From Gorillas to Elephants: Dr. Ian Redmond on Wildlife Conservation in Africa

In this episode of The PrimateCast origins, we’re sharing a lecture given by wildlife biologist and conservationist Dr. Ian Redmond, OBE.

Ian is renowned for his work with gorillas and elephants in Africa. Through research, filming, ecotourism, and conservation science and activism, he’s spent over 40 years cultivating the wisdom and the network needed to inspire and incite real change. 

In this lecture, Ian weaves an engaging tale around his experiences. His wonderful storytelling might make you feel, as I did, like you’re part of the story. And I think that’s one of Ian’s main points; that all of us are part of nature’s story and importantly can be part of its protectorate in lots of different ways.

His stories move effortlessly from African villagers to conservation icons to world leaders, and you get the sense that Ian is at home amongst all of them, never losing sight of the ultimate goal of protecting the planet and its diverse inhabitants. 

He jokes about how he got himself to Karisoke research station to study gorillas by offering to fix Dianne Fossey’s leaky roof. And even has some fun stories about Sir David Attenborough during his filming for the iconic BBC series Life on Earth. 

But its his descriptions of his time in the forests, with the gorillas and elephants, with the local people that live alongside them, which really sparks in us that sense of what might be lost if we fail to act on behalf of the Earth.

To that end, Ian leaves us with some ways to support conservation efforts, including some of the initiatives he’s been directly involved in over the years. Here’s where you might be surprised to learn about blockchains for elephants! 

But it all seems to be part of the bigger picture of finding ways to assess the economic value of the ecosystem services species like elephants and gorillas provide, as the true gardeners of the forests.

It’s easy to get swept away by Ian’s easy nature, engaging rhetoric, and just his plain old dude with interesting stories vibe. But you’re going to learn a lot listening to this lecture.

Other topics covered and links to related organizations:

• virtual ecotourism through vEcotourism
• non-profit nature documentaries at Ecoflix
• holistic natural capital and nature credits with Rebalance Earth
• Great Apes Survival Partnership
• Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
• conservation issues in Africa: bushmeat, materials extraction, deforestation, civil war, poaching

My favorite quote from this episode: "I am vibrating to elephant rumbles in a cave 160m under the ground in total darkness” [Dr. Ian Redmond, OBE]

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves. Credits by Kasia Majewski.

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A podcast from Kyoto University and CICASP.

Transcript

Andrew MacIntosh: 0:00

Welcome to the PrimiCast Origins. Today's origin story comes from the self-described reluctant conservationist, dr Ian Redmond. Well, hello everyone, and once again, glad to have you back in the audience for this, an episode of the PrimiCast Origins, where we hear from experts in the field of primatology and beyond about how they got started and became some of the most influential folks around. I'm your host, andrew McIntosh, from Kyoto University's Wildlife Research Center, and this episode is taken from our International Primatology Lecture Series Past, present and Future Perspectives of the Field. This is the brainchild of Dr Michael Huffman and, like our normal programming, is brought to you by PsyCASP. The main goal of the lecture series is to share the origin stories of experienced practitioners of primatology and related fields. To do that, mike Huffman has invited a revolving door of renowned scientists to join us on the program and share their stories with us. The PrimiCast Origins is our way of sharing those stories right here on the podcast. Unlike our normal interview format, these lectures are being done as part of the PsyCASP Seminar in Science Communication, which aims at graduate students here in the Primatology and Wildlife Science program at Kyoto University. So what you're going to hear is a lecture that was recorded in Zoom and generally includes slides, so there may be some references to visual aids that are not available in audio or only format. But for anyone wishing to see the speakers presenting their talks, we invite you to check those out on the PsyCASP TV YouTube channel. That's CICASP TV.

