Every photo in Chapter Two was taken in one place : Senda Verde (“Green Path”) Animal Sanctuary. 

Vicky Ossio and Marcelo Levy founded Senda Verde in 2003. It was a labor of love then, and it is a testament to their extraordinary tireless commitment that it is very much a labor of love to this day. 

In fact, the existence of the Sanctuary is even more important today than in 2003. In recent years, illegal animal trafficking, escalating deforestation and habitat loss, invasion of illegal agriculture into supposedly protected areas, and forest fires, intensified by droughts as a result of climate change, have increased dramatically in Bolivia. 

All of these factors mean that the population of rescued animals at Senda Verde has quadrupled in the last five years, to almost 1000 rescued animals of more than 60 different species.

Given the Sanctuary’s tiny annual income from donors and visitors, it is astonishing that they are able to care for the number of animals that they do. In fact, whether bear, puma, or jaguar, monkey, tortoise, anteater or bird, Senda Verde never turns away an animal. In addition, within their limited funding, they have an animal hospital staffed by four vets, 20-25 permanent employees, and a vital stream of interns and volunteers. 

Kuimba Shiri sanctuary offers refuge for injured and orphaned birds, many rescued from the wild due to habitat loss, deforestation, and poisoning. Injured and abused captive birds are released to the wild if they are successfully rehabilitated. Those birds that cannot be released are cared for in the park, some whose life span extends decades.

There is also a strong educational component to the park, with a steady supply of children and students visiting to better understand their country’s bird life.

Much of Kuimba Shiri’s income has been badly impacted by the almost complete collapse of international tourism in Zimbabwe since March 2020 with the onset of COVID-19. Donations are very much needed to keep the birds fed and staff paid.

Website: www.kuimbashiribirdpark.com

PELUM Zimbabwe aids resource-poor farmers - such as those featured in The Day May Break - with better, more ecological land use management practices.

So far, PELUM Zimbabwe has reached more than 1 million farmers. Their work contrib-utes to improved nutrition security, climate resilience, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability. This work is ever more important as the country experiences land degra-dation, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, malnutrition, acute poverty, droughts, cyclones, and floods which threaten both the survival of humans and wildlife.

PELUM responds to these challenges by strengthening community-based seed systems and regenerating landscape using agro-ecological practices.

PELUM Zimbabwe is part of the PELUM Association, a regional network operating in twelve African countries. (PELUM stands for Participatory Ecological Land Use Man-agement.)

Website: www.pelumzimbabwe.wixsite.com/pelumzimbabwe

Ol Pejeta Conservancy is a 365 sq. km expanse of grassland, bush, marsh, and riverine habitats on the Laikipia Plateau.

It is home to the last two remaining northern white rhinos on the planet, Najin and Fatu. The last of their species means an almost military level of security, with their own 24-hour armed guards. As a result, Ol Pejeta has not had a single incident of poaching for over 3 years.

In 1993, Ol Pejeta was home to just 20 of the critically endangered eastern black rhino. Today, that number has risen to 143, thanks to innovations in research, stringent anti-poaching measures, and careful land management methods. Indeed, the conservancy has become the largest sanctuary for the species in the whole of Central and East Africa.

Ol Pejeta’s focus now is to secure additional rhino habitat across the Laikipia landscape.

Ol Pejeta’s innovative science and research-based conservation program has earned it the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Green List status—one of only five African conservancies so recognized.

As well as rhinos, the conservancy is home to a host of endangered and vulnerable spe-cies, including Grévy’s zebras, East African oryx, cheetahs, and leopards. All of the big five are there, plus Kenya’s only great apes - Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary - home to dozens of rescued individuals.

Website: www.olpejetaconservancy.org

Ol Jogi is a 58,000-acre private wildlife conservancy in Laikipia County.

They strive to develop a sustainable model for the conservation of wildlife and their habi-tat with a focus on endangered species. They aim to contribute to the development of an interconnected, contiguous landscape through which the wildlife can thrive, while im-proving livelihoods in the local communities.

