This is it. This is what we’ve lost, what we’ve killed, what we exchanged for whatever the fuck we have in Europe, in America. Lost in our anthropocentric delirium, we’ve constructed a world, cemented on an illusion of safety, where there’s only room for those species we deformed to satisfy our own lust and our own egos. Where the endless forms shaped by natural selection are not welcomed and, instead, received with poison and with bullets. But here, deep in Mabuaseube Game Reserve, in this glimpse of 'the greatest show on earth’, without any connection to the outside world, the insanity of men that is ravaging our mother earth seems to faint. It feels as if we regained our sanity, our real place amongst the wild.
From the deepest red to the highest violet, all the range of colors that we can perceive appear to us in the interaction of the rays of a sun that is slowly approaching the horizon that bounce with the particles of the atmosphere and crash with the hundreds of clouds that we can see. And every cloud has its different pallet and its different function. Some are thin, some are low, others have grown tall, from bottom to top, very tall, the tallest things I’ve seen on earth. And we can watch these towers of vapor from the distance, roaring, pouring their insides into the sand of the Kgalagadi, furiously exchanging protons and electrons with the ground in a spectacle of light and shadows. Never in the thirty eight years that I have been traveling around the sun on this beautiful mothership, have I seen such skies as beautiful as the skies in Botswana. It feels as if I was living inside a painting, or a video game, created by some artist or some group of developers with the sole intention of shaping a landscape so exaggeratedly beautiful, with such abuse of contrasts, that the people who would see this piece of art would think that it was just not possible for such a landscape to exist. Every patch of pink Kalahari sand, every bush standing between us and the sun seems (just seems) to be put there on purpose, to make it the most beautiful thing ever created. There’s hardly any day, since we entered the wild part of Botswana, that I haven’t been overwhelmed by beauty and shed a tear.
Surely, what I love the most about Botswana is its biodiversity. My wife and I have traveled through many countries around the world. We haven’t found any other place with so much life and so diverse. I remember when I was a kid, living in rural Mexico, how I played with the caterpillars together with my brother. I remember some nights, when we were sitting outside, and we could see fields lightened up by hundreds of fireflies. That reality doesn’t exist anymore there. We’ve cut the rainforest, filled it with cows and crops to feed our cows, and we shower those fields several times every year with poison that kills all the fireflies, all the caterpillars, all the butterflies, and much, much more. Here, in rural Botswana, watching my kids play with the insects, with the caterpillars, dancing amongst the butterflies, I remember how it was in Mexico thirty years ago. I can suddenly compare and realize the magnitude of the ecocide we committed and that is ongoing. Here, thousands of butterflies move like clouds just above the ground around us, searching for a patch of moisture in the sand as we ride through them in our white Fortuner, trying helplessly not to kill them.
We stay at the edge of a pan. Every morning, before sunrise, we’d see at least two herds come down from the surrounding bushes. Hundreds of springbok, with their gracious ballerina movements that contrast with their dramatic white faces, would eat the low grass of the salty pan. They kind of resemble crying mimes, whose black mascara painting rolled down with their tears and connected their eyes to their black noses. A herd of blue wildebeest with around ten newborns would also come down every morning, at the same time as the springbok do. During the day, the herds of springbok and wildebeest, together with the occasional gemsbok or two, move slowly through the pan, grazing while a jackal or two would walk around the pan looking for some rodents to eat. The young and the weakest stay generally in the middle, protected by the two strongest that usually graze some fifty to sometimes hundred meters away from the herd, stopping every time to have a look at their surroundings, searching for some lurking predator. Most times we could see a wildebeest taking on this role and protecting the herds of springbok. Apparently, these two herds work together for protection. After sunset, the herds would resume their daily procession, back into the bush. Walking in and out of the pan are the most dangerous moments of the day for them. In the pan they are able to see far and, thus, they can see predators getting near.
Around the pan there’s often big cats. During the day, a couple of cheetahs would walk around the pan, searching for the perfect place, against the wind where their pray wouldn’t be able to smell them, waiting with astonishing patience for a herd to come near the edge of the pan where they lay, and lunch an attack; the ancient game between pray and predator. The cheetah would select the weakest one, while the herd would try to protect them. More than 70% of the time, the cheetah would fail. It’s not easy being a cheetah. This is one of the reasons why they are the only large land predator here that hunts mostly during day, when they don’t have to protect their kill against other large predators, simply because they never do. If another predator comes near the kill, the cheetah leaves the carcass. They could fight off some vultures, as we saw in the Central Kalahari, and jackals, but they are powerless against lions, hyenas, leopards and even big vultures. During their processions in and out the pan, the springbok and wildebeest could encounter a leopard hiding, that would wait for its meal to be delivered and would just jump off from a branch on a tree or come out of the bush to kill something light enough for him to be able to pull up a tree, where he could eat without lions or hyenas trying to steal its food.
Nature is ruthless. Cheetahs, for instance, would mostly go for a young grazer; they’re true baby killers. And seeing a leopard dragging by the broken neck the carcass of a baby wildebeest it just killed can be a gruesome sighting, specially for our two young children. But that’s reality; that’s nature. There’s no moral in nature, just the four billion year process of evolution, what professor Richard Dawkins calls ‘the greatest show on Earth’. And that’s fucking beautiful. We’ve learned a lot from it. We’ve discovered ourselves as just another animal that came about from this show of evolution. We were visited by lions at night, while we were sitting down outside, drinking a beer, and ended up sleeping amongst them.
I think about the dying world, the one we transformed to satisfy our big egos, and ask myself ‘how long will it take for it to reach this place? How long until the trees are cut, the cows are brought and the crops we plant to feed those cows are showered with pesticides?’. After driving out, merely seventy kilometers outside, we start seeing the beasts that men shaped, deformed, already surrounding these pristine places, the last recalls of the greatest show on earth. It seems as we’re strangling the life out of these places. Wild lions are being sold to be bred, hunted and displayed as trophies in the offices of wealthy dentists. Wild animals are being bred by humans, raised by humans in captivity to give us the illusion that we’re saving the planet. We’re not. There’s no way a lion can learn how to hunt, how to behave in the wild, without being raised in the wild by wild lions. The same holds to all species. It’s difficult to realize and accept that we are the problem, not the solution. I don’t think for a second that we’ll be able to, for instance, terraform Mars and make it habitable by humans if we don’t, first, make this world habitable.
I fear that this is it; one of the last places on land where the spectacle of what Charles Darwin once called the ‘endless forms most beautiful’ is waiting to be exchanged for whatever the fuck we have in Europe. And I’m glad that I was able to inhabit it, that my children were able to inhabit it, for at least a week, before it disappeared forever.