( intro music )
( transition music )
( applause )
Asher: So I want to start with two questions.
How do you connect to the wild,
and when do you connect to the wild?
My relationship with the wild began as a child
with something as simple as a smile.
The smile that you see on my face right now
is not the one that I had as a kid.
Where you see incisors, I once had fangs.
This led me to believe I was a bat.
I would run about the house with a cape
tied to my neck and my hands
pretending I could fly.
I'm sorry to say that I never took off.
One of the many disappointments of childhood,
things that you learn your limitations.
Few years later,
I remember reading this article about fruit bats,
and a large number of them
are being consumed by the thousands in Guam,
and being shipped from the Pacific Islands to Guam.
This is a commercial outfit.
To think that somebody would want to consume
something that I had been not too long ago,
was kind of shocking.
( laughter )
It really did not resonate with me,
and I figured I needed to do something about that
at some point in my life.
But I didn't think to start then, which I should have,
and I'm always amazed by people who start early
because it's never too early to start.
If you're reacting to something,
do something right then and there.
Don't wait for tomorrow, don't wait for another day,
don't wait to become something.
You're already everything you need to be to act.
Anyhow, so going forward,
eventually I found my way back into conservation
which I'm really grateful for,
and I wound up dealing with numerous species
through numerous non-profit outfits.
For me wild is an implicit part of who I am,
and how I function daily.
It is part of our biological and evolutionary development,
it is a part of our lineage,
it's where we come from.
It is our past, it is in our present,
and it should jolly well be a part of our future,
and that is why I do what I do
because it is so important to me
to evoke this connection that I feel on a cellular level
in every individual I encounter every day.
It led me to dealing with ivory and rhino horn,
and all of last year went by
just tackling this one issue,
and trying to tell the same story over and over again
in as many ways as possible.
These were campaigns for Elephant Voices,
Joyce Poole's organization,
dealing with poaching in Kenya.
This particular campaign was supposed to
cast a light on what's happening
with the Chinese consumer market
being the largest stakeholder in this game.
It is a numbers game.
It is about tipping points, money and time.
And time is running out
at the cost of these animals.
This particular campaign shows these two Chinese characters
which spells China in Chinese,
and beneath that I've written
"Stop the trade. Every toss costs a life."
This got Joyce thrown out of a TCM Conference,
Traditional Chinese Medicine Conference,
and she called me panicked, being,
"Oh my gosh, I can't believe it had such a huge outcry
that I had to be basically evicted from the premises."
She said, "I don't know whether this was a good thing,"
but after a lot of debate
we realized it was a good thing
because shortly after,
we started getting e-mails with images like this.
This was the less shocking image.
I got e-mails with people who had tattooed this
onto their backs and arms.
I was surprised that a single artwork that I created
could have such deep impact on people's lives
that they felt like it could extend their voice
and empower who they were
and what they stood for in the world.
We started running these campaigns as open source.
Anybody could print them out
and use them any which way
they felt was appropriate to get the story out there.
There were demonstrations
completely decentralized, organized by students, schools,
and non-profits around the world,
all carrying banners.
There were banners hanging outside people's houses,
as bumper stickers in cars.
I would get images daily sent in,
and it was really quite lovely to see
that these images could really
have such a strong reach across the world.
Which led me to finding ways to communicate
the same story in as many media as possible,
as well as to tell every angle of the story.
So this is to cast a light on the terror attacks
and the trade in firearms
because illicit contraband does contribute to that.
It's almost important to educate the Chinese demographic
about how each tusk or rhino horn costs a life;
it does result in death.
Most Chinese people believe that
the elephant tusk is like a tooth, it just falls out
and it's picked up by somebody
and delivered to the marketplace.
I needed to show this in a way,
in places where loads of eyes would have
access to these images.
We ran these on mass transport systems in China,
as well as on consumer magazines
in partnership with WildAid,
African Wildlife Foundation,
and Save Our Elephants.
Because we want to target people
who had the purchasing power, who could have immediate impact
on what was happening on the fields.
Because when you kill the demand,
when you stop the buying, it stops the killing.
It's not just important to educate people
about what's happening,
but also to cast light on cultural consciousness
and shift perspectives that are held
for extended periods of time and get those people
to extend the empathy that they feel toward one thing
toward the other thing.
Moving from the known to the unknown.
These two campaigns which were run across China
in a similar format on mass transport,
as well as on billboards and magazines,
were to help the Chinese extend this pride that they feel
in the conservation success
that they've achieved with pandas in China
to African wildlife hence "The pandas of Africa."
It was run in a vocabulary they understood,
and it went viral in China
which was a tremendous success
because it was tweeted on Weibo
and in all the local social media.
The Chinese adopted it as their own message
because it was not targeting them
and singling them out.
Instead it was showing them,
"You've done something well,
extend that positive attitude towards something else."
For me, I'm haunted by this crisis.
My dating life is kind of ruined by it because...
( laughter )
...frankly when I go out on a date with a stranger,
I'm thinking all the while about the one
that's lost every fifteen minutes.
By the time we get to dessert I'm like,
"Is this guy worth six elephants?"
( laughter )
When you're weighing it like that,
it's very hard to sit through that evening.
( laughter )
It also ends up affecting me during my sleep cycle,
it ruins my REM cycle continually.
Or sometimes I actually end up
strategizing solutions and taking notes.
I always sleep with an iPhone by my bed,
or a notebook because I never know
when a sketch is going to occur to me.
Not to mention bathroom breaks.
If I wake up in the middle of the night,
and this was one particular situation,
is a sequence that actually unfolded one evening.