Andrew MacIntosh: 1:54

Now, in this episode of the PrimiCast Origins, we're sharing a lecture given by wildlife biologist and conservationist, dr Ian Redmond. Ian is renowned for his work with gorillas and elephants in Africa Through research, filming, ecotourism, conservation, science and activism. He spent over 40 years cultivating the wisdom and the network needed to inspire and incite real change. In his lecture, ian weaves an engaging tale around his experiences. His wonderful storytelling might make you feel, as I did, like you're part of the story, and I think that's one of Ian's main points. But all of us are part of nature's story and, importantly, can be part of its protector in lots of different ways. His stories move effortlessly from African villagers to conservation icons, to world leaders, and you kind of get the sense that Ian's at home amongst all of them, never losing sight of that ultimate goal of protecting the planet in all its diverse inhabitants. He jokes about how he got himself to Karasoki Research Station to study gorillas by offering to fix Diane Fosse's leaky roof, and he even has some fun stories about Sir David Attenborough during his filming for the iconic BBC series Life on Earth.

Andrew MacIntosh: 3:00

But it's his descriptions of his time in the forests with the gorillas, the elephants, with the local people that live alongside them, which really sparks in us that sense of what might be lost if we fail to act on behalf of the Earth. And, to that end, ian leaves us with some ways to support conservation efforts, including some of the initiatives he's been directly involved in over the years. Here's where you might be surprised to learn about blockchains for elephants, for example, but it all seems to be part of a bigger picture of finding ways and finding ways to connect people to the idea that it's really important to assess the economic value of the ecosystem's services that species like elephants and gorillas provide. They're not just these wonderful things to look at which they are, but they're an incredibly important part of the ecosystems in which they live, and they provide a lot of services as well to the forests and to the people that use them the true gardeners of the forests, as Ian says.

Andrew MacIntosh: 3:57

So I've posted links to some of the organizations that Ian mentions in this lecture that can help you learn more about biodiversity and ways to protect it, like his virtual ecotourism venture, vecotourism, the Nature Credits firm Rebalance Earth, as well as a nonprofit Nature Documentary platform, ecoflix. It's easy to get swept away by Ian's easy nature, engaging rhetoric and just this plain old dude with interesting stories, vibe. But you're going to learn a lot during this lecture as well. So, without further ado, and as always with these origin story lectures, here's Dr Michael Huffman introducing Dr Ian Redmond to get us started.

Michael Huffman: 4:34

Ian, welcome. It's a great pleasure to have you joining us. We've had some very interesting talks over this series, but I think we can all expect some really interesting stories from you today. Ian has spent a lot of time in Africa, traveled around the world a lot, as he's always attending different conservation meetings and on the ground as well, trying to outrun elephants and rhinos and gorillas and whatnot. But he's a very dynamic researcher, conservationist, very dedicated to his field, and he's no stranger to Japan. He's been here and he has many close friendships with some primatologists here in Japan he's worked with over in Africa and I'm sure we'll be hearing about some of those stories as well. But it's really a great pleasure to welcome you to the series, Ian, and without further ado I'll let you have at it.

Ian Redmond: 5:36

Thank you, Michael, and thank you for inviting me to speak in this lecture series. I'm now going to Well. First of all, I regret that I'm not in Japan and that we're not all in a room together and go out afterwards for a glass of sake. But given that we're all in our little boxes watching this on technology, you have to bear with me while I press the share screen thingy. Click that go to share, and can you just confirm that you're now seeing?

Michael Huffman: 6:08

You're good to go.

Ian Redmond: 6:09

My opening slide. Woohoo, I see that works. It's always so much more gratifying than technology that it doesn't. Yes, so I'd like to do a little bit of a retrospective of the past 45 years or so that I have been involved in conservation, which was not my intention and I think I was pushed into it out of necessity. I describe myself as a naturalist by birth because I think naturalists are just born that way. It's fascinated with all life forms. A biologist by training, because it's hard to just make a living as a naturalist. You need to have anologist title to you and I sometimes get called a primatologist or a zoologist or an ecologist and I also get called a conservationist.

