U.S. war veteran now fights to save Africa’s elephants
NAIROBI, Kenya — A decorated U.S. war veteran with two decades’ experience in military intelligence, Lt. Col. Faye Cuevas spent half her career providing intelligence support to U.S. counterinsurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. Now she is using her expertise to fight a different kind of conflict: the war on wildlife poaching.
Calling herself “the accidental conservationist,” Cuevas, an Air Force officer and a trained lawyer originally from Le Center, Minn., is not your typical wildlife enthusiast. She is determined to use her skills, honed in conflicts all over the world, to help save the planet’s remaining wild elephants.
“If you start to really untangle how poaching happens — how poachers are armed, how they’re connected into larger networks and how those networks can move ivory and horn on a global scale, who protects them? Who provides logistics? — it resembles a war in anything but name,” Cuevas said.
In the Air Force, Cuevas worked on America’s drone program, collecting intelligence on individuals and organizations identified as threats. “Getting left of boom” was the term used to predict and prevent the next bomb attack.
Cuevas can pinpoint the moment she realized that she wanted to fight poaching.
“The first time that I saw an elephant in the wild was in Amboseli National Park here in Kenya two years ago,” she said. “It was life-changing.”
“At the current rate of elephant decline, my 6-year-old daughter won’t have an opportunity to see an elephant in the wild before she’s old enough to vote,” she said. “Which just is unacceptable to me, because if that is the case then we have nothing to blame that on but human apathy and greed.”
She realized that she could use the “left of boom” concept to help wildlife rangers get “left of kill.”
Enter tenBoma — or “10 homesteads” — which uses technology to pull together diverse sources of information, from rangers to conservation groups. She analyzes the data to “create value in information in ways that it rises to the level of intelligence.”
Together with the U.S.based International Fund for Animal Welfare, Cuevas introduced a smartphone-based software app that allows rangers and field investigators to enter and share information immediately, rather than write it up in reports at the end of a day’s patrolling.
“The Kenya Wildlife Service and many other conservation groups are doing fantastic conservation work,” Cuevas said. “However, the reality is that there are other challenges — from a cyber perspective, from a global criminal network perspective — that really necessitate security approaches integrated into conservation strategies.”