2/27/2024 0 Comments Northern white rhinoceros.![]() By the early 1980s, hunting had reduced their numbers to around 19,000. A century ago there were hundreds of thousands of rhinos in Africa. On that winter’s day, Sudan was one of only eight northern white rhinos left alive on the planet. I knew I was in the presence of an ancient being, millions of years in the making (fossil records suggest that the lineage is over 50 million years old), whose kind had roamed around much of our world. Surrounded by snow in his brick and iron enclosure, Sudan was being crate trained-learning to walk into the giant box that would carry him almost 4,000 miles south to Kenya. ![]() I saw Sudan for the first time in 2009 at the Dvůr Králové Zoo in Czechia (the Czech Republic). These truths became personal guideposts when I met Sudan, a northern white rhinoceros and, eventually, the last male of his kind. If you dig deep enough behind virtually every human conflict, you will find an erosion of the bond between humans and the natural world around them. Those years in war zones led me to an epiphany: Stories about people and the human condition are also about nature. If we choose to look for what brings us together, we will find that too. ![]() If we choose to look for what divides us, we will find it. While the importance of shining a light on human conflict shouldn’t be minimized, focusing only on that turned my world into a horror show.īut slowly, as I covered conflict after conflict, it became clear to me that journalists also have an obligation to illuminate the things that unite us as human beings. I thought the most powerful stories were those driven by violence and destruction. My reason for going, I told myself, was to document the brutality. Starting at 26, I found myself in places such as Kosovo, Angola, Gaza, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. This story appears in the October 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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