Deforestation + climate change = dead end for wildlife and not only

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Deforestation + climate change = dead end for wildlife and not only

Post by Lisbeth »

2019-07-09 13:58

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Videographic on deforestation. The rate of deforestation in the Amazon, which slowed dramatically from 2004 to 2012, surged again in January, according to conservation group Imazon.

Climate change combined with galloping tropical deforestation is cutting off wildlife from life-saving cooler climes, heightening the risk of extinction, researchers said on Monday.

Less than two-fifths of forests across Latin America, Asia and Africa currently allow for animals and plants to avoid potentially intolerable increases in temperature, they reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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An aerial view over a chemically deforested area of the Amazon jungle caused by illegal mining activities in the river basin of the Madre de Dios region in southeast Peru. (Cris Bouroncle, AFP)

"The loss of tropical forests between 2000 and 2012 led to an area larger than India losing the capacity to protect species from the effects of climate change," lead author Rebecca Senior, a professor at the University of Sheffield, told AFP.

"Not only does forest loss remove habitat directly, it also makes it harder for species to move."

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Sharp rise in Amazon deforestation in Brazil under Bolsonaro

The lack of escape routes to cooler habitats means that warming "will likely result in national and global extinction of vulnerable species," she added.

At current rates of climate change, animals and plants moving to the least heat-ravaged spots accessible today would, on average, be exposed by 2070 to an environment 2.7°C hotter than during the second half of the 20th century, the study found.

Even under a best-case scenario in which humanity caps global warming at 2°C - an increasingly unlikely prospect - species in tropical regions would still see a jump of 0.8°C by that date.

Extreme fragmentation

The 2015 Paris climate treaty enjoins nations to hold warming to "well below" 2°C.

Last year, the UN climate science panel concluded that even this threshold would not prevent severe impacts, such as the loss of shallow-water coral reefs, which anchor a quarter of marine life.

A single degree of warming since the industrial revolution has already boosted the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and tropical storms.

Animal and plant species have always moved up or down mountains, towards or away from the poles, or into cooler or warmer waters when faced with shifts in climate.

But rarely has climate change been so rapid, and never has it been combined with extreme habitat fragmentation.

"Tropical species are particularly sensitive to temperature change," Senior said. "Most are found nowhere else on Earth, and make up a huge proportion of global biodiversity."

Scores of studies have shown how rising temperatures have forced fauna and flora to adapt their behaviour in ways that curtain their ability to collect food, reproduce or both.

Some 550 species - more than half already threatened with extinction - are listed as vulnerable to droughts and temperature extremes on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List.

Nail in the coffin

They include mammals such at red-handed howler monkeys, jaguars and giant otters.

Amphibians - already besieged globally by mysterious pathogens - are especially vulnerable.

"They are highly specialised to particular habitats, can't move very far, and are very sensitive to overheating and drying out," Senior pointed out.

"This is another nail in their coffin."

Higher temperatures force some tropical hummingbirds to seek shade rather than forage, testing their capacity to adapt.

Other research has documented species decline and loss due to forest loss and fragmentation, which has created islands of primary forest hemmed in by palm oil plantations, biofuel crops, cattle ranches and the soyabean crops used to feed livestock.

An area of tropical forest five times the size of England - some 600 000km2 - has been destroyed since 2014, according to Global Forest Watch, a research unit at the University of Maryland.

The new study, however, is the first to investigate the interaction between tropical habitat loss and climate change on a global scale over more than a decade.


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Re: Deforestation + climate change = dead end for wildlife

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The 'lungs of the planet' are in danger of reaching a tipping point that could turn the Amazon rainforest into a savannah

Aylin Woodward , Business Insider US
Jul 31, 2019, 09:36 AM


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Aerial view of Amazon rainforest deforestation and farm management for livestock. Acre State, Brazil. (Photo by Ricardo Funari/Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images)

- In July, the total amount of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest broke its previous one-month record, according to data from Brazilian satellites.

- About three football fields' worth of rainforest per minute are being lost, primarily to infrastructure projects, logging, mining, and farming - much of which is not legally permitted.

- Scientists warn that if the deforestation passes a certain threshold, the Amazon may never recover. In that case, it could become a savannah.