Ian Redmond: 7:00

But I'm a conservationist by necessity because of the things that have happened to me, so let me summarize, I want to set the talk in the context of what's happening this week in Bonn, where the Ip Bess representatives of 139 countries are joined together to discuss what is designed to be the influential body to direct policy on biodiversity, in the same way that the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has influenced the discussions at the Climate Conference. Climate Convention talks. So all these UN bodies are endeavoring to improve the way we govern ourselves and our interaction with nature, and the UN has a number of conventions relating to nature. I'm sure you're familiar with CITES, the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species, the CMS, the Convention on Migratory Species, the CBD, the Convention on Biodiversity, and the CBD was supposed to have its big meeting in 2020, where it was going to agree. It being the parties the 180 countries that are parties to that convention were going to agree on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. The UN is very good at snappy titles and easily forgettable acronyms, but Ip Bess, if you haven't come across it before, is in the right-hand corner the Intergovernmental Platform on Policy for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and those are the key words biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Ian Redmond: 8:58

Why does that matter to primatologists? Because primates in their habitat are keystone species. They play an important role. Many other species are ecologically dependent on them and if you lose the primates from that habitat, then that habitat, that ecosystem, is likely to collapse or certainly see significant changes, not necessarily the next day, but the next decade or the next century. And that's often tied to seed dispersal, which we'll talk about as we come along. So this is this morning's Twitter feed. This week this is happening in Bonn. The UK has a new Chancellor of the Exchequer, resignations, political stuff and the political backdrop to these UN negotiations is important because politicians for example form the legislative framework in which companies operate and which we all live, and we're all law abiding citizens and we want to obey the law.

Ian Redmond: 10:00

But sometimes the laws are not good for nature. They do not protect nature in a way that allows the biosphere to continue to function, and we're seeing the results of poor planning and bad laws with the interlocking crises we're facing. The three big ones are climate change as a result of global warming, biodiversity loss leading to ecosystem collapse and the loss of the processes that keep us all alive. And pollution, plastic, petrochemicals, whatever kind of pollution but those three are likely to so transform life on earth that our future as a species, and certainly our civilization, as we like to call it, is in question. And these big international meetings are set against the backdrop of each one of those. 139 countries meeting in Bonn have the same sort of political turmoil going on at home, with ministers changing and elections, and MPs that design the laws to govern a country are fixed on their political cycle when is the next election and are they going to get in, and they don't want to take bad decisions that will affect that outcome. And yet what we need for biodiversity planning is long term planning, not short term thinking for political reasons. So that's kind of the backdrop of what I'm talking about. And people can protest. I have been on protest. Here we are outside parliament doing an interview for a journalist at an extinction rebellion. Protests were around me, incredibly courageous people were gluing themselves to the pavement, and what an extraordinary thing to do. Just stop and think from what it feels like to say, ok, today I'm going to super glue myself to a building or to a road and cause disruption. Why am I going to do that? Because I think the normal way of just standing there with the banner saying please stop destroying nature hasn't worked, and I've been involved, as you have gathered by now, for 40 something years trying to change the course of this series of events that humans are responsible for. That is leading to the destruction of the ecosystems that sustain us all and I think that primatology is one of the most important sciences within that debate, but I don't see enough primatologists engaging with this. So part of what I'm hoping to do today is to encourage you, not necessarily to glue yourself to the pavement outside of your respective parliament or some company headquarters to ask them to stop destroying nature, but to engage. So requires leadership from politicians and corporate leaders to turn around the climate crisis. That was what Extinction Rebellion was focused on. But notice the name they chose it wasn't climate rebellion, it was Extinction Rebellion, because tied to the climate crisis is this loss of biodiversity and we're potentially facing our own extinction or at least a drastic change in our situation on the planet. So that's, that's a serious stuff.

Ian Redmond: 13:43

Now about elephants I have to bring elephants into this picture. There have been primatological conferences where people have presented papers on elephants, so they're almost honorary primates because their society is so similar to some primates similar to ours in some respects and in terms of their role in the ecosystems where they live, across Africa, south Asia and Southeast Asia. They are where they've been described as super keystone species by the late Hezzi Shoshani. And whereas I talk a lot about primates being the gardeners of the forest, elephants have been dubbed the mega gardeners of the forest Just because of their size, their appetite. They obviously have a huge impact on the ecosystem in which they live and which they are a critical part of. So we will talk about elephants.