Ol Jogi hosts more than 6% of the world’s remaining eastern black rhino’s, 17% of the world’s remaining Grévy zebras, 93 species of mammals, and more than 400 species of birds. They have a state-of-the-art veterinary clinic, a wildlife rescue center, a conserva-tion education program, and their own school for all employees’ children.

Ol Jogi has invested in local community partnership programs for the last 40 years and firmly believe that humanitarian and environmental issues are not mutually exclusive. In order to protect the environment, we must invest in people.

Website: www.oljogihome.com

The Simama Project is a community-based organization in Nanyuki, Kenya (in the area where all the Kenyans photographed for this project currently live).

Founded to address the needs of children living on the street, Simama initially provided school scholarships and social services to youths who found themselves on the margins of society. The guiding principle of Simama is in its name, which means “stand up” in Swahili.

Simama now offers a variety of programming to address the complex needs of street youths and marginalized girls to empower them to become leaders and activists in their community. Simama has continued to grow its school scholarship program which now supports over 150 youths yearly. It maintains multiple homes where youths receive both medical and social services to help integrate them back into school and their families.

In 2016, Simama opened the Center of Worth that provides additional educational and vocational training, counseling services, and outreach with local schools. To date, the center has provided services for over 10,000 youths and their families.

Simama recently purchased 30 acres of land in Nanyuki to develop a campus focused on training to continue to educate and empower youths with the skills needed for a changing world.

Website: www.simamaproject.org

Two years later, in October 2009, he was killed by poachers for his ivory.

Many of his brethren were being killed in the same way on an almost weekly basis in the Amboseli ecosystem. No longer able to sit back and allow the destruction to continue, I cofounded Big Life Foundation in 2010 with one of the most respected conservationists in East Africa, Richard Bonham. The goal: to protect a massive area of the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem straddling Kenya and Tanzania, where Igor had lived.

Big Life became the first organization in East Africa with coordinated patrols operating on both sides of a country’s borders. The animals don’t pay attention to borders, nor do poachers. So neither can we.
Eleven years later, Big Life protects over 1.6 million acres with more than 300 rangers in thirty-six permanent and mobile outposts. With multiple patrol vehicles, tracker dogs, night vision equipment, and aerial monitoring, this new level of coordinated protection for the ecosystem has brought about a dramatic reduction in poaching of all animals in the region, with numerous arrests of some of the worst, most prolific poachers.

However, when you’re trying to protect such a large area, a few hundred rangers will on-ly get you so far. These achievements could never have happened without one critical element: the collaboration with, and support of, the local communities.

Wildlife constantly moves far beyond small park boundaries into the huge unprotected areas that are becoming more populated by humans. This means that the only future for conservation of animals in the wild is to work closely with the local communities. This is at the heart of Big Life’s philosophy: if conservation supports the community, then the community will support conservation.

Big Life does much more than protect the animals from poachers and arrest wildlife traf-fickers. Elephants and other animals increasingly find that land they have always known to be wild has been suddenly converted to farms. To prevent elephants from being speared in their attempts to eat farmers’ crops, by 2021, Big Life has erected nearly 120 kilometers of electrified fence. Big Life also helps maintain a healthy growing population of lions and other predators by providing financial compensation to herders’ who lose livestock to those animals. Big Life manages and leases land conservancies—critical reservoirs of protected land ever more in demand for other uses by man.

But now we face the biggest, most consequential and complex threat of all.

And it all comes down to land.

The ecosystem is being rapidly transformed from community-owned landscape into pri-vate ownership that will shatter the ecosystem into thousands of twenty- to sixty-acre par-cels. As the parcels are converted to other uses, wildlife will run out of space.

It will be difficult to preserve the ecosystem in its current state. However, there are key wildlife corridors and dispersal areas that we can still protect, which would allow the ecosystem to support wildlife numbers similar to those now.

In 2021, this is Big Life’s most urgent task. There is no time to waste. Land preserva-tion can be a win-win for all—not just for the animals, but also for the local communi-ties.

To learn more about how Big Life helps protect this extraordinary and unique ecosystem, and to support this important work, please go to: www.biglife.org

Thank You,
Nick Brandt