Jane Goodall

Small is good: How community-based micro-efforts give the environment reason for hope.

December 16, 2018

So much for digital detox. I return from the tropics — just in time for CoP24 — and find little has changed. Climate change is now a full-on climate emergency, but then if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’ve known that for some time now — long before Mango Circus Freak was elected Leader of the Free World by 63 million low-information voters and climate deniers.

It’s hard to find light in all this darkness — Sir David Attenborough has certainly done his part, even at age 92, with his stirring Planet Earth and Blue Planet films — but as Jane Goodall reminds us in her self-reflective book Reason for Hope, there are always glimmers. We just have to look for them.

And behind every glimmer of light, there’s invariably a small group of committed difference makers who swim against the tide of apathy and willful ignorance, working their hardest to preserve, protect and restore their own small corner of planet Earth.

One such glimmer of hope exists in Mumbai, India — one of the most benighted, overcrowded and polluted metropolises on the entire planet — where, three years ago, activist lawyer Afroz Shah convinced Mumbai residents to clean up pollution-choked Versova Beach. The cynics said he was a fool, a latter-day hippy and would-be cult leader looking to take advantage of gullible locals and convince well-to-do, guilt-laden outsiders to part with their donor money.

He proved the cynics wrong.

Versova Beach remains a success story today, three years later, albeit the success is mixed. Versova is perhaps not the Utopian ideal and semi-permanent breeding colony for sea turtles some hoped for in the campaign’s early days, but despite the return of some garbage — owing to dumping in surrounding creeks around Mumbai that feed into the sea, Versova today is nowhere near the environmental calamity it was in 2015. (Nature has shown over and again that it doesn’t take much for an ecosystem to recover, given enough time and the concerted efforts of ordinary, everyday people to clean up their act, but many activist organizations prefer not to accentuate that fact, fearing — perhaps quite rightly — that misleading information coupled with willful misinterpretation will lead to complacency and the wrong-headed idea that, no matter what we do to the environment, it will always find a way to recover.)

Versova Screen Shot 2018-12-15 at 3.10.51 PM.png

Shah has been in the news again lately, in part because he’s turned his attention to a 17-km stretch of Mumbai’s Mithi River. As the activist who led the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) campaign to remove more than 5.7 million kg. of waste over 90 weeks starting in 2015, he notes that some two million Mumbai residents live along the banks of the Mithi River, choking the river with everything from human waste to everyday household trash.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/mumbai-s-versova-beach-is-dirty-again-here-s-why/story-fYBkgQXhnHTXnXdqRCQ01H.html

Shah has been involved in three previous river rejuvenation projects and has been a featured speaker at NGO environmental conferences in Washington DC, and other cities around the world. He estimates that cleaning even that relatively short stretch of the Mithi River will take five years, but it can be done. Of that, he’s certain.

“The water at all these places is clean,” he told the Times of India this past week. “But (it’s) full of solid waste like plastic, that ultimately floats down to the beaches and oceans.”

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/afroz-shah-it-will-take-us-five-years-to-clean-mithi-river/articleshow/66709174.cms

In an echo of Attenborough’s series-defining caution in Blue Planet II, Shah says plastic is the real problem.

Versova Screen Shot 2018-12-15 at 3.11.10 PM.png

If we can somehow find a way to wean ourselves off plastic, planet Earth might have a chance.

In the meantime, it’s the small, grassroots community organizations working at the local, grassroots level — not the bureaucracy-heavy NGO multinationals with their high media profiles and slick advertising campaigns — that seem to be making the most difference. Micro is often better than macro, where environmental programs are concerned. It’s those small, community organized efforts that, time and time again, provide tiny glimmers of light that give the wild world reason for hope.

Reasons to revisit Jane Goodall’s ‘Reason for Hope’ on International Book Lovers Day.

August 09, 2018

The Jane Goodall Institute shared a tweet early this morning, on Book Lovers Day, asking followers to name their favourite Goodall book.

