Richard Leakey, biodiversity and gloom

Came across an interesting article today by Richard Leakey. It seems that the South African government have now put elephant culls back on the agenda and seem set to reintroduce them (having banned them in the nineties). In one sense the conservation project with the elephants worked too well.

Now Leakey is a paleontologist. I may be doing him a dis-service here, and if so I apologise, but he's not a scientifically trained paleontologist. He learned everything from his parents, who worked the Olduvai gorge in Kenya for many years in the first half of the twentieth century and turned up Homo Erectus, Australapithicus Robustus and in no small way contributed to the knowledge of how rich the 'bush' of early human evolution was. Richard made his contribution to the knowledge about human evolution over a number of years during the 50's and 60's until going on to become Director of Wildlife for the Kenyan Government. (I have a suspicion he just does the lecture circuit now.) Now Leakey gained a bit of a reputation for being bull headed about his own theories of human evolution (I think he was just miffed over Johanson's discovery of australapithicus afarensis, 'Lucy', and the ensuing accolades) and about wildlife in general and it was interesting to see how the old tub thumper had mellowed :)

His article was suggesting that, perhaps, a cull might be necessary.

Now, obviously, as a non-human, I don't think humans have the right to manage the planet for their own benefit, which is, in effect, what the proposed cull is all about. Humans are encroaching more and more on elephant territory, as populations increase, and elephants are being forced into far smaller areas than can sustain them. This means that they end up destroying the area in which they do live to the detriment of other wildlife in the area and ultimately to themselves. If elephants cannot 'roam', they end up turning the environment into a desert and Africa has a big enough problem with desertification as it is!

What was interesting, perhaps much more than the article itself, which tried to take a balanced view, although I fear Leakey was gently sobbing as he wrote it, were the comments. They broadly fell into three camps. Those who reluctantly agreed with Leakey's analysis, those who were opposed to the cull for the same reasons that this penguin is - nothing gives you the right despite what you believe your God may have said in an unguarded moment, off the record, and those who had veered so far towards misanthropy that enforced sterilisation or 'human culling' were being put into the mix, although there weren't an awful lot of them who actually lived in Africa!

It seems to this penguin that this is just another example of the perennial problem 'Man' will always face . Most, if not all, of the creatures on the planet evolved to deal with situations in which man was not present. You are a recent addition to the daily roll call of species. Perhaps less than 40,000 years. Evolution, except in rare cases, does not move so fast. None of us, restricted to natural selection, as we are, can evolve fast enough to deal with you, with a few notable exceptions. The rat, the 'urban' fox, the magpie, although they are largely pre-adaptations. The niche they evolved into has certain similarities with the niches you create. And so they prosper.

But then how does man react? Is it possible to find a route through the morass you have created? In the end, this penguin thinks not. In the end, man will take the product of billions of years of evolution and turn it into little more than a concrete jungle punctuated by the occasional biodiversity theme park. One of the things that Ridley Scott left out of his version of 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' (Blade Runner) was the idea that only human constructed 'animals', using genetic engineering, were possible. Naturally occurring animals had long since died out. One of the most poignant parts of the book is where the narrator of the book thinks he has discovered a real animal, only to later discover it has a 'signature' of its maker. It is a dreary thought, but one which I think will come to fruition. Hopefully not in my lifetime, nor 'little Fricka's' but what an inheritance I leave my daughter and her chicks!