Keynote Speach
~David (Jonah) Western, Ph.D. - African Conservation Centre & author of In the Dust of Kilimanjaro

Excerpt from Program:
"Beyond the park boundary [Amboseli], where elephants wandered back and forth and seldom settled for fear of people, diversity reached its peak.......

"Amboseli's rich patchwork of habitat arose from elephants roaming far and wide on their migrations, never settling in the park because of the presence of Maasai, never settling outside because of lack of permanent.

"I was in my element sizing up the implications of the experimental plot around the house, loving the ideas, the observations, the weird and wonderful connections, and the far-reaching implications -- all coming together in a headlong rush. These deductions led to a new round of ecological surveys and experiments, designed to tease out the factors creating and maintaining Amboseli's biological diversity. The studies culminated in a provocative idea -- to marry the adverse impact of too many elephants and too many livestock to mutual advantage, and in the process re-create Amboseli's lost diversity.

"The idea goes something like this. When cattle are fenced in, they overgraze, destroying the grasslands and creating bushland. When elephants are fenced in, they overbrowse, thinning the bush and creating grasslands. It takes no leap of imagination to deduce that such habitat simplification is happening in ecosystems all across Africa, wherever elephants flee poachers to the safety of a park and livestock are forced out by rangers.....

"If elephants and cattle had their way, they would trade places...With elephants and cattle transforming the habitat in ways inimical to their own survival but beneficial to each other, they create an unstable interplay, advancing and retreating around each.....

"The Maasai, with their cogent ecological wisdom, make the same point: 'Cows grow trees, elephants grow grasslands.' They watch elephants open up thickets and create the grasslands their cattle prefer. They watch grasslands chewed to a nub by cattle revert to the trees and bushes elephants prefer. Like elephants, the Maasai live long enough to figure out the value of trading places in the savannas."
~Excerpt from "Keystone Species" chapter, In the Dust of Kilimanjaro."