In the month of July, the Amazon has lost 1,345 square kilometres of rainforest. That's an area more than twice the size of Tokyo.

It's a record for the most deforestation in the Amazon in a single month, The Guardian reported. Data from Brazilian satellites indicates that about three football fields' worth of Amazonian trees are falling every minute. The total area of deforestation is up 39% from July 2018.

As the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon plays a crucial role in keeping our planet's carbon-dioxide levels in check. Plants and trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen back into the air in their process of photosynthesis. This is why the Amazo is often referred to as the "lungs of the planet." It's also the reason that the Amazon's health is so important in the face of climate change.

What's more, at least 400 indigenous tribes live in the rainforest, and their cultures and livelihoods are intimately linked with the state of the Amazon.

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A drainage pond sits at a tin mine in a deforested section of the Amazon rainforest on June 26, 2017 near Itapua do Oeste, Brazil.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

Brazil controls a lion's share of the Amazon. However, its president, Jair Bolsonaro, has indicated that protecting the rainforest is not one of his top priorities - Bolsonaro supports development projects like a highway and hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.

What's more, between January and May of this year, the Brazilian government lowered the number of fines it levied for illegal deforestation and mining (down 34% from the same period in 2018) and decreased its monitoring of illegal activity in the rainforest. Seizures of illegally harvested timber have also dropped: Under the previous administration, 883,000 cubic feet (25,000 cubic metres) of illegal timber was seized in 2018. As of May 15, Bolsonaro's government agencies had only seized 1,410 cubic feet (40 cubic metres), Pacific Standard reported.

The Amazon could hit a tipping point

In the past 50 years, roughly 20% of the Amazon has been cut down in Brazil, according to the Intercept.

Bolsonaro's administration has worked to loosen protections on natural land reserves. One of his first policy changes was to transfer the authority to certify indigenous lands as protected areas from Brazil's FUNAI (the National Indian Foundation) to its Ministry of Agriculture. The change has since been reversed, however, due to protests and pushback from native communities.

If another 20% of the Amazon were to disappear, that could trigger a feedback loop known as a dieback, in which the forest dries out and burns. Once this dieback starts, the forest would be "beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret," according to the Intercept. That would cause the Amazon to devolve into a savannah-like landscape.

This tipping point would not only lead to the end of the Amazon as we know it; the process would also cause up to 140 billion tons of stored carbon to get released into the atmosphere, causing an uptick in global temperatures.

'Bolsonaro is the worst thing that could happen for the environment'

Bolsonaro is a climate-science skeptic: Last year, he threatened to withdraw Brazil from the Paris climate agreement. He also believes that an excess of protected land has hampered Brazil's economic development.

"There is no point sugar-coating it. Bolsonaro is the worst thing that could happen for the environment," Paulo Artaxo, a climate-change researcher at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, told Science prior to Bolsonaro's election.

During his campaign, Bolsonaro promised to dilute existing environmental protections on Amazonian land and to open up indigenous reserves to industry. In February, Bolsonaro's administration announced an umbrella project called Barão do Rio Branco, which includes the construction of a hydroelectric dam, a bridge over the Amazon River, and an extension to an existing highway.

In March, Bolsonaro's administration started opening swaths of indigenous lands to mining projects. The Brazilian president has also announced plans to remove environmental protections from a chunk of forested land south of Rio de Janeiro in order to created "a Cancún of Brazil," The Guardian reported.

When Brazil's National Institute for Space Research released the satellite data about the country's deforestation, Bolsonaro said the results were "a lie," Reuters reported.

"With all the devastation you accuse us of doing and having done in the past, the Amazon would be extinguished already," the Brazilian president said.

But Marcelino Da Silva, a member of Brazil's indigenous Apurinã tribe, told the Intercept that he is indeed seeing giant chunks of the Amazon vanish.

"We know what happens when the state does nothing," Da Silva said. "We know how quickly the forest can disappear."


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Re: Deforestation + climate change = dead end for wildlife and not only

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And everything is money driven 0*\


Next trip to the bush??

