Tracking Dogs Are Helping Wildlife & People Northern Tanzania

After a few minutes, one of the handlers leads a striking maroon-red Alsatian named Rosdaz, its nose to the ground, to the area between the tents and from there, to an open-air kitchen. Here, the handler directs five camp staff members and about 10 others, including me, to stand still as he presents the dog with one of the pieces of gauze. After a few sniffs, Rosdaz matches the scent to one of the staff members; the dog stands up on his hind legs and places his front paws firmly against the man’s waist. The man, dressed in a crisp, collared shirt, stands motionless and stares straight ahead, avoiding the gaze of his accuser.

Because Rosdaz is still young, the handlers decide they want a second opinion. Rocky is a more classic looking Alsatian with a sloping back and dusty grey coat. At 7 years old, he’s more experienced and bolder than Rosdaz. As one of Tanzania’s two original tracker dogs, Rocky has already made a name for himself. He and another dog, now based in the Serengeti National Park, once tracked a poachers’ trail for some 7 hours. Ultimately, the dogs led rangers to a hidden stash of ivory weighing 60 kilograms (130 pounds), representing tusks from at least a half dozen elephants (Loxodonta africana).

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This type of investigation, while not the team’s primary role, is an important demonstration of the dogs’ keen ability to track down individuals—from poachers to petty thieves—who have left even the slightest clue at the scene of their crime. The methods the dog team used here are the same as those used in the pursuit of some of Tanzania’s most lethal poachers. And in that high-stakes fight, there’s little time to lose.

Tanzania, which recently boasted the continent’s second largest elephant population after Botswana, lost more than 60 percent of its elephants to poaching between 2009 and 2014. Seeking effective low-tech solutions to the problem, rangers began considering using dogs to track down poachers in the bush.

The use of highly trained dogs like Rocky and Rosdaz was pioneered by the Tanzanian conservation organization Honeyguide. (The organization is named after a group of birds in the Indicatoridae family that are known to lead people to sources of wild honey.) Honeyguide first established a conservation tracker dog unit in 2011 in West Kilimanjaro and was one of only a few such programs in Africa.

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With the dogs’ ability to follow a scent—sometimes days-old—from crime scenes over many miles to poachers’ camps or villages, and to match scents collected at a scene to individual suspects, the dogs have proven their value to the rangers. According to Olekashe, this can be measured in the relative prices poachers charge to work in various areas. The higher the risk, the more compensation is required. “From intelligence, we know that a shooter’s charge can now be as much as 5 million Tanzanian Shillings ($2,200) in areas where we operate. Elsewhere, it may be 500,000 ($223) or as little as 200,000 ($89).”

Poaching incidents in Manyara Ranch have fallen as well. In 2014 and 2015, poachers killed 17 elephants inside the ranch. This number fell to zero in 2016, although three elephants were speared on the outskirts of the ranch in retaliation for feeding on farmers’ crops. Thus far, 2017 has been quiet, with no elephants poached or speared. “These days, not only does an elephant die naturally, its tusks are left intact,” Olekashe says. “This would have never happened before.”

In Tanzania’s Manyara Ranch, elephants were once the main targets of poaching.

Thanks to tracker dogs like Rocky and Rosdaz, elephant poaching at Manyara Ranch has since been greatly reduced.

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“I was fond of dogs before becoming a handler,” Isaack says. “Training improved my commitment to them. People were more accustomed to using dogs for hunting. Now we’re using dogs to stop hunting.”

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“In conservation, we have limited resources,” says Damian Bell, Honeyguide’s executive director. “While dogs are expensive to maintain, they have proven effective at helping government and community ranger teams curb poaching and crime.” Bell estimates that it costs at least $30 thousand per year to maintain an established dog unit. The rationale is that if dogs are helping to keep the region’s protected areas, campsites, and communities safe, they are not only fostering positive attitudes toward conservation, but also helping secure a vital sector of Tanzania’s economy. Tourism is a mainstay in the country where the northern circuit—together with the islands of Zanzibar—generate some 90 percent of the country’s $1.3 billion in tourism earnings annually. These funds help subsidize Tanzania’s lesser-known and more remote national parks.

- More Here

So Messed Up Is My Species...

"Lions are the biggest group-hunting land predator on the planet, and thus ought to be the scariest," conservation biologist Michael Clinchy from Western University in Canada said in 2023.

But in over 10,000 recordings of wildlife on the African savannah, 95 percent of the species observed responded with far more terror to the sound of an entirely different beast. This animal isn't even technically an apex predator. It's us: humans.

We're the monsters lurking under other mammals' beds.

"The fear of humans is ingrained and pervasive," said Clinchy. "There's this idea that the animals are going to habituate to humans if they're not hunted. But we've shown that this isn't the case."

- There's One Super Predator in Africa That Instills More Fear Than Lions

Immune & Metabolic Effects of African Heritage Diets vs. Western Diets

Years ago, when I went to an Ethiopian restaurant for the first time , I was blown away. A lot of their dishes were exactly how my grandma and mom cooked. I mean almost 1:1 similarity. 

