Rare Pride Program Manager Annalisa Bianchessi recently made a site visit to a Pride campaign just starting up in Mauritius. These dream-like islands dotted in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Madagascar teem with unique reptiles and other endemic species. Annalisa blogs about the islands, its rich history of biodiversity, and how the nations Pride campaign is working with local partners to ensure sustainable conservation on Mauritius.

Leader of the Mauritius Pride campaign Cathleen Cybele of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF) with a little green friend.

Amongst the many places one could go to learn about environmental conservation, Mauritius is perhaps the ultimate destination. Not only was it once home to the DoDdo, a flightless bird whose disappearance has sparked imagination all over the world – the nation has become an emblem for the power and responsibility that humans carry in determining the fate of other species. It is also a place where extinction and conservation continue to be two very concrete possibilities.

Let me set the scene for you:

In the Southeast of Mauritius there is a small islet named Ilot Chat (Island of the cat). Surrounded by the massive Indian Ocean, it is seemingly no bigger than the average American porch, yet it was the home of two threatened reptile species: the lesser night gecko and the Durrell’s night gecko.

The colorful ornate day geckos, the “flagship” species of this Pride campaign.

Neither of the two species had arrived here on their own account. Their residency was the result of an experiment of some well intentioned ecologists who wanted to see whether the two species could co-exist before undertaking a larger scale restoration project. All had gone well for several months and the geckos had reproduced up to the 4th generation. Then, one day, the scientists arrived to the islet to find that there was not a single gecko in sight. Instead they were greeted by round bellied rat who beamed at them with content. This single rat had managed to wipe out the entire population of the two species of geckos.

Luckily these populations had been part of an experiment and were not the last ones of their kind. Still, the story illustrates how damaging and ruthless the introduction of invasive species, like the rat, can be.

Reptiles in Mauritius were not always threatened. Once upon a time they were amongst the most numerous inhabitants of the island. They were so successful that they constituted the building blocks of a unique world: an entire ecosystem based on reptiles! Through a process, which in ecology is referred to as adaptive radiation, they had come to occupy all different roles of “society” from predators to prey, from pollinators and seed dispersers to giant herbivores. This is because, with the exception of fruit eating bats, there were no mammals in Mauritius. Then, with the arrival of man in the 15th Century everything changed.

The men who first set foot on the island quickly brought about both the accidental and deliberate introduction of invasive species such as rats, monkeys, deer and pigs. This combined with the more recent threat of habitat destruction (mainly due to development) has meant that today few of the reptiles that constituted this unique ecosystem survive on mainland Mauritius. Several went extinct; others have disappeared from the mainland but survived on some smaller islands and islets of the coast of Mauritius.

Mauritius’ Bay of Mahebourg still hosts four endemic species of reptiles, including the Ilot Vacoas Bojer’s skink. This reptile is thought to be a subspecies found only on Ilot Vacoas, an islet only 1 Hectare in size! As well as the looming threat of the introduction of invasives (including rats, shrews, and snakes) some of the main threats to the reptiles found in the Bay is caused by recreational activities of unwary tourist visiting the islets.

It may come as a surprise that besides the dropping of litter the lighting of barbecue fires can also have a significant detrimental impact. This is not only because of the risk of fire to the vegetation, but also because of the heating of the rocks used by the reptiles for shelter and nesting. Unbeknownst to tourists, dozens of eggs lay in the crevices of the rocks, which immediately fry once heated. This act threaten the Bojer’s skinks greatly, which only lay a few eggs a year.

Luckily for the reptiles the extinction of the Dodo on Mauritius has brought this island to the attention of many conservationists. Amongst them are the members of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation (MWF) the oldest conservation organisation of the island. The Foundation has saved several species from the brink of extinction including the Mauritian Kestrel – which, during the 1980s, was one of the rarest birds in the world with only a couple of breeding pairs left.

