Transcriber: H Maria Castro Reviewer: Miloš Milosavljević
I'm very happy to be talking about flourishing in the 21st century.
It's a very optimistic outlook
and I think it's a good lesson for conservation thinking.
So often in conservation
people are talking about survival of endangered species.
We don't just want them to survive,
we want them to flourish.
And by the time I finished,
I hope you will agree
that bringing them along with us
on this journey to the 21st century
is not an option, it's a necessity.
I had a good fortune to work with some
of the most spectacular and charismatic species.
This is Titus. Titus the mountain gorilla,
who lives in the Virunga volcanoes,
or lived in the Virunga volcanoes.
Sadly, he died a couple of years ago,
but he died of natural causes,
having been one of the most successful silver-backs ever known.
You can learn about him by looking up a documentary
about his life called 'Titus, the Gorilla King.'
Having a story about an individual
is a very powerful way of getting across
important information.
My story began in 1976, in this context,
because in 1976, as a newly-qualified biologist,
I had a ridiculously good fortune
to go and work with the late Dr. Dian Fossey,
visiting each day
families of mountain gorillas,
watching them and learning from them.
My ability to do that
was because Dian had already been there for 10 years.
The gorillas had learned to trust her.
She developed methods of winning their trust
so that you're accepted
almost as a member of the family
and you can sit and observe the behaviour,
study what they do,
study how they interact with their environment,
and how they sometimes would interact with you.
Here you see Poppy,
at that time 18 months old or so,
approaching Dian.
Poppy's mum and dad were sitting yards away
and they didn't mind because they knew Dian
and they trusted her.
That mutual trust is an extraordinary way
to study an endangered species.
The other photograph
shows the other side of Dian Fossey's work,
what made her very controversial.
She felt that -- to quote her
-- she couldn't close her eyes or her mind
to what was going on around her.
And that was poaching.
So we would go out each day to find the gorillas,
and sometimes we would find snares.
And those snares are not set for gorillas,
but set for antelope.
The snares, although set for antelope,
could catch gorillas.
Here you see a wire one,
sometimes they are made of string.
But if you get that around your hand,
and you're frightened and you pull,
it creates a tourniquet and you may lose the hand
or you may die.
The poachers would also use weapons.
In those days
it was usually spears.
So we would find these people
in the forest, it's a national park,
they had no right to be there,
we had no right to be intervening
in a law-enforcement capacity,
but we did.
We confiscated spears
and did our best
to protect these amazing animals
and destroy the tools
and equipment of the poachers.
So that was life at Karisoke in the late '70s.
Karisoke is a research centre that Dian Fossey founded.
And the work continues
through the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International,
based in the USA.
And each day scientists still go out to study the gorillas,
but they no longer live in the forest,
because of the changing security situation there.
But this is Titus' group.
Titus became
this powerful patriarch,
living a long life for a silver-back gorilla,
it turns out that 35 years is about what a silver-back might live.
He spent his days
feeding in the forest,
looking after his family.
Watching gorillas feeding,
you see that they prepare
each food item differently.
Usually scientists look at the gorilla feeding,
I want you to think for a moment,
what happens to the plants
after the gorilla has finished feeding?
The gorilla plucks the end of plant stems
and you know, if you're a gardener,
that if you prune the end,
it increases lateral growth of the side shoots,
so it bushes out.
A young gorilla is learning in their mother's lap
how to do this, how to select and prepare different food plants.
So this goes on,
generation after generation,
and gorillas have an impact on their forests
and that's what I wanted to focus on.
They're part of the forest.
People think there's a forest and then you put some animals in.
No. The animals and the trees
and the bacteria are all part of that forest ecosystem.
One of the things that gorillas do spectacularly well
is produce manure.
This is gorilla dung.
You have to understand the importance of dung.
A gorilla will eat and produce
something like between 10 and 20 kilos of dung every day.
That's about a 100 kilos a week.
In 10 weeks, that's a ton of manure
being spread around the forest.
And in that manure are seeds.
You see there two species,
a tree and a blackberry.
Gorillas like blackberries,
but they don't always wait for the blackberries to ripen.
Why do we want to conserve them?