I woke up at three in the morning,
I went to the loo, sat down,
and as I'm peeing I'm looking out the door,
and I see a tile on the floor -
tree rings in this wooden tile.
And I'm immediately thinking
about geological time and about the Giant Sequoia
that I first encountered as a child
in the British Natural History Museum.
About how these species encompass our stories
and assimilate us in such a profound way.
This particular sequoia ring started out its life in 557.
From there, moving forward, it has assimilated
the rise of Islam, spread of Christianity,
it has seen so much down
to the birth and death of Gandhi.
When we cut a tree like that down,
we're cutting this huge part of our history down.
So when a species goes extinct it's not just about
that one individual species that's going off our radar,
but about the fact that this huge part of our story
has just gone missing.
And that is such a terrible loss to me.
Immediately I got to the desk, didn't go back to bed,
started sketching out a rhino,
juxtaposing this tree ring into it,
and then trying to find ways in which
I can show how time is lapsing for the species.
The primary horn became a sand timer,
but a blood timer so every drop that falls
is adding to that narrative of loss.
The secondary horn is a metronome
with a AK-47 going back and forth, keeping count.
The eye of the rhino has a clock
that reads a second before midnight because if you
compress geological time into twenty four hours,
we came onto this planet a second before midnight,
and we've had this immense amount of impact,
changed the face of this planet within that second.
How do I extend the same narrative
on to yet other ideas?
This was about elephants,
hence burning of the ivory, the stockpiles.
Thinking about how that connects to China.
Incense clocks were what they used back in the day,
so burning of incense.
Then thinking about how the target
swings back and forth
just waiting for them to be culled down.
Moving that forward, how can we evolve this into a solution
that's about having a rise in our energy consciousness?
Not just moving to new energy economies,
but also finding this deeper,
spiritual connection to nature
to see if we have the capacity to re-wild ourselves.
Despite being disconnected, despite living
in the cities that we live in,
if there is an honest way in which we understand
that the rhino is a part of who we are,
that the elephant is a part of who we are,
and we cannot live without them in this world with us.
This particular campaign I ran in New York
to raise funding.
It was crowd sourced,
so every time a donor contributed
to this particular campaign,
I would replace a graphically illustrated hand
with an actual human hand.
When I finished raising funding,
I had all the human hands up there,
and this is the power of us coming together.
All of this resulted in me
getting a billboard up in Times Square, on Broadway,
between 46 and 47th, in partnership with loudSource,
and March for Elephants, for a month.
It ran twenty four seven,
and I'm going to play the spot for you.
( gunshot )
( groaning elephant )
( gunshots )
( tapping ) ( elephant groaning )
( applause )
Asher: The acousticscape for this particular animation
was acquired from Elephant Listening Project,
Katy Payne's work.
This was an actual recording
of a poaching incident in Gabon.
You hear the shots being fired in the beginning,
the elephants groaning, succumbing to those shots,
and then you hear the poachers
hacking into their faces,
and the sound of that ... ( tapping )
that's the axe hitting against the bone and also the tusk.
You hear them groaning even after.
That's because they're alive and conscious for this.
You actually see elephants in Africa
stumbling about with completely caved in faces
because they've eaten in with an ax,
and it's still alive.
You have to wait for that elephant to fall
before you can even handle what's happening with it.
It's a pretty grisly trade.
It's really brutal and bloody.
Oh, by the way, that particular campaign
got over 1.5 million views.
That's 1.5 million eyes that were reached,
minds that were reached
and hopefully changed in some way by that campaign.
I did have a lot of people come up to me
and ask me what ivory was
which was a little shocking.
It's the world we live in,
so the need to educate, I cannot underscore that enough.
If you know, transmit that knowledge.
It has to happen now, use social media.
I mean taking a selfie is not just about who we are today,
but who we are has that power.
Becoming that selfie means that you have
a stand in this world, you have a place in this world,
and therefore you need to speak up through it.
Use yourself as a vessel.
Moving forward, it's not just about
the megafauna that is going extinct because of our actions.
It's also the habitat lost that's resulting
in compromised living situations
for all of these incredible animals.
This particular campaign was illustrated in charcoal
because the charcoal trade,
I don't know how many of you know about this,
is pretty rampant in African countries.
They fell over 400,000 acres in just Tanzania
to produce charcoal
because it's the main energy source
for most Tanzanian households.
That's how they light their stoves.
Because most Tanzanian households,
the majority of the population lives off grid.
This basically results in loss of habitat
for the African wildlife.
Cheetahs that are basically
disintegrating before our very own eyes.
These animals need a lot of space.
They need the acres to survive.
I was also in the Serengeti recently
working with Frankfurt Zoological Society very closely.
I got the opportunity to talk to poachers,
from the poachers,
and also install this mural
in the Frankfurt office in Seronera.
The mural actually speaks to how I embed data
into a particular artwork.
Because the composition was not just about
creating something beautiful,
but about how much information
I can embed in a given layout.
In this particular case,
I wanted to show the Serengeti highway coming up.
I wanted to cast a light on demographic momentum
in the upcoming years.
Because if you look at the skyline
that I've illustrated,
you can actually see from 12 million the population
when it peaks at Empire State,
is going to be at 200 million just in Tanzania.
Where is this population going to go?
How is infrastructure going to
develop in the coming years?
How are we going to stop the wild from getting
infringed, fenced in, and fragmented
like it has everywhere else in the world?
These are the questions I wake up to every day.
The reason why I do campaign after campaign,
image after image, day in and day out,
is because I want to change the one thing that I know
will have the most impact in the world around me.
And that's you.
Thank you.
( applause )
( outro music )