Into the bush

We transition from the farm fields to the field of wildlife ecology through a curated visual expedition of Iroro Tanshi’s groundbreaking bat conservation work across Nigeria and beyond. 

Tanshi is the 2026 Goldman Environmental Foundation prize winner for the Foundation’s 2026 African region award.

anshi is a Nigerian tropical ecologist and conservationist internationally recognized for her work protecting endangered West African bat species. Growing up in the industrial, oil-producing city of Warri, she developed an early passion for wildlife that led her to study environmental science at the University of Benin. She went on to earn her master's degree in biodiversity conservation at the University of Leeds and a PhD from Texas Tech University. She is a co-founder and co-executive director of the Small Mammal Conservation Organisation (SMACON), an NGO dedicated to research, species protection, and mentoring the next generation of conservationists in Nigeria.

Tanshi’s career took a pivotal turn in 2016 when she made a remarkable discovery in the caves of the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and Cross River National Park. During an extensive survey, she located a small colony of the short-tailed roundleaf bat (Hipposideros curtus), an endangered species that had not been seen in Nigeria for 45 years. This rediscovery brought critical attention to the region, establishing the population as the last confirmed stronghold for the species and highlighting the urgent need to protect its habitat from human encroachment and destruction.

To safeguard these fragile ecosystems, Tanshi launched the highly successful "Zero Wildfire Campaign." Recognizing that human-induced agricultural fires spreading from nearby farms were the primary threat to the bats' forest habitats, she pioneered a community-led wildfire prevention system. By equipping local "forest guardians" with firefighting gear, establishing early-warning weather stations, and patrolling thousands of farms, her initiative effectively stopped devastating wildfires from spreading into the sanctuary, protecting both critical biodiversity and the agricultural livelihoods of tens of thousands of people in surrounding villages.

Her rigorous, multidisciplinary approach to conservation has earned her widespread global acclaim. Tanshi became the first African woman to win the Future for Nature Award in 2020, and she subsequently received the prestigious Whitley Award—often referred to as a "Green Oscar"—in 2021. Most recently, she was awarded the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of her tireless efforts to pull West Africa's endangered bats back from the brink of extinction through community-led ecological action.

(Photographs, courtesy of the Goldman Environmental Foundation.)

When I was a child, my mother would ask me what I wanted from the market. My answer was always the same: “tractor.”

Looking back now, I believe I was born a farmer.

When I was a student at Ogbomoso High School in Nigeria, my friends and I used to “drive” an abandoned tractor parked by the roadside. It was a John Deere sharing my name so it felt personal to me. Between that old machine and watching my friend Goke’s father plow fields, agriculture became my natural calling.

Today, I practiced what I call contemporary mixed farming. I don’t own a tractor yet, but I hire one for ploughing and ridging, and to save the land; I use the tractor to plough gently along natural contours of the land, avoiding repeated deep tilling. I maintain proper soil moisture before operations, reduce compaction by limiting passes, and create ridges following slope lines for drainage. I rotate directions yearly to protect soil structure and preserve fertility naturally. Then combine that with manual weeding using hoes and cutlasses.

My broader concern is food sovereignty in Nigeria. As one of the most agriculturally endowed countries in Africa, with over 36 million hectares of arable land, vast agro-ecological diversity, and a population of over 220 million people who can serve as both labour force and market. The country still imports a significant portion of its food. In 2023 alone, Nigeria’s food imports were estimated at over $10 billion annually, driven by rising demand for rice, wheat, fish, and processed foods. Abundance of land and dependence on imports raises a critical question about how we utilize our resources.

A major part of this challenge lies in smallholder farmers, who produce over 70% of Nigeria’s food supply. These farmers are the backbone of the agricultural system, yet many operate without adequate access to modern agricultural knowledge, climate information, irrigation systems, or post-harvest infrastructure. Many are not formally educated, and while they continue to produce food, a large percentage is lost due to post-harvest losses estimated at 30–50% in some crops, especially perishable produce. 

Agriculture in Nigeria is also increasingly shaped by environmental and climate challenges. Irregular rainfall patterns, prolonged droughts, and severe flooding have become more frequent, reducing productivity and threatening food systems. These climate pressures are consistent with broader global changes affecting many developing countries. Historical and structural factors including colonial agricultural systems that prioritized export crops over food crops have also contributed to long-term vulnerability in local food systems, leaving many regions exposed to shocks in climate and global food markets.