My dad had told me years ago, plus I have done my DNA and we were one of the first "tribes" to move out of Africa and settle in Tamilnadu. Hence, there is so much similarity in the cooking style which is very different than well.. Indian restaurants here or most of India. 

So over the years, I started cooking like my grandma did. 

And now this paper, I was waiting for the longest time: 

Abstract: 

African heritage diets are increasingly being replaced by Western-style dietary patterns because of urbanization, economic development, increased access to processed foods, globalization and changing social norms. 

The health consequences of this nutrition transition are not well understood. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in the Kilimanjaro region in Northern Tanzania to investigate the immune and metabolic effects of switching between Kilimanjaro heritage-style and Western-style diets for 2 weeks and consuming a traditional fermented banana beverage (‘Mbege’) for 1 week. 

Seventy-seven young and healthy volunteers assigned male at birth, some living in urban areas and some living in rural areas, were recruited in the trial. Primary outcomes were changes in the immune and metabolic profile before and after the intervention and at the 4-week follow-up. The switch from heritage-style to Western-style diet affected different metabolic pathways associated with noncommunicable diseases and promoted a pro-inflammatory state with impaired whole-blood cytokine responses to microbial stimulation. In contrast, the switch from Western-style to heritage-style diet or consuming the fermented beverage had a largely anti-inflammatory effect. 

Some of the observed changes in the immune and metabolic profiles persisted at the follow-up, suggesting a sustained impact from the short-term intervention. These findings show the metabolic and immune effects of dietary transitions and the consumption of fermented beverages, underscoring the importance of preserving indigenous dietary practices to mitigate noncommunicable disease risk factors in sub-Saharan Africa. 

This episode from Zoe Podcast covered this well, listen to it here: Can a traditional African diet help protect against inflammation? 

Prof. Quirijn de Mast: It's not easy to define because there is not a typical, traditional African diet. I mean, Africa is a huge continent, and there's so much diversity in dietary patterns across the different regions. That said, there are some unifying themes. If you talk about African diet, so many of the traditional African diets, they're mainly plant-based. That's one. 

So people consume a lot of legumes, traditional grains like millet, sorghum, and teff in Ethiopia. And these are very, I would say, interesting small grain cereals with many health benefits. 

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Jonathan Wolf: And you've mentioned quite a few grains that I'm not familiar with. Sorghum, I wouldn't know if it dropped on my head. 

Could you describe for listeners who maybe are not familiar with a millet or a sorghum? What are they similar to, that we might be used to finding in a Western supermarket?

Prof. Quirijn de Mast: To be honest, I can't really compare it to what we are used to in Europe or in Western supermarkets. 

But they are extremely interesting, these grained cereals, because they're so nutritious. They contain lots of fiber, more than, for example, wheat. They are rich in polyphenols. They also have a low glycemic index, so you don't see this spike in glucose or insulin when you eat them. 

Yeah, they're kind of neglected, I would say, but they have very interesting health benefits. 

The Elemental Foe - Poverty

Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. Most of humanity lacks a sense of what we are escaping everyday. 

We abuse and torture all animals in the name of protein, waste so much food every time we eat, waste so much water, electricity and zillion other material things. 

Next time you do any of the above and/or forgot gratitude, remember these lines from this important post: 

Even now, having escaped true poverty, you walk through your days with no consciousness of how closely it stalks behind you. Remember the last time you had to go an extra hour without eating? Remember the gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach, the red fog that seemed to settle over your brain? You are always just a few hours away from that. You will never outrun it. Humanity as a whole is only a few days or weeks away; if the elaborate and fantastically expensive food supply and distribution system we’ve built were to suffer an interruption, we would be reduced to the level of starving wild animals in short order.

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It is industrial modernity — our single weapon against the elemental foe. It took centuries of blood and sweat to build, centuries of sacrifice by our sturdiest workers, our most brilliant inventors, and our most visionary leaders. And it is fantastically complex, far beyond the ability of even the most brilliant individual to understand in full; only collectively, at the level of society, do we shore up its fragile walls and keep it from collapse every day.

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And to us also falls the task of reminding the world that growth must be sustainable. If we burn the walls of our fortress to throw a party in the moment, there will be nothing left to protect our descendants, and the foe will devour them. It is tempting to believe that manmade climate change is not real, that natural habitats can be razed without consequence, and that the world’s waters represent an infinite safe dumping ground for pollution. These are all just more unaffordable daydreams.

Part of this task is to remind the world of the importance of technological progress. Without newer and more sustainable sources of energy and materials, our choice would be between degrowth and environmental destruction. Technology built industrial modernity, and technology sustains it, and only technology can extend it into the indefinite future.

But most of all, it falls to us to extend the fortress’ protection to every human on the planet. As you read these words, there are still billions of humans living outside the sheltering walls of industrial modernity — still grappling hand to hand with the foe. Less than half of humanity lives on more than $10 a day. Almost two billion live on less than $3.65. Two billion lack access to safely managed drinking water. Every day, 190 million people go hungry in India alone.

