Rhino Named SUDAN

What has slowly emerged for me as a journalist covering conflict after conflict for over a decade is a conviction that these stories about the human condition cannot be separated from stories about the natural world.

- Ami Vitale

We inhabit an intricate web, and the outcome of almost every story is always dependent on nature.

Today, I use nature as a foil to talk about our home – its past, present, and future. In a field that tends to emphasize difference and focus on conflict, my mission has been to tell stories that remind us of our interconnectedness, of how much we share, rather than simply emphasize our differences.

'' I can recall the exact moment when I truly began to understand how profound our choices are and the impact we have on one another and on all of life on this planet. It happened on a cold, snowy day in December 2009 in the village of Dvůr Králové nad Labem in the Czech Republic. On this day, I met a rhino named Sudan for the first time. Quite unexpectedly, this animal changed the way I see the world forever.

How connected I felt to the gentle, hulking creature sitting in front of me surprised me. When I got close to him, I had a strange feeling that I had just met a unicorn. He was mythical and other-worldly, larger than life. I recognized I was in the presence of a sentient, ancient creature. His species has been roaming the planet for millions of years, and up until the last hundred years, there were possibly hundreds of thousands of them inhabiting the planet.

But on that day in 2009, there were only eight of these rhinos alive and they were all in zoos. I was there because there was a plan to airlift four of these last eight northern white rhinos from the zoo in the Czech Republic to Kenya.