American Scientist

Richard Leakey did not take a traditional path to academia. The second son of Mary and Louis Leakey—the pioneering paleoanthropologists most famously known for their discovery of fossils in the 1960s that showed that humans arose in Africa—Richard Leakey did not want to be in his father's shadow. But after a roundabout route, he still made his mark in early human origins discoveries. He continued to make waves when he later became director of the National Museum of Kenya and then chairman of the Kenya Wildlife Service, where he publicly combatted poaching. Although he lost both his lower legs in a plane crash and has had three organ transplants, Leakey maintains his vivacity and irreverence for protocol. During a recent visit to Duke University, Leakey spoke with American Scientist’s editor-in-chief, Fenella Saunders, about how his experiences have informed his views on the future of anthropology and wildlife conservation. An excerpt of the conversation, edited for clarity, is below.

Many African wildlife refuges abut human communities, and animals wandering in and out of the refuges can cause serious damage to crops or homes (see “Living in an Elephant Landscape,” by Jonathan Salerno et al., January–February 2018). How can human populations better coexist with animals that we want to conserve?

I think in the short term, people living on marginal land adjacent to the national parks will be forced off the land—not by conservation efforts, but by virtue of the fact that climate change will make it impossible to create a living on a few bush cattle or sheep and goats. Over the next 20 years we’ll see a lot of land vacating, people trying to get jobs in towns or cities. That’ll take some of the pressure off.

As an interim measure, some degree of total fencing in particular areas might be necessary. I mean, you can’t fence where there are huge animal migrations, such as the Serengeti or the Maasai Mara, but you can certainly fence a lot of the other parks. And yes, it is an artificial situation. Unfortunately, we’re here to stay, and so we’ll have to learn to accommodate that.

Humans have been practicing husbandry in fowl, sheep, goats, and cattle for a long time, and there’s no reason why we can’t see wildlife as something that has to be intensively managed. We have to control the genetic diversity and health of the animals. We have to deal with predator-prey relationships that may be interrupted. There are lots of things we have to do. But it’s really in the bounds to do it.

We are racing against time. But we have the capacity to sustain some biodiversity in some natural areas if we keep at it.

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Ethically it upsets the conservation story, but I’m afraid that if we’re going to keep some of these parks, we’re going to have to look after the animals properly, and that means investing money in management and restricting the trouble they’re causing. Wildlife outside of parks becomes very questionable.

I live outside Nairobi. I’m 40 minutes from the city. I have a small farm, 150 acres. I have 20 cattle and 30 sheep, and I have 2,000 vines that grow wine grapes, and I have a vegetable garden. Every year at some point they break through my electric fence—”they” being leopards or elands or baboons. I take a complete loss of a crop, or they eat my favorite bull. So I have to now buy a heavy, costly stud animal to keep my little milk herd going and breed some more animals to eat. They take my sheep.

I’m well off, I don’t farm for a living. But for some of my neighbors, it is their livelihood. This is their school fees, their hospital fees. And so they say, “We can’t keep these animals around here. Why don’t you shoot them?” I’m not going to shoot them. I like them. They say, “Well, we don’t like them.” So what's happening is people taking the law into their own hands and poisoning them.

Wildlife outside of parks in eastern Africa has a very dire future. But people have a dire future too, and unless they change their lifestyle, and ultimately end up in the rat race of urban living, they’re not going to survive either. We are racing against time. We’re racing against circumstance. We’re racing against this threat of climate change, which is affecting everything. But we have the capacity to sustain some biodiversity in some natural areas if we keep at it.

Do you think that your background in paleoanthropology informed the way that you manage wildlife?

From paleontology, one is conscious of the huge number of extinct species that you’re dealing with over the millions of years. And all sorts of fascinating animals have become extinct. They presumably became extinct not because the clock ran out, but because they couldn’t eat. The environment changed. And so yes, I think the lack of permanence of habitat and of species has always impressed me.

