African Wildlife & Environment Issue 81

SPECIAL BOOK REVIEW

Mozambique was plunging into civil war. The country’s decades-long struggle to throw off the yoke of Portuguese colonial rule had just ended in 1974 and by 1977, an insurgency against the newly independent government was underway. That war lasted 15 years and Gorongosa was a hotspot

with local management and staff, as well as with the referencing of historical and more recent documents (anecdotal as well as scientific), publications, maps and aerial photographs. This was followed by five years of on-the-ground fieldwork research, that led to a remarkably

Mt Gorongosa from the Southeast (Photograph: Bart Wursten)

of the fighting, as control of the area see-sawed between government and rebel forces. When scientists returned to the park in the mid-1990s, they found the habitats intact, but the wildlife had mostly vanished. In 1972, Tinley had counted nearly 30,000 large herbivores. Twenty-five years later, spotters counted a total of 3 elephant, 2 buffalo, 7 hippo, and some few hundred antelope. After the war ended in 1994 Ken together with lifelong friend and fellow-ecologist Paul Dutton and José Tello, an ex-warden of Gorongosa, were contracted by IUCN to survey the condition of the National Park. Dutton had his own small Piper Cub aircraft and he had helped Ken and José perform the first aerial surveys of the vast herds of large ungulates during the first year of Ken’s research in Gorongosa. Now, returning two decades later, they found no wildlife and devastated infrastructure. Paradise re-visioned It took 30 years for Gorongosa to be ‘noticed’ by the outside world but when it was, in 2005, Gorongosa’s luck changed again when Greg Carr, an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, founder in 1999 of the US-based Carr Foundation,

perceptive and holistic understanding of the Gorongosa ecosystem - an impressive feat by any measure, and all the more so in an era before personal computers, GPS units, and other modern scientific conveniences. Dr Marc Stalmans, current resident Director of Research in Gorongosa, summarises well the unique nature of Tinley’s thesis in saying that “Ken was truly ahead of his time’, applying a landscape ecological perspective well before this approach gained popularity in the 1980s and 90s. Ken manually applied GIS principles before the electronic tool was available. Whereas many studies conventionally only provide a snapshot in time, Ken’s work takes a long term, geomorphic and geo-ecological view of the park in terms of the formation, evolution and long-term outcome of its ecosystems and constituting components. That’s why the work is still hugely relevant one half-century later. Even more astonishing is that this magnum opus resulted from Ken spending only five years in the Gorongosa ecosystem.” Paradise (almost) lost At around the same time that Ken Tinley was completing this masterful thesis in Pretoria,

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