Available From UC Press

Are conservation and protecting animals the same thing? In Game Changer, award-winning environmental reporter Glen Martin takes a fresh look at this question as it applies to Africa’s megafauna. Martin assesses the rising influence of the animal rights movement and finds that the policies championed by animal welfare groups could lead paradoxically to the elimination of the very species—including elephants and lions—that are the most cherished. In his anecdotal and highly engaging style, Martin takes readers to the heart of the conflict. He revisits the debate between conservationists, who believe that people whose lives are directly impacted by the creation of national parks and preserves should be compensated, versus those who believe that restrictive protection that forbids hunting is the most effective way to conserve wildlife and habitats. Focusing on the different approaches taken by Kenya, Tanzania, and Namibia, Martin vividly shows how the world’s last great populations of wildlife have become the hostages in a fight between those who love animals and those who would save them.

Glen Martin is the author of National Geographic’s Guide to Wildlife Watching: 100 of the Best Places in America to See Animals in their Natural Habitat and coauthor (with Jay Stuller) of Through the Grapevine: The Real Story Behind America’s $8 Billion Wine Industry.

"How best to preserve biological diversity and protect endangered species drives the conservation impulse on every continent, but none more so than Africa. In Game Changer Glen Martin plunges bravely into the center of a scalding scientific debate and without sentiment or prejudice reveals and lauds what works on the world's most biodiverse continent, while exposing the destructive romanticism, inchoate philosophy, and outright idiocy that is steering so many contemporary wildlife conservation efforts toward failure."—Mark Dowie, author of Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples

"We are well into a massive global environmental crisis, against which the worldviews and tactics of status quo conservation are manifestly inadequate. Game Changer may well be the most explosively controversial look yet at this tragic state of affairs, viewed through the conflicted topics of animal rights, hunting, and African cultural diversity. I couldn’t put this book down and I can scarcely wait for the inevitable critical reactions, in hopes that Glen Martin’s provocative candor will lead to more effective solutions." —Harry Greene, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University



"A sobering exposé of Africa’s wilderness facade. Martin tours Kenya’s legendary Eden of elephant and lion, wildebeest and rhino, and finds it on the verge of crumbling under the weight of a burgeoning populace and a misguided conservation agenda. Martin's is a gritty tale of bush meat and ivory, poachers and poverty, and a call for a more pragmatic approach toward saving the last great herds of Earth’s quintessential wild kingdom." —Will Stolzenburg, author of Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World's Greatest Wildlife Rescue



"The hardest lesson we all must learn about saving Africa’s wildlife: conservation can’t just be about the animals. Game Changer makes this case brilliantly. While the plight of individual animals pulls on our heartstrings, Glen Martin fearlessly show us how conservationists must think about entire landscapes, including people." —Jonathan Adams, author of The Myth of Wild Africa