Hi again,
Herewith, some snippets from various sources.
I appeal to you to send me items to distribute to our members for both the Cleft Stick and to be posted on the web site.
It is your magazine and website, so ensure it gets the news that you would like to see in it.
Please let me have any changes to your physical address, phone no. or e-mail address to keep the database up to date.
Thanks to all of you who have made the effort. Please will any of you who know of members who do not get this “electric” Cleft~Stick, & have access to e-mail, pass their address along to me.
Don Yunnie
7 Chalet Drive, Hilton, 3245, South Africa Local Tel & Fax (033) 343 1534 Int. Tel & Fax (+2733) 343 1534 cell 082 377 7562 E-mail dyunnie@xsinet.co.za.
Electronic Banking
If you use electronic banking or pay directly into the GRAA account please ensure you put some relevant details in the beneficiary reference. I.e your GRAA number and membership fees or your membership no and ie caps if paying for insignia.
If you do not do this we are unable to trace who paid the money in and will allocate it to donations.
Please also let our treasurer, Janet Snow, know about the transaction so she can allocate the payment to your acct to confirm the transaction.
Please also fax a copy of the transaction to her at 033 267 7171 to confirm your payment.
For your ease of reference herewith the banking details.
First National Bank
Estcourt Branch. Branch No 220325
The account is in the name of Game Rangers Association of Africa, account no.53980026795
Please note also that cheques “Returned to Drawer” attract a R50.00 fee. We will hold the member responsible for this expense for returned cheques.
“Biomass of human bodies now exceeds by a hundred times that of any large animal species that ever existed on land”
New Statesman, Feb 23, 2004 by Mark Lynas.
The century's big issue is not equality in the conventional sense. It is whether we can share with other species and with future human generations.
Neither left nor right understands.
I write this as a former left-winger. No, I haven't made the long, lifetime trek from Trot to Tory, like so many highly placed newspaper columnists (more of them later).
My contention is, I hope, a little more rational: that the "left-wing" label no longer implies an acceptable position on the most crucial issue facing the world today.
A new challenge has arisen which--by transcending the older and less significant divides--will eventually define the course of 21st-century politics.
In comparison, today's "big" issues, on top-up fees, foundation hospitals and the Blair-Brown relationship, recede like bar-room chatter into the background hubbub.
This new challenge does not have an easily recognisable name. E O Wilson, one of the greatest contemporary biologists, calls it "the bottleneck".
Most of its sub-issues are familiar, but the bigger picture is not.
Piece together the disparate elements and the product is terrifying.
The shadow thrown by this looming crisis is everywhere, its darkness growing slowly,almost imperceptibly, as it creeps over our planet.
The crisis is this: within the earth's biosphere, a single species has come to dominate virtually all living systems.
For the past two centuries this species has been reproducing at bacterial levels, almost as an infectious plague envelops its host.
Three hundred thousand new individuals are added to its numbers every single day. Its population of bodies now exceeds by a hundred times the biomass of any large animal species that has ever existed on land since the beginning of geological time.
The species is us. Now numbering more than six billion souls, the human
population has doubled since 1950. Nothing like this has happened before in the earth's entire history. Even the dinosaurs, which dominated for tens of millions of years, were thinly spread compared to the hairless primate Homo sapiens.
Inevitably, our productive and consumptive activities displace other living species from the planetary food web. The result is mass extinction, which has historically accompanied human expansion everywhere, from North America to Easter Island. Wherever humans dwell, other species die out--displaced from land cleared for agriculture, killed for their flesh, or simply allowed to disappear as an unnoticed by-product of the thriving primate economy.
We are now in the early-to-middle stages of the sixth mass extinction to hit the planet since complex life began 2.1 billion years ago.
Species are disappearing at between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural background rate.
A fifth of birds are threatened with extinction, as are 40 per cent of
mammals and fish, a third of amphibians and up to half of all plant species.
Humans now appropriate 40 per cent of the planet's organic matter produced by photosynthesis.
The number of humans born in a single day almost equals the total global population of great apes.
Again, this situation is unprecedented: never before has an agent of mass extinction emerged from within the living systems of the planetary
biosphere. Previous mass extinctions have been caused by external factors, such as the asteroid that likely wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago or the volcanism that seems to have caused the Permian mass extinction (when up to 95 per cent of species died out) 251 million years ago.
In the lottery of evolution, as Wilson writes, Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Planet Earth.
We are entering a new geological era: the Anthropocene.
All this would be bad enough. But there is more. Since the early 1800s,
humans have been using buried carbon--first in coal, later in oil and
gas--as a form of energy.