Let me think......................
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Re: Deforestation + climate change = dead end for wildlife and not only

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The whole system is these days, but there ought to be some exemptions driven by moral or ethic sentiments towards the rest of humanity and our common survival 0*\


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Re: Deforestation + climate change = dead end for wildlife and not only

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We've killed off more than 50% of forest animals on Earth, a new report found — even more evidence of a 6th mass extinction

Morgan McFall-Johnsen , Business Insider US
Aug 21, 2019, 05:26 PM


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Bengal tigers are endangered — about 2,500 remain in the wild. They face threats from poaching and sea-level rise in the mangrove forests in which they live | Getty Images/Justin Sullivan

- Forest animal populations worldwide have declined 53% since 1970, according to a recent analysis from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

- Forests are our "greatest natural ally in the fight against global warming," Susanne Winter, a program director at the WWF, told EcoWatch. But forests can't function without animals.

- The rapid decline of forest animal populations is yet another sign that the planet is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.


Earth's forests are emptying.

Half of their inhabitants have disappeared in the last 40 years, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The report tracked populations of 268 species of forest-dwelling birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles worldwide between 1970 and 2014 (the most recent year for which data is available). The results showed that forest animal populations have declined by 53% worldwide, and humans are to blame.

More than 80% of all terrestrial animal, plant, and insect species call forests home. However, a combination of habitat destruction, hunting, the spread of invasive species, climate change, and disease are killing off forest animals, the researchers said.

Without those animals, forests can't perform the functions we rely on, since animals pollinate forest plants, disperse seeds, and nourish the soil with their waste.

"Forests depend on an intact animal world to perform functions essential to life," Susanne Winter, a program director at the WWF, told EcoWatch.

Forests help us fight climate change

One of the most critical roles forests play is in mitigating climate change. Trees suck enormous amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air and embed the carbon in their wood and the soil. A recent study found that planting new trees over an area the size of the US could suck away two-thirds of all the carbon dioxide emissions that humans have pumped into the atmosphere.

"Without animals, it is harder for forests to absorb carbon, as tree species important for protecting the climate could be lost without animals," Winter said.

In South America and Africa, for example, many of the tree species that absorb the most carbon rely on large birds and primates to eat their fruits and spread their large seeds, according to the report. Without them, those trees would have difficulty reproducing and forests would lose their best carbon-storing trees.

"Forests are our greatest natural ally in the fight against global warming," Winter said. "If we want to reverse the worldwide decline in biodiversity and prevent the climate crisis, we need to protect the forests and the species living there."

Forests also filter water - as water makes its way to reservoirs or groundwater reserves, the roots and soil in forests separate it from sediment and pollution that it collects along the way. What's more, forests regulate the global water cycle, since trees' leaves, branches, and roots store or release water vapor.

Climate models show that deforestation in Central Africa could lead to a 15% drop in rainfall in the US Midwest, and Amazon deforestation could cut Texas rainfall by 25%.

Humans also get food, wood, and medicine from the abundance of plants and animals in forests. Worldwide, 1.6 billion people rely on forests for their livelihoods, including 70 million indigenous people, according to the United Nations. About 300 million people live in forests, according to WWF.

The Earth's 6th mass extinction

A growing body of evidence suggests that the Earth is in the middle of a mass extinction event - the sixth of its kind in the planet's history.

More than 27% of all assessed species on the planet are threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. Currently, 40% of the planet's amphibians, 25% of its mammals, 14% of its birds, and 33% of its coral reefs are threatened. A February study found that 40% of the world's insect species are in decline.

Human activity, specifically deforestation and greenhouse-gas emissions, are to blame: Overall, extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than they would be if humans weren't around, according to a 2014 study.

The new WWF report highlights the impacts of human activity on forests specifically. According to the research, the disappearance or degradation of forests accounts for 60% of the threats to forest animals. Animal populations have suffered the most in tropical forests, which are home to 75% of the declining species analyzed in the report. Those forests support over half of the species on all of Earth's land.

Worldwide, humans have cleared 30% of all forest cover, according to the World Resources Institute. The planet has lost 9% of its tree cover since 2000.

Hunting, too, is a major culprit for declining animal populations - more than half of the species threatened by over-hunting, according to the report, are African primates, since they're hunted in the bushmeat trade. In total, the researchers found that 40 of the 112 primate species analyzed were threatened by over-hunting.

Climate change poses the third big threat to forest animals. Many forest species are struggling to adapt to rising temperatures and more extreme weather. For example, more frequent droughts threaten Asian elephants, which rely on daily access to fresh water. And rising sea levels destroy coastal habitat, adding stress to already threatened species like the Bengal tiger.

Meanwhile, bird populations in the western Amazon have dwindled since 2001, likely because of the area's unusually high rainfall, the WWF researchers suspect. Dry conditions in other parts of the Amazon have increased the risk of severe wildfires.

Humans also move invasive species across the globe, and the newcomers can take over ecosystems and gobble up resources that sustain native animals. Invasive species are the second biggest driver of extinction worldwide, according to the IUCN. They're the primary cause of island extinctions, since many rare species are only found on one island or archipelago.

Most forest animals face multiple threats from this list, the report found.

The report doesn't capture the full extent of the problem - but there is still hope

The WWF analysis isn't comprehensive: It took the most thorough look at bird and mammal populations in Europe and North America. Over half of the species in the report are from the Americas, while less than 10% of known species in other forest regions were represented. Africa had the fewest species analyzed in the report.

According to the authors, these gaps are due to a lack of data, so they called for more efforts to monitor wildlife populations in underrepresented forests.

"The first step towards protecting threatened wildlife is understanding trends in their populations and what drives their decline," Louise McRae, a conservation scientist and a co-author of the report, said in a release.

The team also suggested that animal populations should be considered an important measure of a forest's health

Helping forest animals avoid extinction is not as simple as planting more trees, the report added, since it can take decades for animal populations to recover even after tree cover gets replaced. Additionally, since most animals face more than one threat, efforts to save them require more than one approach.

Mountain gorilla numbers, for example, are finally on the rise due to decades of conservation work in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That's thanks to a multi-faceted strategy that involves "engagement with the local community, daily anti-poaching and anti-snare patrols, veterinary care, regulated eco-tourism and effective law enforcement," the report authors wrote.

Scientists once thought the mountain gorillas would be extinct by 2000, but the most recent estimates suggest there are over 1,000 of them worldwide.

"In order to reverse the decline of forest biodiversity, it is crucial to address the multiple pressures on forest species," the report authors wrote. But with the right strategies, they said, "the recovery of forest species populations is possible."


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Re: Deforestation + climate change = dead end for wildlife and not only

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OUR BURNING PLANET

The way of the white lion: Sacred sites as shock therapy for the broken natural world

By Kevin Bloom• 23 August 2019

The world’s leading natural and climate scientists, in reports that are dropping at the rate of two a month, are telling us to look to indigenous wisdom if we want to leave our children an inhabitable planet. But what do these scientists mean? An international gathering in the Timbavati white lion reserve, framed around the indigenous concept of sacred sites, has unearthed what ecologists, lawyers and activists think could well be an answer.

I. Vusamazulu

“If you can visualise hell on earth,” said the indigenous healer in the black and red cloth, “that is what our governing structures have created with the king of all animals.”

The healer’s name was Linda Tucker, CEO and founder of the Global White Lion Protection Trust, and it was generally accepted that she had received her calling back in November 1991, when she was rescued from a pride of lions by a Shangaan medicine woman known as “the Lion Queen of Timbavati”. The near-death experience, recounted in her book Mystery of the White Lions, had prompted Tucker to return to Timbavati to be initiated into a tradition that was a universe removed from the marketing and fashion circles in which she had already made a name. Now, almost 30 years later, she was here — convening an international gathering of scientists, activists, healers, indigenous leaders and human rights lawyers to address the related crises of social injustice and collapse of the natural world.

Among the groupings that were supporting the conference were the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Colombia, who had lived in seclusion since the Spanish conquests of the 1500s, emerging in the 1990s to appear in a celebrated BBC documentary that warned industrialised society of the potentially disastrous consequences of its extractive ways. A key figure that hung over the conference was Polly Higgins, a Scottish barrister who — until her death in April 2019 — had campaigned to have ecocide recognised by the International Criminal Court. In all, the gathering was a coming together of the deeply esoteric and the demonstrably concrete, a merging of ancient and modern, unknown and known, in service of a planet on life support.