In my case, because I got to know some of them as friends
and they would choose to come and sit with me.
It was a case of:
if someone attacked my friends,
of course I want to defend them.
That's a very personal reason
and why I'm still involved in conservation.
But it's not a very good reason
for wanting to protect a whole species.
What about the gorillas I don't know?
Do they don't matter?
Of course they do.
Dian's reaction to this poaching
was to organise anti-poaching patrols
and here's one of them,
going through the alpine mole
on top of Karisimbi.
And these men put their lives on the line
to protect a forest, which is important
to them and to the surrounding community,
because around that forest
is the most densely populated part of rural Africa,
and all those fields depend on the water
that comes out of the forest.
When Dian was murdered,
many people thought that would be an end to it.
But she had inspired so many people,
sometimes in a positive, sometimes in a negative way,
but she made people do stuff
and now the mountain gorillas
are the focus
of a successful tourism enterprise
in both Rwanda and Uganda,
and, when it's stable enough, in the DRC.
People pay hundreds of dollars
to go and sit for an hour
and experience the life of gorillas from that close proximity,
no longer sitting right next to them,
to protect their health,
we're trying to maintain a 7-metre distance,
so that your germs don't infect them.
But this is wonderful.
And the gorilla families that are visited,
whether by researchers or tourists,
have more babies, that have a better survival chance
than un-habituated families.
So it's a conservation success story.
It's good for the economy of the region, it creates jobs
and the gorillas are increasing in number in this area.
But mountain gorillas are the only kind of great ape
whose numbers are known to be increasing.
Orangutans, Western lowland gorillas,
Eastern lowland gorillas, chimpanzees,
bonobos, all declining.
So how can we use the lessons
from the mountain gorilla conservation
for these other apes, when they don't live in national parks?
Many of them live outside of national parks.
So we can't necessarily use the same methods.
And the people who share the forest with the apes?
This lady is married to a bush meat hunter.
Her well-being and the future of her child
depend on his ability to kill animals.
So we somehow have to give them a better way of life
if we're going to stop them from killing endangered species.
Get them on the side.
I employed them to take me out
to find the gorillas without killing them.
I wanted to go into elephants,
because elephants are even more important
as gardeners of the forest.
If gorillas are gardeners of the forest,
elephants are the mega-gardeners, because they're so big.
And the elephants that I studied go underground.
This is just extraordinary.
Elephants underground.
They go into deep caves to mine the rock.
And they mine the rock because it's rich in minerals
and here you see a young tusker I called Charles,
digging away in a little side chamber, in total darkness,
the flash illuminated it,
and he was tolerant enough to let me take this photograph.
Just as with the gorillas.
Some of the gorillas we knew as individuals,
and even as friends,
were killed by poachers,
because at that time in the late '70s,
their skulls and their hands were being bought
by tourists as gruesome souvenirs.
So with elephants,
Charles was killed by elephant poachers.
For many people, when they look at an elephant,
they think that the value of that elephant is this.
This is a carving,
and when people see a carved piece of ivory
they're often so entranced by the skill of the craftsman
they forget that it was once an elephant's front teeth.
This particular elephant would have been a young bull,
not old enough to breed,
because this part is in the face of the elephant,
only that bit protrudes,
and he was killed before he had a chance to pass on his genes
to the next generation.
So what I want to focus on now
is not the value of ivory
but the value of elephants alive
and living in the forest.
This is the true value of elephants.
Its dung.
And that photograph shows you
elephant dung in the forest
bursting with seedlings.
For an elephant, they eat about
4 percent of their body weight each day,
which means that it's something like
up to 200 kilos of vegetation,
which means roughly 200 kilos of droppings.
Multiply that.
That's a ton of manure every week.
So elephants have a huge impact
and yet in the last two lifetimes,
so early, middle 19th century
when firearms came into Africa,
that's when elephant numbers started to plummet.
It is thought that then there were probably about
10 million elephants in Africa.
Now there are fewer than half million.
So we've lost 95 percent of the work force of the forest
that recycles nutrients, disperses seeds
and creates the forests of tomorrow.
And yet these animals are huge and powerful,
we are so taken aback by how powerful they are
we think they're indestructible.
