The Hunt for the Golden Mole (24 page)

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'.

Ranching at Ol Pejeta is important for the very same reasons that tourism is. It creates the income the conservancy needs to protect wild animals; it reduces the reliance on charitable donations (though these remain important); it demonstrates to
other landowners the viability of managing their hectares for wildlife, and it gives the local communities something in return for their cooperation. That ‘something' is substantial. It includes road improvements and piped fresh water as well as agricultural improvements, support for a hospital, three health clinics and the schools. It's not just Endana. In all, the conservancy supports twenty local schools. On average at any time, forty secondary school students will be maintained on full-time bursaries (awarded in consultation with local leaders and community groups), and some 250 on part-time bursaries given in periods of hardship such as drought, when resources are stretched. There are gifts of books, desks, chairs, laboratory equipment, water tanks and computers. Five schools will be given a couple of cows each, so that they can be self-sufficient in biogas and milk. The camps within the conservancy also play their part – Kicheche sponsors bursaries and has helped to set up a chicken project providing eggs for the local orphanage, to which it also gives blankets. Most importantly Ol Pejeta creates jobs – 700 of them altogether, of which 80 per cent are filled by local people who otherwise would have no prospect of employment. All that would be open to them, says Richard Vigne, would be ‘scratching around on sub-economic plots of land'.

In a way this is a dangerous argument. Emphasising the community benefits of projects such as Ol Pejeta is to invite the conclusion that conservation alone is not enough. It is not easy to make a business case for saving wildlife – economists can always find more intensive ways of using land – but Ol Pejeta strikes me as the model answer. Philosophers such as Peter Singer have argued the case for universal rights, extending to all species the utilitarian principle that the only ethical standard by which behaviour can be judged is, as Jeremy
Bentham put it, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Singer and others specifically reject ‘speciesism' – the inherent belief that
Homo sapiens
has a special entitlement and should enjoy rights denied to others. As they see it, all exploitation of animals by humans should cease. No rhino horn, no ivory, no food animals, no hunting, no pets. The case is morally perfect, smooth as an egg, but no likelier than an egg to survive hard impacts with an imperfect reality. Charred animal bones provide some of the earliest evidence of human settlement, and there is very little in all the millennia to encourage the view that every ‘possessor of a life' is equal in the eyes of the world.

Nature is all about power, and in the Anthropocene the power is all ours. Viruses apart, there is literally nothing we can't find a way to kill. Somewhere within us, however, is something felt rather than reasoned, a well of sentiment that persuades even the simplest mind to travel at least part-way with Jeremy Bentham. Animals earned their right to humane treatment, Bentham argued, not through their capacity for reason but through their ability to suffer. From whatever source it may come – evolution, religion, education – we have a revulsion to cruelty, which we commonly describe as ‘inhuman'. This is not quite universal. Disregard for others' feelings – human as well as animal – is likeliest where survival is hardest.
In extremis
we would eat our neighbours. But most of us are not
in extremis
. Tim Flannery speaks of a ‘commonwealth of virtue' in which people of all cultural, racial and economic backgrounds recognise each other's goodness. In his book
Here on Earth: a new beginning
, he writes movingly of the ‘natural magic' of an encounter, in a remote part of New Guinea, with local people whose ancestors and his own had parted ways not long after the dawn of civilisation. ‘Yet when we met, after fifty millennia of
separation, I understood immediately the meaning of the shy smile on the face of the young boy looking at me, and he understood my motion for him to step closer to better observe what I was doing.'