The colouring book Me . . . Jane, an early primer for her students’ Roots and Shoots program, was always going to prove popular with children.

In the troubled times in which we find ourselves, though, it was always likely to be her 1999 memoir Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey that was going to jump to the fore. Not so much a straight biography as an account of a spiritual epiphany, Reason for Hope is both an appeal to our better natures and shared words of advice about how anyone and everyone can find a reason to hope.

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The ground-breaking — if controversial — primatologist whose pioneering work with the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream, Tanzania in the early 1960s changed the way we look at our closest biological relatives has always been one to swim against the tide of mainstream thinking. Where many choose to see only darkness and destruction, Goodall has always preferred to find that glimmer of light at the end of a long, seemingly dark tunnel, however faint that light may be.

In Reason for Hope — a good book to revisit on International Book Lovers Day — and through her Institute (janegoodall.org), and throughout her periodic lecture tours around the world, she hits the same grace notes, over and over again.

Perhaps, one day, we’ll figure them out on our own.

Goodall’s words:

The Human Brain.

“We have at last begun to understand and face up to the problems that threaten us and the survival of life on Earth as we know it. Surely we can use our problem-solving abilities, our brains, to find ways to live in harmony with nature. Many companies have begun ‘greening’ their operations, and millions of people worldwide are beginning to realize that each of us has a responsibility to the environment and our descendants. Everywhere I go, I see people making wiser choices, and more responsible ones."

The Indomitable Human Spirit.

"My second reason for hope lies in the indomitable nature of the human spirit. There are so many people who have dreamed seemingly unattainable dreams and, because they never gave up, achieved their goals against all the odds, or blazed a path along which others could follow. The [2016] presidential election in the U.S. (was) one example. As I travel around the world I meet so many incredible and amazing human beings. They inspire me. They inspire those around them."

The Resilience of Nature.

"My third reason for hope is the incredible resilience of nature. I have visited Nagasaki, site of the second atomic bomb that ended World War II. Scientists had predicted that nothing could grow there for at least 30 years. But, amazingly, greenery grew very quickly. One sapling actually managed to survive the bombing, and today it is a large tree, with great cracks and fissures, all black inside; but that tree still produces leaves. I carry one of those leaves with me as a powerful symbol of hope. I have seen such renewals time and again, including animal species brought back from the brink of extinction."

The Determination of Today’s Young People.

"My final reason for hope lies in the tremendous energy, enthusiasm and commitment of young people around the world. As they find out about the environmental and social problems that are now part of their heritage, they want to right the wrongs. Of course they do -- they have a vested interest in this, for it will be their world tomorrow. They will be moving into leadership positions, into the workforce, becoming parents themselves. Young people, when informed and empowered, when they realize that what they do truly makes a difference, can indeed change the world. We should never underestimate the power of determined young people.

"I meet many young people with shining eyes who want to tell Dr. Jane what they've been doing, how they are making a difference in their communities. Whether it's something simple like recycling or collecting trash, something that requires a lot of effort, like restoring a wetland or a prairie, or whether it's raising money for the local dog shelter, they are a continual source of inspiration.

“My greatest reason for hope is the spirit and determination of young people, once they know what the problems are and have the tools to take action.

"So let’s move forward in this new millennium with hope, for without it all we can do is eat and drink the last of our resources as we watch our planet slowly die. Let’s have faith in ourselves, in our intellect, in our staunch spirit and in our young people. And let’s do the work that needs to be done, with love and compassion."

Goodall’s published works span six decades, from My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees (1969) through In the Shadow of Man (1971) to, more recently, Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink (2009) and Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants (2013).

Her books have been published in 48 languages,.

It’s Reason for Hope, though, which is most pertinent today, on Book Lovers Day, in the second year of Our Lord, Trumplandia.

“Each one of us matters,” Goodall wrote in Reason for Hope. “(Each one of us) has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us. . . .

“It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behaviour.

