Izilwane

Dr. Tara Waters Lumpkin, an anthropologist, journeyed to South Africa to document the views of traditional healers, scientists, and community members in her effort to understand how human beings can live in ways that protect rather than harm other species. Africa is a continent of large megafauna. It is the birth place of human species and where we co-evolved with other species. Tara explored the multilayered relationships between human beings living in South Africa and the country's wildlife, and what we can learn from his experience to enhance the survival and well-being of humans and other species not only in South Africa but throughout the world.

Currently, we are living through the Sixth Great Extinction, which is the first time a planetary extinction has been caused by one species, human beings, rather than by a physical cause. Through overpopulation and over-consumption, human beings are rapidly disrupting and degrading environments to the point that a massive die-off of other species is occurring.

Approximately 200,000 years ago human beings originated in the cradle of Africa. Then approximately 100,000 years ago a small group left Africa and spread throughout the rest of the world. Wherever human beings have migrated, extinctions of other species have followed. Paul Martin’s blitzkrieg theory states that, as human beings spread out of Africa, they disrupted ecosystems by over-hunting many game species, which were easy prey because they had not previously been in contact with humans. This over-hunting led to extinctions.  

But, in Africa, where human beings co-evolved with other species, many of the larger megafauna and their predators survived. Now, tragically, in the 21st century, the megafauna of Africa are at a crossroads: Elephants, rhino, apes, big cats and many other species are facing extinction caused by human beings.

South Africa is a land of beauty in crisis, with soaring HIV/AIDS rates, rampant poverty, and burgeoning populations. It also is home to traditional healers who have a wealth of indigenous knowledge, to scientists studying ecology, biology, and wildlife, and to relatively abundant wildlife that is increasingly stressed and declining. Because wildlife in Africa co-evolved with human beings, Africa became the starting point for my fieldwork.  

While in South Africa I interviewed shamans, scientists, and people from different ethnic groups, classes, and backgrounds. I traveled to Kuruman, near the Kalahari Desert, and met with the well-known traditional healer Credo Mutwa. I crossed the country through the Drakensberg Mountains to KwaZulu-Natal, and met with my old friend Joel Dlamini, an herbalist, whom I had not seen for 15 years. I interviewed a baboon primatologist who was researching baboons who self-medicated with white clay, which indigenous peoples also used to treat nausea during pregnancy. I talked with school children and teachers in the former township of Acornhoek near Kruger National Park, interviewed a Shangaan tracker who had opened a cultural village for his own people as well as tourists, and stayed with a couple who were trying to save the white lions of Timbavati.

I also spent time among animals in game parks and other preserves. Over and over, I asked, Can we change our perspectives and, thus, improve our relationship with other species? Are we willing to live without elephants, rhino, chimpanzees, big cats, and other species? By the end of my journey I had determined that most of the people I’d interviewed did not want to see other species disappear.  

According to a 2010 report from the United Nations Third Global Biodiversity Outlook, ecosystems are collapsing. And because human beings depend on healthy ecosystems for their basic needs of food, water, and shelter, our own survival is threatened. Faced with extinction are: 21% of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12% of all known birds, and 27% of all reef-building corals.  

What we need is a new trans-species perspective that places human beings within nature, not outside it. We need to recognize that we too are animals and to see our own animal nature in a positive light. If we are unwilling to lose other species, we must radically change the way we perceive ourselves as human beings in relationship to nature. It is is also urgent that we address, at a personal as well as a policy level, the impact, on other species of human population and consumption exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet.

Habitat loss, the bush meat trade, vanishing water, global warming – these are just a few of the stressors caused by human beings that are depleting other species. It is time to look not only at our carbon footprint but also at our biodiversity imprint. And it is time to spread the message that the well-being of other species is important to our own survival.  

It is my hope that as you journey with me to South Africa you will learn, as I did, about the need for us to recognize that all species share our planet and are inter-dependent. We must not remain estranged. The time has come to connect the human animal to the global ecosystem.