Tag: press

Ignored by Media: African Rangers on the Front Line

In a story largely ignored by the American press, armed militants attacked a ranger station in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Upemba National Park on March 3, 2026, killing five rangers and looting and destroying infrastructure.

The attackers remain unidentified but may be linked to Mai-Mai or Bakata Katanga militias, which have historically used Upemba and other parks as hideouts.

Britain’s Prince William, an ardent conservationist active in organizations such as United for Wikdlife, issued a statement lamenting their deaths: “Environmental protection has become one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.”

According to the Game Rangers Association of Africa and the International Ranger Federation, at least 630 rangers have been killed protecting wildlife and protected areas since 2011, including 200 in the Congo’s sprawling Virunga National Park alone, home to one-third of Africa’s endangered mountain gorillas.

Beyond poaching and militia attacks, Africa’s wildlife faces ongoing threats from illegal mining, oil exploration, and agriculture incursion.

Adjacent human populations also place enormous pressure on parks: many rely on charcoal and bushmeat, and some establish homesteads within protected areas.

Ranger deaths in Africa average 47–60 annually. Just between June 2024 and May 2025, 67 rangers were killed. Despite their sacrifices in protecting forests, wildlife, watersheds, and ecosystems on which millions depend, these defenders rarely receive the recognition afforded to soldiers, police, or firefighters.

The fate of Africa’s wildlife is dire. Upemba, established in 1939 and covering over 11,000 km² of wetlands, savannas, and mountains, is home to an estimated 1,800 species. Once teeming with 100,000 elephants in the 1950s, fewer than 200 remain today. Of the once-thriving zebra population, only 200 survive in Africa’s only park offering refuge for zebras. Its lion population, once flourishing, is now extinct.

Climate change further exacerbates these threats, disrupting weather patterns and causing long-term droughts.

Rapid population growth—Africa’s net population increase averages 2.5% annually, with Nigeria projected to reach 750 million by century’s end—intensifies competition for natural resources.

Meanwhile, poverty, especially in rural areas, continues to rise. Some countries, including Zimbabwe and Angola, have recently implemented reductions of wildlife herds to feed growing populations.

Addressing this complex dilemma requires holistic solutions. Key measures include:

   •   Financing protective strategies, including international support, especially given climate change’s role in ecosystem stress.

   •   Expanding access to birth control and reproductive health services, countering population pressures.

   •   Establishing community-based conservation councils and alternative livelihoods like eco-tourism.

   •   Protecting species through migration corridors, no-entry zones, and crop-compensation programs.

   •   Employing satellite and monitoring technology to track poaching and militia activity.

   •   Restoring degraded habitats and prevent illegal settlement and mining through government-NGO partnerships.

   •   Strengthening ranger capacity with training, equipment, and fair compensation.

The five rangers killed in Upemba on March 3 died in a park most of the world has never heard of

While Africa’s wildlife, forests, and watersheds are under siege, the greater tragedy may be how little attention this struggle receives beyond the continent itself. In remote parks like Upemba, rangers patrol landscapes larger than some countries, confronting militias and poachers with little recognition and fewer resources.

They stand, quite literally, as the last line between survival and disappearance. If the world continues to look away, the elephants, zebras, and forests of Upemba may vanish—and the quiet heroism of the men and women who died defending them will have been in vain.

–RJ

When media masquerades

Following Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, the Republicans delivered the customary rebuttal, this year, featuring Senator Marco Rubio as their spokesperson.  Then came the now infamous water bottle moment, washing away not only Rubio’s thirst and whatever substantive remarks he made, but possibly notions of his fitness to seek higher office in 2016.  Mind you, I’m not a Republican, nor a Democrat either, having voted the Green Party last November.  I do, however, have a sense of fair play and I found the media’s persistent, even gleeful replay of a human moment thoroughly annoying and partisan.

I don’t know  about you, but sometimes I prefer avoiding the mass media altogether, since it frequently seems to thrive on the negative and sensational to the point of hinting at animosity, or an underbelly of petty meanness analogous to an undercurrent of daily life manifesting itself in the personality that enjoys another’s fall, the venom of daily gossip with fondness for spilling confidences, speculation, insinuation, ridicule and invasion of privacy or creeping over every fence and peering into every window. Its dynamics, whether public or private, are worth exploring, since they have a human origin. The media likewise strays when it embraces advocacy journalism driven by concealed biases or panders to special interest groups or omits asking the right questions.

Like many of you, Karen and I have recently caught-up with Downton Abbey, TV’s highbrow soap opera that has hooked millions in Britain and America (second in viewers to this year’s Superbowl).  Weaving its spell through subtle intra-episode suspense played out in a facsimile of Edwardian elegance contesting with working class aspirations, its characters, all of them, major or minor, are remarkably chiseled into a sharpened relief, foregrounding their composite individuality, and avoiding stereotype.  As with Shakespere’s Iago, insinuation rather than outright deed works its scourge among some of them. Thomas and O’Brien come to mind as primary instigators, motivated by malice, fomenting innuendo.

As such, they’re not strikingly different from an errant press.  Appropriately, one of Downton Abbey’s other candidates for “dishonorable mention” is Sir Richard Carlisle, hard-ball, newspaper mogul who thrives on scandalizing adversaries, influence peddling, and unbridled intimidation.  He decides what makes or doesn’t make news, as his personal needs dictate.  We are not far from how real media works to manipulate opinion or affirm its biases or cast its critics into disrepute.

While I fervently believe in a free press, devotee that I am of John Stuart Mill (On Liberty), I’ve become wiser with the vintage of my years as to its capabilities for abuse as in outing a CIA operative and endangering intelligence sources in adversary nations; or of unbalanced reporting, whether by design or neglect; or of slanting the news through connotative nuance; or of a more sinister modus operandi of interpretive journalism pursuing an a priori agenda of prejudices.

I wish I had time and space to write more fully on the press, both as to its assets and liabilities; but suffice it to say, there lies a latent psychology underlying its behavior, since it’s so human in its making.  Putting ourselves on the alert, we diminish its power to manipulate us.

Be well,

rj