“We have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behaviour of our own human species. . . . Environmental responsibility – for if there is no God, then, obviously, it is up to us to put things right.”

Jane Goodall and ‘The Wild Immersion’ — a potential watershed moment for wildlife film-making.

May 26, 2018

Have you ever experienced the roar of a jaguar standing in front of you with nothing restraining him?

“The Wild Immersion” aims to make that not just possible but a virtual reality.

With the blessing of Dame Jane Goodall, French film-maker Raphaël Aupy and a small team of dedicated film professionals asked that question just last week of the assembled throngs at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, along with a challenge to, and there’s no subtle way to put this, “Trade the sunglasses for VR helmets.”

Film is one thing; the VR experience quite another. Goodall is determined to not only make younger people see and hear what’s left of our wild world, but experience it and feel it, in their bones and in their soul, as if they were there, in person.

First, the bare bones behind the project. This is the boring part. The explanation of what it is. Why it matters, why you should care — and why Goodall is injecting so much of her personal passion into the project — comes after this.

Simply put, The Wild Immersion is a virtual-reality entertainment production company whose stated aim is to produce, recreate and present immersive experiences in wild, natural surroundings, whether it’s staring up from a blade of grass at a pride of prowling lions or soaring through an African sky while flying with a flock of flamingoes, looking down on the pristine waters of a primordial lake not far from the volcanic highlands where humankind was born.

Goodall, the Bournemouth, UK-born primatologist, anthropologist, ethicist, author, behavioural scientist, mother and human being who founded the Jane Goodall Institute, has been spreading the word of conservation for half a century now, in the trail of her pioneering studies of chimpanzee behaviour at Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park in Central Africa’s “Great Lakes” region.

In 2007, when asked why, if chimpanzees are so much like us, why are they endangered, she famously replied,

“Well, in some ways, we’re not successful at all. We’re destroying our home. That’s not a bit successful.”

And then there was this admission, a few years before that,

when asked by the New York Times’ Tamar Lewin why she had exchanged her calling as a behavioural scientist to that of an environmental activist:

“I feel a desperation to make people see what we are doing to the environment, what a mess we are making of our world. At this point, the more people I reach, the more I accomplish . . . I do miss Gombe and my wonderful years in the forest. But if I were to go back to that, I wouldn’t feel I was doing what I should be doing.

“If you look into their [chimpanzees’] minds, you know you’re looking into a thinking mind. They teach us that we are not the only beings with personalities, minds capable of rational thought, altruism and a sense of humour. That leads to new respect for other animals, respect for the environment and respect for all life.”

The first three 12-minute films in the Wild Immersion film series — depicting the African savannah, underwater and polar habitats — were unveiled at Cannes, but that’s just the beginning.

Future screenings — or immersions, if you will — are planned for China, the U.S. and across Europe. There are plans, too, to introduce The Wild Immersion in schools through headset-maker Lenovo’s “VR Classroom” project, via “virtual field trips.” The Wild Immersion project is designed to raise money for nature reserves — that’s the conservation part — based on 80 minutes of VR footage captured by Aupy and his team of technicians following 120 days of filming on five continents.

In an interview with The Guardian’s Steve Rose earlier this week, Goodall, 84, explained why she refuses to give up in the face of what seems like impossible odds.

“There was one time, years ago, when [David Attenborough] was going to give up. When I talked to him, he was totally depressed and feeling hopeless. Then something happened and he dived back in.”

That something, it seems, was Jane Goodall.

“I (just) did my usual spiel,” Goodall told The Guardian. “‘We can’t give up.’”

Most ordinary people can be forgiven for thinking just that, Goodall said, but there always room for hope. That’s one reason — one reason only — why she titled her 1999 book Reason for Hope.

“Most ordinary people . . . feel, ‘What can I do to help?’ So they do nothing. My life mission is to give people hope. Because, without hope, you don’t bother. Being abusive is not going to get you anyway. You need to reach the heart. Once you’ve reached the heart, you’ve got somebody for good.”