Ian Redmond: 14:38

These are forest elephants. These are actually in the Birongas, and this group of forest elephants are just interacted with a group of gorillas that I was sitting observing and I hadn't seen this group of gorillas for some years. So the young silverback who I knew as a child, pablo, had looked around and was looking at me and then he was staring at me. I'm sure he's pleased to see me he hasn't seen me for a while, but why is he staring? And I realized that behind me there was a herd of elephants and he was staring at the elephants and I was just in the way. So he came past me and interacted with the elephants. He approached them and beat his chest. Now I should mention that the number of forest elephants in the Bironga volcanoes is a fraction of what it was in the 60s and early 70s.

Ian Redmond: 15:26

I arrived at Karisoki in 1976, just after the last of the resident herd of elephants had been killed by ivory poachers, and this was 20 years later. And these were probably the first elephants that many of the younger gorillas had seen. And they were literally they were climbing trees to get a better look Fascinated. And I contend that gorillas are themselves naturalists. They are fascinated by other life forms and if they're not scared and running away, then they are curious and want to observe. And Pablo did more than observe. He came forward and beat his chest in front of the elephants and a young male elephant stepped forward and stuck his ears out and these two young males of their respective species did a face-off and then the elephants moved away and Pablo strutted past me. He'd seen them off. Then he decided to go and investigate further and followed the elephants and I followed Pablo following the elephants and I climbed a tree to see what was going on and again I saw him chest beat. I saw the young male elephant ears out. I have a picture of that, but they just dots in the foliage. You can't really see what's going on. And then the elephants moved off again and he moved on again and I followed again and then he was coming back. So at least two, possibly three times he interacted with the elephants and the elephants back down and he came back and he was obviously really tense because he grabbed my colleague by the rucksack and dragged her across the clearing, just releasing that tension in an entirely harmless but quite entertaining way. So that's.

Ian Redmond: 17:09

You said you wanted some stories. There's one that, in my mind, one of the very few observations of interactions between gurus and elephants and these turned out to be my two main study species. But I started with gurus, not because I was particularly well qualified to do so. I wrote to Diane Fosse, having heard that things were often breaking up at Carisocchi At university. As an undergraduate I organized speakers for the Biology Society. So just as this lecture series if you're doing that job it's really nice because you look through the literature and oh, there's an interesting study. I'll write to that person and invite them to speak and they come and they give a talk.

Ian Redmond: 17:52

And in that instance Sandy Harcourt, who had just done his PhD fieldwork and was writing up his dissertation at Cambridge, came and talked about his work with gurus and I put him up in my flat overnight and I picked his brain. I got Diane Fosse's address and anyway I wrote to Diane and said my academic tutors don't rate me very highly but I love nature and if I can help, I can mend the roof or make the tea. I'd be happy to do so. And I mentioned the mending the roof because Sandy had said this is a remote research center. When something breaks, it stays broken. So if you have any aptitude for fixing things, you should mention it, and I am something of a compulsive fixer. So I'm sure that I thought oh, here's someone who can do their jobs around camp. And that's how, in 1976, I found myself sitting amongst a family of gurus taking notes, which was the then standard practice.

Ian Redmond: 18:49

Notice, the distance between me and the gurus is much less than we aim for today. There was little concern for disease transmission in those days. We were sort of in self-imposed quarantine, living in the mountains for months on end and not seeing many other humans, and I guess it wasn't an issue as much then. Of course, since the COVID pandemic, the distance has been increased. It used to be seven meters that we tried to maintain, and now it's 10 meters. Mask wearing is now mandatory in all ape research and tourism sites. So just bear in mind that these are historical photos and when you see close contact, it is what was happening then, four and a half decades ago, and isn't what's happening today.

