Alan Rodgers: conservator of the forests of East Africa

From The Times
April 25, 2009

W. Alan Rodgers was for nearly 30 years the driving force behind the protection of East Africa’s globally important forests. For although the region is famous for its magnificent wildlife and landscapes — readily conjuring up images of vast herds of game on the great plains around Mount Kilimanjaro — most of its rare animals and plants are found outside the national parks and game reserves, being restricted to the remaining fragments of forests on the mountains and near the coast. Alan Rodgers was instrumental in virtually every major initiative in recent years to conserve those forest patches, most of which have now been given formal protection.

In 1979 Rodgers — as he was affectionately known to his friends — was on a field trip with the anthropologist Katherine Homewood to survey a remote forest on the Udzungwa Mountains in southwest Tanzania when they heard an unusual monkey call which they recognised as a mangabey, a species not previously known to exist within hundreds of kilometres of the spot. It turned out to be a completely new species which was later named the Sanje Mangabey and was the first new primate found in East Africa for many years. Its discovery alerted biologists and conservationists to the potential importance of the forests on the chain of mountains known as the Eastern Arc in Tanzania.

Numerous biological expeditions to the Eastern Arc over the ensuing 30 years have found — and continue to find — a wealth of new species, including another new species of mangabey in the Southern Highlands and nearby Udzungwa Mountains in 2003. The forests on these isolated mountain blocks are now recognised to be the richest tropical ecosystem in Africa for rare plants and animals, with the Udzungwa forests being the most important. Rodgers was among the first to understand their significance, and he spent the remainder of his life vigorously lobbying various Tanzanian authorities and the conservation movement to protect these forests. His efforts were partly rewarded in 1992 with the creation of the Udzungwa Mountains National Park, the first new national park in Tanzania in decades, and the first that was not set up to protect large mammals.

William Alan Rodgers was born in Liverpool in 1944 and moved to Kenya as a child when his father took up a lectureship in Nairobi. Here Rodgers later read zoology and botany, followed by a master’s degree in conservation at Aberdeen. He then spent 11 years in the vast Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania as an ecologist for the Game Department, where he took part in anti-poaching patrols and conducted wildlife census counts in the aircraft that he piloted. He set up the Miombo Research Centre and produced a flurry of scientific papers on the ecology of Africa’s largest wilderness reserve, on topics ranging from lions, elephants and the ivory trade to the effects of fire on vegetation.

By 1976 Rodgers was recognised to be a world expert on miombo woodland ecology and was given a position as a lecturer at the Zoology Department of the University of Dar es Salaam. Here he eagerly shared his knowledge and inspired a generation of students, many of whom were later to join his informal army of conservationists in the common cause of protecting East Africa’s natural heritage. During this time Rodgers’s many initiatives included a permanent research station on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater to discourage corrupt officials from getting involved in rhinocerus poaching. He further co-founded the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group in 1982 and led students on field trips to spearhead research into the remaining fragments of Coastal Forest, another overlooked ecosystem with large numbers of rare animals and plants. Rodgers oversaw the activities of the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group for the rest of his life, and it is today Tanzania’s foremost forest conservation organisation, with 45 staff supporting the management of more than 100,000hectares of forest.

From 1984 until 1991 there followed a seven-year stint in India where Rodgers joined the Wildlife Institute of India. His energy produced another flurry of scientific papers on subjects ranging from snow leopards to sacred groves, together with his monumental work A Biogeographical Classification of India, which is now one of the most cited and used documents in the field of wildlife conservation in India. Rodgers was the key architect in developing “wildlife science” in India, and through his contribution the institute has subsequently produced a vast array of competent biologists who are now contributing to the cause of conservation across the globe. He pioneered a novel technique for preventing tiger attacks by encouraging people walking in forests to wear “face” masks on the back of their heads, as tigers are less likely to attack if they think you can see them. He also put together the Action Plan for Protected Areas Networks in a country with a far greater human population pressure than in East Africa. This experience was to emphasise to Rodgers the urgent need to formally protect as much habitat as possible before it was too late.

Rodgers returned to East Africa in 1992, on the eve of the Earth Summit in Rio and the UN Convention on Biodiversity, to set up a project financed by the Global Environment Facility to support the management of East African Biodiversity. As chief technical adviser for this initiative, Rodgers skilfully used his prominent position to increase the protection afforded to the most important remaining patches of forest. His two great causes, the Eastern Arc Forests and the Eastern African Coastal Forests, which were hardly known at the start of the 1980s, were included in the internationally recognised list of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots by the end of the millennium. After years of dormancy, many new forest reserves and nature reserves were gazetted through his efforts, as well as the Jozani National Park on Zanzibar Island.

Rodgers later served as the regional technical adviser to the UN Development Programme and Global Environment Facility initiatives in East Africa, where he sought to ensure that biodiversity conservation was advanced as part and parcel of the larger development agenda. He led an initiative to put together a manifesto for the environment to the Government of Tanzania in 1994, overcoming resistance from a number of government officials. His infectious enthusiasm held strong, despite his inevitable engagement with bureaucracy. He sought every opportunity to get people out into the field and do practical conservation. He was a mentor to many, who sought him out for his wisdom and encouragement, and who risked his ruthless editing of any documents that crossed his desk — wielding his red pen with pleasure to eliminate redundant prose and unsubstantiated claims.

As a person, Rodgers had more interest promoting and encouraging the right people to achieve action and results than personal recognition. It is therefore largely to his credit that a coherent and effective conservation movement exists in East Africa today, and that so much of the Eastern Arc and Coastal Forests are now protected. They still face enormous challenges and pressures from a growing population hungry for natural resources, but their situation would be far bleaker were it not for him.

Rodgers’s energy was not limited to conservation; he was also a fine rugby player, an enthusiastic actor, a keen fisherman and a generous and jolly host, who with a scratch of his grizzled beard would captivate his audiences with many a mischievous anecdote about his wild youthful years. He is survived by his first wife Bobbi Jacob and their daughter; his second wife Nicky Tortike and their two sons; and his partner Mercy Njoroge. His three children are now following his passion for East Africa and conservation.

Alan Rodgers, ecologist, botanist, zoologist and conservationist, was born on October 25, 1944. He died on March 31, 2009, aged 64.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6163828.ece