When combusted in our oxygen-rich atmosphere, this carbon becomes the potent greenhouse gas carbon dioxide--the same gas that keeps Venus's surface temperature at a searing 460[degrees]C.
Levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere have risen by a third since the start of the industrial revolution, and global temperatures are rising in tandem.
We are now on track to change the globe's average surface temperature by anything up to six degrees Celsius within a century, taking
us into a climate regime last experienced between one million and 40 million years ago, well beyond the evolutionary experience of many creatures alive today—including humanity.
Add these trends together and Wilson's "bottleneck" sounds like an
understatement.
It is inconceivable that humanity and natural species can pass together through this bottleneck unscathed.
And here lies the challenge. Will we emerge at the end of the century with a depleted, devastated planet, inhabited only by remnant super-adaptable species and artificial ecosystems created to support the remaining human population centres?
Or will humanity take sufficient remedial measures to ensure that a reasonable proportion of the living biosphere survives?
This is the shadow under which the battle lines are forming in modern-day politics.
On one side stands a loose and ragged coalition of those who want
to see the survival of nature, not just for the sake of human survival, but because they believe in its intrinsic worth.
On the other side stand those who don't know or don't care, or who actively oppose efforts to get us through the bottleneck unscathed.
Let's meet these people.
First under the spotlight is the United States. Its current government is dedicated to environmental destruction on a scale hitherto unimaginable.
President Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, both deny the reality of global warming. They have approved legislation to speed up the logging of forests, and they are trying to gut the Endangered Species Act, among numerous other blindly destructive measures.
Several of the most powerful US senators--including James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma, and chair of the Senate committee on environment and public works), Larry Craig (Republican,Idaho) and Craig Thomas (Republican, Wyoming) are dedicated anti-environmentalists. Inhofe calls global warming a "hoax", and alleges that the Kyoto treaty "is an economic weapon designed to undermine the global competitiveness and economic superiority of the United States".
In evidence to support this contention, he cites numerous do-scientific
studies, many of them supported by fossil fuel interests and by far-right think-tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the George C Marshall Institute.
Britain, too, has a powerful establishment of anti-environmentalists. The Adam Smith Institute is one of the most prominent, with strong connections to new Labour, despite its Thatcherite political creed.
Of similar bent is the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has published several pamphlets denouncing "climate alarmism", opposing the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and accusing those who try to protect tropical forests of "eco-imperialism".
These viewpoints are popularised by media pundits, primarily but not
exclusively attached to the right-wing press. Their empress dowager is the Daily Mail's Melanie Phillips, who claimed recently that "there's no correlation between rises in climate temperature and sea levels".
This is untrue, even at the level of basic physics--heat makes water expand, raising sea levels at the same time that water from melting ice on land adds more mass to the global ocean.
But the mistakes--and Phillips's article is full of them--are not the point: this is a statement of ideology, based not on scientific rationality or empirical evidence, but on a particular world-view. It is vital to understand this, because it reminds us that those
with truth on their side will not necessarily emerge triumphant as this
conflict deepens.
Joining Phillips on the far right is the self-parodying twitterer Peter Hitchens. He writes: "The Kyoto treaty is a silly waste of time. The greenhouse effect probably doesn't exist. There is as yet no evidence for it." Given that the greenhouse effect is basic atmospheric physics (and that, without it, the average global temperature would be well below freezing), this is a very stupid statement indeed. Again, truth is secondary.
But it is no use looking to the left for a more rational approach.
Communists have always regarded nature as little more than raw material to be scraped up and melted down into pig-iron by an emancipated proletariat, marching in step to a glorious techno-industrial future.
Variants of this view persist among the Socialist Workers Party and its various front groups in the Socialist Alliance and anti-war movements.
Indeed, anti-environmentalism is such an article of faith among the extreme left that the cultish cabal which used to publish Living Marxism magazine, and which has now moved into the electronic media, called its Channel 4 series Against Nature.
More moderate leftists neglect ecological concerns in favour of their
enduring obsession: human equality.
Worthwhile as this objective may be, any consideration of how resources are to be shared with other species or with future human generations is excluded as irrelevant. Moreover, both left and right agree that economic growth can and should go on for ever.
For anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics, the impossibility of everlasting growth based on a finite resource base should be obvious.
And this is the core of my argument: that it is time to de-prioritise the struggle over fair shares to the global economic pie, because the very existence of this pie is increasingly at stake.
If global warming accelerates enough to turn the world's breadbaskets into dust bowls (as is already happening in northern China), then our squabbles over how to divide the spoils from the rape of Planet Earth will look very short-sighted.
