Sir David Attenborough

Finding light in the darkness: An elephants’ tale for Christmas.

December 24, 2018

Christmas. An uncertain ending to a bleak year. And, to those who pay attention to such things, signs of more bleakness to come. Hurricanes, cyclones. Droughts, forest fires. Dying oceans. Shrinking glaciers, melting polar ice caps. A climate emergency in the present, and a looming mass extinction in the future. Feckless leadership. Unquestioning followers. In the kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King.

Christmas is traditionally a time of hope and spiritual renewal, regardless of one’s social, political and religious affiliations, but this Christmas seems empty somehow — a throwback to Dickensian times, perhaps, this time with the added distraction of frenzied technology and the ever-present threat of Big Brother, looming over us, driven and enflamed by social media.

And yet.

There are still good, kind people out there. Science and technology is still capable of producing surprises. And miracles. There have been scientific advances in the past year that take the breath away.

Earlier this month, a 15-year-old, Greta Thunberg of Sweden, and a 92-year-old, Sir David Attenborough, stood and delivered before an international conference on climate change, and the world listened.

NASA landed a space probe on a predetermined, precise spot on the red planet, Mars, after a journey that lasted seven months, over 300 million miles.

The true wonder, which would’ve been unthinkable just a few years ago, was that NASA’s InSight probe beamed pictures from a neighbouring planet, in real time, in such a way that you could watch them on a screen the size of your hand, on your phone.

And in an early Christmas present for anyone who cares about elephants and the health of the world’s remaining wild creatures, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the African country of Zambia, together with the conservation NGO Elephant Connection Research Project ( ECR), provided long-awaited proof of the viability of “wildlife corridors” that connect far-flung populations of wild animals across national, political boundaries. Wildlife corridors for animals such as elephants are essential for the revitalization of threatened and endangered species.

In the case of the Zambia elephant, the pleasure lies in the details. An elephant bull was fitted with a remote tracking collar in 2017. In the past year, he was shown to have walked a long, circuitous route from his original home in in Zambia’s Sioma Ngwezi National Park to neighbouring Kafue National Park, a distance of 390 kilometres, in 14 days, accompanied by six other elephants, through another country.

In moving to Kafue from Sioma Ngwezi through the broader Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA), this elephant and his companions demonstrated that restless tuskers wander in and out of neighbouring countries whenever the mood suits them.

Elephants have been known to wander back and forth between Namibia, Zambia, Angola, Botswana and even neighbouring Zimbabwe and South Africa. The regional transfrontier park system, as represented by the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, recognizes the right of wild animals to travel across national boundaries in protected areas, regardless of any political tensions that may exist between countries. The transfrontier park system was originally proposed in part, co-developed, established and enforced by one of the region’s great elder statesmen. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. His name was Nelson Mandela.

Information and knowledge are vital not just to existing wildlife populations, but for future populations as well. WWF Zambia’s communications officer, Nchimunya Kasongo, noted in a press statement that this isn’t just about elephants. Information gleaned from the satellite-collaring of elephants in Zambia — 15 collared to date — is crucial to understanding the right and wrong way to use land in such a way that subsistence farmers won’t be terrorized by seven-ton elephants, and the elephants in turn won’t be shot by angry farmers. It’s all about lessening the chances for human-wildlife conflict.

The future of the world’s large endangered wild animals, not just elephants but also rhinos, lions, gorillas, jaguars and polar bears wildlife is not only tied to climate change and habitat loss but also making sure the animals who call the wilderness home and the people who live there don’t come into conflict.

Why does this matter? We’ve trashed the planet in recent decades, in thrall to the demands a miserable, insecure society, even as the language of environmental protest has changed. A new, younger generation is involved, and they are engaged in ways we never were. Many of them know, even if we have forgotten, that economics and the environment are inextricably interwoven, in the same way an elephant from Kafue, Zambia is connected to another elephant from Khaudom National Park in Namibia.

Here’s one final thought to leave you with, on this Christmas Day 2018, this one brought to you by Natalie Bennett, former leader of the Green party in Wales and England, writing in The Guardian:

“History is not pre-written, or destined to repeat itself. Offering the hope that with political, economic, social, educational and environmental transformation we can build a society that works for the common good, within the physical limits of this one fragile planet, is politically essential. The politics of the far right is built on fear and we must not feed that.

