Jasper Doest (2026)

24/06/2026

Vaderdag-sentiment

De wolken

Ik droeg nog kleine kleeren, en ik lag
Lang-uit met moeder in de warme hei,
De wolken schoven boven ons voorbij
En moeder vroeg wat ‘k in de wolken zag.

En ik riep: Scandinavië, en: eenden,
Daar gaat een dame, schapen met een herder —
De wond’ren werden woord en dreven verder,
Maar ‘k zag dat moeder met een glimlach weende.

Toen kwam de tijd dat ‘k niet naar boven keek,
Ofschoon de hemel vol van wolken hing,
Ik greep niet naar de vlucht van ‘t vreemde ding
Dat met zijn schaduw langs mijn leven streek.

— Nu ligt mijn jongen naast mij in de heide
En wijst hij me wat hij in de wolken ziet,
Nu schrei ik zelf, en zie in het verschiet
De verre wolken waarom moeder schreide —

~ Martinus Nijhoff, 1918

17/06/2026

Last week, the Netherlands released its annual wildlife damage figures.

At the top of the list: the greylag goose with over €46 million worth of damage to grassland and crops.

I kept staring at the media headlines, because something about it felt strange. The story felt off.

More than 70% of all wildlife damage in the Netherlands occurs in grassland…the very thing we have spent decades optimizing.

Over the last decades we have replaced our natural grasslands with a mono culture that produces a higher protein content. We fertilized them. Drained wetlands. Increased yields. All to build one of the most productive dairy landscapes on Earth.

And then the geese came. Or rather: the geese noticed. That distinction feels important. Because the geese did not create this landscape. They simply discovered the nutritional value of it.

When I read that wildlife damage has increased from €22.9 million to €92.2 million in less than a decade, I don’t immediately see a wildlife story. I see a cultural story.

The damage isn’t distributed randomly across the country. It concentrates overwhelmingly in the dairy provinces. It concentrates in grasslands. It follows the way we use the land.

That doesn’t mean the damage isn’t real. It is.

And it doesn’t automatically mean farmers are to blame. Most are operating within systems they inherited, not systems they designed.

But the way we choose to tell the story doesn’t lead to solving the problem. The geese aren’t the issue, they appeared very late in the story. They are the last link in a chain of decisions stretching back generations.

And yet it is the goose that ends up on the front page. Not the landscape. Not the policies. Not the decades of choices that transformed a country into one of the most productive grazing systems on Earth. The geese merely arrived at the feast. We are the ones who set the table.

So what exactly are these damage reports measuring?

04/06/2026

One of the first clear images of Angola’s so-called ghost elephants.

Among more than 10,000 false triggers of darkness, this middle-aged female paused briefly, looked toward the camera, and continued her way through the forest.

At first glance, when I was asked to work on this story for , it seemed that the story was mainly about elephants.

But after spending weeks in Lisima with , I’m no longer convinced that it was.

People often ask why they should care about a particular species. And honestly, I understand that question. Few of us can carry the weight of every environmental crisis or every species in decline.

What struck me was that the people we met along the way rarely spoke about elephants in isolation. Conversations about elephants quickly became conversations about ancestry, rivers, fishing, children, history, livelihoods and responsibility.

The elephant was never separate from the landscape that sustained it, or from the people whose lives were intertwined with that same landscape.

Perhaps that is the lesson I carry home.

The future may depend less on whether we learn to care about every species on Earth, and more on whether we can sustain our relationship with the places that sustain us.

Because when that relationship remains intact, much else has a chance to endure alongside it.

Photo in

28/05/2026

A traditional mask from southeastern Angola is displayed at the National Anthropology Museum in Luanda.

While photographing ritual objects and masks connected to the Lunda-Chokwe peoples, I asked Nobrega Matata — Scientific Director of the Museu do Dundo — about the relationship between culture and nature in Angola.

He stopped me almost immediately. “That is the wrong question,” he said. “There is no relationship between culture and nature because one is the other.”