Like cockroaches, human beings can scrape a living almost anywhere. The
total extinction of our species is unlikely. But human society is complex and fragile, especially in an age where few people in rich countries have any experience of fending for themselves. Indeed, those who are most dismissive of environmental concerns are precisely those whose meal tables are likely to include green beans from Kenya, prawns from Bangladesh and beef from Argentina. The system of long-distance food transportation is far more vulnerable to ecological collapse than they realise.
Moreover, we are all deeply dependent on the "ecosystem services" providedfree by the natural world.
These include the purification and retention of fresh water (and flood control);
the formation and enrichment of soil;
the detoxification and recirculation of waste;
the pollination of crops;
the production of lumber, fodder and biomass fuel;
and the regulation of the atmosphere and climate.
The monetary value of these ecosystem services has been costed at $33 trillion a year, roughly the same as combined world GDP.
If natural systems are mostly wiped out, we will need to replace these
services artificially, which is a physical and economic impossibility.
So who is to blame for this blindness? It is tempting to follow the
anti-globalisation movement in castigating multinational corporations, the World Trade Organisation and rampaging capital markets.
I believe that something much baser is happening.
The NS essayist John Gray gets it about right: "The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'western civilisation' or any flaw in human
institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an
exceptionally rapacious primate."
That is why we need to abandon the left-right battle lines. They offer us no guidance on how to survive the century ahead. Neither does Gray, for that matter. For him, all grand plans are by definition doomed to fail. Looking at history, one can see his point. But we have got to survive the bottleneck, and just muddling through won't do.
Thinking up solutions is not the problem. The "contraction and convergence" proposal for tackling climate change (global emissions contract to a sustainable level; per capita emissions converge between countries) knits both human equality and ecological survival into an elegant equation.
Similarly, we can protect biodiversity by stopping habitat destruction and countering the spread of invasive alien species around the world, especially in highly biodiverse "hot-spot" areas. And increasing women's control over their fertility is a straightforward way to reduce population growth.
Yet these proposals are so vast and all-consuming as to require a strong and durable consensus before they can be agreed or implemented. Biodiversity protection cannot be bolted on to existing growth-oriented economics.
Contraction and convergence would require enormous resource transfers from rich to poor countries, as the developed world pays the developing nations not to follow in its own dirty footsteps.
Hence the failure of the various UN environmental summits: they take place in a political vacuum, with little public knowledge or interest to support or enforce their decisions. It is the formation of any durable political consensus towards ecological survival that the anti-green movement is determined to prevent.
In the meantime, the rest of us get side-tracked. I still believe that Tony Blair, for all his faults, remains unusually committed--compared to other government leaders--to tackling global warming. But by joining Bush's war on Iraq, Blair helped deliver the world's second-largest reserves of oil into the hands of the only major country fully under the control of climate change deniers. Rather than chasing all over the desert in search of a few mouldering old canisters of mustard gas, those seeking weapons of mass destruction need only have drilled down a few hundred metres until they hit oil, the most potent and destructive WMD of all.
The government's chief scientist, Dr David King, recently found himself at the centre of controversy when he said global warming is a more serious threat than terrorism. Of course it is: just add up the numbers. Global warming: 150,000 deaths annually from the increased disease caused by higher temperatures, according to the World Health Organisation. Terrorism: 1,000 a year (at a guess). So why is terrorism the apocalyptic threat we all have to mobilise against? You're more likely, in a poor country at least, to die of flood-related diarrhoea. And the rich won't be safe for long. The much-vaunted "clash of civilisations" is at best a distraction, at worst a racist fiction. Preventing the clash between human civilisation and nature is the battle we ought to be fighting.
Mark Lynas is the author of High Tide: news from a warming world, published by Flamingo on 1 March ([pounds sterling]16.99).
www.marklynas.org
COPYRIGHT 2004 New Statesman, Ltd., COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.
KRUGER BOUNDARY MOVES WEST!
The fence between the Balule Nature Reserve and the Klaseri Private Nature Reserve has been taken down, enlarging the open protected area (already over 2 million ha in size) with the 35 000ha of Balule NR.
The 19km of fence-line used to be part of the Western boundary of the Greater Kruger National Park.
The enthusiasm for taking it down was so great from both sides that it took a mere ten days to leave not even a piece of wire on the ground!
This means that the new boundary fence of the Greater Kruger National Park is Balule's Western boundary fence-line running largely along the tar road between Hoedspruit and Phalaborwa.
This fence, although electrified and looked after, will now have to be upgraded to meet proper standards. It is particularly the area where the Olifants River enters the Balule Nature Reserve (which happened to be at the bridge where the tar road crosses the river) where problems are experienced with young elephant bulls going out of the reserve and wandering around on the tar road and adjoining farms.