“Business as usual isn’t an option. But then that is one thing that certainly is not going to happen. That’s good news, for our planet and for its people.”

Merry Christmas, good people of Planet Earth.

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

‘The World’s Most Wanted Animal’ eye-opening, heart-rending — and urgent.

May 20, 2018

Cute — but doomed. That, at least, was the gist of a cranky review in The Independent of the BBC Two TV special Pangolins: The World’s Most Animal last week. “I’m not sure how many more wildlife documentaries along the lines of World’s Most Wanted I can cope with,” The Independent’s Sean O’Grady wrote, no doubt keeping in tune with his publication’s stated penchant for, erm, independent thinking.

“This sub-genre conforms to a template roughly as follows,” O’Grady continued: “Sir David Attenborough narrates; attention is focused on an endearing critically endangered creature; but also on some plucky humans trying to save them from extinction; heart-rending scenes of the human conservationist encountering the bagged-up corpses of their smuggled favourite creature at some airport terminal, usually in East Asia; plus, at the end, some scant hope represented by the work of the hopelessly underfunded endangered species reserve.”

But wait, there’s more.

“I was sort of ready for the pangolin to get the usual moving treatment, and sympathetically so, but, as I say, it’s just so overwhelmingly depressing and the battle to save these creatures so plainly unwinnable I feel like just letting the poachers get on with it and save us all more upset.”

Alrighty, then! Plainly, this is not the kind of program where a grinning, exquisitely coifed Jim Carrey is going to pop up as Ace Ventura, animal detective, pulling Courteney Cox, Sean Young and former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino in tow behind him. (For the record, it’s worth noting that the movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective received “generally unfavourable reviews” from the critics when it was released in theatres in midwinter in 1994; made for $15 million, it went on to gross $107 million worldwide, proving that, while critics talk a good game, their opinion is often worthless.)

This is instructive because Pangolins: The Most Wanted Animal gets its North American debut this week, Wednesday on PBS, as the season finale of Nature — now in its, and I’m not making this up, 36th season. Nature’s 500-plus episodes puts it in the same league as The Simpsons, where longevity is concerned. Nature bowed in 1982; The Simpsons bowed in 1989. Pangolins may be doomed, but if they are, they’re not about to pass by unnoticed.

And when a writer for The Independent ends by saying, “Sorry, pangolins, elephants, rhinos, orang-utans, gorillas, pandas, sea cows, sh=now leopards, butterflies and bees, but I reckon you’ve all had it,” it’s hard to know whether he’s being deliberately facetious or whether he’s plugging for a leading role in the new Lars Von Trier movie.

“We’ll miss you, though,” O’Grady admits, “if only for all the nice footage.”

Alrighty, then! Why not give up altogether — just stand idly by while pangolins and everything else marches off planet Earth into oblivion, shortly to be followed by the 91-year-old Attenborough and all hopes of a future, greener, better world.

Despite the crabby review in the UK Independent, The World’s Most Wanted Animal struck a chord with viewers across Britain. As the reaction to Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II showed, natural, history programs do better with a UK TV audience than they do in the US and Canada, but that’s not to say they don’t have an effect.

Anyone who reads this space already knows about Maria Diekmann’s Rare and Endangered Species Trust (REST, website www.restnamibia.org) and the crisis facing pangolins, scaly anteaters, the world’s only scaly mammal, who are now being trafficked at a faster rate than elephants, rhinos and tigers combined, for quasi-medicinal use in China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, and because their scales

Pangolins are often labelled, “the most endangered animal you’ve never heard of,” but — crabby reviews in The Independent aside — that’s exactly why programs like The World’s Most Wanted Animal serve a purpose, quite apart from filling empty hours on BBC Two and PBS’s prime-time schedules.

Years ago, while at a Television Critics Association get-together in Pasadena, Calif., I asked long-time Nature executive-producer Fred Kaufman what he looks for in a Nature documentary, considering his program has been a staple for public broadcasting in the US for nearly four decades now.

Kaufman replied that he’s always looking for new stories, stories that haven’t been told before — or, if they have been told, told in a new way. The World’s Most Wanted Animal fills the bill in both respects.

