The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  The headmaster is Adam Elmoge. He tells me his school has six classrooms, nine teachers and 224 students organised in five streams. They range in age from around fourteen to nineteenish, but the classes are not as rigidly age-structured as they are in other parts of the world. Primary education in Kenya is free, but there is no fixed age at which children must report to school. A couple of days later at a chimpanzee sanctuary I will meet a coach-load of primary schoolchildren in the widest imaginable range of sizes. In fact, I hear them before I see them. They are shrieking with pretended terror as an irascible male chimp pelts them with stones from behind the wire. Some of the boys look like men, but they wear their sharply pressed grey uniform shorts with every appearance of pride. It would be a strange thing in Europe or America to see primary schoolchildren looking older than their secondary-school cousins, but here it is all part of the miracle.

  Secondary education is not free. Day pupils pay 9,500 Kenyan shillings a year (at the time of my visit, equivalent to £72.12 or $114.39); and boarders 23,627 shillings (£178.92 or $284.49). The compulsory uniform – blue shirt, green pullover, brown trousers or skirt – adds another 4,500 shillings. To a Kenyan farmer these sums do not seem as small as they might to a European or an American. It is an expenditure that has to be thought about, especially when the pupil is a girl for whom no future is envisaged beyond the bearing of children. Even when girls do go to school, says Adam Elmoge, their academic careers can be cut short by pregnancy. This is no surprise. In Mozambique I saw teenage girls at school with babies in their arms. Teachers assured me that the infants were younger siblings being cared for while their parents were in the fields. It might have been true, but the frankly lascivious attitudes of polygamous village men to pubescent girls gave me cause to wonder (I met a witch doctor who believably gave his age as eighty, and whose latest wife was fifteen).

  The fees at Endana may be daunting to herdsmen, but – albeit for the opposite reason – they are daunting for the headmaster, too. The boarding fees, he explains, barely cover the students’ upkeep, particularly when the country’s 18 per cent inflation rate is factored in. They live mostly on maize and beans, and don’t have enough books. In the context of a miracle, however, such things are minor nuisances. Miracle is the word. In 2008 Endana had twelve pupils. By January 2010 it had146, and now (March 2012) it has 224 including sixty-two girls. What has made it possible – what built five of the six classrooms and will soon provide a laboratory – is the rhinoceros. Not the rhino alone, I confess, but the whole living bestiary of Ol Pejeta and the cash it earns from visitors. Every day we pass 4x4s and open-top minibuses glinting with optical arsenals ranging from reflective sunglasses to telephoto lenses the size of rocket-launchers. The drivers stop to quiz each other – who has seen what, where? – but it’s not like some national parks (or even the birdwatching hot-spots of North Norfolk), where the bush telegraph gathers a throng for anything rare or iconic. The number of beds on the conservancy is limited to 200, so visitors melt into the landscape like specks of dust. Only once, when a pair of lionesses display themselves on a bluff, do we have to share wild animals with other vehicles. But the visitors are a valuable commodity. Each pays a conservation fee ($68 or £42.87 for a day-trip; less for Kenyan residents and students) and each camp or lodge pays a levy for every night a visitor stays. (If you book a holiday, all this will be included in the price.) The result is what we all see framed in our binoculars – teeming wildlife, with some of the densest concentrations of predators ever recorded in Kenya – and what I now see at Endana School. It is well worth being laughed at. It will not be long before some child of this dusty plain wins a place at university.