He explained how, during Mukanda initiation rites, young boys are taken into the forest and shaped through animals, stories, fear, rhythm and landscape itself. The natural world does not sit outside culture here. It shapes it.

And suddenly, much of what I had been trying to understand throughout my my time in Lisima started making sense to me.

Because many of the stories surrounding forests, rivers, source lakes and elephants were never simply myths or folklore. They carried instruction. Obligation. Restraint. Ways of moving through the living world that helped shape how people related to the landscapes around them.

Standing in front of this mask in a quiet corner of the museum, I found myself wondering whether the real tragedy is not only that cultural memory disappears…

…but that when the stories stop and people lose connection with their environment, the landscapes often begin to disappear with them.

Photo in

27/05/2026

Elias Kalueyo crosses the Kwando wetlands near his home village of Cutiti using a traditional nkasi paddle carved from local wood.

Long before roads connected many parts of southeastern Angola, rivers were the pathways through the landscape. They carried people, stories, trade, memory and, during the war, sometimes survival itself. As a young boy, Elias ferried supplies through these waterways during Angola’s civil war, navigating channels and floodplains that he still knows intimately today.

Watching him move through the wetlands, I was struck by how knowledge here often exists not in books or maps, but in movement itself. In knowing how water changes with the seasons. Which channels remain deep enough to cross. Where fish gather. Where elephants pass. How to read a landscape that, to outsiders, can feel almost impenetrable.

In many modern societies, we often speak about nature as something separate from human life — places we visit, study or manage.

But places like Lisima remind us that for much of human history, landscapes were not simply surroundings.

They were something people learned to move through as part of themselves.

Photo in

26/05/2026

Orlando Cavunge swims in the Luanginga River near Cangamba in southeastern Angola’s Lisima highlands.

Fed by pristine source lakes, peat-rich wetlands and the ancient Kalahari sand systems of southeastern Angola that slowly filter and release freshwater across the landscape, these headwaters sustain major river systems that unspool across southern Africa.

Before leaving for the expedition, I remember asking why nobody on his team seemed to be packing drinking water.

He looked at me almost surprised and said:
“Jasper, you can swim in these waters with your mouth open.”

And we did.

(Though judging by the second frame, Kerllen may have viewed the river less as hydration and more as an opportunity for a moving protein snack 🐟😂)

It struck me how unusual that experience felt to me as someone coming from the Netherlands, where water is carefully engineered, monitored and controlled long before it reaches us.

Here, trust in the river itself still existed.

And perhaps that says something not only about the condition of these waters being this far upstream, but also about the kind of relationship people are still able to have with the living systems around them — in a place where rivers are not something separate from life, but something people still understand themselves to be part of.

Photos in

21/05/2026

Elias Kalueyo stands with his youngest daughter in the village of Cutiti in southeastern Angola’s Lisima highlands.

Cutiti lies at the confluence of the Kwando and Kembo rivers, deep within a landscape once filled with elephants. During the war, Elias ferried supplies through these waterways as a young boy. Later, like many others, he left for Angola’s capital Luanda searching for opportunity before eventually returning home to the landscape he knew best.

As a father of two daughters myself, I found myself wondering how Elias thought about her future — whether he hoped she would remain connected to this landscape, or instead find opportunities far beyond it, like he once did.

Elias proudly shared he hopes she will go to school. That she will have opportunities beyond the region. That she will have the freedom to choose her own path…and that he didn’t feel like the responsibility for the land should not be inherited unquestioningly from one generation to the next. For Elias, it is something that ultimately had to be chosen.

And that tension quietly sits at the heart of this entire story. Because landscapes like Lisima have survived not only through ecology, but through relationships, memory and ways of living that people continued to carry forward across generations. Yet every generation also deserves the freedom to imagine a different future for themselves.

Listening to Elias, I found myself reflecting on my own country and how differently many of us now relate to the landscapes around us. Coming from the Netherlands — where much of the land has already been engineered, optimized and pushed into service of economic growth — I sometimes wonder what relationships with nature, seasonality and limits my own ancestors may once have understood differently before so much of it was reshaped or lost.