Based on the early evidence — and just take a gander at the images below, if you doubt that — The Wild Immersion is going to touch a great many hearts, possibly more than any two-dimensional film or TV program can hope to do.

http://www.thewildimmersion.com

Ivory ban: World’s largest exporter of legal ivory is shutting down the trade.

October 06, 2017

Finally. The UK government has bowed to pressure from wildlife campaigners and will ban the sale of ivory, regardless of its age.

At least, that was the word this past Friday, after acting UK environment secretary Michael Gove — of all people — put forward a ban on the sales of all items carved from ivory, including those carved before 1947.

That’s key because, while the international trade in ivory had been illegal since 1990, a loophole in UK law permitted trade in ivory “antiques,” loosely defined as an ivory item carved before 1947. A further loophole — a loophole inside the loophole, if you will — permitted ivory “worked before 1990,” provided those items were accompanied by government certificates.

Given that government corruption is a driving force behind the illegal wildlife trade in many of the developing countries where elephants are trafficked for their tusks by international crime syndicates, the UK loophole was the very definition of hypocrisy. Why should UK government officials be allowed to sign off on supposedly “antique” ivory, but not government officials in, say, Tanzania or Namibia?

The UK is, or rather was, the world’s largest exporter of legal ivory — I did not know that until this past week — and cutting off the trade will in theory help slow down the illegal trade in ivory by international crime syndicates.

Despite recent wins by wildlife campaigners — China and the U.S. have both resolved to scale back trade in ivory, if not eliminate it entirely — poaching continues to be a serious problem. More than 50 elephants are killed by poachers every day. A 2016 elephant census across Africa, funded in part by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, showed that the continent lost a third of its remaining wild elephant in just the 10 years prior to 2016.

If anything, poaching has only increased over the past year, exacerbated by a sudden, unwelcome surge in the poaching of rhinos for their horns. Considering the gestation period for an elephant is two years, and elephants only give birth to one baby at a time, it doesn’t take an advanced degree in mathematics to see how see where an already dwindling population of wild elephants could be heading.

The ruling Conservative government was believed to be disinterested in widening the UK ban; the Tories removed a pledge on ivory from their 2017 election manifesto in June, even though it had been included in the party’s 2015 election manifesto.

Celebrity campaigners from Prince William to Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking and Ricky Gervais mounted a vocal protest that found favour with ordinary, everyday voters fed up with what they perceive to be wanton greed — the rich getting richer — with utter disregard for the wellbeing of the planet.

Of course, bans are one thing; discouraging demand and eliminating the market entirely is another.

“The unprecedented crisis we face – with Africa’s natural heritage being destroyed and communities put at risk due to poaching by illegal armed gangs – will only stop when people stop buying ivory,” Stop Ivory’s John Stephenson told the media Friday.

Even so, Stephenson said he was gratified by the government’s “important step,” and looks forward to seeing the ban implemented and enforced “without delay.”

Other NGOs caution that the road ahead is not entirely clear, either for elephants or any other endangered animals trafficked for profit.

World Wildlife Fund CEO Tanya Steele warned that the scale of the problem is vast, and promises need to be back up with action.

“The illegal trade involving organized criminals is a global problem requiring global solutions,” Steele told reporters. “To end it anywhere means ending it everywhere. This is about more than banning ivory sales in one country. It means working with leaders and communities around the world, particularly in China and Southeast Asia.”

While China has appeared to have turned a corner, for example, and to a lesser extent Vietnam, Laos has suddenly become the new frontier in the wild west of illegal wildlife trafficking.

In the meantime, carefully staged photo ops in developing countries like Kenya — twice in four years, now — have seen governments burn stockpiles of elephant tusks, to show the world that they value their remaining living elephants, and the tourist revenue they bring, over selling ivory on the black market and getting rich at the expense of future generations.

The ivory burns, dismissed by some as a cheap publicity gimmick — even though, given the value of the ivory involved, they can hardly be said to have been inexpensive — clearly had an effect on public opinion in the media-savvy West.

