and I visited. A Boulder friend who visited East Africa last summer came back with terrible tales of drought and desperation. This year appears to be no better, as the equatorial region continues to become dryer and the once-reliable rains no longer are so.

Kenya's rhinoceros population has plummeted from 20,000 in 1963 to 500 today. Friedman quotes Julius Kipng'etich, director of Kenya's wildlife service, saying, "When you see a rhino today, you are very lucky. Your children or grandchildren may never see one." We were lucky to see three of the fewer than two dozen rhinos known in Tanzania when we visited. We drove around and around Ngorongoro Crater, with our sharp-eyed driver-guide who spotted them in the grass at least a quarter of a mile from our Land Rover. With strong binoculars, we could just spot them slowly rising up from the grass. When I later saw one at the Denver Zoo, I put it into context of my own then-recent travels.

Friedman pointed out that Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of the emissions that contribute to global warming, yet its fragile and threatened ecosystems suffer from the problems caused by the developed world. "You [industrial countries] are causing aggression toward us by causing global warming," Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni said at the African Union summit recently.

Drought, famine, disease and death will increase upon Africa's human population. The animals that we travel so far to see in their native habitats are already fall to that fate.