Ian Redmond: 19:44

Now, the story of Diana Fosse and her book Gurus and the Mist famously was made into a movie, starring Sigourney Weaver in the title role, and for many people that was their introduction to primatology, people who wouldn't necessarily sit and watch a documentary, and there hadn't been many documentaries about Diana at that time, only a couple really. So she wasn't the world famous primatologist she became and of course, her life was ended tragically when she was murdered in Christmas 1985. And that was just before the producers of this film were coming to Rwanda to talk to her about the film and they were literally on the way and they heard that the person they were going to meet had just been murdered. So it's a horrible story and it became part of the movie and the movie itself made history because for the first time there were two studios Warner Brothers and Universal wanted to make a film about Gurus and the Mist, about Diana Fosse's life, and for the first time in Hollywood history they worked together Extraordinary they had two directors, two producers.

Ian Redmond: 21:00

They managed to woodlick down to one actress to play the title role, which is good, and it is a very powerful film. It is a drama, not a documentary, but there are elements in there which are very accurate in their presentation of field work. There are other elements which are not, and the scene where Diana is touching the Gurus, where there was one scene where a silverback did, struck by her and she cowered appropriately and that was real, it wasn't acting. But there are other scenes where people in gorilla suits were doing the action to get the necessary close-up shots, the real story of Gurus and Mist. You should read the book if you haven't. It is an extraordinary story because this woman, who was sort of 36 when she came to Rwanda she wasn't a new graduate, she'd been working as a physiotherapist in a children's hospital, an occupational therapist in Louisville, kentucky, and saved up and borrowed money to go on a safari in the early 60s. And it was so and transpired what she glimpsed in the Virungas when the filmmaker Alan Root helped her to see Gurus, that she convinced the late great Louis Leakey to take her on as his next study of great apes. He'd already initiated Jane Goodall's study of chimpanzees at Gombe in 1960. And in 1967, diane Fosse began her work.

Ian Redmond: 22:35

I got there in 1976 and nearly 10 years later and it was not a happy time for Karyosoki because they were still poaching and during the time that I was there some of our study animals were killed by poachers, not for traditional purposes but because for us would pay good money for a gorilla skull or a baby gorilla. Those are the two main reasons skulls and hands to sell from gurus that have been killed and baby gorillas to sell if they were captured alive. And these two photographs illustrate how Diane responded to that. She had learned how to win the trust of wild gorillas. So the picture on the right shows Poppy, then an infant, for about 18 months, investigating Diane in a way which now we do not encourage and try to avoid because obviously droplet infection and even aerosol infection, that proximity is a possibility and gorillas are susceptible to the same viruses and other pathogens as we are. But at the time that was an extraordinary situation because just sitting a few yards away with a mother and father of Poppy who didn't mind that their child was approaching a human, that was the level of trust that Diane had won over 10 years. So these gorillas were seeing some humans as friendly, but other humans in the forest had a very different agenda, and the other picture shows Diane's response to that. She hired additional trackers to not track the gorillas but to track poachers and cut snares. And eventually she got them to work with the park guards whose job it was to do that but who were not motivated or paid or trained or equipped to do that.

Ian Redmond: 24:28

And it was a turbulent time, with a loss of some of our study animals, the setting of snares for antelope that would sometimes name or injure young gorillas, and in the midst of all that, film crews coming to film, one of which was the BBC, then David Attenborough now. So David Attenborough turned up in January 1978, literally days after the death of the gorilla who's portrayed as behind me in my office, that's Digit. Digit was killed by poachers, decapitated hands and cut off and body mutilated in what must have been a very dramatic scene. And while he was fighting off the poachers, as the young male, the peripheral male dealing with the external threat, the lead. So about the alpha male, uncle Burt and his females and young fled. So in human terms, digit gave his life so that his family would survive, and that was the most dramatic thing. It was a sort of a turning point in gorilla conservation.

