12 
EANHB 
\A.'Axv*}i Hufrt*’ T A ? MOT 
2001 CHAIRMANS 
REPORT 
91th Annual General 
Meeting 
of the East Africa Natural 
History Society 
Leon Bennun 
leon.bennun@birdlife.org.uk 
Ladies and gentlemen 
Gerard Manley Hopkins is not a poet 
to everyone’s taste, but I have always 
been struck by his force of 
expression, as well as his profound 
identification with nature. It was he 
who wrote that 
'...the mind, nund has mountains, 
cliffs of fall 
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. ‘ 
I don't suppose he had Nature Kenya 
in mind — after all, our venerable 
Society did not yet exist in 1H8S! Bui 
I did think of this poem during nur 
strategic plan review in December 
200 1 Not because of its title < it is 
i ailed No worst, then.* is none' — and 
even strategic plan reviews are not 
that bad), but because at times 
working w it h Nature Kenya, and I 
suppose in conservation generally, is 
like climbing a very large and very 
steep mountain. Every step ahead 
seems an enormous effort, and a bit 
ol loose scree can even send you 
slipping backwards. There never 
seems to be enough oxygen to 
breathe comfortably. Sometimes the 
only way up is to craw I along the 
brink of an abyss, where the slightest 
misjudgement could send you 
hurtling to destruction. You pause to 
latch your breath and look back, and 
are astonished by how far you have 
already come — the landmarks you 
left behind now diminished to N|x.vks 
in the distance. Then you look up and 
feel a sinking sense of dismay at how 
far you Mill have to climb. 
All this by way of saying that it has 
again been a year of progress, but 
reversals too. and there remains a lot 
still to do. My task in this report is 