For Tucker, the esoteric part was anchored in the visions and prophecies of Baba Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa, the great wisdom keeper of Africa and her former instructor, who’d taught her that the Timbavati region on the western border of the Kruger National Park had been acknowledged as a sacred site long before the latter had been declared a reserve for wildlife in 1926. Mutwa’s teaching, backed up by indigenous members of the local Tsonga and Sepedi communities, was that the white lions were a divine species, their presence a harbinger of the time when humanity would either bow to the primacy of nature or go extinct. On the day that the last of Timbavati’s white lions was shot, or so the prophecy went, the fate of humanity would be sealed.

The part of science was contained in the fact that Timbavati’s white lions, like all remaining lions of the region, were integral to the Kruger-to-Canyons Biosphere, the third-largest biosphere reserve in the world. Jason Turner, a specialist lion ecologist, would explain to the gathering how the lions of Timbavati exerted their influence through a scientific discovery known as “trophic cascading,” a process whereby each subordinate layer of the ecosystem benefited from the presence of the capstone animal. According to Turner, the classic example was the North American wolf, which after its reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 had restored the entire ecosystem, down to the path and flow of the rivers.

Yet in South Africa, even though the full effect on the biosphere had yet to be worked out, the authorities were wilfully oblivious to the lion’s place and role.

“The only value that government is seeing for these lions is as skeletons for the lion bone trade,” said Tucker. “The same lions that were hugged as babies by tourists are the ones that are being sent to slaughterhouses, having been starved to death.”

By way of hard data on this slaughter, Turner would reference the nexus between the 300 or so captive breeding operations in South Africa and the country’s standing as the largest legal exporter of lion bones and skeletons in the world — a scenario that had resulted in the issuing of upwards of 5,300 export permits between 2008 and 2015, 98% of which were for Laos and Vietnam. The global population of wild lion, which had vanished from 95% of its historic range, plummeting from 200,000 in the early twentieth century to somewhere around 20,000 in 2018, now faced this new threat too. Where the demand for tiger bone had contributed to the decimation of wild tiger populations in Asia, the new fear of conservationists was that its replacement in the market by lion bone would (along with further habitat loss and trophy hunting) drive the African cats to extinction by 2050.

What’s more, there was zero evidence, according to Tucker and Turner, that the revenues generated from canned hunting and the lion bone trade would work to preserve the species. As for the white lion, while there were hundreds in captivity, there were less than 13 individuals left in the Timbavati wilds, their only natural home. Which all explained why, in her presentations to Parliament of August 2018 and February 2019, addressing a controversial hunting and benefit-sharing agreement between the Kruger National Park and the adjacent private reserves, Tucker spoke for the indigenous view.

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“Today we propose that the solution requires important and radical shifts toward a new pioneering conservation model,” she said, “which is ultimately more African, as well as being more international.”

What she meant by that was articulated in the statement of the National Khoisan Council for Parliamentary Inquiry, a cry that echoed the pain of indigenous communities all the way from the vanishing rainforests of South America to the thawing tundra of the Arctic north:

You speak of stakeholders in the new Kruger deal.
Who are these so-called stakeholders?
Have the First Nations been consulted?
Have the animals been asked?
Have the plants, the rivers, the earth given their consent?
Has the lion, king and primary stakeholder in service to all creation, given authorisation for this new Kruger deal?
We have already said in Parliament:
If you kill the lion, you kill the Bushman people.’
And now let it be recorded:
‘If you kill the white lion, you kill South Africa.’


II. Mupo

Like Tucker, before speaking as anything else, Mpatheleni Makaulule spoke as a healer, a human being in service of her ancestors, her people, the rains and the soil. As a young girl, the eleventh of 24 children, she was given the name “Pangami,” which refers to the work of the shepherd, or the one who “leads from behind”. Makaulule was also a “Makhadzi,” the highest of Venda healers, a tradition linked to Modjadji the Rain Queen and the deepest mysteries of Venda lore.

