The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  Another important signatory was the zoologist Oldfield Thomas, who described and catalogued some 2,000 new mammals for the Natural History Museum. It might be supposed that he at least would have had some knowledge and understanding of the golden moles and other tiny basement-dwellers that lurked in the southern dark, and there were perhaps a few others whose knowledge of birds would have given them some understanding of how species related to each other. But it is difficult to imagine that many of these great men would have felt much concern for nature’s lower orders. Their interest was selective. What they sought to ensure was a continuing supply of species big enough to be shot at, not the sort of creature that might turn up in an owl pellet. It earned them a sobriquet – ‘penitent butchers’ – and set a precedent which, even now, conservationists find hard to live down. The white man helps himself to Africa’s wildlife, and blankets the earth with greenhouses gases, then tells the rest of the world it must not do the same.

  The Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire nevertheless deserves our gratitude. Though it saw itself somewhat disingenuously as ‘a modest and unpretentious group of gentlemen’, it did aim to put its influence to good use, urging the protection ‘from appalling destruction’ of wild animals throughout the British Empire. As the Empire at that time covered a quarter of the globe, and as the gentlemen themselves were nothing if not influential, this was no mere token. The society since has been through various name changes. After the First World War it dropped the ‘Wild’ to become just the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire. In 1950 it became simply the Fauna Preservation Society, then extended its interests in 1981 to become the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society. Over time it has metamorphosed from an elite club of colonial administrators into, now, the thoroughly modern Fauna & Flora International, one of the world’s most effective champions of biodiversity.

  Even so, it was not until 1948, forty-five years after the foundation of the SPWFE, that George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature was supplanted as the pre-eminent published authority. Again the writer was a distinguished American – Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society. Again the message was desperate, and again the book – Our Plundered Planet – was a bestseller endorsed by the intelligentsia. My own copy (a London edition) bears encomia from Eleanor Roosevelt, Aldous Huxley and Albert Einstein. ‘Reading it,’ said Einstein, ‘one feels very keenly how futile most of our political quarrels are compared with the basic realities of life.’ Well, just so. The timing was both significant and symbolic. In his introduction, Osborn explained that the inspiration for the book came towards the end of the Second World War, when it seemed to him that mankind was involved in two major conflicts. ‘This other world-wide war, still continuing, is bringing more widespread distress to the human race than any that has resulted from armed conflict. It contains potentialities of ultimate disaster greater even than would follow the misuse of atomic power. This other war is man’s conflict with nature.’

  In recent years I have read and reviewed some nightmare visions of catastrophe. Yet none of them conjures a picture more apocalyptic than Fairfield Osborn’s. ‘Blind to the need of co-operating with nature,’ he writes, ‘man is destroying the sources of his life. Another century like the last and civilisation will be facing its final crisis.’ This was, remember, 1948. Like Marsh, Osborn was a blunt-spoken polymath not much inhibited by sensitivity. His views on the need for human population control must have sounded even more shocking in 1948, when the world was still counting its dead, than they do now. ‘Even after his wars, too many are left alive,’ he said.

  He echoed Marsh in condemning deforestation and overexploitation of land, measuring the cost in dried-up watercourses, silted rivers, erosion and vanishing wildlife – ‘as deadly ultimately as any delayed-action bomb’. In the USA, he complained, timber was being felled twice as fast as it grew. ‘The story of this nation in the last century as regards the use of forests, grasslands, wildlife and water sources is the most violent and the most destructive of any written in the long history of civilisation.’ Fifty-seven years before the post-Katrina storm surge that would devastate New Orleans, he saw all too plainly what must come: ‘How about the valley of the greatest river of them all, the Mississippi, its bed so lifted, its waters so choked, so blocked with the wash of productive lands, that the river at flood crests runs high above the streets of New Orleans? As in historical times, the power of nature in revolt will one day overwhelm the bonds that even the most ingenious modern engineer can prepare.’ Fourteen years before Silent Spring, he even recognised the danger of DDT.

