Translator: Carol Wang Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Aquaponics has altered my perception on today's dilemmas in conservation.
I am the east African field specialist for ECOLIFE Foundation.
Aquaponics is closed-system sustainable fish and vegetable farming
with heavy outputs of food and near-zero impact on the environment.
In 500 gallons of water, we can produce 100 pounds of fish.
And for every pound of fish,
we can create enough nutrients to grow 70 pounds of vegetables,
all outside of the soil.
This system is based on natural systems such as rivers and lakes,
and it is an ancient practice
that has been revamped into modern solution.
Last year, Bill Toone, the Director of ECOLIFE, and my boss,
spoke here at TEDx about community-based conservation.
To sum it up,
if we meet the needs of every household in a community,
we can achieve our immediate and long-term goals
for ourselves and for our environment.
We've all seen the devastating impacts humans have on their environment,
and the devastation caused by that environmental impact on humanity.
So I'm not here to talk at you today,
but to create a new type of dialogue for conservation solutions.
I just returned from Bwindi, Uganda,
where I literally work at the end of the road -
civilization ends and the forest begins.
This is me holding a workshop on aquaponics.
With ECOLIFE,
I get to implement conservation through humanitarian-aid projects.
But before I began working with ECOLIFE,
I worked in wildlife rescue around the world for many years.
I mean, what's more fun than this?
I loved my job, and I loved the animals.
But as the animals I raised from infants began to get older,
I started to ask questions:
What happens next?
Where do they go?
I quickly realized
that rescue centers function like a Band-aid on a hemorrhage.
Animals keep coming in and very few ever leave.
Many of the animals that I cared for
have either died in captivity or now live in cages.
Roger, the chacma baboon, went from here
to here.
Los, the leopard,
went from here
to here.
Eventually, many end up here, in the incinerator.
And this is where it reached my impasse of conservation.
But what I came to realize was that rescue centers,
along with a majority of conservation solutions used today,
are only addressing one aspect of a multi-faceted problem -
rescue centers and zoos are rescuing and breeding animals
to put back into habitat;
at the same time, habitat is being bought and conserved,
but without ever addressing and confronting
why land and animals are in crisis in the first place.
What I saw
was that environmental conservation is not whole
when people are left out of the equation -
we must address the issue of human need.
Many of us don't actively care about conservation,
and it is not because we are bad people,
but because we do not feel affected.
For years we've been asked to choose between people, land and animals.
But it doesn't have to be one or the other.
If we understand that conservation is self-preservation,
we can look at this for what it really is:
a complex problem of a complex ecosystem.
So as demand increases and supplies run out,
finely-tuned natural order begins to falter,
and we will find ourselves victim of our own hubris and exploitation.
We often think that these issues won't affect us for generations,
but these problems are creeping into all of our backyards,
faster than we would like.
And where I work in Uganda,
people and the environment interface on a daily basis.
Lake Victoria is one of the largest lakes in the world,
and is the largest lake in Africa.
It is surrounded
by some of the fastest-growing populations on the planet.
In the Lake Victoria basin,
we are not looking for solutions to problems generations away
Today, Lake Victoria has been overfished
to the point of total collapse of the fishing stock.
So what are our solutions?
To save fish,
we stop fishing and control populations;
to save people,
we allow fishing to continue at the current rates.
But these are all short-term simplistic solutions.
Though equal in merit,
they contradict in application,
creating an even bigger dilemma.
So with aquaponics,
we can implement human-interest-based conservation.
So we don't have to pick fish or people,
we can renew fishing stocks
and create new sources of protein.
And this isn't just in the third world or in Africa.
Each one of you can build these in your own backyards
or in your own homes.
So the solutions to these complex problems are there.
So when things aren't working,
even though we think that they should,
we need to reevaluate our notions
and look towards new solutions.
Sometimes the seeds of change are small,
but we just have to learn to cultivate them.
Just like many Ugandans laughed at me saying,
It's impossible to grow plants in bricks
and fish in plastic tanks.
We challenged their perceptions and truths,
and all it took
was one seed to grow.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)