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If you want to understand the principles that underlie my political leanings, this is the key. Humanity is at war — a war so old, so terrible, and so all-consuming that even World War 3 would be a minor skirmish in comparison. Whether or not we remember it, we are always on death ground. 

We need to innovate to eradicate elemental foe, and eradicate pain and suffering of all living beings.

• Perceptually educate kids on this. 
• Work on turning this into an omnipresent awareness. 

Because as usual in the history of humanity, only a handful of humans will rise to the task and make this a reality. 

And yes, rest will be complacent. We cannot afford to keep complaining about the complacent 99.9% of humanity. 

Focus on lifting those handful of humans who act on it. 

 

Elephants Call Each Other by Name

Abstract

Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogues exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the named individual. Labelling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the referent radically expands the expressive power of language. Thus, if non-imitative name analogues were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution. Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver. We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call’s acoustic structure, regardless of how similar the call was to the receiver’s vocalizations. Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual. Our findings offer evidence for individual addressing of conspecifics in elephants. They further suggest that, unlike other non-human animals, elephants probably do not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls to address one another.

- Full paper here

The Myth Of The West

I am exhausted hearing people talking and writing about omnipotent and wise Greeks and Romans. 

A delusion propagated for centuries that these ancients somehow "plucked" wisdom out of thin air. The reality was very different. 

Few years ago, Gladwell wrote a brilliant piece titled "The Tweaker" on Steve Jobs. 

Greeks and Romans (as far as we know) were the best tweakers. They were exceptional at assimilating good ideas from other civilizations. In other words, these folks were open-minded, and integrated wisdom from other civilizations. 

We need to understand this important and powerful trait and stop teaching "magic". 

Review of Josephine Quinn's new book How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History:

This book is written in opposition to “civilisational thinking”, which suggests that there is such a thing as “Western civilisation” existing independently of all others. To Quinn, the concept is not only a manifestation of arrogance on the part of the Westerners who promoted it (especially 19th-century imperialists): it is also a recipe for sterility. Civilisation thrives on cross-pollination.

Quinn’s second big idea is that the notion of “influence”, suggesting that successor cultures are shaped by those that precede them, is misleading. A conventional narrative relates that the collective European mind was formed by the thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, with modifications by Christianity. On the contrary, says Quinn: the past is dead. It is the living who pick and choose the ingredients they will throw into the stew of their own culture. Peoples of the “West” cooked up their material and conceptual world using the wheel from the Central-Asian steppe, poetry from Persia, legal codes from Mesopotamia, mathematics from Babylon and India, Mongolian stirrups, gold from sub-Saharan Africa, maritime skills from the people of the Levant and the far north, and an Asian religion. The founders of “Western civilisation” didn’t limit themselves to any hemisphere, geographically or intellectually, and without their interminglings the mongrel culture we have inherited would have been infinitely poorer and less dynamic.

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She is more interested in trade than in conquest, less impressed by Alexander and Julius Caesar than by the Phoenician sailors who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the sixth century BCE, nearly 2,000 years before the Renaissance explorer Bartolomeu Dias. Readers are likely to seize upon old acquaintances, but she nods only briefly at Achilles and Abraham (whom she describes approvingly as a “travelling man”) and at William the Conqueror. Her project is to remind us that if these names are familiar, it is because the caprices of fate and propaganda have made them so. She prefers to dwell on less celebrated names and societies – not Rome but Etruria; not Sparta but Uruk; not the Egypt of the pharaohs and Cleopatra, but the Garamantes, who built a city that dominated trade across the Sahara for a thousand years, digging tunnels up to five kilometres long to bring water from underground lakes to irrigate their crops.

Her time-scale is immense, and she manages it in quick-quick-slow rhythm. An empire can rise and crumble, four centuries passing, in one sentence. Other times she slows right down to focus on a single encounter. Her geographical reach is equally large. Constantine is in York when he is proclaimed “Augustus” (a term Quinn prefers to “emperor”), and from there he crosses all Europe to establish his capital in the Greek town of Byzantium, on the Roman empire’s easternmost edge.

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Quinn is a professor of ancient history at Oxford, and year after year she reads applications from students saying dutifully that they want to study classics to familiarise themselves with the roots of Western culture. Wrong, she says. This book is a reminder of how much more widely they need to look.

The Tiny Ant and the Mighty Lion

Talk about complex systems and inter-connectedness of all living beings in this beautiful planet! 

Read this and train your organs to be humble and not hurt any living being.

This real-life fable begins with the iconic umbrella-shaped acacia tree, also known as the whistling thorn tree. Graceful and resilient, the acacia tree dominates the savannah landscape and often provides most of the tree cover for thousands of square miles. Hidden in the branches of this tree are great numbers of tiny acacia ants, which make their home there and act as protectors. With their painful stings and bites, the ants ward off large herbivores such as elephants and giraffes, and allow the trees to thrive.

