#98 Important Addenda and Corrigenda to Dispatch #97
Let’s start with the most important one, from Eric Tah at LAGA. Please if you are going to quote anything from my interview with him, use these corrections:
Dear Alex,
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to get this right before actually making it public, I have copied the areas that concern me and or LAGA for …Read More
#97: Mission Corrupted: Is WWF Cameroon Trafficking in Ivory and Beating Pygmies?
This investigation was made possible by a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation
Last November Survival International, the London-based tribal people’s advocacy group, ran a story on its Web site about a big-game hunter and trustee of World Wildlife South Africa named Peter Flack who went on a safari into the rain forest of Cameroon …Read More
#88: Borneo’s Ruined Forest’s Nomads Have Nowhere to Go
Smithsonian Magazine has published my piece on the destruction by the logging and palm-oil industries of Borneo’s rain forest and the ancient way of life of the Penan Hunter gatherers, who still hunt with blowguns. Last fall peat fires which should never have been set killed thousands of orangutans in Kalimantan, from starvation and smoke …Read More
#87: A Letter From Rwanda
A Letter From Rwanda. Part One : Reunion with the Gorillas.
Whom I hadn’t seen since l986, when I was writing about the murder of Dian Fossey. The experience today, by up to 80 ecotourists a day visiting ten different families, is really well done, you get up close and personal and en famille with our …Read More
#86: The White Spirit Bear of British Columbia
Smithsonian Magazine has published my piece on the white spirit bear of British Columbia, with magnificent photographs by Melissa Groo
Click to read the article
#85: Ethiopia’s Black Stalin
While we’re on the subject of this amazing ancient country, here’s a piece I did on the fall of Ethiopia’s dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in l991. It has a lot of interesting political and cultural and ethnohistorical information. The late eminent historian of the African Horn, Harold Marcus, accompanied me to Zimbabwe and Addis and …Read More
#83: The Devil and the Art Dealer
Vanity Fair has published “The Devil and the Art Dealer,” my piece on the old recluse in Munich who was found with a billion dollars worth of looted Nazi art in his apartment
Click to read the article
#82: Nebraska Spring Crane Gathering
Smithsonian Magazine has published in its March issue an article by me with stunning images by Melissa Groo about the 600,000 sandhill cranes that gather on the Platte River in Nebraska to dance and fatten up for the trip to their arctic and subarctic breeding grounds.
Click to read the article
#81: The Last of Eden
The Last of Eden, about the critically endangered Awa tribe of the eastern Amazon, by Alex with photos by Sebastiao Salgado, was published in the December 2013 Vanity Fair.
Read the article on Vanity Fair
#80: The Sanctity of Whales, by Cyril Cristo
An essay by Cyril Cristo, whose constant pestering of my editor’s assistant was responsible for Vanity Fair assigning “Agony and Ivory.” Cyril lives in Santa Fe and cares deeply about the life on earth. He has produced a number of beautiful coffee table books of his photos of wild animals, notably Walking Thunder about the …Read More