This is a photo story of my experiences in wildlife conservation in Africa. The first project we undertook was the Great Elephant Census to count how many elephants were left across twenty African savannah countries. My role was to identify how technology could be leveraged to help with the count.
Over the course of the ensuing five years I traveled to eleven African countries and over twenty wildlife protected areas. I made a personal journey from wildlife conservation neophyte to one of a small group of people who call themselves conservation technologists. We moved from counting to saving elephants and other wildlife of Africa, looking for technology-based solutions to protected area management and wildlife anti-trafficking.
My love of wildlife grew along with my understanding of the scope and scale of the challenges they face. I learned from the leading conservationists in Africa about the potential of technology to provide tools commensurate with the challenges. I learned too of the many attempts and failures of delivering sustainable, context appropriate applications of technology. I am hopeful we are on a path to overcoming them.
Even if we succeed, technology will not save wildlife and the wild places they need to live. It will only buy time. We humans must provide the solutions. We must care enough to move beyond the solutions our human-centered market-driven world provides that fail to value wildlife sufficiently to do what is required. The alternative is a world increasingly without wildlife, where experiencing it is an amenity for people who can afford it.