An environmental travelogue of a walk, on foot, across Kenya, from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro all the way to the Indian Ocean. You'll learn about the various debates surrounding efforts to conserve habitat and wildlife in Africa, you'll learn a lot about elephants and the people who used to hunt them, and you'll be perhaps disturbed by the arrogance of non-local "experts" meddling with (and often catastrophically disrupting) entire cultures, all in the name of "conservation."
You'll also, at times, suffer from author Rick Ridgeway's leaden pen. His style would improve significantly if he would do three simple things:
1) Put down the thesaurus and stay within the constraints of his working vocabulary,
2) Stop using compound verbs (e.g.: have done, has said, had known), and
3) Omit needless words.
There's also something creepy and bothersome about a white environmentalist/travel writer walking unburdened through the African bush with guides and armed guards, while hired local porters drive ahead, prepare a camp, carry and set up all their shit for them, make gourmet dinners for them, etc., while the author talks about various "hardships" he experiences. It's discordant and tone-deaf.
Notes:
* The anti poaching efforts with the Waliangulu tribe look to a modern reader like aggressive prosecutorial excess: preying on the sincere naivete of one tribe member to capture others, and ultimately achieving the (most likely unnecessary) destruction of their way of life.
* Note how the governments in Africa--particularly white-led governments--decided the fate of entire cultures by (among other examples) outlawing elephant hunting by the Waliangulu, a tribe with a centuries- or possibly millennia-long tradition of sustainable hunting.
* There is a conundrum in imposing conservation standards on cultures that are not ready for those standards--kind of like imposing democracy on unready cultures. Or, is it wrong--even condescending--to assume, with certainty, that developing countries will exterminate their megafauna, and thus "need" standards imposed on them? But can you then afford to risk waiting until the megafauna are all gone? Do you trust that the various peoples there figure it out themselves before that happens? Or do you externally impose conservation discipline anyway, which may involve taking away tremendous regions of land, resettling people, and disrupting many cultures?
* Orthodox environmentalists seem to struggle with the idea that hunters love the planet too, that hunters might actually be interested in conservation as well. This author is orthodox in his thinking, and that he expels a lot of ink struggling with resolving these ideas. Just resolve them! Sometimes people you don't expect to be on your team are on your team. Take them onto your team. It's like compulsively using a democrat/republican paradigm to navigate reality--it doesn't work anymore.
* A dead, dead giveaway for a windy, masturbatory writer is the use of the expression "warp and woof." Even worse is the red-headed stepchild "warp and weft" which the author uses twice in ten pages near the end of the book. Do not use these phrases.
Reading list:
The Hunting Peoples by Carlton S. Coon
Coming of Age with Elephants by Joyce Poole
Ivory Crisis by Ian Parker
The Lunatic Express by Charles Miller
The End of the Game by Peter Beard
Out of Africa by Isaac Dinesen/Karen Blixen
The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea (10th Century Byzantine manuscript)
The Myth of Wild Africa by Jonathan Adams and Thomas McShane