Our Wild World

A highlight of traveling on a photographic safari is to see and to listen, and capture your visual journey… to not just ‘take’ a picture, but make a great image that brings to life moments in your experience and your story, and which you, the photographer, have that at your fingertips with today’s technology. Beside the basic skills in understanding the camera and it's capabilities, it is the photographer who makes the image worth a thousand words whether your subject is wildlife, landscape or people. Beside the gear you need, it also takes patience, perseverance, a joy in the journey, and usually a bit of luck. This episode will provide some practical tips for the photographer and some information about the technical gear you’ll need, and then what to do with those great photos once you get home! So you may want to take some notes today! And you’re welcome to call in an ask questions.

This episode will provide some trips for planning your safari to ensure you get the most out of what could well be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. From managing your expectations to working with your outfitter, to the ‘do-it-yourself’ self-hire and camping safaris, we’ll provide some tips, tools and packing lists that will make your trip a whole lot enjoyable. We'll also include some tips for the photographic equipment to get the most out of the sights you'll see.

This episode will provide some trips for planning your safari to ensure you get the most out of what could well be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. From managing your expectations to working with your outfitter, to the ‘do-it-yourself’ self-hire and camping safaris, we’ll provide some tips, tools and packing lists that will make your trip a whole lot enjoyable. We'll also include some tips for the photographic equipment to get the most out of the sights you'll see.

With guest Dr. Barbara Shor, DVM, author and animal communicator, we hope to highlight that in any given community, we are always communicating with each other. This communication also exists in each wildlife community, regardless of its proximity to people. Dr. Shor’s work strives to help the human community appreciate the qualities that are replicated in animals through their complex social lives, emotions and sense of justice. Each animal species has its own function on the Earth, which is intimately tied in with its form. No one species is any more or less valuable, regardless of the degree of intelligence or beauty it exhibits. It is fascinating to approach wild animals from this perspective, and helps us move away from regarding some animals as more or less worthy of protection than others, or simply as not being very separate from us after all.

Dr. Dusti Becker and Dr. Tony Povilitis, Ann Nampayio Saruni, and Moran Kerika of the Maasai Morans Conservation Group will be joining us live to further discuss their community based conservation project. the Maasai Morans Conservation Group and Walking Safaris (MMCWS) is a community-based organization (CBO) created and composed of young adult Maasai from Oloirien Group Ranch in the Transmara District of Kenya. The group is dedicated to conservation of local wildlife and wildlife habitat in conjunction with improving lives of local Maasai. MMCWS is developing exciting walking safaris to support their organization so that they can move forward with habitat conservation. Life Net Nature, a conservation charity, is helping MMCWS to develop skills in wildlife monitoring and legal planning for conservation along the edge of the Siria Escarpment and for wildlife corridors to forests critical to the survival of many birds and mammals, but seriously threatened by current trends in land use.

Over the past couple of weeks our guests have highlighted different conservation strategies from management to community based conservation, both which entail all the lateral concepts the show has highlighted so far. Today we’re going to reframe these concepts in light of discussions and comments resulting from the episodes by various conservationists around the world. We’ll discuss parallels between models both here in the US and Africa and bring up points that have yet to be addressed such as hunting as a management tool, poverty and disease, community vs. state level, and reorienting definitions of wealth & health in terms of economics vs. biosphere, and introduce where we will be heading with our guests over the coming weeks.

Many reserves around the world are too small to sustain viable wildlife populations for long in the future. Wildlife counts in the Masai Mara Reserve in western Kenya have declined by as much as 70% in the past several decades, largely due to habitat loss and habitat degradation. Join us with Dr. Dusti Becker and Dr. Tony Povilitis and the partnerships between LifeNet Nature and the Maasai Moran Conservation and Walking Safaris, a Community Based Organization composed of of young Maasai that are working to create a buffer zone for wildlife on the Siria Plateau next to Masai Mara Reserve in southwestern Kenya. The 15,000-acre area proposed for conservation management includes grasslands, woodlands, riparian areas, forest corridors and a larger forested area used by elephants (for birthing). It also includes portions of the ecologically unique Siria Escarpment, which separates the Masai Mara and the Siria Plateau.

Today we'll have an on the ground look at multilayered conservation in Botswana. We have special Guests Dr. Kathy Alexander and Dr. Mark Vandewalle, whom together have founded and are directors of the CARACAL Biodiversity Center in Kasane, Botswana. CARACAL is a field based educational and research center that focuses on strengthening rural livelihoods, developing community approaches to mitigation of human-wildlife conflict, and securing the health of the ecosystems on which we all depend. CARACAL is the only indigenous conservation and rural development NGO in the Chobe Linyanti Kwando Wetlands within the Botswana component of the Zambezi Basin. This facility provides first class field laboratory and supporting research into the health of the ecosystems and wildlife in the area with the development of the first regional Wildlife Health Laboratory with both molecular genetics and bacteriological capabilities.

One of the greatest joys of working in the field of conservation is getting to work with, know and learn from amazing people who are our there everyday dedicating their lives in the field for conservation, living in remote parts of the world, navigating through both social and political systems in physically demanding places and situations. Today we’ll talk about some of the dedicated people Eli and WildiZe work with across sub-Saharan Africa, providing you the opportunity to learn about what they are doing on the ground making conservation happen and creative solutions to some of the big issues we’ve been talking about, which usually end up with some tale of adventure.

The needs of people and wildlife are inextricably linked, bound together by the common resources of our earth. Our human sense of entitlement over these resources vs. the needs of animals is where conflict arises that often turns into a boiling battle: Let’s call it the Tree-hugger vs. the Corporation. But what we're really talking about here is the economics of conservation vs. the moral and ethical dilemma of providing an atmosphere that allows for and includes security for the other life-forms we share this earth with. This is the basis of how we can define the health and wealth of our communities, both locally and globally; the decisions we make that affect not only our current quality of life, but that of future generations of both our human and wildlife communities.

Our media sound bytes makes it all so overwhelming and depressing: everywhere we turn it’s “Oh Despair and Hopelessness: Climate change, habitat loss, overpopulation, and impending extinctions, loss of forests and oceans, disease poverty!! We are NOT helpless! Each of us has the ability to minimize the “human factors” and engage in conservation. We all can find focus and strength to tackle these substantial challenges, individually and as a global community - finding a path through information and misinformation that will guide our ability to make informed decisions that affect both ourselves and our world. It’s time to Get Happy about the positive and become aware of what you can do to minimize our impacts on our natural world that will have positive impacts.

To create a paradigm shift, we must understand the paradigm we wish to shift. It is easy to think that conservation is something going on a world away, places that seem exotic and out of reach. What we want to help you understand is that critical to the success of any conservation effort anywhere is that individuals become aware and get involved. While it may seem like the survival of a species, or a community in Africa would not impact you, the health of ecosystems far away will affect the health and future of us all. This episode will explore what you can do and how it affects projects on the ground, so you can make the right decision on which course of action to take and provide some interesting anecdotes and information that will help you minimize your impact on our open spaces, natural landscapes and wildlife.

A Wild Idea: It is easy to think that conservation is something going on in places so far away and exotic that it seems unimaginable that one person here in the U.S. could have any significant impact on the greater outcome of a child, a community or even an entire species. In our first episode, our goal is to help you understand and learn about the big picture of what is involved in making conservation happen and provide a platform to engage our listeners to speak up about what is important to you, and how you can get involved in making a difference for your life and our future as a whole, through a variety of conservation challenges such as climate change, poverty and disease, notes from the field and photography, along with practical tips that you can implement at home in living with and enjoying the wildlife in your back yard. We want you to participate in Our Wild World, with your questions, emails and comments.