Because to me the real question shouldn’t be choosing between tradition or progress, but figuring out whether it is still possible to move forward without completely losing the relationships that once taught humans how to live within the living systems around them.

Photo

19/05/2026

Beneath the surface of the source lakes in Angola’s Lisima highlands, water lilies drift through water so clear it almost feels untouched by time.

Spending time in Lisima, I often found myself thinking less about conservation itself and more about the strange trajectory of humanity.

Unable to fully participate in many of the conversations around the fire at night because of my limited Portuguese, these big existential questions kept returning. Because every day, I was reminded that humans are clearly capable of living in ways that maintain balance with the systems around them. Many of the communities we visited spoke about the rivers as they always had: something that provided enough.

Enough.

That balance still lives here and is passed on through stories, rituals and ways of moving through the landscape that evolved over generations.

And yet, across so much of today’s world, we moved away from those relationships with astonishing speed. Economic growth became inseparable from extraction. Efficiency replaced reciprocity. Land became resource. Rivers became infrastructure.

But perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that most of us no longer really know how to step outside of that logic, even when we recognize its consequences. Our systems of “success,” “stability” and “prosperity” are built around growth.

And yet, some of the moments that stayed with me most in Lisima were astonishingly simple… drinking my morning tea while staring into the distance, the feeling of community, stillness and connection to the landscape itself. And I still find myself searching for those same moments at home.

It reminded me that many of the things that make life meaningful exist independently of the systems we keep feeding.

Perhaps it would be naive to think we can suddenly change the systems we are part of. But since returning home, I have found myself trying to integrate some of these values more consciously into daily life. Because if we already know another way of relating to the world is possible, then what exactly keeps us from choosing it?

18/05/2026

Bushmeat remains a significant part of daily life in eastern Angola. Some communities do not traditionally rely on commercially produced meat, but instead on wild-sourced animals as an important source of protein.

Bushmeat here is more than just food — it is tied to traditional knowledge, ecological adaptation and survival. For generations, people have lived from the landscape while understanding its rhythms, limits and seasons.

However, recent fuel price increases across Angola have pushed transport and food costs sharply upward, making daily life significantly harder for many families. As basic goods become less affordable, more people turn toward hunting not only for sustenance, but also as a source of income because it remains more accessible than store-bought alternatives.

And slowly, these economic pressures begin to ripple outward through the landscape itself.

In regions like Lisima, increased hunting pressure can disrupt fragile ecological balances that have endured for generations — not through one dramatic event, but through the gradual erosion of systems once shaped by necessity, restraint and local knowledge.

A rise in fuel prices in a distant city can eventually shape the fate of forests, rivers and wildlife hundreds of kilometers away.

And perhaps that tension reaches far beyond Angola.

Because landscapes all over the world are increasingly under pressure by economic pressure and systems that reward extraction far more easily than balance.

The question is whether we are still capable of building societies where both people and the living systems around them are able to endure together.

17/05/2026

Abraão António “Tony” Lujoque stands beside the remains of a Soviet-era tank in Angola’s Lisima highlands — a landscape where the scars of war still sit quietly beneath the forest canopy.

Tony joined the rebel forces at a young age and spent much of Angola’s civil war moving through these forests. Long before conservation teams arrived here, survival depended on understanding the landscape intimately — where water could be found, how to move unseen through the forest, how to read danger in silence, broken vegetation or distant animal movement.

Today, that same knowledge helps guide efforts to understand and protect this ecosystem.

“The forest speaks,” Tony explained me one evening beside the fire. “If you do not know how to listen, you will not be able to see these elephants and it might seem the forest is empty.”

People like Tony have carried knowledge of this place through war, isolation and generations of living with the land itself.

And standing beside the remains of conflict slowly disappearing back into the forest, I found myself wondering how many landscapes survive not because they were untouched by people, but because there were still people left who knew how to listen to them.

Jasper Doest

24/06/2026

17/06/2026

04/06/2026

28/05/2026

27/05/2026

26/05/2026

21/05/2026

19/05/2026

18/05/2026

17/05/2026

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