Treeple and the the dancer

Today I found this tree and was immediately struck by the fact that it was so obviously human once. My guess is that it was a dancer of sorts, some kind of performer definitely. Initially I got a distinctly feminine vibe, but as I look at it now I think it's more likely a man, stuck forever in a climactic flourish, a performance-ending posture designed to bring the audience to their feet in adoration and from whence he might properly bask in this glorious moment.

Then my thoughts turned to the reason behind this (sad?) fate: was this a punishment? A reward of some sort? A consolation prize? What had this man done to deserve this? Was he killed prematurely in a car crash? Was he murdered by a rival suitor? Did he hang himself? Overdose? Was he thereby rescued from something that pursued him?

In ancient Greek mythology, Daphne is saved from the amorous advances of Apollo (who is literally chasing her) by her father, the river god Peneus, who turns her into a laurel tree. Apollo is so irredeemably smitten with Daphne that he uses his powers to render the tree ever-green, so that in a way Daphne is granted eternal youth of a sort.

The word used to describe this transformation is δενδρόω (Dendroo), which means "turned into a tree". In ancient Greek mythology, arboreal transformations of this sort are not infrequent, and, depending on circumstances, can be either rewards or punishments.

Another favorite (more recent) example - which might actually be read as a variant of the Daphne/Apollo story - is Radiohead's There, There from their 2003 album, Hail to the Thief, in which Thom Yorke is pursued through a forest before eventually being transformed into a tree. The track is awesome, and the video ranks as one of my all-time favorites from their collection (already bulging with incredible work).

So there is precedence for this kind of thing. I'm not sure about how this figures in African folklore/histories, though I would certainly like to find out now that I've found a (once) living example.

The real question, though, is about the tree itself: who was this person, and why was he condemned to this eternal unbending existence? There is something strangely triumphal about the whole thing - almost too much of it for the story to be entirely sad somehow. The tree has a monumental or commemorative feel about it I think - surely a testament to to some great thespian of the Chobe; even better perhaps, the thespian himself, glorying endlessly in his dramatic achievements. Or perhaps this is actually a sad reflection on what might have been. Perhaps I will write this story myself, thereby adding another layer to the lore. Would that be wrong? I don't know.

To burn or not to burn: that is only half the question

[This article is a response an article by Botswana's Minister of Wildlife and Environment, Tshekedi Khama, published in the Evening Standard, Monday 25 April 2016]

While I do think that Botswana's decision not to burn their ivory stockpiles is an excellent one, and while I do applaud their decision to boycott the ivory burning at the conclusion of the upcoming Giants Club summit, I would question the strategy behind erecting and displaying a statue built from this material and I would suggest that there might be a much more effective use for Botswana and other African nations' stockpiles.

On the one hand, I can appreciate the idea behind the statue – in the Honourable Minister's own words, “there is value in conserving elephants for eco-tourism and emphasising the value of a live elephant should be upheld at all costs.” It is true, I think, that the future of Botswana's elephants is dependent on not only the perception of value, but the actual value of these animals to Botswana's communities. This means that elephants must generate revenues for the communities in the way that they did while trophy hunters were still allowed to operate in Botswana, when communities generated large incomes each year by selling their trophy allocations. Eco-tourism, it is true, has a role to play, but does a statue made of ivory displayed in an airport actually contribute any real value or is it just, if you'll pardon the excruciating pun, a white elephant?

The truth of the matter, economically speaking, is that burning and stockpiling (or building statues) have the same economic effect: supply is restricted in relation to existing demand. There is, and likely always will be such a demand – there is no denying this fact. As a result, the price of the commodity is driven ever higher, the luxury status of ivory is maintained or even enhanced. This means that the price per kilogram increases, and impoverished people from adjacent countries (and increasingly from within Botswana itself) are further incentivised to risk their lives in order to obtain quantities of this valuable commodity at any cost.