The UK Tory government didn’t widen the ivory ban because they wanted to, but because ordinary, everyday people shamed them into doing it, and not just because of the Duke of Cambridge and Stephen Hawking.

Yes, the UK is just one country, but wins in wildlife conservation have to be taken as they come, day by day, and at a time.

A year of living dangerously for nature’s defenders

September 07, 2017

Even before last month’s murder by unknown gunmen of leading elephant conservationist Wayne Lotter in Dar es Salaam. Tanzania — which ironically enough translates from the Swahili as “Place of Peace” — the world has become a more dangerous place for nature and the people trying to protect it.

In just the past year, according to the non-governmental organization Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers, or ALERT, more than 200 conservations and wildlife workers from some 24 countries were killed while confronting environmentally destructive development projects. Mining, logging, illegal farming and wildlife poaching are mainly to blame, though old-fashioned human greed is never too far away.

In Lotter’s case, his lifelong campaign to protect wild elephants and expose the illegal ivory trade, made him a target. Unlike some of the more prominent wildlife campaigners, he preferred to stay in the shadows, away from the media spotlight — a silent hero. He earned a hard-won reputation as a pragmatist eager to work with local communities in alleviating poverty and show through example the wisdom of conservation over making a fast buck from ivory poaching. He was never going to become a household name. Until now, that is.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Wayne’s anti-poaching efforts made a big difference in the fight to save Tanzania’s elephants from the illegal ivory trade,” Jane Goodall said, in a public tribute. “His courage in the face of personal threats and his determination to keep on fighting has inspired many, and encouraged them to keep on fighting for wildlife. If this cowardly act was an effort to bring his work to an end, it will fail.”

Famed elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who played a prominent role in writer Peter Matthiessen’s 1960’s classic The Tree Where Man Was Born, credited Lotter with exposing corruption in the highest levels of power in Tanzania.

Lotter made enemies in high places, wealthy people who benefitted for decades from the poaching of illegal ivory in Tanzania. The East African country is home along with Botswana to Africa’s largest surviving population of wild elephants.

“He pursued justice for wildlife with little apparent concern for his own life,” Douglas-Hamilton said. “His loss is a grave blow to the defence of the living planet.”

Lotter, the South African-born co-founder and director of the Tanzania-based, somewhat prosaically named Protected Area Management Solutions (PAMS) Foundation, was one of the subjects of the just-released Netflix documentary The Ivory Game, produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. He was 51. He leaves behind a wife and two young daughters.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/17/leading-elephant-conservationist-ivory-shot-dead-in-tanzania#img-1

East Africa is not the only region in the world beset by violence against conservationists and wildlife workers, despite ongoing armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), home of one of the last remaining strongholds of the critically endangered mountain gorilla.

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is the most dangerous place to be a conservationist, with 49 deaths in 2016 alone, according to ALERT. Land theft by wealthy cattle ranchers and speculators is driving the violence there, as evidenced by the 2005 murder of Dorothy Stang, an American-born Catholic nun and active campaigner for indigenous rights. The Amazon is currently under siege from government efforts in Brazil to weaken environmental laws and reduce the size of protected areas, while at the same time looking away from illegal land-grabs.

Despite the murder of Lotter and other, less well-known wildlife campaigners, all is not lost.

In an impassioned call to action, ALERT director William Laurance urged followers not to lose hope, and cites several “win-wins” that suggest the battle to save the planet is far from over.

©Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers (ALERT)

Campaigns to slow down and in some cases stop altogether the building of dams, roads and highways through ecologically sensitive hot spots in Sumatra, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and even Tanzania’s own Serengeti National Park have proven surprisingly effective.

The fight is hard, but the battle is not over yet.

http://alert-conservation.org/issues-research-highlights/2016/6/28/is-nature-conservation-hopeless?rq=good%20news

http://alert-conservation.org/

©Charlie Hamilton James/National Geographic

Sir David Attenborough on the reason for hope.