But lately, the trees have come under the growing influence of a globe-trotting intruder: the big-headed ant. Named for its large heart-shaped head and thought to have originated on the island nation of Mauritius, this aggressive ant has quickly spread across the savannah over the past 20 years, outnumbering and, in some places, eradicating the acacia ant. 

Here’s where the lion comes in. As an ambush predator, the lion is heavily reliant on the cover provided by the acacia trees. The trees’ branches and foliage serve as a hiding place from which the lion can sneak up on its favored prey, the zebra. Without the acacia ant, the acacia trees are susceptible to hungry passersby. When elephants extract the nutrients in the bark and roots with their trunks, the acacia trees are stripped and often left broken. As more and more of these trees are consumed, the landscape has radically changed, becoming open and bare.

Conservationists, noticing the change in tree cover, have worried lions might struggle to capture their prey and feed themselves and begin to die. With nowhere to hide, how would they get their dinner?

Recently, an international team of biologists set out to answer this question. They collected data about ant invasions; tree cover; zebra, elephant, and giraffe populations; and the behavior of lions and their prey across the 300-square-kilometer Ol Pejeta Conservancy in northern Kenya. What they found surprised them, says Douglas Kamaru, a University of Wyoming Ph.D. student and the lead author of a new paper about their study. 

Kamaru and his colleagues expected lions to starve and their populations to shrink, but that’s not what happened. “The lion population was stable,” says Kamaru. In areas invaded by big-headed ants, the lions simply changed their diets, swapping out zebras for African buffalo. The buffalo aren’t as skittish as the zebras, so the lions are less reliant on stealth and surprise.

In 2020, zebra kill occurrence was nearly three times lower in areas invaded by big-headed ants. Zebras also accounted for less than half of total prey kills that year, down from about two-thirds in 2003, while buffalo accounted for 42 percent of all prey kills, up from zero. These changes were unrelated to zebra or buffalo densities, which remained unchanged from 2014 to 2020.

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The ant and the lion offer a dramatic example of the ripple effect—how a seemingly diminutive change in a web of relationships can fundamentally alter an entire ecosystem. The tiniest creature can upset the mightiest beast on the land.

What I've Been Reading

When a true opening of the heart develops collectively, miracles are possible. 

This is perhaps the most difficult point of all to accept in today's cynical world, and I will not try to argue abstractly for what Adam illustrates so poignantly. 

By miracles I don't mean that somehow everything turns out for the best with no effort or uncertainty. 

Hardly, if anything, the effort required greatly exceeds what is typical, and people learn to embrace a level of uncertainty from which most of us normally retreat. 

But this embrace arises from a collective strength that we have all but ceased to imagine, let alone develop: the strength of a creative human community grounded in a genuine sense of a creative human community grounded in a genuine sense of connectedness and possibility, rather than one based on fear and dogma. 

- Forward by Peter Senge

Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities by Adam Kahane.

Max's holiday card for 2024 was quoted from this brilliant 20 year old book. 

We in America think that the political and ideological problems here are unsolvable because of polarization and people don't even look in each other's eyes, leave alone talking to each other. 

Adam beautifully explain in this book,  how even people who wanted to kill each other, worked together for a better future. 

This book teaches us that: 

A transformation in our ability to talk, think and act together. 

These are actual events from countries much worse than most countries in the world. We are talking about South Africa after Mandela's release, drug lords ridden Colombia in early 2000's, Argentina post their economic fallout to Guatemala.  

We are not talking abstract "hope" here but actual transformative events. If these people in these countries can do it, anybody in any country can do it. And we can do it at home too. 

In order to embark on that better future, read the quote from Max's holiday card. 

There are three kinds of complex problems: 

• Dynamically complex—Causes and their effects are separated by space and time, making the links between them difficult for any one person or group to identify.

•  Generatively complex—They are unpredictable and unfold in unfamiliar ways. A problem that is generatively complex cannot be solved with a prepackaged solution from the past. A solution has to be worked out as the situation unfolds, through a creative, emergent, generative process. 

• Socially complex—The people involved are extremely diverse and have very different perspectives.

Our common way of talking and listening therefore guarantees that our complex problems will either remain stuck or will get unstuck by force. (There are no problem so complex that is does not have a simple solution ... that is wrong.) We need to learn another, less common, more open way. 

There are four different ways of talking and listening based on the work of Otto Scharmer of MIT: 

• Downloading: we merely repeat the story that’s already in our heads, like download- ing a file from the Internet without making any change to it. When we download, we are deaf to other stories, we only hear that which confirms our story. This is the kind of non-listening exhibited by fundamentalists, dictators,  experts, and people are arrogant or angry.

• Debating: When we debate, we listen to each other and to ideas (including our own ideas) from the outside, objectively, like a judge in a debate or a court room. 

• Reflective Dialogue: We engage in such dialogue when we listen to ourselves reflectively and when we listen to others empathetically - listening from inside subjectively. 