Botswana has taken a tough stance on poaching, and much like the anti-poaching operations being conducted in South Africa in defense of rhino populations, there have been results in terms of arrests, confiscations, and also in terms of poachers killed. The Botswana Defence Force and the Department of Wildlife and National Parks have a well-deserved reputation as some of the worlds finest and most effective anti-poaching forces, and yet even this is not enough to deter the ever-increasing waves of young men willing to risk death for a few kilos of white gold. The sad truth of the matter is that as long as the existing supply/demand equation is maintained, there will always be fresh volunteers eager to take up the rifle and try their luck in the cat-and-mouse game that plays out every day in Southern Africa's National Parks and border regions.

But is there an alternative? I think there might be, because in economic terms a stockpile is an immensely powerful thing. A stockpile represents a potential economic force – a force that might be used to alter existing market dynamics if it is exerted in the correct way. One example of the manner in which such a stockpile might be used is supplied by arch-imperialist and mining magnate, Cecil John Rhodes. During his time at the helm of De Beers, he was often frustrated by the periodic collapse of the price of diamonds due to oversupply, which would have dire effects on his business. His solution to the problem of oversupply was to stockpile and carefully regulate the release of precious stones onto the European market, thereby avoiding gluts and maintaining a steady and predictable diamond price, year in and year out. A stockpile retained and regulated in this way can be used to maintain an artificially high commodity value, and this, I would argue, is the unintended consequence ivory of stockpiling and burning across the African continent.

Another potential use of such a stockpile involves precisely the opposite strategy. A stockpile might be suddenly released in order to flood the market deliberately, which has the effect of creating a crash in commodity value. Demand, for a time, is overwhelmed by supply, and the market collapses as a result.

What if Botswana unbanned the sale of ivory? What if government itself either released a massive amount of stockpiled ivory (an elephant-statue's worth, say) to crash the market in one fell swoop or, even better, set about regulating the market through a gradual controlled release of these stockpiles, thereby eliminating black-market/poaching/smuggling networks, bringing the market above-board, generating taxable revenue and creating value-added industries while disinsetivising poachers/poaching activity? Fewer animals would be shot illegally, particularly if this strategy was coupled with Botswana's already tough stance on illegal poaching activity.

In a country with as many elephant as Botswana, we could maintain a steady stream of sustainably harvested ivory – i.e. ivory obtained from naturally occurring elephant carcasses (predation, disease, old age), of which there are many, as well as from existing stockpiles. A well-regulated and well-managed market and supply could contribute massively to the conservation of these animals, and, crucially, could help to generate real revenues for communities. The war on black-market ivory is like the war on drugs: it is unwinnable for the simple reason that there is a significant demand and there is an (illegally obtainable) supply. As in countries where approaches have changed to regulation, education, decriminalization (and taxation) of narcotics, perhaps Botswana should consider a similar approach for ivory?

Have a picture 3: Pel's Fishing Owl, Shakawe

2016 has been a huge year for me already, and the above photo shows one of the reasons for this. This is none other than a Pel's Fishing Owl (Scotopelia peli) - a species that is listed as threatened in Botswana due to large-scale habitat loss caused by large herbivores in some of the areas where they used to be quite common. In Kasane, for example, we had breeding pairs as recently as two or three years ago. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, and despite repeated attempts and insider information, I have failed again and again to see one of these birds in the wild. Over the Easter long-weekend, though, I was lucky enough to be invited out to Lloyd Wilmot's camp on the Okavango River in a place called Shakawe (Okavango Panhandle). Here there are still some places where the right kind of old-growth riverine forests exist, and here I was fortunate enough to encounter not just one, but three of these magnificent creatures – two of which were at their breeding sight. While I can't tell you exactly where I found them, I can tell you that if you're as desperate to see one as I was, Alistair Wilmot (www.wilmotsafaris.com) might be a good place to start.  

I'm really interested in birds - though I wouldn't quite call myself a twitcher. Birding is great for several reasons when you're out in the bush. First off it adds another level of interest that can help relieve the monotony of hours on the back of game-drive vehicle and the endless herds of elephant and impala that make up, for the most part, the average day's sightings up here. Secondly, if you're birding, you've got your eyes peeled and you're looking very carefully at every bush, every tree, every patch of open ground. You're looking for the tiniest movement and listening for the most imperceptible little sound. If you're birding, in other words, you're also much more likely not to miss out on other things that might be lurking inconspicuously just off the road. Birds are beautiful in their own right too, and interesting besides. Bird photography (particularly when they're in flight) is one of the most technically challenging varieties of the art to be found - you really have to know your gear and think very carefully about what you want to capture and how you want to capture it in order to be even remotely successful. So that's why I love it, and that's also why you'll see more of this kind of thing if you stick around. The top spot on my wish-list has just been freed up! Next one down - the Narina Trogon, that most illusive of birds!

