When Sicelo Mbatha was just seven years old, his life changed. Born on the edge of Africa’s oldest nature reserve, now Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in northwestern South Africa, Mbatha had developed an intense love of all living things, from a shimmering fish he’d caught but thrown back because it was too beautiful to eat, to a massive umbrella thorn acacia he called the “queen of trees.” But nature, as we know, is not always benign. To walk the roughly 10-mile round-trip to school each day, Mbatha and other students had to…