Ian Redmond: 25:39

And just a few days later David Attenborough turned up to make a seven minute sequence on the use of the opposable thumb for his landmark series Life on Earth, which I think can still find online. You can certainly find this sequence because it has become television history. It's one of the most watched and most loved sequences. And no one was expecting Pablo the then a juvenile, to come and sit on our esteemed presenter. No one was expecting Puck, the gorilla sitting behind Pablo, to lean forward, take hold of his head and look into his eyes upside down. And the producer and the cameraman are thinking a gorilla's got the head of our presenter. We haven't finished the series yet, but Puck was very polite and put David's head back onto his shoulders and Pablo just played and Poppy came and did his shoelace. And it was a wonderful sequence and it wasn't planned to be filmed Because David was trying to talk about the importance of the opposable thumb in primate evolution, how it gives you that manipulative grasp, and I've often said to him well, you should have talked about the fact that Poppy is using her opposable thumb to undo your shoelace, david, come on. Anyway, it was a wonderful moment and it has gone down in history. And yet this was 10 days after digital being killed and decapitated, so that there's highs and lows.

Ian Redmond: 26:58

Of fieldwork are extraordinary and as a scientist you're supposed to remain objective. Study animal killed by poachers Is that what you do, or do you get involved If you see it about to happen? Do you step forward and say stop and hope that the poachers run away and don't attack you? It puts you into very difficult situations when your study animals are the subject of someone else's route out of poverty, because it's often the poverty stricken villager who's either supplying an outside market with a gorilla skull or hands or a baby, or just wants to meet if there are other culture that eat gorillas. People in Rwanda don't eat gorillas, so they don't face that threat, but Western Mellon gorillas and Cross River gorillas and some Eastern Mellon gorillas do live alongside people who see them as not just meat but special meat. We'll come on to that later.

Ian Redmond: 27:50

So, for those who aren't familiar with the Virunga volcanoes, here's an image that shows you the two gorilla habitats and I think you can see my cursor. So you've got the Virunga Massif here and you've got Bwindi, which does actually extend over into the Sarambwe reserve. So both are transboundary pockets of forest surrounded by human habitation, except for this little link here which goes on because the Virunga National Park goes all the way up to the ruins or is off this map, but only this bit is gorilla habitat. Oh, and a little bit Mount Chabarimu, where Eastern Mellon gorillas live. So fragmented, isolated pockets of forest in which there are small populations.

Ian Redmond: 28:34

The numbers on this map are rather out of date Now. The combined population of these two areas of forest is just over a thousand. Just over a thousand. The mountain rulers are back into four figures and when I started there were around 250, 280, and on a downward trajectory. So the last census that I took part in in 1981, it was 242, counted and probably aligned for a few that we might have missed around 250 in the verungas and we'd never counted windy. But gradually the numbers are picking up. What an amazing success story. Mountain gorillas have more at the end of each year than they had at the beginning of each year.

Ian Redmond: 29:20

They are the only species of great ape, apart from humans, whose numbers are increasing year on year, and that's as a result of the intensive conservation work that has continued through genocide and war and civil unrest. And right now in the DRC there are armed militias occupying gorilla habitat with whatever their political or economic objectives are. Sometimes they just bandits, sometimes they have political objectives and that's where you do mountain gorilla conservation. You can't wait till it's peaceful and come and see what's happened. You have to be there throughout and that has led to some extraordinary experiences for colleagues of all nationalities who have worked there, but most especially for the Rwandan and Ugandan and Congolese conservationists, for whom that is their working environment and still they do it. They are inspirations to the rest of us because they used to live there and carry on protecting the habitat and the gorillas.

Ian Redmond: 30:22

The first gorilla I met, the first gorilla on the screen when I started my lecture and couldn't get the slides in advance, was Titus, and Titus was one of the gorillas who was behind David Attenborough when he did his. There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know, and he was doing that off the cuff. I'm sure he thought it through, but he didn't have a script or an autocue, he was just speaking from the heart and while he said that behind him Titus and Qualey were peering at the camera and he turns around and says I'm sure he was going to do that because he was reassuring the gorillas with a contact call that Diane had started to use to reassure the gorillas when habituating them and whenever it seemed appropriate you would just let the gorillas know that you were there and everything was fine. And so we were winning of the trust of these free, living wild gorillas, with no persuasion on our part to come to us, no provisioning. Diane felt that the Jane's method of putting out bananas to bring the chimps to camps so she could observe them would change their behavior. So she was proud not to provision the gorillas but simply to find them each day and observe them.