The crisis facing the world’s endangered animals — climate scientists and wildlife biologists are now talking about our present time as being the latest and potentially most serious in a series of mass extinctions — is an old, all-too-familiar story, but Most Wanted throws a new spin on it, despite The Independent’s gripe about it following a time-tested template of endearing, critically endangered animals and plucky humans, voiced-over by the sonorous tones of the great Sir David Attenborough.

A quick look at REST’s Facebook page, in the hours and days after The World’s Most Wanted Animal aired in the UK,

shows that, in actual fact, many people don’t know what a pangolin is — or at least they didn’t, until they watched the program.

Now you know.

Pangolins: The World's Most Wanted Animal premieres in the the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, May 23, on PBS Nature at 8E/7C.

Blue Planet II: Family programming in a way you didn’t expect.

January 19, 2018

Finally. The curtain rises Saturday on Planet Earth: Blue Planet II, on BBC America and four of its AMC Networks sibling channels.

By now, followers of Sir David Attenborough’s stirring forays into the natural world know what to expect: haunting images, memorable moments and a gentle, almost childlike appreciation of nature’s wonders.

Blue Planet II has already aired in the UK — to record-setting ratings and widespread critical acclaim, as old and cliché-ridden as that may sound — and the wait here is finally over. That wait has been excruciating at times, not least for AMC and BBC America programming executives who could be forgiven for wondering if one of the year’s most talked-about global TV spectacles had somehow passed them by. It’s never a good idea to be last out of the gate when the stakes are so high. And the stakes in Blue Planet II could not be higher.

For this one is different.

Yes, all of Planet Earth’s signature marks are there. It’s joyous and harrowing in equal measure. It’s heart-lifting and heartbreaking by turns. It’s eye-filling in a way TV rarely is, and yet there it is: There is enough visual spectacle in Blue Planet II to put anything on the big screen to shame. Hans Zimmer’s music — while criticized by some for being loud and overbearing at times — tells its own story of power and majesty. There are moments that will make you laugh; there are moments that will fill you with wonder.

The world’s oceans play a vital role in the health and future of our planet Earth, and Blue Planet II pulls back the veil on some timeless mysteries that speak to the very heart of what it means to be alive and living on this world, in the same way Planet Earth and Planet Earth II lifted the spirits of even the most jaded city dweller.

Blue Planet II is unique, though, because it has already inspired change in the real world, outside TV. It’s not often a TV program can be said to change the planet, but there are signs Blue Planet II has already done just that. It seems strange to say this now, before a single minute has been broadcast in North America, but Blue Planet II has started a social movement.

The UK — ahead of the US environmentally in some ways, but profoundly behind in others — is considering new, onerous restrictions on the use of plastic, in everything from bottled water to supermarket grocery bags. Plastic bags are now banned in a growing number of countries around the world, including Kenya and Rwanda. Tourists’ bags are being opened at airports there, not for drugs or contraband but for plastic bags.

Plastic is the new enemy, for environmentalists, marine conservationists and anyone who cares about the future of the planet’s oceans. Plastic is forever. It doesn’t decompose over time, at least not in any time we care to measure. Plastic waste is dumped at sea by the ton — out of sight, out of mind — where it sinks to the bottom, breaks up, fragments and makes its way into the entire food chain. Plastic residue is everywhere, from the ocean surface, where it floats in a congealed mass, to the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. There are now even traces of plastic in tap-water — the water you drink — and there’s evidence to suggest particles may be in the very air we breathe.

David Attenborough often said he didn’t want to be seen as preaching or hectoring viewers about our lifestyle habits, but as the environment has changed around him — he is now 91 — he has changed his mind. Blue Planet II ends with a plea to consider our footprint on the environment and think about our children’s future and that of their children, and the future of the planet itself. The health of the world’s oceans is indelibly tied to the future of the planet itself.

Words by themselves can often appear empty of meaning. If there’s a single image, a single sequence in Blue Planet II that had a profound effect on everyone watching, it was a scene toward the end of a series, of a colony of albatrosses feeding their newborn baby chicks bits and pieces of plastic, mistaking it for actual food. We can be lectured at length, loudly and often, but it rarely sinks in. A single image — in a TV show watched by millions — can have a much more powerful, galvanizing effect.