Environmental issues extend beyond climate alone. Practices such as bush burning continue to affect soil fertility, biodiversity, and ecosystem balance. When vegetation is destroyed, the natural habitat of important organisms is disrupted. Even species such as bats, which play a vital role in pollination and insect control, are displaced, indirectly affecting agricultural productivity and ecological balance. These ecological disruptions weaken the natural systems that sustain farming.

My grandfather often said, “if there is food, work becomes easy.” This means that food is not just a necessity, it is the foundation of productivity, stability, and human survival. In my family, farming is not only for income; it is for feeding people, our household, our neighbours, and our community, before even thinking of commercial gain and this is one of the reasons I just established a not for profit organization called “One Fruit A Day Initiative (OFADI)” just to help feed children in underserved communities in Nigeria and Africa with one fruit a day to help their growth and nutrition.

So, How can Nigeria achieve year-round food production without dependency on food imports? Because reliance on external food sources creates vulnerability. It exposes the country to price shocks, supply disruptions, and economic instability. In many ways, excessive food importation becomes a form of structural dependency that limits national food sovereignty.

These realities, agricultural potential, environmental challenges, climate change impacts, biodiversity loss, post-harvest inefficiencies, and knowledge gaps, are what shaped my journey into farming. They also shaped my growing interest in environmental conservation and the work of environmental scientists such as Iroro Tanshi and Bennett Obitte, whose research bridges wildlife conservation, land cultivation and community health.

I first became aware of how traditional West African agriculture reflects what Americans now call agroecology and regenerative agriculture when I was in junior secondary school in Ogbomoso. My agric teacher, whom we always called Baba Agric, introduced us to this idea during one of his lessons. He explained that our fathers’ way of farming; mixed cropping, composting, leaving land to rest, and respecting seasons was not backward as people thought, but actually a smart system that protects the soil and sustains yields.

He said that farming has to be sustainable and requires constant adaptation, and it is true because last year, I failed to plant my cashew at the right time as I did not understand the weather patterns. That mistake pushed me to start studying climate more seriously using online platforms. Farming will humble you, but it will also teach you, if you are willing to learn.

My great-grandparents farmed. My family depends on the land. For me, farming is not just an occupation. It is spiritual.

Even in my Christian faith, agriculture is deeply rooted, from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob. The land, the harvest, the increase, it is all connected. 

So when I farm, I don’t just see crops. I see purpose. I feel like I am feeding people. I feel like I am building something that matters. I feel like I am part of something bigger than myself.

When I went to Technology University, I already knew I didn’t want to leave agriculture behind.  I wanted to understand how to improve it.

Studying project management exposed me to project planning, systems, construction, and even software thinking. At the same time, I already had practical knowledge from home..

My father is a bricklayer. That is the handwork he grew up learning aside farming. He worked on major projects like the emergency unit at Bowen University Teaching hospitals and hostels at LAUTECH in Ogbomoso. He built houses, including his own. From him, I learned construction, not just in theory, but in practice.

So I don’t just want to farm. I want to build farms. I want to combine technology to improve how farming is done. Construction to build strong farm structures, and agriculture is the foundation of it all. That has always been the plan.

Everything I have learned and built; technology, project management, construction; is for sustainable agriculture.

Our home area is gradually shifting from rural to semi-urban, so we use family land farther away for farming. We raise chickens both at home and at a farm settlement.

Personally, I have acquired farmland, about 20 acres which I am working on. On the field, I still practice traditional weeding using hoes, cutlasses, and sometimes uprooting weeds by hand.

I began to rethink waste and food production in the city. Instead of seeing used jerricans and waste plastics as pollution, I pioneered a simple aquaculture idea by converting them into movable fishponds. This was my own small way of introducing fish farming into tight urban spaces. The idea was to reduce environmental waste while still producing food. By readjusting these materials, we created low-cost, flexible systems that can hold water and support fish growth. It showed me that innovation does not always need big capital, but creativity, local materials, and a deep respect for the environment.

At the same time, I am open to modern methods where needed. It is not about choosing one over the other. It is about saving humanity and the ecosystem like the bats do.

