To Take on Trump, Think Like a Lion

One late afternoon long ago at the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, I was with a group of birders when we located a pride of sleeping lions. As evening approached, they yawned big-fanged yawns and slowly roused. About 10 in total, scarred veterans and prime young hunters.

It was time for them to hunt. But first they licked one another, pressed bodies and indulged in much face rubbing. They reaffirmed, “Yes, we are together, we remain as one.” Only then did they set off.

Their tawny bodies flowed up into the tall golden grass along the ridge of a low hill. One sat; the others kept walking. Ten yards on, another sat while the others walked. And so on until the ridge was lined with a hidden picket fence of hungry lions all attentively gazing onto a plain where a herd of unsuspecting zebras grazed. Then one, who’d remained standing, poured herself downhill. Her job was to flank and then spook the zebras into running uphill, directly into her veteran sisters and their spry younger hunters.

Rubbing noses does not catch a zebra. But only after the lions rubbed noses and reaffirmed a shared identity were the zebras in any danger. Those lions showed me that a sense of community is prerequisite for coordinated strategy. They did not succeed in that hunt. But they would try again. Failure, these lions had learned, is necessary for success.

Like the lions, I learned about success through failures. My earliest lessons were in seemingly lost causes. As a child poring over picture books in Suffolk County on Long Island, N.Y., my favorite was about birds of prey — eagles, ospreys, peregrine falcons — all endangered at the time. By my teens I’d read sickening accounts of how DDT was causing their eggs to break. I assumed I’d never see any of these magnificent raptors: Complete extinction was expected. I had seen “landscapers” in our neighborhood spraying trees, insects raining down, and robins eating those insects and going into convulsions right in the street, while I was walking home from school.

But in 1966, several adamant people sued the county’s mosquito commission to stop the indiscriminate spraying of DDT in our salt marshes. They shocked everyone by winning, a prelude to the banning of the destructive pesticide nationwide in 1972 when I was in high school. Half a century later, those doomed birds have recovered. Art Cooley, a high school biology teacher who led the effort in Suffolk County, reflected years later, “It’s possible for a small group of people who are committed and have their facts right to really make a change in the way society does business.” Sometimes facing what seems hopeless is how we realize what is possible.