Don’t discount the impact Blue Planet II had on ordinary, everyday viewers in the UK, where the program was reportedly seen by more viewers than any TV broadcast of the past five years, save two (the 2014 World Cup soccer final, and a season finale of the UK equivalent of Dancing with the Stars). These weren’t die-hard environmentalists or Whole Foods groupies, either, but everyday people who work hard, pay taxes and raise families — in short, the TV audience.

The BBC has commissioned a pair of new documentary series based on Blue Planet’s success, Drowning in Plastic and The Truth About What You Wear. As you read this, the UK parliament is debating new legislation designed to sharply curtail the use of plastic. China has said it will no longer take in the rest of the world’s plastic waste, at any price.

Not all of this is because of Blue Planet II, of course, but there’s no question it has had a profound effect, even before it’s aired in the US.

It’s family programming in the truest sense of the word — not just programming the entire family can watch together but programming that, at its heart, is about your family’s future. It’s TV that matters.

Blue Planet II premieres tonight at 9ET/8C on BBC America, AMC, IFC, WE tv and SundanceTV, and in Canada on BBC Earth. The seven-part series will air Saturdays through February and March. Blue Planet II is narrated by Sir David Attenborough, scored by Hans Zimmer and was produced by James Honeyborne. It has already aired in the UK and other parts of the world. It was the top-rated series of 2017 in the UK and the most-watched natural history program in more than 15 years.

Reason for hope: Time to celebrate conservation’s successes, as well as challenges.

April 09, 2017

I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid stories of environmental woe and sturm und drang since starting this blog late last year. There’s enough of that going around.

Besides, those contrarians who don’t believe humans are affecting the environment — the small but noisy and politically influential minority who insist climate change is a fabrication intended to deep-six the coal and fossil fuel industry — are unlikely to change their minds now.

As for the rest, as Sir David Attenborough so aptly put it when defending his sunny-skies view in Planet Earth, no one sitting at home at the end of a long, hard day wants to be told the world is going to hell in a hand basket and that it’s all their fault.

Pessimists often depict conservation efforts — underfunded for the most part, and stretched thin — as a cry in the wilderness, and about as effective.

There are success stories, though.

And the Attenboroughs of the world — not to mention the conservationists themselves — prefer to focus on those stories, rather than warning yet again of imminent threat of a mass extinction. The planet has lost 58% of its birds, mammals, fish and reptiles since 1970 — this, according to a recent survey by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and London Zoological Society, but virtually anyone who can read already knows that.

The same survey found that the average yearly decrease in animal biodiversity is now 2%, “with no sign yet that this rate will slow down,” but again, this won’t come as a surprise to anyone watching the nightly news.

The success stories, rare as they might appear at times, are in the news now, though, thanks to a specially arranged meeting of conservationists, the Conservation Optimism Summit, later this month in London, with gatherings in other cities around the world, including Washington, DC and Hong Kong.

The summit is timed at least in part to Earth Day, which falls on April 22.

The implications extend beyond one day in April, though. People need to hear that all is not lost, that there’s reason for hope. One of the surprising conclusions to be drawn from the past 25 years of conservation is that it’s the smaller, grassroots efforts that have a more pronounced effect on the ground than the efforts of big, bloated conservation organizations that are often weighted down by their own bureaucracy and burgeoning operating costs.

Some of the more radical environmental activists say people ought to be told what they need to know, rather than what they want to hear.

The truth is that there’s room for both.

Polar bears are in serious trouble — the bears need pack ice on which to hunt and sustain themselves throughout winter hibernation, and the ice is melting across the Arctic — but the panda bear, the iconic symbol of the World Wildlife Fund, has recovered significantly throughout its former range.

Rhinos are facing a devastating surge in poaching throughout their range in Africa, but the saiga antelope, an oddly shaped grazing antelope endemic to the Eurasian steppe, has survived not one but two population crashes in recent years. The Siberian tiger has made a comeback in Russia, and a new population of rare Indonesian tigers was discovered in a national park in eastern Thailand just last month, even as conservationists warn that the lion — one of the most iconic, most easily recognized animals on the planet — faces a population crash throughout much of its range in Africa, due to habitat destruction, human population growth and the inevitable animal-human conflict that results.

Despite its Pollyannaish and easy-to-ridicule name, the Conservation Optimism Summit has an important purpose, as Oxford University zoologist E.J. MIlner-Gulland, a summit cofounder, and Oxford professor of biodiversity, told the Sunday Observer this past weekend.

