The sun was high and hot over Mabale when Chief Dingane Nelukoba came out to welcome me. He was barefooted. Dust on his feet. Behind his homestead the mopane and acacia thinned out and became Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. He searched my face for familiarity. His eyes moved over me as though trying to remember where he had seen me before. He looked past me rather than towards me. He pointed 500m to a patch of bare ground. "The goats were left unattended there. Lions ate them. Three weeks ago, a bull elephant trampled a man near the Mabale business centre." Then he addressed me. Not with a greeting but a question. "I had been told you were coming. Some of your colleagues came before and asked me questions. But years have passed and we are still living with the same problems. What is the point of talking to you if nothing changes and we do not get help?" His words hung in the air with the smell of crushed goats. Since 2019, Zimbabwe has recorded 370 human deaths, 453 injuries and 10 368 reported cases of human-wildlife conflict. Nowhere is the pressure worse than Hwange. As boreholes and waterholes...

Our biodiversity is wealth. Our functioning habitat is wealth. The continued presence of wild populations within an increasingly human-dominated landscape is wealth. If that is true, we are choosing t...