Landmark Foundation Trust

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The Landmark Foundation is led by Dr Bool Smuts, a passionate environmentalist. 

Landmark Foundation is a conservation Non-Governmental Organisation based in South Africa that implements practical, economical, and ecological viable land use management approaches that ensure sustainable conservation goals at a large scale.

We promote evidence-led, ethics-driven tools that create effective conservation custodianship so that Southern African landscapes can effectively be conserved.

Our focus areas include work on top trophic species conservation efforts, landscape conservation and rewilding, ecological restoration, ecological governance and human wildlife coexistence in production landscapes.

Organisational Philosophy

 The organisation is an ethics-based, science-guided advocacy organisation concerned with biodiversity conservation.

The organisational philosophy is guided by a set of ethical principles that embrace the primacy of respecting life, the interrelatedness of life, the sentience of all living things and maintaining a healthy environment for a sustainable future for all forms of life.

While humans have been granted legal rights that reflect society’s ethical and behavioural expectations, such rights have not been accorded to the environment and other life forms. In South African law, the human right to a healthy environment, fair administration and access to information provides for protection of our environmental assets and to ensure this is constitutionally entrenched. Landmark Foundation is pursuing avenues to improve the legal status of wildlife and the environment in general and protection of the biodiversity commons.

Landmark Foundation believes that the environment has intrinsic value. Humans are merely parts of the ecological whole, and we have a duty of care towards all other members of that community. By dominating the extraction of resources from the entire ecosystem and the commoditisation of life and resources, we have become a destructive species.

Aldo Leopold argues that we ought to regard the environment and its communities as morally considerable in our actions. ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’

In terms of the environment, wildlife management, animal husbandry and welfare, and social relations, Landmark Foundation believes our actions must meet high moral and ethical standards; in this complex environment we continually attempt to determine right and wrong in our interactions with the natural world. In our projects, while seeking to address the impact of livestock farming and other land uses on the environment, we also strive to develop an ethical path for the industry.

Our success is thus measured by our advocacy actions, our efforts in animal rescues, our educational and public advocacy campaigns, our research, our landscape conservation campaigns, market mechanisms, and the legislative inputs to which we contribute. We have become one of the foremost voices in wildlife advocacy in the country and a credible information source in exposing abuse of wildlife. Therefore, our success must be measured by our ability to place our ambitions and agenda in the public domain for the benefit of wildlife, and thus influence policy, legislation, administration and accountability.

We continue to increase our influence where we can without fear or favour. We use the lessons we have learnt to fight the battles better in the future. We honour the trust that our supporters and partners have placed in us and, most importantly, we honour our obligation to the voiceless wildlife for which we have become an advocate.

Core organisational purposes

1. To support restorative conservation actions to maintain naturally occurring patterns and processes of biodiversity;
2. To focus our conservation activities on top trophic-level species and the landscape impacts of production agriculture, with a focus on leopards and landscape conservation efforts;
3. To promote awareness of the intrinsic value of natural systems and life forms;
4. To recognise and promote the interconnectedness of life, and the fact that humans are merely members of the ecological whole;
5. To recognise and promote the sentience of life and our obligation to respect it;
6. To promote governance and accountability for the conservation of biodiversity patterns and processes.

Core Outputs and Broad Activities

1. Conservation of leopard, top trophic species and conservation land uses on agricultural production landscapes focusing on human wildlife conflicts.
   1. Direct Action: Rescuing imperilled leopards, Promote human tolerance of wildlife
   2. Research: Test mitigations: Compensation, Translocations, Genetics, Population assessments, Rewilding
   3. Education: Extension and youth education
   4. Habitat expansion: Establishing leopard friendly areas and focusing on connectivity of isolated populations
   5. Advocacy: Public, consumer, management, and litigation
   6. Market mechanisms: Ethical green branding
   7. Project locations: Eastern, Northern and Western Cape locations
2. Environmental Education     
   1. Establishing Green Clubs at schools and preschools
   2. Community food gardens and a specific focus on creche educational facilities
   3. Youth in Conservation
   4. Public information and mobilisation
   5. Research            
   6. Post-doctoral Leopard research: Leopard connectivity, Quantification of Leopard/human conflict losses, identifying high conflict areas, efficacy of mitigations and compensation, translocation efficacy and genetic vitality of remaining populations
   7. Habitat restoration and rewilding
3. Establishment of conservation areas
   1. Zeekoegat Wetland Restoration project
   2. Alien invasive plant removal
   3. Water course restoration
   4. Rewilding and Reafforestation
   5. Shepherding Back Biodiversity Project/ Ecologically sustainable rangeland management experiment & Rangeland rewilding
4. Public Advocacy Litigation/ Litigation for the right to a healthy environment/ Advocating for the rights of nature

Our Backabuddy campaigns will select specific outputs amongst these for supports by funders and donors.