August 27, 2017

He’s been a voice in the wilderness — literally — for six decades.

So it should have been a surprise to no one, detractors and supporters alike, that when David Attenborough faced the room at last weekend’s Edinburgh International Television Festival, he would strike a discordant note.

There is reason for hope, Attenborough told a room more used to hearing how humankind has already passed the the turning point of global destruction.

Planet Earth has never faced so many crises, everything from pollution and overpopulation to wholesale global climate change and the imminent threat of a new mass extinction — which will be planet’s sixth, if the scientists are to be believed.

So it was a shock for many environmentalists to hear the man who has chronicled the lives of Earth’s most remarkable creatures for the better part of a century to sound a note of optimism.

Nearly 20 years ago, primatologist Jane Goodall wrote the book Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, an autobiographical odyssey that covered much of the same emotional terrain. Goodall argued in Reason for Hope that young people are more attuned to the natural world than their forebears, and will fight hard to preserve what remains of the natural world.

Attenborough’s argument is much the same — the future of planet Earth lies with its young people, who have the most to lose from a ruined environment — but given how much the planet’s ecosystems have suffered in just the past two decades, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Attenborough is knowingly putting a positive spin on an otherwise hopeless situation. No one wants top fight a battle that’s already lost, after all, and environmental news in 2017is a seemingly relentless parade of horror stories.

Attenborough, 91, told the Edinburgh Festival that he’s detected a “worldwide shift” — his words — in attitudes toward conservation, with voters and leaders in previously skeptical nations seeing the light of day.

The current state of politics in the U.S. is a temporary aberration, he insisted, and flies in the face of what’s happening across Europe, Asia, and Latin and South America. Attenborough likened the emerging consensus in favour of protecting what’s left of the natural world, to the awakening of anti-communist sentiment in eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That consensus, he argued, was reflected in last year’s Paris deal on greenhouse gases. As of now, 195 countries have signed the Paris accord; 160 of those countries have taken the extra step of ratifying the agreement.

The U.S. has signalled its intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but anything the U.S. does or does not do is outweighed by signatories like China, India, Brazil, Russia, Canada, Germany and other members of the G20, as well as countless emerging nations around the world.

Attenborough returns to TV screens this fall with Blue Planet II, which those who’ve seen it say will do forBlue Planet, the acclaimed program Attenborough made in 2001, what Planet Earth II did for the originalPlanet Earth.

Programs such as Planet Earth, The Blue Planet, Frozen Planet and Life on Earth have played a crucial role in raising public awareness, Attenborough told the room, without a hint of self-aggrandizement.

Optimism doesn’t mean the world’s environmental problems are solved, Attenborough noted. Changing attitudes is a good start, though.

Attenborough’s detractors note that words come easily, and that the world’s largest polluters — the U.S., China, India and Russia — have done little in terms of concrete action to reduce greenhouse gases and our over-reliance on fossil fuel, not to mention the growing stress on the world’s remaining rivers, forests, lakes and oceans. Some ecologists argue that by 2050 — within 35 years — the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans will outweigh the weight of fish. Human beings produce some 500 billion plastic bags and half a trillion plastic bottles each year, some argue, most of which will end up in a landfill and take 400 years to biodegrade.

Coupled with steadily rising population growth — which Attenborough himself has campaigned against — the future looks bleak.

That’s why this may be as good a place as any to end with Attenborough’s own words. (A video link to the full interview follows below.)

There are indeed signs of hope, Attenborough insisted, much as Jane Goodall argued 20 years ago.

As for whether the turning point has already been crossed, that is something only time itself can judge.

“I spend a lot of time wringing my hands and saying how dreadful it is, that this forest has been obliterated and that sea has been polluted, and whatever,” Attenborough told his audience in Edinburgh. “But there are signs of hope. It’s almost like the way suddenly — to me at any rate — the knocking-over of the Berlin Wall was a surprise. I had no idea that there was this (political) build-up and that suddenly it was going to be the end of an era, politically.