This situation is being monitored and patrolled, and four road-signs warning motorists of possible elephants on the road have been put up along the tar road.
A special word of thanks should go out to those who were actively involved in achieving this feat, i.e.Mr Andy Dott who has been driving this initiative for years, Mr Quentin Sussman and Mr Mike Myers, Chairmen of Balule and Klaseri, under whose leadership this has happened, and Mr Mario Cesare and Mr Colin Rowles, the wardens of the two reserves, who spent a lot of time and energy on this project.
May this be a landmark that will be followed by many more such initiatives all over our country and the world!
MARIUS FULS
Manager - Struwig Eco-Reserve, Balule
(t) 015-769 6057, (f) 015-769 6169
struwig@xpoint.co.za.
Tourism Investment opportunity in Ghana's National Parks
Hello, my name is John Mason.
I am an IUCN – World Conservation Union consultant to the Wildlife Division, Forestry Commission, Ghana.
I have been given your name and address by a colleague who recommended I contact you because of your influential role with the Game Rangers
Association of Africa (GRAA) and that you do an excellent job in networking conservationists and keeping members in touch with all things environmental.
I am requesting your kind assistance in spreading the word about a new
wildlife tourism opportunity in Ghana. I understand you have a monthly
electronic newsletter and I would request that you kindly insert information about this opportunity into your up-coming issues.
Specifically we want to draw attention to an Exciting Tourism investment opportunity in Ghana's National Parks.
The Wildlife Division of Ghana is announcing an international tender for 5 tourism concessions within two key national parks in the country: Mole and Kakum Parks.
The tender is being launched in Ghana on May 24th and the closing date is October 16, 2005.
I am not –( it is 28 pages – any one wanting it can
contact me - ed) attaching the Expression of Interest document to this
email.
If you are interested in learning more and receiving the tender
documents please contact me at ghanaparks@yahoo.com or phone me at
233-24-4697485. You may also contact me at johnmason@ncrc-ghana.org
Thank you in advance for your kind assistance,
John J. Mason, IUCN Consultant, Wildlife Division, Accra, Ghana
MEDIA RELEASE, For immediate release 12th May 2005
HELP US TO CONSERVE OWLS AND OTHER RAPTORS ON OUR ROADS Starts
It is the start of the new harvesting season for crops such as mealies and sorghum over large parts of South Africa’s summer rainfall-area.
Thus, the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Birds of Prey Working Group is making an urgent plea to all individuals and businesses involved in the harvest, to take extra care when loading and transporting these products to avoid excessive grain spillage during the process.
Although it is illegal to transport materials without taking adequate
measures to secure cargo and prevent excessive spillage during
transportation, grain is still regularly spilled during transportation and ends up on the side of the road where it acts as a magnet for hungry rodents. These rodents, while feasting on the spilled grain in turn attract predatory birds such as Black shouldered Kites by day and a variety of owl species at night. This inevitably exposes the birds to the danger of being struck and killed by vehicles when they attempt to catch rodents along our roads.
Research undertaken as part of the Nashua Central Owl Project of the Birds of Prey Working Group along the N17-route east of Springs in Gauteng over the last 5 years, revealed that large numbers of birds, especially owls, are killed in this manner in areas where excessive grain spillage occurs along roads.
This naturally occurs in most areas where grain is regularly
transported and due care to secure the grain is not taken. Although
mitigation measures such as “Owl Restaurants” situated strategically along problem routes seem to work effectively in luring rodents and predatory birds away from busy roads, these are considered as temporary measures only.
The Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Birds of Prey Working Group believes that an increased awareness amongst farmers, transport companies and their staff of the danger posed by grain spillage to our birds of prey, and the need to implement effective measures to prevent spillage during the transportation of grain is vital to prevent many predatory birds from being killed on our roads.
Motorists can also assist in preventing the deaths of birds of prey on our roads by reducing speed, being more aware of the presence of birds on our roads and hooting when they see a bird perched in the road, especially at night.
In an attempt to interact with and create greater awareness amongst the
farming community about this and other important conservation issues, staff from the Endangered Wildlife Trust will be participating in the NAMPO Harvest Day at Bothaville from the 17th to the 20th of May 2005.
The Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) is one of the largest conservation
non-governmental organisations in southern Africa.
Initiated in 1973, the EWT functions through multi-stakeholder Working Groups which collectively coordinate over 90 projects throughout southern Africa.
The EWT conserves threatened species and their habitats through field-based projects, applied research and community conservation programmes and has developed effective partnerships with a wide variety of stakeholder groups to achieve these goals.
