The World Without Us

Counting elephants is David Western’s project today—something he has done continually for nearly three decades. Raised in Tanzania, son of a British big-game hunter, as a boy he often hiked alongside his gun-toting father for days without seeing another human. The first animal he shot was his last; the look in the dying warthog’s eyes cooled any further passion to hunt. After an elephant fatally gored his father, his mother took her children to the comparative safety of London. David stayed through university studies in zoology, then returned to Africa.

An hour southeast of Nairobi, Kilimanjaro appears, its shrinking snowcap dripping butterscotch under the rising sun. Just before it, verdant swamps burst from a brown alkaline basin, fed by springs from the volcano’s rainy slopes. This is Amboseli, one of Africa’s smallest, richest parks, an obligatory pilgrimage for tourists hoping to photograph elephants silhouetted against Kilimanjaro. That used to be a dry-season event, when wildlife would pack into Amboseli’s marshland oasis to survive on cattails and sedges. Now they’re always here. “Elephants aren’t supposed to be sedentary,” Western mutters as he passes over dozens of females and calves wading not far from a pod of mucking hippos.

From high above, the plain surrounding the park seems infected by giant spores. These are bomas: rings of mud-and-dung huts belonging to Maasai pastoralists, some occupied, some abandoned and melting back into the earth. A defensive ring of stacked, thorny acacia branches encircles each. The bright green patch in every compound’s center is where the nomadic Maasai keep cattle safe from predators at night before moving their herds and families to the next pasture.

As Maasai move out, elephants move in. Since people first brought cattle down from northern Africa after the Sahara dried, a choreography has evolved featuring elephants and livestock. After cattle chew savanna grasses down, woody shrubs invade. Soon they’re tall enough for elephants to munch, using their tusks to strip and eat bark, knocking trees over to reach their tender canopies, clearing the way for grass to return.

As a graduate student, David Western sat atop an Amboseli hill, counting cows led to graze by Maasai herders as elephants plodded in the opposite direction to browse. The census he began here of cattle, elephants, and people has never stopped during his subsequent careers as Amboseli park director, head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, and founder of the nonprofit African Conservation Centre, which works to preserve wildlife habitats by accommodating, not banning, humans who have traditionally shared them.

Dropping to 300 feet, he begins flying wide, clockwise circles, banked at a 30° angle. He tallies a ring of dung-plastered huts—one hut per wife: some wealthy Maasai have as many as 10 wives. He calculates the approximate number of inhabitants, and notes 77 cattle on his vegetation map. What looked from above like blood drops on a green plain turns out to be the Maasai herders themselves: tall, lithe, dark men in traditional red plaid shoulder cloaks—traditional, at least, since the 19th century, when Scottish missionaries distributed tartan blankets that Maasai herdsmen found both warm and light enough to carry as they followed their herds for weeks.

“The pastoralists,” Western shouts over the engine noise, “have become a surrogate migratory species. They behave much like wildebeest.” Like the wildebeest, Maasai herd their cows into short-grass savannas during wet seasons and bring them back to water holes when the rains stop. Over a year, Amboseli’s Maasai live in an average of eight settlements. Such human movement, Western is convinced, has literally landscaped Kenya and Tanzania to the benefit of wildlife.

“They graze their cattle and leave behind woodland for elephants. In time, elephants create grassland again. You get a patchy mosaic of grass, woods, and shrublands. That’s the whole reason for the savanna’s diversity. If you only had woodlands or grasslands, you would only support woodland species or grassland species.”

In 1999, Western described this to paleoecologist Paul Martin, father of the Pleistocene overkill extinction theory, while driving through southern Arizona en route to see where Clovis people finished off local mammoths 13,000 years earlier. Since that time, the American Southwest had evolved without big herbivore browsers. Martin gestured at the tangle of mesquite sprouting on public lands that ranchers leased, which they were always begging permission to burn. “Do you think this could work as elephant habitat?” he asked.

At the time, David Western laughed. But Martin persisted: How would African elephants do in this desert? Would they be able to ascend the craggy granite mountain ranges to find water? Might Asian elephants do better, since they were more closely related to mammoths?