“I have a sense that worldwide — certainly in Europe and certainly China, which we would never have thought before — people are concerned about this. And perhaps, if I may say this, there are people in America, parté Mr. Trump, who don’t accept that human beings can do no wrong and you can simply exterminate the wilderness. There are people who care about the wilderness, in the United States.

“There has been a worldwide shift, I think, amongst people in general about the concern that there should be for the natural world. I am encouraged more than I have been for quite some time.”

Attenborough has no doubt about the effect natural-history programming such as Planet Earth and Blue Planet have had on popular opinion — not just on BBC in the UK, but globally, around the entire world.

“We have to be careful that not every program that we put out is grinding an axe. We have to also remember that there is joy and delight and beauty and pleasure and excitement in the natural world. This is our bread-and-butter. That’s what it’s about.

“If there was no need to talk about conservation, the happier I would be. We could just relish (the natural world) and enjoy it. But that isn’t the case. If we are responsible, we have to take on this responsibility.”

When nature docs go wild.

March 14, 2017

Scan YouTube for highlights of Planet Earth II, now nearing the end of its North American debut, and one can’t help but be struck by how many compilation fan videos are of the blood-’n-claws variety. If it bleeds, it leads, seems to be the thinking. And nothing sells like sex and violence. (No, I won’t insert a video link here; I won’t glorify compilation violence videos by making them easier to access than they already are. Suffice it to say that anyYouTube video titled “Huge jaguar vs. a caiman crocodile (insane fight)” — in full caps, no less — tells you all you need to know.)

The bigger picture is that, with more people curious about nature every day but with little means to actually experience nature for themselves, wildlife filmmaking, nature documentaries and conservation photography have never been more meaningful, or influential to popular opinion.

Ethics in nature filmmaking are more topical now than at any point in the history of television and film, as the world’s few remaining green spots are shrinking at an ever-increasing pace.

This was brought into sharp relief recently by environmental-film producer Chris Palmer’s controversial book Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom.

I say inspired in part because, like many viewers of Planet Earth, my early life was informed by a steady diet of nature films, from big-screen theatricals like Born Free, which I first saw when I was seven, to Disney nature docs like Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar and King of the Grizzlies.

What we see at a young age informs us in our later years and shapes our opinions and outlooks on the world. Palmer’s book, as Jane Goodall writes in her introduction, is important and much-needed. It won’t change any preconceived notions about climate change, habitat loss or the increasingly evident man-made mass extinction, but it does raise meaningful questions about how these films are made, the motivations and ethics involved, and what the filmmakers’ responsibilities are to the viewer.

Palmer, director of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University, was executive producer of the 2000 Oscar-nominated IMAX documentary Dolphins, so he knows something of what he speaks.

Without doubt, nature films have helped raise awareness of the wonders of the natural world and the need for conservation. How are these films made, though? Can we always believe everything the narrator tells us? Was that stunning sequence we just saw of a polar bear giving birth filmed in the wild, as implied in the film, or will telling viewers that it was actually filmed in a zoo in Germany make them less engaged and possibly less willing to help a conservation cause? Is it ethical to stage a fight between a leopard and a terrified baboon, in order to get a dramatic cover story for Life magazine, during Life’s heyday? (This actually happened.)

To what extent are animals otherwise living in the wild disturbed in their day-to-day activities during the making of a film?

Is it right to manipulate footage while editing, so that it appears two animals are interacting when in fact they were filmed on separate occasions in separate locations?

Where does artistic freedom and the need to tell a good story meet the obligation to tell the truth when making a documentary?

How much should the viewer be told, anyway? Disney’s early nature films were designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. They were made for children, but directed in such a way that they would appeal to parents, too — charming enough for kids to enjoy, but never boring or too tedious for the adults in the family.

That was the idea, anyway. Everyone likes a good story, and many of us like to watch a good fight. The reality is those early nature films had about as much in common with David Attenborough’s pioneering BBC documentaries as Bambi had to Racing Extinction.