• Generative Dialogue: We listen not only from within ourselves or from within others, but from the whole of the system. 

There is a remarkable story in the video below. One can sense generative dialogue when: 

The team sensed that something important and special happened during that story telling. One story seemed to flow into another, as if the tellers were all telling parts of the same larger story. 

Time seemed to slow down: I wasn't sure how long the five minutes of silence actually lasted. 

The normal separation between people seemed lessen: the team shifted from listening to each other's individual perspectives to being, for a while, a whole collective "I". 

Animals Fear Human Voices More Than Lions

Human voices cause considerably more fear in wild mammals than the sound of lions, a study in South Africa has found.

Scientists played recordings of people talking normally through speakers hidden at water holes in the Kruger National Park.

About 95% of animals were extremely frightened and quickly ran away.

In contrast, recordings of snarling and growling lions elicited significantly less alarm.

The human speech they chose to play included local languages commonly spoken in the country.

During the experiment they noted that some elephants, in response to the big cat calls, even attempted to confront the source of the sound.

The study's findings suggest that the animals, which included antelopes, elephants, giraffes, leopards and warthogs, have learnt that contact with humans is extremely dangerous, due to hunting, gun use and the use of dogs to catch them.

The fear exhibited goes beyond the Kruger National Park, as a global pattern shows wildlife tend to fear humans more than any other predator, according to the study.

The authors note that this poses a challenge for areas which rely on wildlife tourism, because the human visitors they want to attract are inadvertently scaring off the animals they have come to see.

- More Here

What a shameful trait for humans!

Second, yet another reason to stop the madness of travel and vacation. Stop going to a safari. 

Any economy which depends on travel only is doomed if not today, tomorrow. 

Chimpanzee and Human Risk Preferences Show Key Similarities

Abstract

Risk preference impacts how people make key life decisions related to health, wealth, and well-being. Systematic variations in risk-taking behavior can be the result of differences in fitness expectations, as predicted by life-history theory. Yet the evolutionary roots of human risk-taking behavior remain poorly understood. Here, we studied risk preferences of chimpanzees (86 Pan troglodytes; 47 females; age = 2–40 years) using a multimethod approach that combined observer ratings with behavioral choice experiments. We found that chimpanzees’ willingness to take risks shared structural similarities with that of humans. First, chimpanzees’ risk preference manifested as a traitlike preference that was consistent across domains and measurements. Second, chimpanzees were ambiguity averse. Third, males were more risk prone than females. Fourth, the appetite for risk showed an inverted-U-shaped relation to age and peaked in young adulthood. Our findings suggest that key dimensions of risk preference appear to emerge independently of the influence of human cultural evolution.

- Full paper here

Lessons From Bono On How To Be Good

This is one the uplifting piece I have read this year - How To Do Good

It was uplifting not because of a sole hero changing the world. It's about working tirelessly - plowing through bull shit, human ego, human arrogance, money et al. Working tirelessly not for self but to do good for others. 

This is how change happens. This is the wisdom the younger generation needs to learn and avoid embracing ideologically driven worldview. Otherwise soon you will forget what you started fighting for. 

Quick summary of what we are dealing with here:

• Bono - famed U2 singer who could live a gala life but choose to help Africans. It's no surprise that he is a democrat but yet he chose to work with then (2002) Republican president Bush and his team. In the process, Bono alienated most of his liberal friends (reminds me of what happened to Christopher Hitches around the same time when he supported Iraq war)
• Condoleezza Rice - She herself black but needs someone like Bono (and much more) to convince her to help African people. So called pragmatism sprinkled with right wing tribalism blinded even Rice too. 
• President Bush - I started respecting him a couple of decades ago when I learned he had helped Africans  more than any other presidents (yeah, virtue signaling democrats). 
• The Good - What good are we talking here? Making cure for AIDS affordable to Africans since we already have a cure. Its sheer brutality to watch millions die just for the sake of money. 
• Warren Buffet - Beautiful advice from Buffet via his life long understanding of human nature. 
• Americans - Thanks to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's anchoring bias. It's sad the nationalism motivates every nationality, not just Americans. 
• Maximus and Me - I hate politicians and politics in democracy (other models are crap). But yet, I have the deepest respect for some politicians. I mean, one must be insane to put their body through the Cortisal roller coaster; no amount of money, fame and power is worth it except the passion for doing good. Thank you from Max and I for being a decent and good human. 

I have a confession to make. Until last week, I had never heard of FTX nor its founder. Obviously, I do know the technicalities of block chain and crypto. In a rare moment last week, I felt vindicated for focusing my awareness on things that matter more than crap such as FTX. The crazy thing is most sites I read regularly did cover FTX for years but yet the Max in me subconsciously avoided it. 

I love you Max!

Read the whole piece plus I have to read Bono's memoir Surrender. 

In his memoir, Surrender, Bono recalls a fraught conversation in 2002 with Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush. The next day, the president was due to launch the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), a $5 billion aid programme for poor countries with democratic governments. Bono had agreed to stand by his side as he did so. Now he was having second thoughts.

Bono’s charity, DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), had been lobbying the Bush administration to do something much more ambitious: to commit to funding universal access to AIDS drugs for Africans. AIDS patients in rich countries had access to these life-saving drugs, and in the West, AIDS was on its way to becoming a minor public health problem. No such drugs were available to Africans, and an epidemic was devastating the continent. In Botswana, 38% of adults were HIV positive. In Malawi, Bono had been shown around a hospital in which each bed was shared by three or four patients. Most of them were going to die. In South Africa, Prudence Mabele, one of the first women in the country to make her HIV status public, explained to Bono that in order to meet him she was missing the funeral of a family member who had died of AIDS. “I hope you are not wasting our time, Mr Bono,” she said. “Because some of us don’t have any to waste.”

Bono and his team went to the Bush White House with a plan and some trepidation. He was used to high-level meetings - this one came a few years after he lobbied G7 leaders to Drop the Debt - but the Clinton administration was a more natural partner than the current one. First, Bono managed to get Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill onside, despite O’Neill’s deep scepticism about all aid programs. He then persuaded Jesse Helms, a powerful senator, to support the initiative, despite the fact that Helm had called AIDS a plague from God (he repented). Over a series of meetings with Condoleezza Rice, Bono convinced her not only that America had to act, but that his program represented an effective use of funds.

The president had still not made a public commitment, however, even after meeting Bono in the Oval Office. Now, Bono worried that if he showed up at the MCA launch he would be lending his celebrity aura to Bush for nothing in return. AIDS activists and others had already accused him of giving a warmongering Republican president cover for inaction. He risked looking like a puppet of the powerful.

When Bono told Rice about his fears, she made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that if he didn’t turn up the next day, that was the end of his access to the White House. You’ll just have to trust us on AIDS, she told him. Bono swallowed his doubts, took a risk, and turned up at the press conference. The activists shook their heads. Even George Soros told him, “You have sold out for a plate of lentils”. Bono thought they might be right, but he kept going. While he waited on the White House, he toured the American Midwest with U2, building support for AIDS relief in Republican heartlands. He went on Oprah to talk about it.

Digression: to be reminded of what a talented communicator Bono is, watch his Oprah interview. It’s a masterclass. He has an amazing ability to deliver his messages in crystalline phrases which go arrowing to his audience’s heart. When Oprah asks him why he cares about Africa, he makes the question personal by talking about Ireland’s historic experience of famine. Aware that his audience includes millions of churchgoers, he recalls witnessing poverty in Ethiopia and realising that although he could give money, something bigger was required: “God is not looking for alms, he’s looking for action.” He also uses a more businesslike register, of priorities and practicality: “You can’t fix every problem, but the ones that we can, we’ve got to.” He frames the core question as a simple choice: millions of people in Africa are going to die of AIDS, we have the drugs to prevent that - so why wouldn’t we?

In Surrender, Bono recounts advice from Warren Buffett: “Don’t appeal to the conscience of America. Appeal to its greatness. That’s how to get the job done.” The Oprah appearance took place a year after 9/11. Bono talks about much he loves America and how shocking it was for Americans to learn that others hate it. If American drugs save African lives, he says, it will be harder for extremists to turn Africans against us. His best answer comes when Oprah asks the hardest question: there are millions of women watching, worrying about what to put on the table for dinner this evening - what does all this have to do with them? Bono smiles and says, “You don’t have to explain to a mother that the life of a child in Africa has the same value as her child. You might have to explain that to men, but not to women.” The audience erupts with delight (including the men).

Bono was working the problem from both ends, seducing the masses and the elites at the same time, in TV studios, on arena stages, in the Oval Office and in back-offices. His entanglement with elites represented a significant risk to his reputation. He was constantly in danger of making himself very unpopular with fellow activists and with some of the public, not to mention his own bandmates.

This risk paid off. Early in 2003, President Bush made an announcement: $15 billion for AIDS relief. Until Covid-19, it was the largest ever public health intervention against a single disease, and it went overseas. Prudence Mabele’s time had not been wasted.

[---]

Bono’s style of activism is very unfashionable. Today’s generation of activists believe that brokering deals between elites is irrelevant and corrupting, a diversion from the work of “systemic change”. It is better to make a lot of noise in the media, raising the collective consciousness, inciting enough anger that politicians have no choice but to give in and do something. Do what, though? The answer is often left vague.

 

What I've Been Reading

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. One of the best books I have read this decade - brilliant !! Home-sapiens should read this book and understand what kind of creatures we are.

"Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the on hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became even more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google."

And our relationship with Dogs:

What generalizations can we make about life in the per-agricultural world nevertheless? It seems safe to say that the vast majority of people lived in small bands numbering several dozens or at most several hundred individuals, and that all these individuals were humans. It is important to note this last point, because it is far from obvious. Most members of agriculture and industrial societies are domesticated animals. They are not equal to their masters, of course, but they are members all the same. Today, the society called New Zealand is composed of 4.5 million Sapiens and 50 million sheep.