  The Ol Pejeta Conservancy is ‘not for profit’ only in the economic sense. The profits are everywhere visible, manifested in gains for the communities of southern Laikipia. The school is one example but there are many more. In a sense what I’m writing is a mea culpa. When environmental journalism was in its infancy, some of us, the newly converted, were more inclined to sanctimony than to hard analysis. We were too keen on banning things, and provided an uncritical mouthpiece for campaign groups whose rectitude we took for granted. Carried along by their propaganda and by our own altitudinous rhetoric, we saw every issue as a struggle between man and nature. Wrong and right were as clear as night and day. Wherever such conflicts occurred, it was axiomatic that nature should win. Up with newts! Down with horrible humans! It took too long for many of us to realise the scientific and economic illiteracy of our cause – the knee-jerk opposition, for example, to well-designed and environmentally beneficial applications of GM technology or nuclear power. The perpetual doom-mongering that turned conservationists into technophobes and put environmental politics beyond the electoral pale. The hijacking of the environment movement by the political left, the tendency to submit every issue to trial by ideology, has done immeasurable harm. Rather than destroying the arguments of the free-marketeering libertarian right, they have succeeded only in locking themselves into an unwinnable war of propaganda and misinformation. Until they can acknowledge the benefits, as well as the costs, of GM technology and nuclear power, and recognise the costs as well as the benefits of organics and wind-power, then they will go on shooting themselves in the foot.

  On my earlier visits to Mozambique I spent much of my time observing a community forest project at N’hambita in the buffer zone of the Gorongosa National Park. I have already described how civil war had stripped the area of trees and wildlife. At N’hambita another not-for-profit company, part-funded by the European Union, was trying to repair the damage. It was doing this by encouraging farmers to plant trees rather than cut them down, and to abandon slash-and-burn in favour of less exhausting and wasteful methods of agriculture. These had nothing to do with mechanisation, agri-chemicals or anything else that would expose subsistence farmers to risk. They were simply encouraged to intermix their traditional crops – sorghum, maize, cashew, rice, bananas – with pigeon peas. This was soil science at its simplest. Pigeon peas are one of the most useful plants in Africa. They provide an edible crop rich in protein and vitamin B, foliage that can be dug in as compost, and roots that feed the soil with nitrogen. This means the soil stays healthy, the farmers get bigger crops and can go on using the same land year after year without hacking new fields out of the forest.

  As a further incentive, they were paid to plant new trees. It was a runaway success. The looming corn grown by the pioneers was a powerful encouragement to their neighbours, and the scheme soon spread to involve more than 1,500 farmers cultivating 2,500 fields in several different communities. In forest clearings I saw pot-grown saplings lined up by the hundred, as neat as a Home Counties garden centre, and tidy rows of vegetable plants being trickle-hosed into plumpness. Soon the farmers were able to produce a bit of surplus, which they could sell for cash. The old mud-hut or outdoor sit-on-a-log schools were replaced with proper buildings. A small clinic appeared, able to offer basic medicines and beds where women could give birth more safely than on the mud floors of their huts, and where the authority of the witch doctor was decisively challenged. Who would not applaud such enterprise?

  A girl walks to school at N’hambita in Mozambique. The plant is for the school garden

  The answer was Friends of the Earth. On my third visit I was accompanied by a camera crew making a film for BBC World, in which I gave as enthusiastic an account of the project as the director would allow. Back in London, for the sake of balance, an opportunity had to be given for a representative of FoE to tell the camera why none of this should be happening. The reason, inevitably, was ideological. Behind N’hambita stood a non-profit company that brokered carbon credits. Imperfections of the Kyoto Protocol meant that it could not be part of any official compliance scheme and so had to be voluntary, but it worked in a similar way. Concerned or image-conscious corporations, organisations and individuals could buy credits from the company to offset their carbon output against tree-planting. Quite apart from
its benefits to biodiversity and the carbon economy, this seemed a pretty good way to transfer wealth from the northern rich to the African poor. A bush secondary school with a computer on every desk? Not an impossible dream. Here it had already happened.

