Dot Earth Blog: Rhino Horn as Club Drug and Other Tales from Safari Talk

Safari Talk is an active and interesting online gathering place for a globe-spanning community focused on watching, studying and protecting African wildlife. The Web forum and blog was created in 2006 by Matthew Wilkinson, a Briton living in Portugal who is very enamored of all things wild and African. During last week?s meeting of my Pace University Blogging a Better Planet class, we caught Wilkinson for a Google+ Hangout on Air.

The conversation is worth sharing here because Wilkinson demonstrates how the Web enables anyone with a passion and energy for conserving or improving some aspect of life on this planet to facilitate a global discussion. That?s all part of what I?ve been calling the emerging Knowosphere. Of course the Web can enable people with darker goals, as well, but I?m convinced (I can?t prove it) that the upside will swamp the downside.

I found Wilkinson just over a year ago while sifting Google+ to try to grasp its merits. I then followed his forums and blogging on Safari Talk, and that?s where I stumbled on the astonishingly powerful elephant portraits, and conservation work, of Nick Brandt. I think you?ll enjoy a few minutes with Wilkinson, whose self-deprecating opening line elicited a round of warm laughter from my students:

?In all honesty I?m just really a fat bloke with a beard who runs a Web site,? he told us. After a 2006 trip to Tanzania, he pondered setting up a nonprofit group focused on wildlife conservation but that didn?t seem realistic living in Portugal (his wife works there). ?The best way to raise awarenss of conservation issues in sub-Saharan Africa was to set up a forum,? he said.

And so he did, and ? to my mind ? he has established an invaluable hub for insights and discussion related to everything from ecotourism to the Asian demand for rhino horn, which ? as you?ll hear ? has become something of a club drug in Vietnam.

Who else do you know who?s followed a similar course?

Related: ?Myths, More than Traditional Medicine, Driving Rhino Slaughter?

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/rhino-horn-as-club-drug-and-other-tales-from-safari-talk/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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