Feeling hot hot hot

The nights here are cool enough to sleep. But the forest outside my tent is anything but quiet. Weird squeaks and howls, hooting owls, cracking sticks, something munching. It sounds big enough to be an elephant, although I’m told it’s probably an anteater or a small deer. “If it were an elephant, you wouldn’t hear it,” points out one of the guides here at camp.

At 4am, the sky starts to lighten and the cacophony gets louder. The cicadas rev up, sounding like tiny electric generators, picking up steam and volume. They’re almost deafening – a steady, high-pitched thrum. And apparently when the cicadas are up and going this early, it’s going to be a hot day.

Dawn is misty, making everything feel like it’s covered in a thick, wet blanket. That doesn’t last long – at 7am, as we get ready to go out into the bush again, the sun emerges and the temperature ratchets up a few more notches. When we reach our destination, after a jaw-snapping, bone-rattling ride over another one-lane, dirt road, it’s hotter still. And as we get out of the truck, the wind picks up, making the air feel like a hair dryer. Still, it’s welcome relief, as it evaporates sweat from my already soggy shirt.

In the meantime, the men I’m with are wearing long sleeves, long pants, in dark olive green. No one appears to be breaking a sweat. But for me, the heat is oppressive, engulfing. It’s all you can think about. I'm longing for the inches of snow they got in Denver, ice cold showers, popsicles. I drink water like it’s, well, water and I sweat it out just as quickly.

No matter. We’re still going out for a walk and we’ll stay out there till we find what we’re looking for…

Wildlife sightings:

• Samango monkeys
• Red daikur
• Reedbuck
• Fish eagle

Into Africa

Arrived yesterday afternoon after what felt like a brutally long journey – original flights cancelled due to a strike on Lufthansa, a mad dash the airport, a rebooked trip, a red-eye to JFK on Sunday night followed by a 15 hour flight to Johannesburg followed by a two hour flight to Beira, Mozambique followed by a very bumpy 50 minute flight in a eight-seater GA8 Airvan.

Whew!

But I’m here and I’m relatively awake. I still haven’t quite grasped that I’m on the other side of the world, although it feels about as far away from Colorado as I can get. For those of you who don’t know, I’m somewhere in the Zambezi River Delta in central Mozambique for a story on anti-poaching operations. I’m staying in a hunting camp with a collection of fancy tents, a dining hall, a giant concrete fire pit and slow, but operating, wi-fi.

Set on concrete pads, the tents are constructed from heavy-duty canvas with thick screens for windows and doors. The door out the back of the tent leads into a private, stucco walled, open-air bathroom, complete with flushing toilets and running water. There’s even hot water, although with temps approaching 100 degrees, hot water doesn’t hold much appeal.

At sunset, there are drinks and appetizers by the (thankfully unlit) fire pit and then a big group dinner in the dining hall. At 6am, the staff brings a French press of fresh coffee to your door. There’s laundry done every day. In other words, I’ve stayed worse places.

But it’s not all sitting around in camp, popping bonbons and drinking beer. While I can’t really get too detailed (have to save something for the actual story), this morning’s outing was definitely an adventure. We were up and out by 7am, following some potential leads, bouncing over one-lane dirt/sand roads in a beat up Toyota LandCruiser with a spider-webbed windshield and holes in the floorboards. 

The landscape here is sparser than I’d expected (was thinking more tropical forest) – scrubby looking palms rising out of mounds of sand, stubbly grasses. In places, taller trees provide something of a canopy, although in the middle of the day, shade is hard to come by. And it’s the dry season here and there’s a serious drought, so everything looks dry and brown. Flammable. Which it is. People here set fire to the grasses to burn them away for farming purposes. As we were flying in yesterday, you could see dozens of fires, sending up enough smoke that, at times, you couldn’t see the horizon. It’s hazy here and the air constantly smells of smoke.

No elephants or leopards or water buffalo yet. But here’s a list of what I have seen:

• Baboon
• Warthog
• Reedbuck
• Hooded vulture
• Guinea hens
• 8-inch grasshopper
• Hummingbird-sized black wasp with orange butt
• Wood owl

Rhinoplasty

I wrote a (very) short piece for the November 2015 issue of Smithsonian Magazine about people who are trying to save rhinos from being poached with some seriously creative ideas. In all honesty, I wasn't happy with the final result - it was my research and my quotes but not my writing. Nor did it really include everything I felt should be in there. So I'm posting my original draft, which I was much happier about.

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What if you could make a perfect biological copy of a rhino horn? That idea bounced around Matthew Markus’s brain as he pursued his computer science courses at the University of Illinois. It was the early 1990s and Africa was experiencing a devastating wave of rhino poaching. He saw how easy it was to copy and share software. So why couldn’t he make copies of a rhino horn, flood the market with them and put poachers out of business? The concept intrigued him, but it would have to wait. Full genomic sequencing remained years off and was beyond expensive. Markus shelved his idea and moved on to other pursuits.