Ian Redmond: 31:35

And we learned about their daily routine. They get up in the morning and feed, and each item of food is carefully selected and prepared, different preparation for each species of plant. This is Titus eating thistles. He stripped off the foliage from the midrib of each leaf, folding them over to tuck most of the spines away, and then he's biting through that wadge of vegetation, twisting the wrist with each mouthful, and the other female is is plucking sedge flowers. Now they also eat the base of the leaves of sedge, but the flowers.

Ian Redmond: 32:14

When you get a bunch of flowers, you're a gorilla, you pop it in your mouth, and there are many edible flowers that some of you may know. It's always fun, if you're in a restaurant and you spot an edible flower, to stop plucking the flower, eating them, maybe making a few gorilla contentment while you're doing it. And that clip ended on the baby gorilla who, of course, is sitting in his mum's lap being showered by bits of the inedible parts of plants. It must be like living under the waste disposal shoot for vegetarian kitchen as bits of peel and root and so on, that the bits that the mother doesn't want to read are showering down. And young gorillas, of course, are curious and will pick up bits of the food plant and chew them and get the taste and watching, observing their mother and what they're doing. They're learning botany, how to identify the food plants from the other species and culinary techniques, how to prepare the edible parts of each plant and dispose of the inedible part. And you can learn a lot, obviously by looking at the will of dumb. Even if they're unhabituated and you can't get close to observe them, you can examine, done, and I'm particularly interested in the parasites of girls. So I spend a lot of time sifting through kilo after kilo of gorilla dumb, not always with as interesting seeds in as this.

Ian Redmond: 33:31

The large round seeds are piegeum species. They're sometimes called the African plumber, african cherry piegeum, after color, and it is seed dispersed by gorillas, but also by ruins or turcos. The seeds can be swallowed by larger birds and on the right of the picture you can see a blackberry. Blackberries are a favorite fruit of gorillas. They don't always wait for them to go black and you can see that it's a green blackberry that is not ripe. But when they're sitting in front of a thicket plucking blackberries a black ones, that red ones, that green ones they all go down, and the ones that don't get digested and of course the seeds are the ones that do get digested come out in the dumb and are deposited in a little package of fertilizer, because of course the dumb rocks down to manure and miles from the parent plant and that role of seed dispersal agent is important. It's also important on a personal level that when you're studying animals that are so like yourself that you cannot help but care about them we are social species. We have empathy. I think gorillas also have empathy. They form friendships.

Ian Redmond: 34:51

This is Pablo, 10 years after I first met him, where he's grown up into a splendid young silverback, not yet with any responsibilities, so he's like a silverback without portfolio. He was hanging around on the edge of the group. He's got the muscles in the bulk is lost. The hair in his chest, his chest beat is coming on. It's starting to sound like a silverback. But he hasn't got any females and he hasn't yet got any responsibilities. And he hadn't seen me for some years. So he came over and sat next to me and clearly recognize me from his childhood, when he used to be the bane of my existence. When I was trying to film the girls. He would steal cans of film and items to play with. And he came over and sat and reached around and started to invite me to solve a play tussle and that's against the rules. Historical photograph.

Ian Redmond: 35:39

I'm not suggesting anyone tries to emulate this. I didn't ask for this to happen, but because I was interested in gorilla parasites. This is my first opportunity to groom a silverback, because normally they're a bit more standoffish. They don't come and sit next to you, so I'm grooming his shoulder. I didn't find any lice because he was a very well groomed young silverback. He's got friends to keep the lice population down.