There was just one exception to this general rule: the dog. The dog was the first animal domesticated by Home Sapiens, and this occurred before the Agriculture Revolution. Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago. They may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier.
Dogs were used for hunting and fighting, and as an alarm system against wild beasts and human intruders. With the passing of generations, the two species co-evolved to communicate well with each other. Dogs that were most attentive to the needs  and feelings of their human companions got extra care and food, were more likely to survive. Simultaneously, dogs learned to manipulate people for their own needs. A 15,000-year bond has yielded a much deeper understanding and affection between humans and dogs than between humans and any other animal. In some cases dead dogs were even buried ceremoniously much like humans.

Sympathy for a Desert Dog

My relationship with Dog, as the Ju/’hoansi reminded me, was an artifact of the Neolithic Revolution. The domestication of the wolf was but a small part of a transition that fundamentally reconfigured how humans related to their environments. Where they once saw themselves as one of many creatures sharing environments, they now placed themselves at its center and sought mastery over it. Accordingly animals were divided into a series of new categories based on how they fit into the human world. Some were designated pets or “livestock” – and a duty of care was extended to them. Others were designated pests or vermin. Animals ceased to be considered different kinds of “people,” and those like dogs were selected and bred, for human-like traits, among other things, that we could easily empathize with without displacing our sense of ourselves as humans.

My and Dog’s lives intersected momentarily. And I am glad they did. We were both Neolithic orphans stranded in a Paleolithic world. The Ju/’hoansi’s sense of interspecies relations and their extraordinary empathy was right for the wild animals that shared their world, and there is much we can learn from it. But when it comes to dogs, and other creatures that have evolved to crave our affection, I am glad to be a child of the Neolithic.

- More Here

Illegal Poaching - Where Do We Stand?

 

- More Here

Good Bye Nelson Mandela

A great man bids adieu - Thank you for all that you gave us.

The best lesson I learnt from him was while reading Richard Stengel's brilliant book Mandela's Way: Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage:

None of us is born courageous, Mandela would say, it is all in how we react to different situations. Sometimes it is only through putting up a brave front that you discover true courage. Sometimes the front is your courage:

"Pretend to be brave and you not only become brave, you are brave."

To those who would say that everything happens for a reason, Mandela would reply:

"We are the reason and we are the ones who make things happen. There is no destiny that shapes our end; we shape it ourselves."

(Nelson Mandela and his Rhodesian Ridgeback)

Here’s My Plan to Improve Our World And How You Can Help - Bill Gates

Look at what happened to agriculture in the 20th century. For decades, scientists worked to develop hardier crops. But those advances mostly benefited the rich world, leaving the poor behind. Then in the middle of the century, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations stepped in. They funded Norman Borlaug’s research on new strains of high-yielding wheat, which sparked the Green Revolution. (As Borlaug said, fertilizer was the fuel that powered the forward thrust of the Green Revolution, but these new crops were the catalysts that sparked it.) No private company had any interest in funding Borlaug. There was no profit in it. But today all the people who have escaped poverty represent a huge market opportunity—and now companies are flocking to serve them.

Or take a more recent example: the advent of Big Data. It’s indisputable that the availability of massive amounts of information will revolutionize US health care, manufac­turing, retail, and more. But it can also benefit the poorest 2 billion. Right now researchers are using satellite images to study soil health and help poor farmers plan their harvests more efficiently. We need a lot more of this kind of innovation. Otherwise, Big Data will be a big wasted opportunity to reduce inequity.

People often ask me, “What can I do? How can I help?”

Companies—especially those in the technology sector—can dedicate a percentage of their top innovators’ time to issues that could help people who’ve been left out of the global economy or deprived of opportunity here in the US. If you write great code or are an expert in genomics or know how to develop new seeds, I’d encourage you to learn more about the problems of the poorest and see how you can help.

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What I've Been Reading

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray. I am kicking myself for not reading this book for almost a decade ago when it came. This is one of the best books, I have ever read in my life, period. A book that bought solace, spoke my mind and might shape it more in the remaining days.

Today the good life means making full use of science and technology - without succumbing to the illusion that they can make us free, reasonable, or even sane. It means seeking peace - without hoping for a world without war. It means cherishing freedom - in the knowledge that it is an interval between anarchy and tyranny. 

Wisdom Of The Week

I always assumed that it's too idealistic to ask an influential politician to take a firm stance against poaching at an international stage; I guess sometimes politicians do surprise us with their noble deeds - Clinton Unites African Leaders in Her Crusade Against Poaching

We're now confronting the possibility of a world without elephants,” Chelsea Clinton said at the Clinton Global Initiative on Thursday in an introduction to a new commitment that has become Hillary Clinton's post-office cause célèbre: ending wildlife poaching. Last year alone, the practice took the lives of 35,000 elephants and more than one thousand rangers.

