Why the Penguins Must Die

Below is a sad, honest insight into the world of conservation in South Africa. This letter, written by journalist and conservationist JOHANN BOTHA on his Facebook timeline is about the penguins, but those fighting to save the rhino from extinction say it sums up how they are feeling too…

WHY THE PENGUINS MUST DIE – by Johann Botha

Bamboesina, Henriette, Joe and fellow wild penguin lovers…

Short of a miracle, I fear we’ve lost the fight for the penguins. They will go extinct and there is pretty much nothing we can do about that. That is the long and the short of it.

Just before I went to bed last night, I received a reply from Mark Anderson of Birdlife. I was excited, because he was my last hope in bringing sanity back into the debate about the fence. [This refers to a proposed high security perimeter fence at Stony Point, home to a breeding colony of endangered African Penguin.] 

I spent hours writing his letter, compiling the 20 most important conservation and scientific red flags about why the fence will spell disaster for the colony, carefully pointing out, once again, that this is the only remaining breeding colony of the species with positive growth, and that we should therefore be extra-cautionary in any management decisions, especially something as incisive as the new fence will be.

But, like all the others we’ve approached about this, he did not shed light. Instead, like his predecessors, he chose to avoid all 20 issues, not even referring to them, simply stating that the fence will have no impact and that they support Cape Nature in all their decisions.

I could not believe my eyes – how can he say there will be no impact when i’ve just supplied him with proof of the massive impact? Did he not read my letter?

I could not sleep last night. More than four years of collecting data, doing research, being publicly and falsely discredited, you being victimised, me being threatened – after all of this – to once again run into the same brick wall.

As soon as we ask for facts to support their decision they cut off the debate by blocking us, ignoring us or falling back on personal attacks. Or they suddenly start talking about the fishing stocks, which has absolutely no link to the fence whatsoever.

How can it be that the whole penguin conservation world have all gone mad at the same time? Or have I finally lost my marbles?

Remember back in 2012 when Stony resident Mark warned us that we cannot win this fight. He said they will just frustrate, delay and simply wear us down into submission…

Then, this morning, while I was having coffee and my first unwanted cigarette of the day, I clicked what was going on. I cannot believe that it took me so long to get the picture, especially as, through my work as investigative journalist, I have had more opportunities to see the bigger picture than most other people.

Actually, while drinking my coffe, I was thinking of other stories I had been working on the past two years, when I first chose to give up on environmental reporting. And about living in a country where the president is potentially corrupt. Where the justice system seems to be buckling under political pressure. Where parliament, the economy, SAPS, SARS, the Hawks, health care, the educational system, electricity, water supply, sewerage removal, the SABC, SAA and just about everything else around us seems caught up in a downward spiral of mismanagement, lack of money due to wasteful expenditure and corruption, appointments of incompetent people on all levels of employment and a myriad other reasons.

The whole country is in trouble.

Almost nothing functions properly – from the natal care units where our children are born to the frail care units where we must die, or, as we say in conservation lingo, literally from cradle to grave.

We’ve got people starving of hunger, massive unemployment, uncontrolled influx of masses from even poorer countries and organised crime, drug syndicates, violent crime, xenophobia, race driven hatred, the scars of apartheid, a constant brain drain of the last anaesthetists, engineers, nurses, IT-specialists and almost everyone else who is competent enough to think he will survive in another country.

Leaders are raping the system and don’t give a shit about the rest. I can carry on but you get the idea. There was no sugar in my coffee.

And then I thought about the penguins.

I’ve done numerous stories in the past ten years about the threatening collapse of provincial nature conservation, in Limpopo, Gauteng, North West, the Free State and Northern Cape.

They all suffer from lack of funding, from serious shortages of qualified and/or dedicated ecologists, scientists and conservationists. They are all under constant pressure of land claims, mining rights, poaching, etc.

The few solitary true conservationists who survived the onslaught are all fighting a losing battle. They don’t have the tools or the support from above to make any real difference.

Conservation has always been seen as a junior department by government and in parliament. In 2016 we have way more serious issues to worry about than saving the Brenton Blue butterfly.

And why would Cape Nature be any different? I’ve been told that, compared to the needs of their department, the shortage of skilled staff is enormous – there is no way they can fix everything or even maintain what is left.

The people with passion have almost all retired, left for the private sector, been retrenched or emigrated. There is no more institutional memory or culture to speak off. Those left with passion (if any) are silenced and forced to toe the line to be able to feed their own families.

The NGOs who exist to support conservation are also struggling to survive, or at least, to make a decent profit. Or so they say.

Gone are the days when conservation was trendy and everyone donated money to help save species, eco-systems or biospheres. Some of these organisations still try their best, but they are understaffed and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of issues demanding attention.

They are also careful not to criticise government, fearing that such criticism may lead to even the last few effective individuals inside government getting blamed and fired.

The media who are supposed to act as environmental watchdogs have been silenced. There are more important issues to write about and most media houses don’t even have environmental journalists left.

Readers, viewers and listeners don’t want to know about these things anymore, it’s all too depressing already, and that’s why (I was told) programmes like 50/50 decided to rather not deal with issues, but only bring in so-called good news stories.