The poachers, however, did not move on and the slaughter continued. As recently as a century ago, 500,000 rhinos crashed through Asian underbrush and African grasslands. Now, fewer than 30 thousand remain worldwide. Of the five species of rhino, four are considered vulnerable or critically endangered. The fifth, the white rhino, is listed as “near threatened.” Their precipitous drop in numbers can be almost entirely attributed to poaching and the incredibly lucrative illegal rhino horn trade. Horns - valued as status symbols in Vietnam, hangover cures in China and dagger handles in Yemen - gross between $63 and $192 million annually, selling for at least $65,000 per kilogram. If the average weight of a rhino horn is three to four kilograms, it’s no surprise that these animals are such tempting targets. In South Africa alone, poachers killed over 1200 rhinos in 2014 and 2015 is currently on track to be just as bad.

While wildlife rangers, military and the international community have increased their efforts to protect rhinos, the problem remains intractable. Bribery and corruption are rampant and the penalties for poaching are minimal. Additionally, modern-day poachers are the same types of people that traffic in drugs, weapons and humans: They’re well-armed, well-funded and well-connected to international criminal organizations. The effort to stop them has led to some unconventional solutions.

The Rhino Rescue Project in South Africa drills into the horns of live rhinos and injects them with toxic ectoparasiticides - an antiparisitic drug - and a permanent dye. That potent cocktail, while harmless to the rhino, makes the horn undesireable for ornamental use and, if ingested by people, can cause nausea, vomiting and convulsions. So far, it seems to be effective in stopping poachers, at least in parts of South Africa. “In the KwaZulu-Natal province, two of the hardest-hit reserves informed us that incursions had dropped from eighteen in the three months leading up to the procedures to only two in the three months after,” reports Dr. Lorinda Hern, one of the co-founders of the project. “To date, we have only lost 7 animals in total over a five year period. This is a triumph by any standard, especially, if you consider that South Africa is currently losing four animals to poaching per day."

There’s also Protect, a British non-profit that, in July, unveiled a monitoring system to help officials react to poaching in real time. Rhinos are outfitted with a heart-rate monitor and a radio collar, while a video camera is embedded in the horn. When approaching poachers cause the animal’s heart-rate to skyrocket, the monitor and collar send an alert and GPS coordinates to an anti-poaching surveillance team, which can confirm poachers as the cause via the video feed and quickly dispatch an anti-poaching unit. “Typically, an anti-poaching force will find out an incident took place a days later. You’re never gonna catch the guys who’ve done it or stop the horn from getting to market,” says Steve Piper. “But in this case, it puts anti-poaching forces hot on the poachers’ tracks.”

And then there’s Matthew Markus. Two decades later, technology has finally caught up with his original idea. “DNA sequencing dropped from billions of dollars to thousands of dollars; DNA synthesis, which didn’t exist back then, can now be done really easily,” he says. “If there was ever a time to try something, this would be the time to do it.” His company Pembient uses keratin - the protein that makes up rhino horn, as well as human hair and fingernails - in combination with rhino DNA to create a dried powder. That powder can be included in various products, like beer or cosmetics, or used to 3D print a completely synthetic full rhino horn.

Markus plans to flood the market with this synthetic version, which will have an identical genetic fingerprint to the real thing. Consumers wouldn’t be able tell the difference. Neither would high-tech labs. And a sudden surge in the availability of rhino horn would make it a much less lucrative venture for poachers. Pembient already has a partnership with a Chinese beer company to include the powder in their rhino horn beer. The company is also developing a relationship with pharmacies that sell rhino horn powder as part of traditional Chinese medicines. Markus also sees a way to attack the problem from the supply side; already he’s been contacted by people in South Africa and Kenya, where rhino poaching is rampant. “They feel the problem acutely and they’re interested in working on the supply side, injecting some of this product up the black market chain,” he says.

Even the best ideas have flaws and conservationists have highlighted many of the issues that these potential solutions possess. Injecting horns with poison is temporary, not to mention traumatic for rhinos, which have to be sedated. Ditto with embedding cameras into rhino horns. High-tech surveillance systems only work if connectivity and communications are strong. They also require local officials be able to respond in a timely way - not all parks have the equipment and ability to do so. And an influx of fake horns could end up drastically increasing demand for the real thing - making rhinos all that much more valuable. But just because these ideas aren’t perfect doesn’t mean one of them - or a combination - can’t succeed. The poaching problem requires creative, out-of-the-box thinking and a willingness to experiment. Scientists and entrepreneurs should keep the ideas coming.

The End

Today is the last day of my fellowship. I can't believe it's already been nine months - the time went so incredibly fast. It's been a wonderful experience - I'd almost go so far as to say magical - and I'm sad to see it end. This is one of those situations in life where you get out of it what you put into it and I feel like I poured a lot of energy and time and heart and soul in. What I got out of it was an exponentially larger return on investment.

All the fellows were asked to write up an evaluation of our time here - some of my answers are below. It's hard to summarize the experience in such a small space but, suffice it to say, I feel infinitely richer for my time here.

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1.    Courses: How do you think these might help you with your environmental journalism?

I think they help tremendously. My biggest weakness was lack of solid baseline knowledge – I feel much more comfortable with environmental subjects (especially when it comes to natural resources and energy) now that I’ve had these courses. I also now have a tremendous number of contacts I can reach out to when I have questions.

2.    Independent Project: Here is where you should describe the work you’ve done.

When I applied for the Scripps Fellowship, I said I wanted to gain a better understanding of wildfire in the American West. It has always been part of the environment here but with climate change and drought, it is permanently altering the landscape and it’s doing so in a much shorter period of time.

It was a big topic – more than I could tackle in just this year and it was very similar to the book that Michael is writing. But I ended up finding a narrower focus within this topic, looking specifically at the problem of development in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) and the repercussions that has had for both people and forests.

I wrote two articles on this topic. One was for Newsweek, about the Black Forest Fire, which was one of the most destructive in Colorado’s history, partially because of a history of forest mismanagement, partially because of where people are living and partially because of the attitudes of the locals toward mitigation and preparedness. It’s an example of what is becoming a very expensive problem all across the west. The story appeared in the February 13 edition of the magazine, as well as online.

The second article is for Outside Magazine. It looks at the issue of controlled burns, which are an incredibly useful tool for land managers but can also have some terrible consequences if they get out of control. That article is to be published in the July edition of the magazine.

Another project is unrelated to fire but grew from an interesting presentation by James Edward Mills, one of our seminar guests. He talked to us about the lack of diversity in outdoor activities. Out of that conversation, I created and pitched a series to NPR’s Code Switch Team. I’m working closely with reporter Shereen Meraji as the editor and producer on five or six stories – the first one ran in February, pegged to the National Brotherhood of Skiers and the Black Ski Summit, which was held in Aspen at the end of February. The remaining stories will run this summer on Weekend Edition with Rachel Martin – the series is called “Race + Recreation”.

3.    Please share any other comments about the program, general or specific that you might have.

This program gave me the opportunity to really dig into a subject that I care about deeply. I’d been working in general news for years and hadn’t had the time/opportunity to work on many environmental stories. This year will give me a lot more leverage to report on these kinds of topics. Additionally, I’d been doing radio for my entire journalism career. I specifically focused on doing print while at CU because I wanted to try something new. It would have been much, much harder to experiment with a different kind of journalism if I hadn’t been in this program.

In short, I can’t say enough good things. This has, hands down, been one of the best years of my life. To have the opportunity to go back to classes, to have unlimited access to professors and scientists and journalists, to have the time to think and write and reflect – it was truly a gift. I also had a great group of fellows who were enthusiastic learners (and bowlers and beer-drinkers) and game for just about anything.

4.    How do you think you might approach environmental subjects differently in light of your fellowship experiences?

With more confidence. I always felt a bit shaky on the science, given that I don’t have a science/environment background, but the fellowship helped me a) get some more basic knowledge and b) realize that it’s possible to write about these topics in a smart, interesting way – even without a PhD in physics or biology.

5.    In what other Journalism & Mass Communication/College of Media, Communication and Information activities or events have you been a participant?

I helped start a podcast with the graduate students of the CEJ. It was something of an ambitious project but the goal was to help them have an audio story as one of their clips and to have a good, final product that they could then shop around to get university support and funding. 

6.    What activities have you and/or your family enjoyed as the result of living in Boulder and in Colorado?

Oh man. Where to begin. The hiking, for starters – Chautauqua is a short walk from where my boyfriend & I are living. Mount Sanitas. The Table Mesa trail. Then there’s Eldora – we went skiing there multiple times. With the fellows (some current, some former), we took trips up to Devil’s Thumb Ranch to go cross-country skiing. We hit up the Buffalo Bill Museum in Golden. Visited multiple breweries here in town and in Longmont and Fort Collins. Went to Rocky Mountain National Park to see the elk. Took a trip to Paonia in spring. Skied at Aspen (!). Swam at El Dorado Springs. Snowshoed up to one of the 10th Mountain Division Huts at Berthoud Pass for an overnight trip. Shopped at that fantastic farmers’ market. Watched the bronc riders at the Western Stock Show. Went to Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland. Squeezed in a little culture at the Denver Museum of Art. Made lots of new friends and had tons of happy hours, dinners, bbqs, potlucks and parties with all of them.

7.    What do you plan to do after the fellowship program is over?

Wait – it’s over?

I’ve got a number of plans in the works. I’m not ready to go back to a full-time office job yet – I’d like to continue to do more writing but also do some radio projects. I’ll be working with a former fellow who’s now at High Country News, to help develop a possible podcast. I’m also going to be collaborating on an independent radio project called “I See Change” that crowdsources climate change and marries it with data from NASA.  I’ll finish working with NPR on the “Race + Recreation” series that we launched in February – there will be 5 pieces total, running in August on Weekend Edition. I’ll be editing and producing, as well as writing web copy. And I’ve got a couple of my own writing projects in the works.

Thinking Ahead

Jim White, on addressing the problem of climate change: 

"Until one generation is willing to forego short-term gains for the long-term benefit of its children, we won't be able to address climate change."