“We have to change our ways and celebrate our successes if we’re going to protect endangered species,” she told the newspaper. “If we’re too gloomy about saving wildlife, you people will think there’s nothing they can do and that would be tragic. And wrong.”

How wild animals adapt to the big city, as told in Planet Earth’s stirring series finale.

March 20, 2017

Of all the hours that went into making Planet Earth II, it is the final episode “Cities” — which makes its North American debut this weekend on BBC America — which drew the most attention when it aired in the UK last December, and small wonder.

The finale is not just a summing-up of all that has come before. It takes on the thorny issue of where the planet goes from here, as wild animals evolve and adapt — with varying degrees of success — to the world’s sprawling and ever-growing urban areas.

No spoilers here. One of the special joys in watching Planet Earth is being surprised by those unexpected moments that evoke awe, majesty and, in many cases, an almost childlike sense of wonder. Nature is full of mysteries, after all. For every answer, new questions are almost certain to emerge.

©Steve Winter, National Geographic/NatGeo Wild

The issue of how wildlife can adapt to big cities has been tackled before, most notably in National Geographic’s 2015 documentary program Urban Jungle. This is the first time the Planet Earth team have tackled it head-on, though, after almost 20 hours of often breath-taking filmmaking.

That’s worth noting because if Sir David Attenborough and his team of filmmakers have faced one criticism over the years, it’s that, for all Planet Earth’s celebration of nature at its most pure and pristine, it has pointedly avoided the ways in which human beings have affected what remains of the natural world, whether through climate change or unchecked population growth and our increasingly unsustainable lifestyles.

Evolution is not so much about survival of the fittest as it is about adaptability to ever-changing surroundings, so a close-up look at how wild animals find new ways to survive when living in close proximity to large numbers of people is ideally suited to a program with the ambition and scope of Planet Earth, and a fitting way to end the series.

Veteran National Geographic photographer Steve Winter, who followed leopards hunting by night in the centre of Mumbai and who has just concluded a multi-year photographic survey of wild jaguars in Brazil’s Pantanal region (a National Geographic magazine feature and feature-length nature documentary are in the works), shared his experience of photographing leopards — an unpredictable and potentially deadly predator — withjournalists from the Television Critics Association at a gathering in Beverly Hills, Calif. several years ago, while promoting Urban Jungle.

Coincidentally, one of Winter’s most famous photographs — of a wild mountain lion, dubbed “P22” by local biologists, living in the Hollywood Hills, the giant “Hollywood” sign lit up in the background — was taken at night using a trap camera, just a short drive from the very Beverly Hills hotel where Winter was meeting journalists.

“The leopards in Mumbai are absolutely incredible,” Winter recalled. “They come out when it gets dark. People live right on the edge of the park. I was there, and saw it with my own eyes. People would do their walking, exercising, walk their dogs like we do in parks, and, boom, the sun goes down, and the habitat changes. It's then the leopards' area, and they co-exist without really any major problems.

“The ecosystem changes once the sun goes down. People came up to us, wanted to know, ‘What are you doing here?’ I told them and showed them some of the footage and images we were getting. They had lived there for ten years and didn’t even know the leopards were there, as close as from me to you, and yet have zero problems with them. A guy got up in the middle of the night one night, looked out his windows, and for the first time in ten years, he sees this leopard on a bridge. They are happy about it, too.They want to live with these animals because they don’t find that there’s any conflict.”

There are more mountain lions in the coastal Los Angeles area than people might suppose, Winter added. “There’s a healthy population of mountain lions in the Santa Monica Recreational Area, between, like, Sunset and a little further north. There are probably 15 or 20 cats in all.”

Mountain lions are just as secretive around people as leopards. P22 is native to Griffith Park, site of the famous Griffith Observatory.

“In all the months I spent in Griffith Park, I never met anybody who saw the mountain lion,” Winter said. “I never saw the mountain lion there. They don’t want to be seen, and they have plenty to eat there. So they’re comfortable.”

Wild animals getting along with people pre-supposes there aren’t any idiots — of the human kind — who will mess things up, Winter admitted.

“The mountain lion doesn’t want to be seen. That’s the bottom line. The leopard is the most adaptable cat in the world, as far as I’m concerned. They are secretive, and they don’t want any interaction. But as far as the idiot part goes, that’s, well . . . who knows?”

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