Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 5
EDITOR'S NOTE
The Living Laboratory of Hope
BY ANNA BADKHEN
writes
Katharine Gammon in “The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the Ecosystem,” “chances are he’s going to
tell you about the state of the world.”
In this issue, three writers—Gammon, Jori Lewis,
and Charles Digges—zoom in on the million-acre living
laboratory that is the Gorongosa National Park in central Mozambique. Established in 1960 and devastated
during Mozambique’s decade-long war for independence and the subsequent 16 years of civil war, which
decimated the park’s wildlife, Gorongosa is now “a
model of wildlife recovery,” as Lewis puts it.
Gorongosa’s ecosystems bring together rainforests, woodland, savanna, and marshes. Its location at
the southernmost part of the great African Rift Valley,
which rends the continent north to south from the Red
Sea to Lake Malawi, makes Gorongosa a converging
zone for southern and eastern African species as well
as one of a handful of parks around the world with so
many ecosystems in one protected place. This creates
an ideal location for collaborative, cross-disciplinary
research in biodiversity documentation, ecology, conservation biology, paleoanthropology, climate science,
and other fields that are, in the words of the polymath
entomologist Piotr Naskrecki, “prerequisite to effective
conservation that’s firmly based in science.”
For six months in 2023, Lewis, Gammon, and Digges
investigated the extraordinary scholarship that takes
place at the park. They wrote about the scientists’
effort to study the language of bats (“scientists believe
many species can sing; some can recognize each other’s voices; they have dialects; they can alert others
to dangers; and they form intense bonds with their
young,” Lewis writes), understand the needs of species
F YO U G I V E A C AT E R P I L L A R A L E A F,”
in aftermaths of natural catastrophes, and build a multidimensional map of multi-species interactions that can
indicate ecosystems’ resilience to change—precious
knowledge at the time of unprecedented climate crisis.
As you read their stories, I hope you, too, fall in
love with the solitary pangolin (“Think of a cat. Then
add scales,” writes Digges); marvel at the inventive
solutions of the park’s Human-Wildlife Coexistence
Teams to “facilitate an entente … if not a perfect peace”
between wild animals and humans living near the park
(Lewis); and hold your breath alongside scientists of
the Paleo-Primate Project who are “looking to fill out
the pages of humanity’s family album” by collecting
animal bones from the Miocene Epoch—relics they
hope will help them shape “the beginnings of a sweeping narrative involving the life, death, and the shifting
landscapes of our cagey hominin ancestors, the creatures with which they shared the planet, and the environment in which they emerged” (Digges).
What do we feel in the face of a drastically changing planet? Despair. Wonder. Grief. Hope. The same,
I imagine, as what our “cagey hominin ancestors”
felt, or the Homo sapiens who faced the East African
megadroughts that began 135,000 years ago and lasted
60,000 years, putting humankind at the brink of extinction. The science this issue highlights invites you to
peek at what scholars at the Gorongosa National Park
are learning as they try to make sense of what it means
to be alive on this planet, today.
AnnA BAdkhen is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her seventh book,
Bright Unbearable Reality, was longlisted for the 2022 National
Book Award.