Ethical questions surrounding nature filmmaking will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, of course, in the same way many conservation groups can’t even agree on the seemingly clearcut question of whether the legal sale of ivory stockpiles will help or hurt elephant conservation in the wild.

As Goodall writes in her introduction to Shooting in the Wild, though, it’s high time those questions were asked, and discussed openly.

“We owe this to the animals themselves,” Goodall says, “to the filmmakers who practice truly ethical behaviour, and to the viewing public.”

Amen to that.

Over the next several weeks and months, I hope to tackle some of these issues here. In depth.

How satellite technology is helping save the chimpanzee.

February 02, 2017

Fewer than 350,000 chimpanzees remain in the wild, down sharply from the two million believed to have roamed the rainforests of central Africa only a century ago.

These are estimates only, of course, but one doesn’t need a degree in earth science — or statistics — to know that habitat loss, illegal logging and the bushmeat trade are a continuing threat to one of humankind’s closest genetic relatives.

©Michael "Nick" Nichols for National Geographic

What is less known — until now — is that a recent, unique collaboration between the Jane Goodall Institute and NASA is boosting knowledge of what’s happening and, more importantly, how and where it’s happening.

Behavioural scientists with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other groups have being doing a credible job of tracking known family groups of chimpanzees, ever since Jane Goodall made her first visit to Tanzania’s Gombe region in 1960. Conservationists have mapped both chimpanzees’ territories — a family group’s immediate neighbhourhood — and their home ranges, the area chimpanzees roam outside their territories in their search for food, potential mates and other family groups.

In orbit, meanwhile, NASA has recorded the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute changes to the earth’s surface for the past 44 years. Some of the most technologically advanced satellites have been placed in orbit in just the past two years.

Until recently, conservation groups and NASA worked at cross purproses. Information was gathered, but not shared. Thanks to the Goodall Institute, a new program of cooperation now makes it possible for primate researchers to monitor the environmental effects of habitat loss on individual family groups on a day-by-day basis.

©NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr

This is important to chimpanzees’ future survival in the wild because behavioural scientists can now predict with a degree of certainty which family groups will be affected by proposed development projects, and how. The shared information can also be used as evidence in court cases brought against illegal loggers and rogue mining operations.

The bad news is that habitat loss is visible from space. The good news is that, by knowing how, when and where and environmental destruction is taking place, law-enforcement agencies and regulators now have real, tangible information on which to act.

The Landsat series of satellites, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has been providing a continuous record of earth’s land use for more than four decades now. Images taken from orbit have been made available cost-free to the public: the Landsat program is a truly democratic, people-driven program.

“NASA satellite data helps us understand what it means to be a chimp by overlaying distribution of the habitat with chimpanzee behaviuor and ranging data," Lilian Pintea, vice-president of conservation science for the Goodall Institute, said in a statement for the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center.

Chimpanzees once lived in an uninterrupted belt of woodland rain forests from Lake Tanganyika westward through Uganda and the Congo Basin.

In the 1970s, little more than a decade after Goodall first arrived in the region, the forest started to be cut down.

Increased population growth, driven in part by rural poverty, has exacerbated forest clearing for farmland and charcoal production.

The Goodall Institute is using the Landsat images to convince villagers in the area that conservation is in their best interests.

Goodall, now in her 80s, is still active with her namesake institute, though her primary role is now focused on education, fundraising and lecture tours around the world. She still tries to return to Gombe once a year, though. She’s noticed a direct effect the Landsat program has had on local opinion.

“It was exciting to see the impact of these images on the villagers,” Goodall said in a statement for the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center.

Villagers could identify landmarks and sacred places in the satellite imagery, she added.

“It was like a piece of reality dropped magically from the sky.”

If the chimpanzee is to be saved in the wild, it will require concerted efforts on the ground, not just from space.

For now, though, the satellite images are proving to be a game changer for improving local conservation efforts.

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen