Omen for the Land: Saving the World's Most Critically Endangered Antelope

Courtney Carlson, M.F.A.
Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities
University of Wyoming Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources

Abstract

Forty years ago, fifteen thousand hirola antelope occupied the grasslands spanning the border of Somalia and Kenya. Today fewer than five hundred individuals remain, and the hirola (Beatragus hunteri) has become the world’s most critically endangered antelope. Human activities including war, overgrazing, fire suppression, and elephant poaching have degraded the animal’s habitat. Efforts of overseas nonprofits to revive the population have sputtered, in part because hirola, which occur entirely outside protected areas in a remote, conflict-riven region, are uniquely ill suited to conventional conservation. Yet an unlikely local coalition led by Kenyan-born, ethnic Somali Abdullahi Ali offers hope that replacing top-down policies and enforcement with a fresh strategy resting on ideals of tolerance and cooperation might save the hirola.

I am a nonfiction writer interested in the essays of Mark Dowie, Vandana Shiva, and Ramachandra Guha, incisive thinkers who have challenged the global conservation orthodoxy, asserting that the protected area model too often irreparably harms indigenous people. Ali’s work caught my attention when he was a doctoral student in Wyoming, studying conservation biology and raising funds for his burgeoning hirola NGO. Today Dr. Abdullahi employs thirty locals—schoolteachers, nomadic pastoralists, and reformed poachers—as rangers and trackers working to increase hirola numbers and distribution in their native landscape. Saving the species has become a cause for unity and pride in the region: when managers proposed trans-locating hirola to Tsavo National Park, locals sued the government, asserting that the animal was a symbol of their identity, a benefit to future generations, and an omen of good health in their landscape.

I am chronicling this effort in a literary nonfiction essay exploring how diverse stakeholders have responded to a local issue of environmental concern, forging a just solution across different value systems; I would like to share from this work at the conference.