On stage with presidents from six African nations—Uganda, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Malawi, Cote d'Ivoire, and Tanzania—the former secretary of state made a three-year, $80 million pledge to halt the brutal killing of African elephants, which she said is on track to make the African forest elephant extinct within 10 years.

Warning of the “hidden terrible costs of ivory,” Clinton spoke about groups like al-Shabab, the perpetrators of the Nairobi mall terror attack this past weekend, that get their funding through poaching efforts. The black-market channels which ferry ivory from poachers are often the same used for illegal arms, drugs, and trafficked labor. In July, a few weeks after the White House announced a $10 million fund to combat poaching, it was reported that Clinton had been meeting with environmental groups to discuss initiatives and to unite her contacts in to help with the cause.

"We will not be the generation that allowed for the extinction of the magnificent African elephant," said Cristian Samper, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society. The commitment, made in partnership with the largest conservation foundations and experts like Jane Goodall and Ian Hamilton, brings together a multi-national group to enforce a moratorium on commercial exports, import, and domestic sales of ivory products until the elephant is no longer threatened by poaching. The presidents on stage with Clinton have agreed to support the effort, along with the leaders of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Kenya, Liberia, and South Sudan.

“This has gone beyond an environmental issue; it threatens the stability of countries and blocks economic development,” said Gabon's President Ali Bongo Ondimba. He declared that last year his country burned its entire stockpile of ivory. “My government has zero tolerance for wildlife crime,” he said.

All the largest markets for illegal ivory, from Australia to Vietnam, have jumped on board to start campaigns to spread awareness. “Many people in Asia don't understand it’s not like losing a tooth, you have to kill the elephant to get the tusk,” Clinton said.

Another brilliant piece of this week - Making Juries Better: Some Ideas from Neuroeconomics:

All of that research means, ironically, that if you start with a group of individuals who have differing beliefs, and present them all with the same evidence, they’re more likely to diverge, rather than converge, on a decision. “This polarization can be really bad,” says Isabelle Brocas, an economist at the University of Southern California.

Although the psychological literature is lousy with studies of confirmation bias, nobody really knows its root cause. In an intriguing new paper, Brocas and her colleague Juan Carrillo propose an explanation based on neuroscience. The biases of juries, they say, can be explained by the way that our neurons encode information from the outside world. Their model (and let’s be clear: it’s a mathematical model, rife with assumptions) points to several recommendations for making our justice system more just.

So if the model’s true, it has several interesting implications for real-world trials. The first is related to the order in which evidence is presented. Facts or testimony presented at the beginning of a trial will be weighed more strongly in the jurors’ minds than evidence presented at the end. (And for that matter, the authors say, cases that a judge presides over at the beginning of her career will have a strong influence on those later on.)
It also means that it would be better for everybody if jurors were chosen who didn’t have strong views to begin with. “If you want to have an impartial judgment, you need to have relatively impartial people,” Brocas says.

Jury selection — the process before the trial in which both lawyers have a chance to kick out certain jurors based on their backgrounds and preferences — might be one way to get impartial people. But Brocas notes that lawyers don’t necessarily want impartial people so much as they want people who will be sympathetic with their arguments.

Quote of the Day

“No administrative system,” Scott writes, “is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification.” In the case of the Millennium Villages, this simplification was embodied by the 147-page handbook, written by academics in New York with insufficient regard for hard-won local knowledge. What Sachs failed to recognize, more than any individual research finding, is that rural Africa is thick with the wreckage of failed development projects more or less imposed by outsiders, and that Western powers have adopted new, often contradictory aid policies every decade or so, never publicly acknowledging their mistakes or owning up to the collateral damage they’ve inflicted on African lives.

- Review of the new book The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty by Nina Munk

How Soccer is Saving Elephants, Rhinos & Other Endangered Species

The clock strikes 4:00 pm and the bell rings – signaling the end of classes and the beginning of playtime at Tigithi Secondary School in Laikipia County, Kenya.  Almost immediately, 150 boys and girls rush out of their classrooms to enjoy a game of football on the school’s pitch. What’s unique is that these young energetic students are playing with the nearly indestructible One World Futbols sponsored by Chevrolet. These balls were donated to the school back in February.

The rate of poaching in Kenya has nearly doubled in the past 24 months. Poaching has become such a serious problem in East Africa that in 2011 alone Ol Pejeta lost five of our 88 rhinos to poachers – our greatest loss in 20 years.  Elephants and rhinos are on top of the endangered species list, being slaughtered for their tusks and horns respectively. Unfortunately, some local villagers are being lured into the illegal killing of these animals in exchange for large sums of cash.  These products are then smuggled through well-connected middlemen and find their way to Asia where the market is rife.2013 through a partnership between One World Futbol Project and the Ol Pejeta Conservancy – a non-profit wildlife conservancy in Kenya supporting endangered species, tourism and community outreach.

The Conservancy is using soccer and these ultra-durable balls to engage youth living close to wildlife.  Through soccer, Ol Pejeta Conservancy is teaching students about the troubles poaching causes and giving the community at large a greater sense of the importance of conservation.

- More Here