The campaign is on its way! Above, a  MWF volunteer working with Cathleen interviews a street vendor about her relations with the flagship species.

Today the Foundation has teamed up with the National Parks and Conservation Services (NP&CS) to take on the protection of the endemic reptiles of the Islets in the Bay of Mahebourg. As well as a substantial restoration program run as part of a Darwin Initiative, the Foundation will be running a Rare pride Campaign to try and mitigate the threats caused to the reptiles by recreational activities.

The flagship species will be a charismatic ornate day gecko belonging to the Phelsuma family, a group that is incidentally also a favourite prey of the Mauritius Kestrel. Having had the pleasure to visit Mauritius and work with many of the MWF staff, including the charismatic Campaign Manager Cathleen Cybele, I am looking forward to this campaign’s progress.

Photographer Jason Houston recently went to the opening of “Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet,” a program co-sponsored by Rare along with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, Calif. The opening was held in San Diego on Aug. 17, and gathered a wide range of contemporary artists and conservationists all pondering: Can contemporary art inspire conservation? Read Jason’s insights on the event and the Human/Nature project (formally titled “Rare Art”). 

view more photos from the exhibit!

I was first introduced to Rare in 2004 when Brett Jenks, Rare President & CEO, called , the magazine where I work as picture editor, to talk about a new program: “Rare Art”. He had big ideas of sending a group of contemporary artists around the world to experience some of the most interesting, biologically important, and critically threatened environments. They would be inspired by the people and places they visit and they would make art. This art would become a traveling exhibition hosted at prestigious contemporary arts museums across the country, bringing the emotional, visceral impact of art to conversations about conservation, and bringing the issue of conservation to new and different audiences.

Rare President and CEO Brett Jenks speaks to contemporary artist Dario Robleto at the project’s opening in San Diego.

He sounded crazy. Not only was the scope and scale of such a project huge for a non-arts organization, but this sort of proactive, collaborative residency program and its related practical agendas is an unusual arrangement in the art world at odds with the independent spirits and conceptually inquisitive approaches of most contemporary artists.

But here we are now, four years after it’s inception, at the opening of “Rare Art,” which has become “Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet.” Eight of today’s leading contemporary artists visited eight UNESCO world heritage sites, bringing back inspiration and creating work born of their individual experiences. This group show opened Sunday August 17th, 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

The artists (and places) featured in this show are Mark Dion (Komodo National Park, Indonesia), Ann Hamilton (Galápagos National Park, Ecuador), Iñigo Mnglano-Ovalle (El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, Mexico), Marcos Ramirez ERRE (Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas, China), Rigo 23 (Atlantic Forest Southeast Reserves, Brazil), Dario Robleto (Glacier/Waterton International Peace Park, United States and Canada), Diana Thater (iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa), and Xu Bing (Mount Kenya National Park, Kenya). The art ranges from performance and installation to sculpture, drawing, and video.

Some of the work is directly responsive to conservation subjects and issues, while other pieces are more broadly conceptual, related to the artists’ impressions and their personally developed sense of the places they visited. The result is a diverse collection of work exploring value and loss; awe and appreciation; concern and collaboration; and, in all cases, personal and creative connections to the forests, salt flats, glaciers, oceans, and their cultures that many of us have come to know in one way or another in much more literal and traditional ways.

A question posed in the statement accompanying the show is, “Can art inspire conservation? Can conservation inspire art?” The answer to the second part is obviously ‘yes’. The first part has yet to be answered. These works are not, as participating artist Dario Robleto put it, the typical public service announcement style of environmental art. They are focused more deeply on the bigger pictures, and related more tangentially as values-based inquiries that explore the quality of the relationships we have with the natural world. None of the works present explicit calls to action—that would defeat the point. But all present a challenge to the viewer to consider themselves and the natural world in which we live, and to reflect on the complex and interdependent nature of that relationship.

Human/Nature is open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego until February, when it then travels on to the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, Calif. Click here for a slide show of the preparations and opening events.