This is the silver-back who lives in Kahusi-Biega National Park,
his father, his uncle, were killed for bush meat.
And they were killed for bush meat
because during the war the rangers couldn't help.
The NGO's like The Born Free Foundation,
The Gorilla Organisation,
that helped to fund the conservation activities,
couldn't cope because of the insecurity
and also because everyone of us,
in the developed world,
has some kind of mobile electronic device in our pocket
and our mobile phones and laptops need tantalum,
and one of the places on Earth where you can find tantalum
is underground in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
and these kids are chiselling,
trying to earn money,
and in the illegal mines,
that are controlled by rebels,
they feed the workers on bush meat.
If you loose the gorillas from the forest,
you don't just loose the gorillas.
We're so taken by their similarity to us,
the fact that they share a lot of DNA with us,
if you read the conservation literature
that's why we have to protect them, because they share DNA with us,
or because we want our children to be able to go and see them
when they're growing up, and of course that would be nice.
But the real reason we need to think about protecting
not just the few habituated gorillas but all gorillas and all elephants,
wherever they live, is because every day
they are dispersing seeds
and sowing the next generation of trees.
Right now, we are suddenly realising
that tropical forests are not just ornamental.
So, for the health of the planet,
and this is the UN scheme for Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Degradation
and helping biodiversity
and developments into the bargain,
can the dollars we attach now to carbon help to fund conservation?
But it's not just carbon.
This is an animated weather map
of rainfall around the world.
The white is water vapour,
the orangey bits are storms
and it's speeded up,
you can see the clock in the top right-hand corner
that's wheezing round,
about one day a second.
Every day rains in the Congo basin,
so that big pulsing in the middle of Africa
is the daily rainfall.
It doesn't just rain in the rainforest, though.
Those weather systems move West across the Atlantic
and meet the Amazon pump,
which is pulsing away and sending weather off up to North America
and swiftly across the Atlantic to Britain, and Europe.
We're all benefiting from the ecosystem services
provided by these forests in the tropics
and the animals that play
a keystone role in those forests
need our protection
because we want to continue
to have this global water distribution system
acting as a sort of a biotic pump.
The children in Africa,
who live next door to these forests or in those forests,
have very little concept of this.
So how can we educate them?
One method, the Ape Alliance,
which is a coalition of NGOs
that I have the privilege to chair,
one of our members is the Great Ape Film Initiative
and with the Gorilla Organisation in Uganda,
we're taking pedal-powered cinemas.
This is a room full of children,
about a thousand kids,
who have never seen movie images before.
And they are cycling
to generate power to see the film,
so the kids themselves generate the power
and they're learning about the importance of apes and ecosystems,
and the importance of forest in their lives.
All around the world,
we want to get this message across.
So it's now possible to visit the gorillas virtually
by going to vEcotourism.org
and experiencing that amazing experience
of hearing the sounds of the forest,
seeing the gorillas, their behaviour,
their interaction with the forest
and realising, I hope,
that the forest will not be the same if we lose them.
So we're protecting gorillas, elephants,
we're trying to protect orangutans, but we're losing,
because when we raise money
for NGOs, for organisations
to support the efforts of government agencies
that are trying to protect these forests,
we're thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands,
bigger NGOs maybe low millions.
At the same time corporations,
mining corporations,
agricultural corporations,
are spending billions of dollars to develop those same lands.
And the Ministers that come to our UN meetings
and sign agreements to protect apes
are often trumped by the more powerful Ministries
of Agriculture and Development,
who want the mines to develop,
or want the roads to be put through the forest,
even though opening up the forest
begins a degradation that results in extinction.
So my message to the world is:
bringing along the gorillas and the elephants
in our journey to the 21st century isn't an option.
It isn't optional,
they are not ornaments,
they're not things to go and see on holiday.
Even if you don't see them on holiday,
every gorilla, every elephant,
every howler monkey in Latin America or taper
are working for us,
dispersing seeds for the trees of tomorrow
and if we want those carbon stores
and those rainwater-generating forests
to continue into the next century
we have to make sure that the seeds
are being sown today to do that job.
That's the message.
If you value the forest,
protect the gardeners of the forest.
Thank you.
(Applause)