The Death of Travel

Many years ago on a beach in India near a town called Gokarna, I witnessed a scuzzy, dread-locked Englishman launch into a tirade against an apparently innocent fellow-beach-goer for the heinous crime of Being a Tourist.

It sounded like this: "You facking tourist FACK! How dare you?!"

Now, while this might at first seem a little pots and kettles, there was a more to the exchange than that. You see, this other chap had actually made a serious error: he had dared to inquire as to the whereabouts of the facilities. This question so incensed his companion for a very simple reason: he had just revealed himself to be that most despicable of things to India's travelling riff-raff (worse even than a stingy front-desk manager or a salesman who refuses to haggle) - a tourist. Only a tourist would ask after the bogs on a remote beach in Karnataka. A traveler would never ask such a question. A traveler would simply relieve themselves in the most convenient and least obtrusive manner available - which in the case of a beach is pretty fucking obvious.

This same dread-locked individual later tried to convince me that the sound of a boat-engine under water was actually a dolphin attempting to communicate with me (while I was relieving myself, incidentally), so maybe we can take his view on the situation a little less seriously. The point, though, is that there is a terrible yawning gulf between real travel and clicky-snap production-line instagram-braggy tourism. The fact that most real travelers tend to be odoriferous Eurotrash need not detract from my next claim either, which is that travel is infinitely superior to mere tourism.

Unfortunately, in the eternal battle between tourism and travel, which is fought in never-ending cycles of trail-blazing, normalizing, commercializing, and fucking off somewhere else, tourism is winning. Travelers, real travelers, are losing out, and the places they've inadvertently helped open up to package tours, touts, pimps, drug dealers and all of the other horrible things that go along with them are one by one becoming all but overrun by that lowest form of humanity, the snooty camera-laden here-today-gone-tomorrow tourist.

This is bad.

This is bad for a number of reasons, the first of which is obvious and totally beside the point: travel as an experience is superior, and tourists, by being tourists and not travelers, are actually losing out. This does not, to be clear, trouble me overmuch. The real problem is that there are people and places which are traveler friendly, and, one-by-one, they're being overrun.

Take Botswana, for example. I live there right now. This is my idea of travel. I like to live and work in a place for a good long time, settle into its rhythms, really get intimate with the people, see the sights and hear the sounds properly. This is what uptight French intellectuals refer to as the longue durée - when they're talking about something completely different, that is. But the idea holds true nonetheless - it means something like long-view, and to me that's the only way to really get to know a place properly. If I get to see fewer places as a result, that's fine by me because I've seen what I've seen properly. So I live in Botswana, which has just been named Lonely Planet's Destination of 2016.

Botswana was kind of traveler-averse to begin with. It is expensive to be here and to do things here. Things like eat, for example. It is easy to get a visa, but back-packers are few and far between, and there is not much of a "scene"as a result. Long-stay travelers like myself have a really hard time because work-permits are really difficult to come by. The sad thing about this is that Botswana is a country that is really worth traveling in. For a start, it's huge, and there are so many things to see that a seven-day whistle-stop safari just doesn't cut it. Sadly, that seems to be the only thing going at the moment aside from the occasional lonely self-drive and the many wagon-trains coming out of the South.

This is also bad. Bad for the tourists. Bad for the businesses set up to offer a little more than a three-day all-inclusive package deal, and ultimately, I think, bad for the environment because all of these fuckers demand flushing toilets.

Full circle - the end.

No but seriously, please, despite what lonely planet says, and despite the fact that you want a Victoria Falls Selfie, a Delta selfie, an elephant selfie and a Namibian selfie despite only having a week to do it in, please don't whistle-stop Botswana. The truth is that at the end of it you won't really have been there. Thanks.