By any measure, Remembering Rhinos, a Kickstarter-funded photo book for charity, is an eye-opener. Sixty-five prominent wildlife photographers, including many of the leaders in their respective fields, have donated one of their prized images to the coffee-table book, all in the name of raising funds for rhino conservation.

The Kickstarter campaign, launched earlier this year achieved its initial goal in near-record time. It didn’t stop there, either. Galvanized by public opinion and a growing sense of outrage at what is happening to our planet, it grew from there, much like a baby rhino that has finally found a safe home in which to grow up in the wild.

Remembering Rhinos will be officially unveiled Wednesday at an evening champagne reception at London’s prestigious — and historic — Royal Geographical Society, a Victorian-era redbrick home tucked behind the Natural History Museum in Kensington. It’s from these very halls that 19th century explorers plotted and mapped early expeditions deep into Africa’s interior. The idea of unveiling a coffee-table book dedicated to saving Africa and Asia’s remaining rhinos at the Royal Geographical Society in the 21st century seems entirely appropriate somehow.

Remembering Rhinos is a follow-up to 2016’s successful Remembering Elephants, which raised some USD $200,000 in the war against ivory poaching. Remembering Rhinos is more than that, though. It seems more urgent. More pressing.

The situation facing rhinos in 2017 is desperate. The illegal trade in rhino horn — driven by superstition, ignorance and a thriving black market in emerging economies in Southeast Asia and China — threatens to wipe out one of the planet’s oldest, longest-surviving land mammals, an animal so deeply buried in the human imagination that virtually anyone can recognize a rhino at a brief glance.

The photographers represented in the book include freelance photographers, staffers for some of the world’s leading nature periodicals and international award winners. They may not be household names outside the nature community, but they represent some of the most respected photographers working in the field today — Mike Muizebelt, Steve Winter, Greg du Toit, Frans Lanting, Piper Mckay, James Warwick, David Lloyd, Ayesha Cantor, Jan van der Greef, Will Burrard-Lucas, Marina Cano, Hilary Hann, Remembering Rhinos founder-editor Margo Raggett, and countless others.

“Everyone in the wildlife world is sick to their back teeth of animals being treated like commodities and slaughtered on a daily basis for their horns, tusks or whatever other body part the . . . market in the Far East seems to crave,” Raggett explained, when launching her Kickstarter campaign.

“Our book hit a nerve as a way for photographers and animal lovers to unite and do something positive to stand up to poachers. We don’t want to see these species wiped out in our lifetime.”

The Remembering Rhinos campaign has drawn numerous nigh-profile celebrities, from film actors Michelle Pfeiffer and Russell Crowe to comedian and animal-rights campaigner Ricky Gervais, Mad Men ensemble player Jared Harris and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

Virginia McKenna, a lifelong animal-rights campaigner, former model and actor who starred in the 1966 film Born Free, and Will Travers OBE, president of the Born Free Foundation, are closely involved.

Travers will introduce Wednesday’s reception.

The keynote speaker is Steve Winter, veteran wildlife photographer and lecturer with the National Geographic Society and a former winner of the Natural History Museum’s prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award. Winter was a nominee again this year, for his sad, haunting image of a captured, caged Sumatran tiger that had just had its hind leg amputated to save its life.

The idea behind Remembering Rhinos was to produce the most beautiful, memorable book about rhinos possible, in the hopes that, decades and centuries from now, photographic images won’t be all future generations have to remember rhinos by.

All proceeds from sales of the book go toward protecting rhinos in Africa and Asia.

The World Wildlife Fund’s official website (worldwildlife.org) notes that rhinos once roamed freely throughout Eurasia and Africa. They were known to early Europeans, who depicted them in cave paintings, and frequented savannah grasslands and tropical forests throughout Africa and Asia.

Today, very few rhinos survive outside national parks and reserves. Two species of Asian rhinos — the Javan and Sumatran rhinos — are officially classified on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) list of endangered species as Critically Endangered. A subspecies of the Javan rhino was declared extinct in Vietnam in 2011.

Conservation efforts have helped a third Asian species, the greater one-horned (or Indian) rhino, to increase in number, albeit slightly. Their status has been upgraded to Vulnerable from Endangered, but Indian rhinos are still poached for their horns.

In Africa, Southern white rhinos, once thought to be extinct, now thrive in protected sanctuaries and are classified as Near Threatened. A surge in land invasions and poaching raids in the past year by heavily armed crime syndicates in South Africa now threaten even the most protected sanctuaries, however.

The Northern white rhino subspecies is now believed to be extinct in the wild, and only a few captive individuals remain in a sanctuary in Kenya — also threatened by poaching.

