Richard Leakey was an informative and witty speaker at Guilford College last night.
Known primarily as a paleoanthropologist, he's also a champion for conservation and wildlife preservation in his native Kenya. His book, "Wildlife Wars," is a gripping account of his experience as head of the country's wildlife service when he battled poachers for the lives of elephants. Disrupting the worldwide ivory trade keyed the elephants' recovery in Africa.
Leakey spoke a good bit about those times and his tough approach, including his "shoot-to-kill" orders to rangers in their battles against poachers. The enemies also included corrupt officials in government, who were partners in the ivory trade.
Leakey still takes a hard line toward protection of animals, under threat from the growth of human populations. Keep them separate, Leakey argues, even by fencing the wildlife parks if necessary.
"How do you keep an elephant inside a fence? For most elephants, it's easy because they don't like electricity." He added that smart elephants might drop a tree limb on the fence and short it out. "Those have to be dealt with." In the old days, dealing with troublesome elephants meant shooting; now it means relocation.
Is it wise to turn Africa's parks, where animals roam freely, into big zoos? Leakey says the parks are so big you'd only see the fence when you entered or left. Having been in Tanzania's Serengeti National Park, which is as big as Connecticut, I'd say he's right about that. But that's a lot of fencing. Even then, the migratory patterns of some of the animals, like wildebeest, still take them out of the Serengeti. Elephants also roam far and wide, and when they get out of the parks they sometimes trample farms or even whole villages. One elephant herd can destroy a village's food supply, in areas where people barely get by even in good times. So the only solution is to keep people and elephants apart.
Leakey warned about climate change in Africa. There's less and less rain in many parts of the continent, and this is going to produce refugees that the West must help. But he also said Africa has great resources and potential. Many good things are happening in Kenya with improvements in health and education, he said -- points that were made by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in his recent reports from the East African country.
Leakey graciously took questions but was pretty sharp in answering a woman who said she's going on a dig at Olduvai Gorge, the site where Leakey's parents, Louis and Mary, made their most famous discoveries. The woman said she's heard the gorge is threatened by erosion caused by runoff from the melting glacier on Mount Kilimanjaro.
I thought there was something wrong with that question. I've been to Olduvai Gorge, and you can't even see Mount Kili from there. Leakey confirmed it.
He asked the woman what group she was digging with. Earthwatch, she said.
"I'm afraid they have slightly misled you," he said. The glacier on Africa's highest peak indeed is fast disappearing after 10,000 years but it's too far off to affect Olduvai Gorge. The real problem there, he said, is too many people going on digs, walking all over the place and putting fossils in their pockets. Ouch!
Leakey talked a little anthropology and said the fossil record showing stages of man's development (he avoided the "E" word, perhaps expecting a fundamentalist crowd here in North Carolina) is now very strong.
But not for leaders of Kenya's Pentecostal churches, who tried to have fossils removed from the national museum because they were "dangerous," Leakey recounted.
"They're dangerous? They've been dead for millions of years. They're not going to harm anyone," Leakey said he told a bishop.
The fossils are still on display.