Most environmental journalists I encounter have no frame of reference anymore, they don’t know the basics of conservation issues, let alone the complexities of a word like sustainability.

As I write this, I cannot think of five serious environmental journalists left in this whole country. The ones claiming to be do nothing more than publish the press releases landing on their desks. No one has the time or the skill to go and check the facts.

Government, mining houses and everyone else including the NGO’s know this and feed these poor sods whatever they want published. Now and then they throw in a nice trip to a lodge or an evening with free drinks at their headquarters, and so they get away with murder.

Where does this leave the penguins at Stony Point? They are f**ked, I’m sorry to say. Just like the million plus penguins who were wiped out in the last 60 years due to man’s greed destroying their islands and finishing their main food supplies.

These little bastards ran for their lives and ended up at Stony Point, not knowing or understanding that they’ve run straight into the enemy’s den. They were entertaining for a while, and even have tourism value, and they make great study material, but we won’t give them an inch more of our land than we absolutely have to.

The residents won’t let them shit or sleep in their pretty exotic gardens, or leave the dogs at home when they come here.

In a (maybe) desperate attempt to save them, Cape Nature, already facing all the above mentioned challenges and incompetencies, fall back on the only way they know – fencing them in to their land where they will have the only say and full control over these refugees.

Their logic (it seems) tells them that with their limited resources and shortage of trained staff, the penguins will have a better chance of survival on a smaller piece of fenced-in land.

The scientifically proven threats such as disease caused by too high population density, of a fire catastrophe, of cutting the fringe of the colony off from the core etc, weigh less than the energy and skills it would take to convince the selfish landowners to make the sacrifice of creating a conservancy and by so doing expanding their habitat.

The difference being that penguins can’t talk, won’t take them to court and will hopefully just go quietly extinct.

And if they do go, and some hard-ass journalist or an innocent nature lover should ask any questions about it, they will blame it on the fish stocks disappearing, on climate change or on whatever sellable reason their marketing departments can come up with.

And should there be follow-up questions they will simply block you and embark on a process of threatening you and trying to discredit you.

And then they will all put on their sad faces, and try and convince tourists and donors that they were the heroes and therefore deserve more money and more research projects to try and not save the next species in line for extinction.

Something in me believes that these people are actually trying their best, they are just drowning in the current that is dragging the whole country out to sea.

But it is just a small part of me that always seems to hope for the best. The rest, the experienced, battered into cynicism part, believes the opposite, and is probably right.

Right now, penguin scientists are spending loads of donor funding and many hours of research time, planning to get two artificial penguin breeding colonies going. The odds are against them, as no-one really knows if it will work.

Yet, here at Stony, which is the only already working breeding colony we have, chosen by the penguins themselves and which obviously suits them, the same people choose to support the fence, cutting the colony off from most of the habitat where the penguins try their utmost to go and breed.

Is it the hassle that is too much? Do the new colonies offer better fund-raising and marketing opportunities? Or is it simply the old-school control freak attitude?

The penguin society and especially Cape Nature are about as transparent as the SABC board. And when someone dares to start asking the uncomfortable questions, they don’t reply with facts, they publish articles and write letters claiming that we are unscientific, that we distort the facts, or even that we don’t understand the complexity of the problems.

Yet, these same people who claim to have this superior insight into complex issues, can’t even follow my line of argument and complain that my letters are too long and exhaustive.

Shame…

So… I’m pretty convinced that we won’t be stopping the fence, and, should we by any means manage to do so, it will probably be at the expense of some other species out of our sight who will then lose whatever energy and support they are currently getting. If you try and feed 100 hungry mouths with one apple, someone will go hungry…

And then I drew the most obvious conclusion as to why they don’t try and argue our facts and issues – They know all the things we say are true, better than we know it – but they are either puppets or just don’t have the backbone required of conservationists – now they’re probably hoping for some magical miracle that will appear out of nowhere and help them.

If it doesn’t, they know, and have accepted – the penguins must die.

I guess that in some small way, I’m also hoping for a miracle. I’m hoping that the petition will get enough signatures, that the local residents would have a change of heart, that the public at large and the NGO’s will step in as they did in the 1980s at St Lucia, but the reality is that everyone is trying so hard to survive; that caring, passion and compassion for other creatures have finally been nailed to the crosses of greed, disempowerment and personal interest.

I have finished my coffee, and I fear that this may be my last environmental fight. You can’t win the hearts of people who have no hearts, who call you mad, unscientific or anamorphic simply because you feel that other creatures, that Nature as a whole, Mother Earth, also has rights.

It will cost us dearly in future, but in true South African style, that is tomorrow’s problem.

For now, all I can do is sit back and feel Chief Seattle’s great loneliness of spirit settle around us. Maybe I’ve finally given up.

Or, maybe, by tomorrow I’ll try to give it one more go. I’d prefer the penguins not to die.

MORE

Please read the original letter here.

If you’d like to support the petition to bring down the fence around the Stony Point penguin colony, click here.