Translator: Denise RQ Reviewer: Lena Clemente
I'm going to start with a quote by the Dalai Lama,
"Today, more than ever before,
life must be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility
not only nation to nation and human to human
but human to other forms of life."
That's what I'm here to talk about;
I'm passionate about wildlife conservation,
thus, other forms of life.
In the last ten years, I've done everything I can
to learn as much as I can about it.
I've read books, I've talked to experts,
I've gone to conferences, and traveled the world.
I wanted to see for myself what's going on in these places.
I visited chimpanzees in Uganda,
I visited mountain gorilla families in Rwanda.
Everywhere I go, the root cause of the dwindling numbers of these species
is human population pressure.
A recent visual example I saw of this is in Uganda,
with farms going up the hillside
right to the boundary of Bwindi National Park,
part of the last remaining habitat for the mountain gorilla.
Let's talk about population.
We're at 6.7 billion people in the world today,
expected to rise to nine or ten billion just in the next 40 years.
The problem is we've already got a billion people
who don't have enough to eat.
What is it going to be like when we increase the pressure,
the human population pressure,
by another 50%?
So, I think, what we are going to have are more conflicts, more wars
over scarcer resources,
less drinking water per person.
We're going to have less food per person, more disease, and suffering.
It's difficult to comprehend, but that's suffering on a global scale
when we are talking about billions of people.
I know this is sobering to think about.
Is this a future we want to leave for our children and grandchildren?
I don't think so either.
So let's steer towards a better future.
Thomas Berry wrote that our great work for our generation
is to learn to live on the planet at least benignly.
Why would we do that?
One reason we would do that is that our fellow living things,
who happen not to be human,
don't have a representative in Congress;
they don't have a lobbyist in Washington,
they don't have a voice at the table,
and yet, they are completely dependent for their survival on our good will;
much like children.
Let's talk about our country's population and our wildlife.
We had about five million people in our country around 1800
and about 290 million people in 2000 - more now, of course.
At a conference, I met a scientist, Andrea Laliberte,
who had done fascinating work
comparing wildlife sightings in the 1700 and 1800 in our country
to how wildlife range today in our country.
This chart, the pinkish areas - I'm not sure how it looks here -
are where we used to have black bears.
The yellow areas are where they still are today
- you see there's been a lot of recession there.
This is the gray wolf;
we used to have gray wolves running all over our country;
- the pinkish areas you see on the chart -
not so today.
We used to have grizzly bears running over about half of our country;
as you see, they've receded, and we don't have them.
This was just 200 years ago.
That yellow island-like area
- that would be the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.
Let's look at a summary map: take a look at the right here -
red is good, green is bad, white is very bad.
You see that we've lost a lot of species in our country;
those white areas mean that all of wildlife that was looked at,
- in this case, in the 1800s -
it's gone from our country.
Do you think is normal not to have wildlife
running around us all the time in our country?
That's not normal.
Let's bring it home, here, to the Front Range of Colorado; tonight.
We used to have wild bison; they're gone.
We used to have gray wolves; they're gone.
We used to have-- - sorry, my clicker's little sluggish -
grizzly bears; could've been right outside.
They're gone.
We used to have lynx, the cat; gone.
Maybe they are not leaving.
(Laughter)
We used to have black-footed ferret,
very dependent on prairie dog for their survival; gone.
We used to have
this beautiful, little bird: the mountain plover; also gone.
This is sobering information, so what can we do?
We can choose a better future.
Let's apply the empathy
that we have for our cats, dogs, and other pets
to endangered species like this chimpanzee,
but all endangered species.
Let's have fewer children; that's one of the most powerful--
(Applause)
- Thank you! -
(Applause)
- I didn't expect that response. -
That's one of the most powerful things that we can do in the United States;
if we want to have kids, great; let's have two.
If want to have more than two kids, let's adopt.
What else can we do?
Well, we won't go there.
So, what else can we do?
We can help educate girls and provide economic opportunity to women
in developing countries.
(Applause)
Amen!
When we do that, those ladies choose to have to have smaller families,
and we have more nutrition, more health care,
more education for their kids,
and the impact on the global population is huge.
Finally, what we can do
is we can give more to our planet.
We can give half of our donations, let's say,
to people and people-related causes,
and half of our donations to the planet,
to ocean conservation, to wildlife conservation.
I want to mention, by the way, that today, we only give about 2 to 5%
of all giving that goes to environment and wildlife as a category.
You've been very patient with sometimes, a difficult topic;
I just want to say that the thing to think about
is do we change, as a species, what do we do,
so that our fellow living beings who happen not to be human
can thrive alongside of us
a 100, 500, and 1,000 years from now.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)