  So why did FoE decry it? Simple. It had a policy of opposition to carbon trading, and so was constitutionally disbarred from acknowledging any benefit derived from it. Equally predictably, I soon found myself being vilified from the opposite wing of the belief-spectrum by a climate-sceptic blog which implied that I was a paid stooge of the company that founded the project. This is a pretty good example of the debased condition into which ‘debate’ has fallen. The same blog chose to see something sinister in the fact that The Sunday Times had asked me to interview Professor Phil Jones, the man at the centre of the so-called Climategate scandal (when emails leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia seemed to suggest that data had been withheld or fiddled with). As it happened, the interview had been fixed by arrangement between the Sunday Times news editor and a media consultant hired by the university. This man, who was unknown to me, was a former executive of the now defunct News of the World who later would be arrested over allegations of phone hacking (though he was subsequently released without charge). The blogger purported to think that this proved an ‘illicit relationship’ between myself and the man’s PR firm – further reason, if any were needed, to disbelieve every word I wrote. There was nothing unusual in this. Anyone who enters the climate-change arena can expect to be smeared, and compared with others I got off lightly. My regret is that by over-simplification in the past, and by promoting a doctrine of absolute truth, for all our good intentions we may ourselves have contributed to the moral and intellectual implosion that makes such nonsense possible.

  For far too long, the natural and human worlds have been perceived as warring entities whose interests are irreconcilable. In their different ways, both N’hambita and Ol Pejeta have shown this to be false. Ol Pejeta’s chief executive Richard Vigne puts it like this: ‘We are moving away from the idea of fortress conservation that takes place behind fences in the absence of any other human activity. We’re saying that if conservation is going to continue on a landscape scale, then we’re going to have to accommodate people and their activities in some way or another. We are opening up more opportunities for conservation by overcoming the mindset that you can only do it where there are no humans.’ This is what’s in my mind when headmaster Elmoge describes the Endana curriculum. All pupils at the school are taught English, Swahili, maths, chemistry and religion, and may choose between biology and physics, history and geography, business studies and agriculture.

  ‘Crop science,’ says Adam Elmoge when I ask what is taught in the agriculture classes. On the evidence of what I’ve seen, this could sound like a joke – lessons in cake-making in a land with no bread. But it could not be more apposite. The lights that begin to glow as twilight falls across the lower slopes of Mount Kenya are from nurseries growing vegetables that will find their way to British supermarkets. I am always irritated by green evangelists who bang on about ‘localism’ and ‘food miles’, as if there were something un-green about eating African beans. If ‘green’ means a co-operative and sustainable sharing of the world’s resources, then what could be greener than supporting Kenyan farmworkers?

  Of course this is not the issue at Ol Pejeta. The priority here is subsistence, not exports, but this doesn’t alter the message. As sons and daughters are being taught in the classroom, so their parents are learning in the fields. At the conservancy headquarters I meet Josphat Kiama, Ol Pejeta’s Agricultural Extension Officer. He is young, energetic and persuasive, at once idealistic and pragmatic, driven by outcomes rather than ideologies. The keyword is productivity. This doesn’t mean telling traditional farmers to radically change their ways. As at N’hambita, it means showing them how to make the old ways work more efficiently. Example: it takes eight men four days to weed an acre by hand. With Roundup weedkiller one man can do it in an hour. This is much cheaper, especially when farmers combine to bulk-buy the weedkiller (and let the organo-fascists fulminate as they may). The same is true of seed and fertiliser. This is about life, not lifestyle. And it is about cooperation. Example: one farmer owns a drilling machine and lets others borrow it for the price of the diesel.

  Josphat is high on practicality, low on cant. ‘Sustainability’ is not some gaseous extrusion of environmental Newspeak, pace Gro Harlem Brundtland, but the very lifeline by which families cling to the soil. The landscape asks brutal questions; Josphat provides uncomplicated answers. To keep the soil healthy he prescribes a simple crop rotation – maize, beans, potatoes – and mulching to retain the moisture. Soil disturbance is minimised by bio-friendly ‘no-till’ techniques that require no ploughing. This ensures the survival of worms and micro-organisms, and keeps carbon locked in the earth. The ground is disturbed only as far as it is necessary to implant the seed, which is watered by a drip irrigation system that delivers what the crop needs and not a cupful more. It uses only a sixth of the water consumed by haphazard sloshing. The no-till method is also parsimonious with fuel. Petrol consumption per acre is down to half a litre a week – previously it was six.