Black rhinos have doubled in number over the past two decades from their low point of fewer than 2,500 individuals in the mid-1990s, but their total numbers are still a tiny fraction of the estimated 100,000 that roamed across Africa’s grasslands in the late 19th century and early part of the 20th century.

“We simply cannot let extinction happen on our watch,” Raggett said simply.

It will take more than a book to prevent that, of course, but every bit helps. Especially when the book is as elegant and hard-to-forget as Remembering Rhinos.

Remembering Rhinos

Wildlife Photographers United

Envisage Books

£45, 144 pages, hardback

978-0-99301-932-6

https://rememberingwildlife.com/remembering-rhinos/

10. screen build1 ©Remembering Rhinos.png

Finally. The UK government has bowed to pressure from wildlife campaigners and will ban the sale of ivory, regardless of its age.

At least, that was the word this past Friday, after acting UK environment secretary Michael Gove — of all people — put forward a ban on the sales of all items carved from ivory, including those carved before 1947.

That’s key because, while the international trade in ivory had been illegal since 1990, a loophole in UK law permitted trade in ivory “antiques,” loosely defined as an ivory item carved before 1947. A further loophole — a loophole inside the loophole, if you will — permitted ivory “worked before 1990,” provided those items were accompanied by government certificates.

Given that government corruption is a driving force behind the illegal wildlife trade in many of the developing countries where elephants are trafficked for their tusks by international crime syndicates, the UK loophole was the very definition of hypocrisy. Why should UK government officials be allowed to sign off on supposedly “antique” ivory, but not government officials in, say, Tanzania or Namibia?

The UK is, or rather was, the world’s largest exporter of legal ivory — I did not know that until this past week — and cutting off the trade will in theory help slow down the illegal trade in ivory by international crime syndicates.

Despite recent wins by wildlife campaigners — China and the U.S. have both resolved to scale back trade in ivory, if not eliminate it entirely — poaching continues to be a serious problem. More than 50 elephants are killed by poachers every day. A 2016 elephant census across Africa, funded in part by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, showed that the continent lost a third of its remaining wild elephant in just the 10 years prior to 2016.

If anything, poaching has only increased over the past year, exacerbated by a sudden, unwelcome surge in the poaching of rhinos for their horns. Considering the gestation period for an elephant is two years, and elephants only give birth to one baby at a time, it doesn’t take an advanced degree in mathematics to see how see where an already dwindling population of wild elephants could be heading.

The ruling Conservative government was believed to be disinterested in widening the UK ban; the Tories removed a pledge on ivory from their 2017 election manifesto in June, even though it had been included in the party’s 2015 election manifesto.

Celebrity campaigners from Prince William to Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking and Ricky Gervais mounted a vocal protest that found favour with ordinary, everyday voters fed up with what they perceive to be wanton greed — the rich getting richer — with utter disregard for the wellbeing of the planet.

Of course, bans are one thing; discouraging demand and eliminating the market entirely is another.

“The unprecedented crisis we face – with Africa’s natural heritage being destroyed and communities put at risk due to poaching by illegal armed gangs – will only stop when people stop buying ivory,” Stop Ivory’s John Stephenson told the media Friday.

Even so, Stephenson said he was gratified by the government’s “important step,” and looks forward to seeing the ban implemented and enforced “without delay.”

Other NGOs caution that the road ahead is not entirely clear, either for elephants or any other endangered animals trafficked for profit.

World Wildlife Fund CEO Tanya Steele warned that the scale of the problem is vast, and promises need to be back up with action.

“The illegal trade involving organized criminals is a global problem requiring global solutions,” Steele told reporters. “To end it anywhere means ending it everywhere. This is about more than banning ivory sales in one country. It means working with leaders and communities around the world, particularly in China and Southeast Asia.”

While China has appeared to have turned a corner, for example, and to a lesser extent Vietnam, Laos has suddenly become the new frontier in the wild west of illegal wildlife trafficking.

In the meantime, carefully staged photo ops in developing countries like Kenya — twice in four years, now — have seen governments burn stockpiles of elephant tusks, to show the world that they value their remaining living elephants, and the tourist revenue they bring, over selling ivory on the black market and getting rich at the expense of future generations.

The ivory burns, dismissed by some as a cheap publicity gimmick — even though, given the value of the ivory involved, they can hardly be said to have been inexpensive — clearly had an effect on public opinion in the media-savvy West.

The UK Tory government didn’t widen the ivory ban because they wanted to, but because ordinary, everyday people shamed them into doing it, and not just because of the Duke of Cambridge and Stephen Hawking.

Yes, the UK is just one country, but wins in wildlife conservation have to be taken as they come, day by day, and at a time.

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen