30/08/2026
STOP.
Sometimes a photograph arrives at exactly the right moment.
This beautiful image was taken by my good friend Dave Hurwitz of Simon’s Town Boat Company, a man whose love for False Bay, its whales, its ocean and the extraordinary natural world around Simon’s Town has contributed to the wealth of this place in so many ways.
A Cape Point baboon sitting quietly above a STOP sign. At this particular moment, I cannot imagine a more appropriate photograph.
Perhaps it is time to stop, not simply what we are doing to baboons, but the way we have learned to think about wildlife altogether.
For too long, our response to animals living alongside us has been remarkably old-fashioned. When coexistence becomes difficult, we manage, punish, displace or remove the animal, rather than having the courage and imagination to change the conditions we have created around it. Somehow wildlife is continually expected to adapt to us, while we ask remarkably little adaptation of ourselves.
I think we need to reinvent that relationship.
And that requires courage. We need to be prepared to stand up and say that we want wildlife here. Not only the beautiful or charismatic species. Not only the animals that never inconvenience us. All of it.
We want to wake up to birdsong. We want to hear crickets on summer evenings and toads calling from our waterways. We want reptiles in the mountains, insects in our gardens, whales in our bay and primates moving freely through the landscapes to which they belong. We want to know that the other lives sharing this extraordinary corner of the world still have somewhere to exist, and that our presence has not made their survival harder.
That means widening our idea of what it is to care for a place.
We are understandably fierce about protecting our own homes, our streets and our neighbourhoods. But the mountain is a home too. The wetlands are homes. The rocky outcrops, trees, coastline and remaining corridors of natural habitat are homes. And the creatures living in them are, in the truest sense, our neighbours.
Their homes deserve defending too.
If existing systems are not enough to safeguard those places, then perhaps communities themselves need to become stronger custodians of them. We cannot keep watching the natural world diminish around us and assume that somebody else will be brave enough to speak for it.
Wildlife is not disposable. It is not an obstacle to progress and it is not something we should only value once it becomes rare.
It is part of our wealth.
More precious, ultimately, than any mineral we could take from the earth, because a living landscape cannot simply be purchased again once we have dismantled it.
So perhaps this baboon sitting above a stop sign is offering us something more than a wonderful photograph.
An invitation to stop long enough to decide what kind of world we actually want to live in, and then to have the courage to stand up for it.
Thank you, Dave, for capturing such an extraordinary moment, and thank you to every person who cares for some part of our living world, whether it is plants, insects, reptiles, birds, primates, marine life or the landscape itself. Perhaps that collective care is exactly where a different future begins.
Photograph: Dave Hurwitz, Simon’s Town Boat Company