There was a time bats started eating the bananas in my compound. My first reaction was to chase them away, even kill them if possible. I remembered bats at Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminary, there are countless bats, millions of them living among mango trees. Though bats are known to be nocturnal, these ones were active during the day, feeding and flying across the sky in large numbers.

But I recently learned about the work of Nigerian ecologist and conservationist Iroro Tanshi. Her research changed my perspective on bats. Bats eat insects that affect agricultural production, consumption of insect pests by bats results in a savings of more than $3 billion per year. Bats also eat fruit and nectar which pollinates a variety of plants like peaches, bananas and agaves. And in eating fruit they perform another important role in the ecosystem: seed dispersal.

Into the bush

We transition from the farm fields to the field of wildlife ecology through a curated visual expedition of Iroro Tanshi’s groundbreaking bat conservation work across Nigeria and beyond. 

Tanshi is the 2026 Goldman Environmental Foundation prize winner for the Foundation’s 2026 African region award.

anshi is a Nigerian tropical ecologist and conservationist internationally recognized for her work protecting endangered West African bat species. Growing up in the industrial, oil-producing city of Warri, she developed an early passion for wildlife that led her to study environmental science at the University of Benin. She went on to earn her master's degree in biodiversity conservation at the University of Leeds and a PhD from Texas Tech University. She is a co-founder and co-executive director of the Small Mammal Conservation Organisation (SMACON), an NGO dedicated to research, species protection, and mentoring the next generation of conservationists in Nigeria.

Tanshi’s career took a pivotal turn in 2016 when she made a remarkable discovery in the caves of the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and Cross River National Park. During an extensive survey, she located a small colony of the short-tailed roundleaf bat (Hipposideros curtus), an endangered species that had not been seen in Nigeria for 45 years. This rediscovery brought critical attention to the region, establishing the population as the last confirmed stronghold for the species and highlighting the urgent need to protect its habitat from human encroachment and destruction.

To safeguard these fragile ecosystems, Tanshi launched the highly successful "Zero Wildfire Campaign." Recognizing that human-induced agricultural fires spreading from nearby farms were the primary threat to the bats' forest habitats, she pioneered a community-led wildfire prevention system. By equipping local "forest guardians" with firefighting gear, establishing early-warning weather stations, and patrolling thousands of farms, her initiative effectively stopped devastating wildfires from spreading into the sanctuary, protecting both critical biodiversity and the agricultural livelihoods of tens of thousands of people in surrounding villages.

Her rigorous, multidisciplinary approach to conservation has earned her widespread global acclaim. Tanshi became the first African woman to win the Future for Nature Award in 2020, and she subsequently received the prestigious Whitley Award—often referred to as a "Green Oscar"—in 2021. Most recently, she was awarded the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of her tireless efforts to pull West Africa's endangered bats back from the brink of extinction through community-led ecological action.

(Photographs, courtesy of the Goldman Environmental Foundation.)

The autumnal beauty was foreboding.

Your green day in spring-come-too-soon was preceded by the blossoming rose bush in my summer-stayed-too-long day. On November 19, 2025, this bush’s Thanksgiving week blooming was a recent annual occurence. The bush had bloomed late the previous year, but not before.

So, in that respect, I feel your blues, Kendra. From close. personal observation, we know that climate change is real. But you don’t have to go a retreat in England to allow your already-intuited comprehension of spiritual ecology to emerge. The ancestors evoked by the ecotone of your recent sojourn through South Carolina and Georgia can be your guides, along with plants, animals, land and water scapes of your southern homeland and a growing intimacy with Presence.

thought you shone brightly as an eco-lit memoirist in the “Second Summer” essay you submitted with the fellowship application but not particularly as a spiritually oriented writer.

The great potential for your eco-spirituality to be expressed in your writing was evident in that essay, however. And had your black identity been more apparent in your submission, the competition sponsors, as dedicated environmentalists, would have loved to have facilitated that aspect of diversity among the fellows. A favorable meaning of “woke” is recognizing existing talent, its potential development for excellence, as well as balanced racial and gender representation.

If the competition is held again next year, you should submit this March 2026 Substack as evidence of your intensifying quest for what, by the end of the essay, you realize you already know as “spirituals ecology.”

the peace of all-pervasive presence as refuge from writer’s dread and being her perfect reader.

very competitive: a writing friend

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