Ends
Contact: André Botha, Manager: EWT Birds of Prey Working Group, Endangered Wildlife Trust
Tel: 082-962-5725, Fax: 011-486-1506, e-mail: andreb@ewt.org.za.
GRAA LOWVELD REGION YEAR PLANNER
This is the Year Planner of the GRAA Lowveld region. Any members, even from other regions, are welcome to attend. Please contact the Chairman, Marius Fuls (083-305 3104) or (struwig@xpoint.co.za).
DATE ACTIVITY DETAILS
10-12 June Lowveld meeting Social weekend at Struwig Eco-Reserve
12-14 August Lowveld meeting Twanana, Mooiplaas Section, KNP
26-28 August GRAA Golf day on 27 August Merensky Country Club
25-27 November Year-end Party Looking for suggestions
MARIUS FULS
Bestuurder - Struwig Eko-Reservaat
(t) 015-769 6057, (f) 015-769 6169
struwig@xpoint.co.za
POSITION(s) AVAILABLE
Jeremy Anderson asks:
Can the GRAA set up a database of members who are available for short or long term work in the field. Our little company is increasingly being asked to provide someone for a short term job (For example John Forrest is now building a tented camp in Banhine). We are in contention for some park planning jobs in the Middle East and India and if we land any, there could be some short to medium term opportunities for GRAA members.
Cheers
Jeremy
Is this something we need to pursue? We did start a skills database some years ago but not very much data was captures and its now out of date.
Lets have your views -ed
Lodge Mgt Couple required
Interested in Lodge Management?
Chete Island Safari Lodge is looking for a relief management couple for the period of: 20/06/05-10/07/05.
There will also be more dates in the future.
Interested parties pleast contact:
Tel: 01483144, Email: chete@zamnet.zm.
This e-mail address is in aid of Lusaka Animal Welfare Society and has
approximately 1400 addresses.
If you wish to advertise through us all you have to do is respond to this e-mail or call the number below, pay K 50,000 and then send your
advertisement. For lists of "items for sale" we ask that 5% of the total sales be donated to the society.
Regretfully, due to the amount of adverts now being sent out and the length of time it can take to send them to everyone, we are unable to send adverts out individually. Please note that we can only send written advertisements and small graphics as some people cannot download easily.
Lusaka Animal Welfare Society Telephone for e-mail adverts: 097 782167
Telephone for any other LAWS related issues : 096 765138.
Laws thanks its pet food sponsors Tiger Feeds, Zambeef, Eureka Chickens, Pama and Best Beef.
Thanks also to Homenet Hollywood for collecting donations on our behalf.
If anyone has some spare time and would like to help us, WE NEED YOU! Please
call us!
Thank you for your support!
Tailpiece-
Harry did like he always does, kissing his wife, crawling into bed and
Falling to sleep.
All of a sudden, he wakes up with an elderly man dressed in a cowl standing in front of his bed.
"What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?......and who are you?" he asked.
"This is not your bedroom," the man replied, "I am St. Peter, and you are in heaven."
"WHAT!?? Are you saying I'm dead? I don't want to die.....I'm too young." said Harry. "If I'm dead, I want you to send me back immediately."
"It's not that easy", said St.Peter, "you can only return as a dog or a hen.
You can choose on your own..."
Harry thought about it for a while, and figured out that being a dog is too tiring, but a hen probably has a nice and relaxed life. Running around with a rooster can't be that bad.
"I want to return as a hen." Harry replied.
And in the next second, he found himself in a chicken run, really nicely feathered. But man, now "he" felt like the rear end was gonna
blow........then along came the rooster.
"Hey, you must be the new hen on the farm." he said. "How does it feel?"
"Well, it's OK I guess, but it feels like my rear end is blowing up."
"Oh that!" said the rooster. "That's only the ovulation going on. Have you never laid an egg before??"
"No, how do I do that?" Harry asked.
"Cluck twice, and then you push all you can."
Harry clucked twice, and pushed more than he was good for, and then 'Plop' and an egg was on the ground.
"Wow" Harry said "that felt really good!" So he clucked again and squeezed.
And you better believe that there was yet another egg on the ground.
The third time he clucked, he heard his wife shout:
"Harry, for Gods sake wake up, you're sh ! tting all over the bed!"
Matter of Fact
This is an electronic newsletter of the Game Rangers' Association of Africa. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the Association, nor of the Editor. This is intended to be an exchange of news snips, ideas and communication between members. Newsletter content may be copied and re-distributed without authorisation. Correspondence should be addressed to the Editor at dyunnie@xsinet.co.za
