2018 large format hardcover with dust jacket and 179 pages new and unread.

Just a Blade of Grass is a story about the African Bushveld, its delights and its problems. It is also pertinent to the entire natural world in which all forms of life are so quickly disappearing as human populations grow at rates almost beyond belief.
Here in the Bushveld there is not enough money, not enough space, a fickle climate with a year of floods soon followed by severe droughts and, not least of all, a poaching industry that has grown explosively. Despite CITES 40-year-old ban on the sale of rhino horn, followed a few years later by a ban on ivory sales, this industry has flourished. If the rate of killing continues, rhino could be extinct in a very short space of time. In the last year in South Africa three rhino were killed every day by poachers. Some years ago South Africa, leading the rhino- and elephant-range countries, and their supporters, lost by one vote the proposal to lift the ban on sales of rhino products. Since then nothing has changed except that poaching has flourished. The CITES ban also prevents many African countries from using animal products wisely to aid conservation and the poor people of Africa.
Paddy Hagelthorn and Molly Buchanan who have written this book appreciate a growing donor fatigue throughout the world at a time when more money is needed than ever before to safeguard Africas wildlife heritage. Just a Blade of Grass bravely tackles emotively charged issues such as elephant culling, the legal sale of rhino horn when not a single rhino needs to be killed, and the role of a responsible hunting industry, all of which could provide substantial and sustainable much needed revenue to protect these animals