Richard Leakey
Two in one week, Richard Leakey joins E.O. Wilson. Voices for wildlife conservation have always been too few, always overwhelmed by industrialism's cacophony. Leakey was a great voice for and actor in conserving the ecology of Africa, where, as he helped prove, we as a species were birthed and defined.
He was the son of Mary and Louis Leakey, two paleoanthropologists, who discovered some of our earliest homo ancestors in Kenya. They set up Jane Goodall, Diane Fosse, and Birute Gildikas to study our closest surviving relatives in their habitats, respectively, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Their studies all gradually included fighting to conserve remaining populations and habitats.
Richard followed his parents paleo-anthropologist's footsteps, making important fossil discoveries, including the above “Turkana Boy,” found along the lake in north Kenya. That homo erectus youth lived 1.4 million years ago.
Later, Leakey was heavily involved in wildlife conservation as head of the Kenya Wildlife Services. He launched a war against elephant poaching, ordering shoot to kill poachers. His efforts helped stop the slaughter and stabilized populations, though at numbers well below what they had once been. The fight to keep and grow Kenya's elephant populations continues today. Afterwards, Leakey would get involved in Kenyan politics. In short, he was an exemplary citizen of his era.
He wrote a number of books. I read one, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human. It's a wonderful important work on his fossil discoveries and his thoughts on homo sapiens and our ancestors. I used an essential thought of his on homo tool making in my Politics of Technology, “Our ancestors made these tools, but, in a real sense, these tools made our ancestors. By the same token, they made us what we are today.”
Since we refuse to recognize evolution, especially in both habitat destruction and our directly related technological development, we don't understand the relativity of the process. There is no understanding of any species without its habitat. Without water, you can't understand a fish, without bamboo, there's no panda.
An associated but indeed different understanding comes with the evolution of technology. In Origins, Leakey illustrates technology, including sharpening stones and harnessing fire, helped define our ancestors going back millions of years. This is true today. Technological development is relative too, by defining our environments, they define us. However, technologies can arise completely independent of their environments, their adoption creating environments then entirely defined by the technology itself.
An easy example, the internal combustible engine, without which there would be no American road system or any pandering American policy toward the medieval regime of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This literally is the technological road we've been traveling the last century and half, so completely destroying the environments and even more radically, the cultures from which we evolved, leaving us with less understanding of ourselves. Increasingly, we more or less become our technologies.
Conserving the diversity of life, in every one of its manifestations is understanding and appreciating the history of who we are. Can we have computers and elephants? It's a must. Without elephants, there will soon be no computers. Richard Leakey understood this completely, a sad voice to lose.