On the second night of the conference, before she was due to present, Makaulule stayed up well past midnight, writing down her teachings with the help of Dr Moshudu Dima, a colleague and elder who looked much younger than his 80 years.

Because the wisdom carried by Makaulule and Dima had never been the wisdom of books, to see it freshly written down was — for almost all of the delegates — to see a whole new version of truth.

“We cannot understand sacred sites if we do not understand the word ‘Mupo’,” Makaulule began, reading from the text on the screen. “Our ancestors called the origin of creation ‘Mupo’. When we look at the sky, we see Mupo. When we look at nature, we see Mupo. Mupo means all that is not man-made. For us, the Venda people, our life is connected with Mupo. Our ancestors are Mupo, this is where the spirit goes back to after death. Our sacred sites, called ‘zwifho,’ are where Mupo lives.”

While she may have been preaching to the converted, Makaulule wanted to stress that a person could not separate herself or himself from “vhadzimu,” the ancestor spirits. She spoke about how most people nowadays, when talking to “vhadzimu” in “zwifho,” did so in hiding, visiting the sacred sites after dark.

“Why should people be afraid of other people?” she asked.

But she had a more fundamental question.

“There’s nobody that goes to a church and desecrates the altar,” she said, “so why do people come to our temples, our ‘zwifhos,’ and build houses?”

Here, Makaulule was referring directly to the Phiphidi Falls, above which chalets had been built and concerning which an entrance fee of R20 had recently granted access to the general public. Makaulule’s position was that sacred sites were desecrated when they were commercialised in any way. They were desecrated, she said, when their animals, plants, waters and minerals were removed, exploited, polluted or otherwise damaged, a law that applied in extra measure to the sacred animals and totems.

For this reason, the Ramunangi clan, traditional custodians of the Phiphidi Falls and the spirits that dwelt in its waters, no longer came to perform the rituals. It was said even the mythical lion, Guvhuguvhu, no longer roared.

And it wasn’t just the site of the falls that held the desecration — located near the source of the Mutshindudi River, trash from the chalets and the unending influx of tourists had polluted the ecosystem downstream.

“These are places of critical ecological significance,” said Makaulule, emphasising once again that the “zwifhos” had been chosen by nature, not man. “For example, forests in watershed areas which assist the climatic cycle, springs or rivers which provide water for the whole ecosystem, lakes which maintain the water table.”

Then she added: “‘Zwifhos’ should not be disturbed by any human interference, there must be no activities other than those directed by the Makhadzis.”

An injunction, it appeared, that was at the core of the sacred site concept. If the “zwifhos” were going to protect and regenerate the ecosystem, it was essential that they be left undisturbed. In Venda tradition, it was only the clan members associated with a specific site that were allowed to visit, and then only on specific dates for specific purposes. Almost always, these dates and purposes aligned with the cause of renewal itself; almost never did people come to just sit and look.

In Venda even today, insisted Dima, the spirits were exacting a price from the local tourists. If not so much at Phiphidi Falls, he said, where the energies had been mostly depleted, then at power sites like Thathe Vondo Forest, protected by a half-man half-lion creature known as “Nethane,” and at Lake Fundudzi, protected by a giant python god.

Given that these forces had kept almost everyone but the authorised clan members out of the sacred sites, and had thus safeguarded their attendant ecosystems, the scorn of the Westernised mind was of little significance. But the Westernised mind, according to Makaulule, was encroaching — which was why activism was becoming ever more urgent.

As the founder and leader of an organisation called “Dzomo la Mupo,” which means “to speak for the natural world,” the protection of sacred sites was now Makaulule’s full-time job. And her job description was in full view on the homepage of the website, where the organisation provided its raison d’etre:

“Massive destruction of forests along the rivers and in the mountains of the Vhembe district of South Africa… has already caused great losses in healthy food sovereignty, where many communities in the area harvest from the wild for their survival. Dzomo la Mupo is working to alleviate this environmental degradation.”

Alleviate how?

Under Makaulule’s guidance, the organisation had taken custodianship of 11 sacred sites. As a Makhadzi, she was in a perfect position to direct the clans in the old ways. But there were now also 25 schools and 15 communities under her aegis, which were receiving training in cultural biodiversity and indigenous living, as well as regular hand-outs of seeds.

III. Npenvu

In early May 2019, as Daily Maverick reported, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, released what George Monbiot called “the biggest and worst news humanity has ever received”. The natural world, we learnt, was in the middle of an unprecedented crisis, with extinction rates tens to hundreds of times higher than they had been in the past 10 million years. Prepared by 145 leading experts from 50 countries, the 40-page summary for policymakers mentioned the phrase “indigenous” 32 times.

The instruction from the scientists was clear — to get through the mess that Western civilisation and its energy, transport and farming industries had created, indigenous wisdom was key. And so Daily Maverick’s report on the IPBES assessment was framed around the teachings of a !Xo healer named Kummt’sa, who we visited in the Kalahari, and who also happened to be at the conference in Timbavati.

“There’s no left or right,” Kummt’sa would say, when the discussion veered towards the political. “There’s only underground.”

Which was profoundly true as far as it went, but didn’t help with the broken political system on its own obstinate terms. For this, there was Pooven Moodley, executive director of the pan-African indigenous rights group Natural Justice. As a lawyer with a background in anti-apartheid student activism, Moodley was able to track the juncture between social justice and environmental justice in local and international law.

He spoke about his work with indigenous communities in the Lamu archipelago in Kenya, where “massive desecration of sacred sites” was occurring in terms of dredging of the ocean, killing of the mangroves and expulsion of the farmers and fisherfolk.

“A complete onslaught,” he said, “which is kind of typical of the development happening on this continent.”

But a victory had been won by thinking holistically and longer term, with the focus on protecting natural resources and choosing the legal battles wisely. In June 2019, said Moodley, Beijing’s plan to build a coal plant had been stopped by the Kenyan courts, which “created ripple effects all the way to China” with the banks taking a hit.

Although the war wasn’t over, the victory underscored in Moodley’s view the strength of indigenous communities when standing up to global superpowers or their own intransigent governments. Aside from the local example of Xolobeni, which Moodley agreed was South Africa’s “Standing Rock,” he also provided the example of the Enderois in Kenya, who in 1974 were forced from their ancestral lands to make way for a game park — in 2010, after the case was taken to the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, a ruling was passed that the Kenyan government had violated the rights of the Enderois to religious practice, to property, to culture and to the free disposition of natural resources.

The Holy Grail, though, was the granting of juristic personhood to these resources, as had happened in New Zealand in 2017, when a Maori tribe, after 140 years of negotiation, had won recognition for the Whanganui River, which henceforth would be treated as a living entity.

In South Africa, although it seemed that such a thing was still aeons off, a judgment had just been passed that fed the delegates at the sacred site conference with a morsel of hope. On 6 August 2019, in a matter where the National Council of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was the applicant and the Department of Environmental Affairs was the first respondent, the North Gauteng High Court ruled that the government’s decision to set quotas for the export of lion bone was “unlawful and constitutionally invalid”.

As Judge Kollapen wrote in the judgment: “[It] is inconceivable that the State Respondents could have ignored welfare considerations of lions in captivity in setting the annual export quota.”

In other words, the lion slaughterhouses were just that — a place where the felt lives of animals, despite Section 24 of the Constitution, were completely ignored by the State.

It was, of course, a long way from the Kollapen judgment to the juristic recognition of sacred sites, but the tide of history was turning. The four-aspect beast of truth, which Baba Credo Mutwa called “Npenvu,” was already flying.

“Mutwa told me that truth was as mighty as a lion, and as brave as an eagle,” Linda Tucker wrote in Mystery of the White Lions. “When I inquired why this entity should have a serpent’s tail, he told me that truth also bit — like a mamba.” 4

The final aspect, needless to say, was the human — which held the quality of free will. DM


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
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Re: Deforestation + climate change = dead end for wildlife and not only

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Animals are disappearing from forests, with grave consequences for the fight against climate breakdown – new research

October 14, 2019 2.25pm BST

It’s tempting to think that our forests would be fine if we could simply stop trees being felled or burnt. But forests – particularly tropical ones – are more than just trees. They’re also the animals that skulk and swoop among them.