  As to mismanagement of wildlife, Osborn could find no worse an example than America’s own treatment of the bison. The white man had arrived on the continent to find fifty million of them north of the Rio Grande. By 1905 only 500 remained – a loss of 99.999 per cent. Osborn’s verdict on humankind is correspondingly bleak: ‘The uncomfortable truth is that man during innumerable past ages has been a predator – a hunter, a meat eater and a killer.’ Comparisons with other species worked only to man’s disadvantage. ‘His nearest relatives in the animal world most similar to him physiologically remained vegetarians. And at no time, even to the present day, have depended upon the lives of other living creatures for their own survival.’

  As he saw it, the result was a mounting catalogue of devastation in which the old world fared no better than the new. A traveller in Greece told him that ‘during all his travels through the mountain section of the country he saw only two pair of partridges and one rabbit – all the natural wild life having been killed off’. In North Africa, ‘wandering tribes of herdsmen move from oasis to oasis, their herds stripping such grass as there is from the gullied slopes, leaving nothing but the raw unstable soil’. In southern Africa, animal life continued to be spent as if it were both a limitless resource and an offence to the sovereignty of man. ‘Alarming reports have come from southern Rhodesia to the effect that more than 300,000 native wild animals have been deliberately destroyed in recent years on the grounds that they were carriers of the tsetse fly pest. This move on the part of the Rhodesian authorities, unfortunately being imitated in neighbouring territories, may well prove to be a misguided and futile butchering of the superb wild life of those regions . . . [This is] typical of man’s lack of understanding of the place that wild living things occupy in the economy of nature.’

  Gratifyingly to this latter-day seeker of moles, Osborn celebrated the work of burrowing animals in maintaining the health of the soil. But he had little confidence that his vision would be shared. ‘It is amazing how far one has to travel to find a person, even among those most widely informed, who is aware of the processes of mounting destruction that we are inflicting upon our life sources.’

  One place he might usefully have visited was the cricket-loving English county of Gloucestershire. It was here, two years earlier at Slimbridge in 1946, that Peter Scott established the Severn Wildlife Trust – the small but potent beginnings of what would grow to become the Wildlife and Wetland Trust, now one of the most effective guardians of wetland habitat, with nine reserves strung across Britain. It was indeed Britain that would become the control centre of international efforts to conserve animals and their habitats. The crucial last shove came from the recently knighted Julian Huxley in a series of three articles for the British Sunday newspaper the Observer, published in November 1960. Huxley had just returned from what he described as ‘the most interesting assignment I have ever had’ – a three-month journey through ten African countries to prepare a report for UNESCO on ‘The Conservation of Wild Life and Natural Resources in Central and East Africa’. The result was a powerful mix of excitement and foreboding. His unconcealed sense of awe leapfrogs back in time over the sombre gloom of Osborn and Marsh to reawaken the ghost of Alfred Russel Wallace.

  The variety of Eastern African mammals is astonishing and so are their numbers. There is still an abundance of relatively easily visible
creatures – elephants, hippos, warthogs, rhinos, giraffes, lions, leopards, servals, cheetahs, hyenas, zebras, buffaloes and baboons, monkeys and mongooses, hyraxes and hares, and a unique array of antelopes large and small – eland, hartebeest, topi, oryx, sable, roan, gnu (wildebeest), kudu, waterbuck and gerenuk, to lechwe, gazelles, bushbuck, reedbuck, impala, steinbuck and klipspringer to the little duikers and tiny dikdik.

  And the sight of great herds of topi or gnu or zebra galloping across the open plains, of a troop of elephants coming down to drink and play, of a pride of lions on a kill, of sausage-like hippos in and out of the water, of a herd of impala leaping in all directions, of prehistory incarnate in a rhinoceros, of a family of giraffes cantering along like elongated rocking horses – any of these is unforgettable, a unique contribution to the riches of our experience.