But at least over millions of years, there’s a chance for new species to establish themselves and take root. Now, the environment is changing so fast that if we get rid of the stock from which new species might one day emerge, at least for the mammals and birds and reptiles, it’s not going to happen [because there isn’t time for new species to emerge]. We go from what we have to zero, very easily.

You have mentioned that the field of genetics is connecting with paleontology to expand both fields. What do you feel is the role of genetics and paleontology working together?

I said that in the context of the human story, but it shouldn’t be just that. We are now able to use our knowledge of the genome to look at ancient DNA in some species, and we’re beginning to realize that there’s a much greater complexity to human origins than what was hitherto a fairly simple story.

The application of genetics to understanding both the past and the present is as important as it’s ever been, and it’s not a tool that’s widely used in Africa, because we don’t have the equipment. But I think it’s coming.

What role has genetics played in conservation efforts?

The northern white rhinoceros is an interesting story. There has been this huge attempt to save a subspecies of the white rhino, the so-called northern white rhino, of which there were three females and one male surviving in a zoo in the Czech Republic. They were brought to a ranch in Kenya where finally the male died from old age. They’ve done in vitro fertilization, and they’ve grafted a couple of fetuses into another white rhino, but this would be a pure northern species. And I hate to think—it must have cost a quarter of a million dollars to get it to this point.

The certainty of what we are and how we came to be is something that we need, that we’ve always needed.

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The southern white rhino to all intents and purposes looks like the northern white rhino, and it is suffering because its range is going, its habitat’s going, poaching is rampant. People are selling the southern white rhino to be shot.

We’re spending half a million dollars to fly northern white rhinos around the world and get the vets to collect eggs and do the fertilization in a petri dish—but is that what the world is going to have to deal with? I would have thought not. We’ve lost so many subspecies, let alone species, that we should probably put our biggest effort into saving what is clearly still viable, and not trying to do modern science magic.

I’m very torn about this, because conservation organizations want to pour money into it. They’re pouring money into it because it’s saving something that was to be gone forever, but does it matter? How many Europeans or indigenous Americans go around with long faces because the giant sloth has disappeared, or the mammoth has disappeared? I haven’t found anyone. What’s gone is gone. It’s sad. But I think conservation tends to try and take on the obvious that helps them raise money, but it doesn’t actually prolong the viability of biodiversity in a broader sense.

What do you think is the value of continuing to search for early human fossils, in terms of use of resources and other places such resources could go, such as current conservation? Given what you've said, how do we justify spending the money to search for more early human fossils?

Throughout history, we have wanted to know more about ourselves. That’s, if you like, the very juice of religion—faith, origins. The certainty of what we are and how we came to be is something that we need, that we’ve always needed. It’s almost—well, it’s at our fingertips, and I think if we can grab it, we should.

I also think that knowledge of human origins may do a lot to persuade us of the commonality of what we are, and that we—boy, girl, black, white, brown, yellow, pink—we’re all one. In your country people are still hugely sensitive about what they call race, and I’m calling color. Because there’s no biological distinction of race. Color isn’t race.

Africa has been a pejorative concept for several hundred years. Africa has always been a sort of negative. And Africa is trying to come out from the cold, or wants to be part of the world again. And the fact that we can demonstrate that it all came from Africa, that humans are an African species—I think we could celebrate the African species and put Africa’s self-awareness, self-consciousness, and pride into a position that would have an enormous impact on upcoming generations, about the prejudices that have gone with this whole thing.

Knowing about the certainty of our past, and being absolutely sure of that, and seeing how we got to be where we are by a series of facts, rather than myths, will give the species a lot more confidence in dealing with the problems that we face today. We could understand that climate change and environmental change have driven evolution, and they’re still driving it.

There are people who don’t believe in evolution, and yet they do worry about new bacteria and new viruses that are picked up in the hospital. Those bacteria and viruses are evolved. They are evolving. Their generation time is quite small, so if you don’t believe in evolution, then you have no need to worry. But evolution is happening as we’re talking, all around us. And we’re causing it. There’s a lot we can learn from studying the past that’s pretty solid.