Worryingly, these furry and feathered companions are rapidly disappearing – and our new research indicates that this will have grave repercussions for the role forests play in combating climate breakdown.

Healthy tropical forests swarm with life. Beyond myriad invertebrates there are seed-eating rodents, a range of leaf eaters, birds of all kinds, and often primates. However, many forests have already lost most of their largest animals, mainly as a result of hunting to supply a growing bushmeat trade.

Hunting isn’t the only reason. Thanks to deforestation for farmland and logging, many forests today are highly fragmented. The small, unconnected patches that remain aren’t big enough to support populations of the largest species, which tend to need more space.

The disappearance of animals from otherwise intact habitats is known as defaunation, and it is leading to a growing number of empty forests not just in tropical countries, but around the world. The UK has already lost most of its largest species (think lynx, wolf, and wisent), while woodland bird numbers have declined by a quarter since 1970.

The impacts of this defaunation have attracted the attention of the world’s conservation scientists, but studies to date have usually been carried out at single locations. Consequently, we lack a worldwide picture that takes into account different types of forest and the diversity of animals that are disappearing.

To fill this gap, we worked with William Baldwin-Cantello, chief adviser on forests at the World Wide Fund for Nature UK, to gather together all the existing research and perform a meta-analysis – an analysis of analyses – on the available data.

Forest flora need flourishing fauna

Our findings reveal a worrying trend. The loss of animals compromises the ability of forests to reproduce. This effect is particularly severe when primates and birds disappear, because of the key role they play in seed dispersal. Trees make fruit to entice animals to transport their seeds, because they are more likely to germinate and grow successfully if they fall further from their parent tree. So when fruit-eating animals disappear, fewer seeds are dispersed and the trees struggle to reproduce.

Image
A black howler monkey eating a juicy cashew fruit. akramer/Shutterstock

This animal absence will slowly change how forests look. Most tropical forests today are dominated by trees whose seeds are dispersed by animals. Over time, they are likely to be gradually replaced by trees that use the wind to reproduce. Naturally, these usually have small seeds, and therefore produce smaller trees that store less carbon for the same area of forest. As a result, forests will store less and less carbon, even if we completely halt deforestation.

This is particularly concerning because roughly 20% of the carbon dioxide we emit is absorbed by the world’s vegetation and soils, and half of this is due to tropical forests alone.

Rethinking forest health

Conserving forests is essential for the fight against climate breakdown – and, we do have a global tool at our disposal to help. Known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, or REDD+ for short, it allows wealthy countries with large carbon footprints to pay poorer, tropical countries to protect their forests.

Of course, REDD+ is only an effective tool if the forests countries pay to protect continue to store the same amount of carbon. We usually monitor this by taking satellite images of the quantity of forest canopy remaining. But what satellite imagery can’t do is measure aspects of forest quality beneath the canopy.

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Our research strongly suggests that one aspect of forest quality – defaunation – is a vital early warning sign of future losses in the carbon storing capacity of forests. In light of this, policies for managing forest carbon around the world may need a rethink.

We need to pay more attention to what’s going on beneath global forest canopies through research on the ground, though this will be difficult in remote areas. More importantly, we must make sure we’re doing all we can to conserve the full complement of animal species that live in our forests. For example, we need to heavily invest in conservation actions that help communities accustomed to hunting bushmeat to meet their dietary protein needs without harming wildlife. We must also enforce existing rules better, such as those that outlaw hunting within parks and reserves.

Preventing defaunation in forests won’t be easy. But given what we know about the critical role forest animals play, doing so will be essential if we hope to retain diverse and carbon-rich forests in the tropics and around the world. If the beauty and wonder of the forest’s animals wasn’t enough reason to protect them, we now have another: by conserving wildlife, we will be helping to save ourselves from the catastrophic effects of climate breakdown.

Authors

Charlie Gardner
Lecturer in Conservation Biology, University of Kent

Jake Bicknell
Lecturer in Conservation Biology, University of Kent

Matthew Struebig
Senior Lecturer in Biological Conservation, University of Kent

Zoe Davies
Professor of Biodiversity Conservation, University of Kent


"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
The desire for equality must never exceed the demands of knowledge
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