  Besides these, there are many less frequently seen but wonderfully interesting mammals – chimpanzees and gorillas, bongo and situtunga, bushpigs and giant forest hogs, wild dogs and bat-eared foxes, otters and wildcats, civets and genets, polecats and honey badgers, furred mole rats and naked sand rats, elephant shrews and bush babies, porcupines and pangolins, springhares, squirrels and the strange nocturnal aardvarks and aardwolves.

  Unlike Wallace he made no mention of golden moles, but one feels they were there in spirit. This was indeed the picture of Africa I had grown up with, implanted in my mind by Attenborough, Scott, and Armand and Michaela Denis. Huxley, however, was not deceived. Though there were still ‘a great many’ wild animals left, he noted that they were patchily distributed over a very wide area, and that their numbers were ‘grievously reduced’.

  A century ago South Africa harboured tens of millions of large mammals: to-day they survive in any density only in a few National Parks and Reserves. Many parts of Kenya and Tanganyika and the Rhodesias which fifty years ago were swarming with game are now bare of all large wildlife. Throughout the area, cultivation is extending, native cattle are multiplying at the expense of wild animals, poaching is becoming heavier and more organised, forests are being cut down or destroyed, means are being found to prevent cattle suffering from tsetse-borne diseases, large areas are being over-grazed and degenerating into semi-desert, and above and behind all this, the human population is inexorably mounting, to press ever harder on a limited land space.

  Poaching in particular dismays him. It would have dismayed him even more if he could have imagined a time sixty years hence when park rangers – some of the bravest men on the planet – would be required to face guerrilla bands armed with rocket-launchers, AK-47s and NATO-standard Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles. But then, as now, game departments and national park authorities had too few men to stop the poachers. Then, as now, the criminals’ incentive was not just an appetite for meat.

  It is also Asian superstition and European taste for ‘curios’. Indians and Chinese believe (on the basis of purely magical reasoning akin to that which led medieval herbalists to the doctrine of signatures) that rhinoceros horn is a potent aphrodisiac: they believe it so firmly that it now fetches an extremely high price per pound – much more than the best ivory; in consequence rhinos are being poached out of existence, except where well protected.

  Many giraffes are slaughtered by poachers merely to sell their tails for fly whisks; many Colobus monkeys to make rugs out of their lovely black and white fur; many elephants to satisfy the demands of white men for ivory ornaments, usually of low aesthetic value.

  He was not entirely a pessimist, but his faith in reason would turn out to have little more foundation than the ‘god hypothesis’ he rejected (he was, after all, a Huxley). The route to salvation, he believed, lay in licensed game-cropping schemes that would ‘go far to satisfy the Africans’ legitimate meat-hunger’ and so reduce the poachers’ incentive to hunt illegally. It would also ‘help them to realise that African wildlife is a major resource’. Somewhere at a theoretical level this truism has always been recognised. On the plains, however, the ‘major resource’ would be viewed in a rather narrower sense than Huxley had intended. Inside government as well as out, private gain and common good are locked in eternal enmity. During a visit to a southern African village not long ago, protocol required my hosts to introduce me to a local official of the national government, responsible for protecting wildlife. He turned out to be a cocky, tough-looking young man accompanied by muscular sidekicks, who saw no need during our brief interview to remove his reflective sunglasses. It was like meeting the Tonton Macoute. He took little trouble to conceal the fact that he combined his official duties as nature’s protector with a profitable sideline as the local Mr Big in the illegal bushmeat trade. But it is not false optimism for which Huxley’s articles should be remembered. Fifty years on, it is hard to believe that a short series of pieces in a Sunday newspaper could have a lasting effect on public opinion, let alone on the care and governance of the natural world. But that is exactly what they did.

  Through his director-generalship of UNESCO, Huxley had already got the International Union for the Conservation of Nature up and running. This was a huge testament to his diplomatic skill and powers of persuasion. The worldwide fellowship of naturalists and conservationists was far from the bonded coterie of like-minded fur-freaks that people tend to imagine. The international rivalries, jealousies, theological hair-splitting and clashes of personality would have done credit to any faction competing for the legacy of Marx and Lenin, or for control of the Vatican. A nest of vipers by comparison would have looked like a model of friendship. For a while it had seemed that the global centre of conservationism would drift to the USA, but the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt – a president committed to the conservationist cause – somewhat stalled the American impetus. In any case, with the focus on what was still called ‘big game’ in Africa, Eurocentrism had a certain political logic. At the end of the Second World War, most of Africa was still governed by European colonial powers. After a long, frustrating and often unedifying tussle for supremacy, which revolved mostly around the Swiss, Huxley used his political clout to convene an international conference to establish what at first would be the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN), and what in 1956 would become, as it remains today, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). The conference at Fontainebleau, from 30 September to 7 October 1948, involved twenty-three governments, 126 national institutions and eight international organisations. They resolved that the new body would ‘collect, analyse, interpret and disseminate information about “the protection of nature”’. The mission statement has evolved with its burgeoning ambition – it now pledges to ‘help the world find pragmatic solutions to our most pressing environment and development challenges’ – but the dissemination of information remains at its core. Much of the information is unwelcome – the Red List of Threatened Species makes hard reading for anyone excited by the visions of Alfred Russel Wallace or the films of Armand and Michaela Denis. But without it the zoos, learned societies and conservation charities dedicated to the survival of wildlife would be like the blind watchmaker, struggling to put together complex life-systems in the dark.

  Information was just the starting point. On its own it might help conservationists define their objectives but it didn’t provide the means of carrying them out. If saving the giant panda or black rhinoceros was to be more than just a pious hope, then some means of raising money would have to be found. Once again all eyes were on Huxley. Having been instrumental in driving forward the information network, he was now the catalyst for effective action. It is a long story to which my brief account will do scant justice, but the response to Huxley’s Observer articles was electrifying. Many others would be centrally involved – most importantly the director-general of Britain’s Nature Conservancy, Max Nicholson – but it was Huxley who inspired the foundation of what is now the world’s biggest non-governmental conservation organisation, WWF (originally the World Wildlife Fund, and since 1986 the Worldwide Fund fo
r Nature). Its official launch was at the Royal Society of Arts in London on 28 September 1961, when the speakers included Peter Scott and Huxley himself. Scott became WWF’s energetic first vice-president, and recruited Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and the Duke of Edinburgh as its international and UK presidents. He also designed the WWF’s famous panda logo.

  Progress was rarely smooth. Conflicts with other conservation bodies, especially those in America, were par for the political course. Fairfield Osborn, who by now had founded America’s Conservation Foundation, was initially a board member of WWF-US, but resigned and refused to be a trustee. (The Conservation Foundation would not merge with WWF until the 1980s, and even then WWF-US, along with Canada, would not accept the name change adopted by every other country.) Elsewhere, the royal figureheads’ penchant for hunting would cause controversy reminiscent of the ‘penitent butchers’. So, later, would sponsorship from oil and agro-chemical companies. There were spats with the IUCN (with which for many years it shared an office) and with the Fauna Preservation Society (over who should take the credit for saving the Arabian oryx). But gradually, over the years, like magnetised particles the forces of conservation would turn and point in the same direction.

  It is a coincidence that my own idealised and wildly optimistic notion of African wildlife should have developed during that early, critical post-war period. Coincidence, too, of a happier sort, that a couple of decades later I should find myself sitting alongside my boyhood heroes, Attenborough and Scott, on the judging panel of an environmental essay competition run by The Sunday Times in memory of the nature writer and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop. I knew little of Julian Huxley then (and had certainly never read his Observer articles, which were published while I was still at school), and would never see or hear him speak – he died, aged eighty-seven, in 1975 – but his voice and philosophy, however unconsciously, were fundamental to every entry we received. It is only now that I realise the centrality of his thinking to everything I believe about wildlife. How else, I wonder, would I see any point in searching for the world’s most improbable mole?