By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick This crisis is not an excess of elephants, but an excess of human walls, human weapons and human denial. If you only read the headlines, you’d think southern Africa is groaning under a booming elephant problem with no silver bullet in...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick In a brief note, President Cyril Ramaphosa has accepted DA leader John Steenhuisen’s request to remove the key wildlife portfolio from Dion George. A short statement from the office of the Presidency has ended speculation and rising...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Eskom’s proposed transmission line in Limpopo illustrates the cruel paradox of South Africa’s energy dilemma: a coal-dependent grid already fuelling climate change is now being expanded in ways that further destroy biodiversity. South...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick The move to oust the environment minister exposes a deeper hijacking – of the National Elephant Heritage Strategy, of policy integrity and of conservation itself. When South Africa’s National Elephant Heritage Strategy (NEHS)...
By Don Pinnock - Daily Maverick Behind claims of escalating human-elephant conflict lies a tangle of weak data, mismanagement and a R460-million fund that seems to need a crisis more than it proves one. Are elephants becoming increasingly dangerous to humans? Deputy...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick South Africa’s provincial nature reserves, the quiet custodians of our country’s natural heritage, are in freefall. Once envisioned as sanctuaries of biodiversity and engines of rural development, they are now symbols of systemic...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick A quiet but highly significant policy rift is opening among southern African states as the world turns its attention to CITES CoP20, scheduled for 24 November 2025 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. For decades, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and...
By Mike Cadman - Financial Mail Madikwe’s pachyderms are at the centre of a debate on how to manage the wildlife reserve.\ The Madikwe Game Reserve in North West has become the focal point of an extraordinary wrestling match over how the reserve, and particularly its...
By Adam Cruise - Daily Maverick Carrying capacity came from livestock management in the US in the early twentieth century, where calculating how many cattle a pasture could support before overgrazing was a matter of profit. But elephants are not cattle. They are...
By Don Ross and Ross Harvey - Business Day The overpopulation myth seems to be a useful pretext on which to justify the hunting and culling tender. The human brain is a remarkable organ (and remarkably metabolically expensive, so its evolution confirms our intuition...