  Livestock, too, is being improved by selective breeding. The arrival of Dorper sheep from South Africa means that animals now reach market weight in six months instead of three years. This may not delight the European welfare lobby but it’s good news in equatorial Africa. For milk, Josphat favours the goat – much more likely than a cow to withstand drought. He also encourages farmers to grow and store hay rather than expect their animals to survive on the desiccated scraps that nature provides in the dry season. No one has to take his word for it. He can talk the hind legs off a giraffe, and reduce to jelly the writing arm of a visiting note-taker (having made a point, he will not move on until I have written it down), but he knows it’s example that counts, not explication. As it was at N’hambita, so it is here. It is the early-adopters, the emboldened pioneers enjoying their heavier crops and healthier animals, who are the best recruiters. So it is that in a single season the human benefit from Ol Pejeta passes from classroom into field.

  Back in the conservancy, still thinking about the mole and what it represents, I recall another childhood visit to London Zoo. In a shady corner, away from all the big attractions – which in those days included elephants, rhinos, big cats, bears and wolves – a crowd was gathering. Cameras were clicking. Parents were shouting for their children (including me) to come and look. Ooh, we went, and, aah! The object of our admiration paused for a moment – I would guess now in bewildered fright, but at the time I imagined it was playing to the gallery – before vanishing suddenly skywards up a tree. It was an ordinary grey squirrel, a mundane but suddenly unignorable anomaly in the company of lions. On the plains of Ol Pejeta I experience a similar moment of disconnection. The circumstances are different, and there is a vastly different scale of magnitude, but the sense of displaced ordinariness, of the mundane made exotic, is weirdly alike. Often during our game drives we would see distant clusters of tour vehicles, flashing like diamonds in the sun. It was not the plains game that drew them. Not big cats. Not rhinos, giraffes or elephants. Not even anything small and cute like a squirrel.

  It was cows. Ranch-scale herds of domestic cattle, sharing the land with lions. These are not, it must be admitted, the Herefords and Friesian-Holsteins of the English lowlands. They are spectacular Ankole, whose curved horns can reach 8 feet from tip to tip, and humped Borans like the sacred cattle of India. Both are exotic to western eyes, but they are cattle all the same, with the same needs and vulnerabilities as any herd in the Cotswolds, but here with the added spice of the world’s top predators – a somewhat more exciting risk than badger-borne bovine TB. In a very direct way, though unconnected with this apparent supply of easy meat, the lions are beneficiaries of the cattle. So too are the impala, the zebras, the rhinos, giraffes, leopards and hyenas . .
. So is everything that lives here, from the raptors overhead to the subterranean confrères of the elusive golden mole. Even the schoolchildren in their classrooms and laboratories, at least in part, owe their improving exam grades to Ol Pejeta beef.

  This duality is not something you will see in Kenya’s National Parks, where a purist philosophy deems ranching and wildlife to be incompatible. Neither is it something you would have seen years ago in the ranch-lands. ‘In the old days,’ says Richard Vigne, ‘the feeling was that if you wanted to succeed as a cattle rancher, one thing you had to do was eliminate wildlife from your land. And that’s what they did.’ So Ol Pejeta is different. It refutes the old idea that a gain for wildlife is a loss for humans, and it recognises that it’s not enough simply to rewrite the law in favour of conservation. For millennia, people on this continent lived by hunting. At sea, aboriginal fishermen have been allowed a quota for subsistence, but on land the ban on most traditionally hunted species is absolute. Anyone caught poaching – provided they are not corrupt officials protected by their peers – should be caught and punished. Flesh from wild animals, once just plain ‘meat’, is now illegal ‘bushmeat’. I think yet again of the Chitengo Two, held for killing a warthog. I think, too, of the injustices of English nineteenth-century poaching laws, when poor village men snaring rabbits to feed their families were viciously man-trapped, shot at and transported to penal colonies in Australia. Whatever word you might choose to describe this, it is unlikely to be ‘justice’.