Ian Redmond: 35:59

But gorillas have a species of lice louse that is is the only other species in the genus, theorus, and theorus pubis the human pubic louse and theorus gorilla the gorilla louse are closely related species. What does that tell us about the evolution of humans and gorillas? That we have not just particulars the head louse that chimpanzees have an equivalent species of, but gorillas have an equivalent species of louse evolved to cope with thick, widely spaced hairs which covers human pubic hair and armpit hair, and gorilla pubic and armpit hair. That's where they tend to congregate the most. So lots of lessons to learn. But in this instance it was just wonderful that he recognized me and came over and said, said hello, but not to be to attempt to be emulated, and he can't emulate that because it was at the gorillas instigation and I put his hand back. I probably know this against the rules.

Ian Redmond: 37:02

So Diane's response to being surrounded by illegal activities in the Africa's first National Park, created in 1925 by the Belgian colonial authorities, was to hire men and send them out on patrols and cut stairs. And we had unofficial patrols and we had no authority to arrest people, they might make a citizens arrest. I was a visiting researcher, so kind of breaking the rules to enforce the law doesn't sound like a good strategy. And indeed, after the death of digit and David Attenborough taking word of that killing back to London, to what was then the form of preservation society, now for on the national, an appeal was launched and then other organizations joined and a coalition was formed called the mountain gorilla project, which later evolved into the IGCP, the International Gorilla Conservation Program. Meanwhile, diane was just paying local guys to go out and cut stairs and try to catch approaches and when the ranges turned up the park guards. They would work together If they didn't turn up and they went out. So it's like being a backstop until such time as all the money that was raised off the killing of digit and then Uncle Bert and Macho and other members of our study groups raised funds that could properly equip and train the park guards. Now it is a totally different situation. I think the volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, the Brunger National Park in Congo and Mugahinga and windy in Uganda are among the best protected and the best run National Park in the world, and so we're going to make it up as you go along, try and hold back the forces that are destroying the species and the habitat until such time as a more orderly and organized protection system could be introduced.

Ian Redmond: 38:58

And although the murder of Diane falsely has not been solved she died effectively in action and she was killed in her cabin but as a result of her activities and whether you approve or disapprove of the way Diane responded to that crisis, she has for many people served as an example of someone who's prepared to dedicate their life and in the end, give their life to conservation, and sadly, I have so many colleagues who have done the same. We've died in the field and as a result of the political turmoil that surrounds some of these areas, to the genocide it is. It is not in that sense a happy place, and yet it is such a wonderful place. If you have time, at the end of this talk will look at a website called Vico tourism and you can take a tour to Diane's to in virtual reality and sit there and contemplate that beautiful spot which is buried. Diane was killed.

Ian Redmond: 40:00

Many people feared that that would be it, for mountain gorillas have lost their champion, but fortunately, diane had inspired so many people, sometimes in a positive way. People wanted to emulate her courage, sometimes in a she's doing it all wrong, we can do it better way, but she, she blew the whistle and out of that grew gorilla tourism and better or organized conservation and sharing of revenues with local communities or the local people have a stake in the conservation of the mountain gorillas and, as I mentioned earlier, their numbers are now increasing every year and thousands of people every year. Normally, when there isn't a pandemic or there isn't a civil war, genocide. It has proved to be a very resilient form of tourism because you don't need many people, and so many people have been inspired by seeing documentaries about those that they want to go and do a David Asenberg, sit near the girls and take their photographs that even in times of terrible strife of the surrounding human communities, there are a few people who are prepared to go and pay the money to go see the girls, and in Rwanda that money is now $1,500. In Uganda and DRC it's less, but it's still a substantial amount of money, and the result of that is that the gorilla groups that are habituated and visited by either researchers or tourists, or now both, have more babies and a higher infant survival rate than the wild growers that still flee from people. And the reason for that is the gorilla doctors, the team of vets who will intervene if a gorilla infant gets caught in a snare. In the habituated groups it's seen, and they have now got methods with again incredibly courageous ranges who stand between the silverback and the injured animal so that the vet can dart it and remove the snare and give it some antibiotics and then release it. It's not taken out of the forest, it has a much better chance of survival, just recuperating naturally. So here you see a wonderful scene of a new infant and the older juveniles now displaced from the maternal nest, having to cope with a sibling and all the sibling rivalry that we're used to in human families, you see play out in gorilla families. So the signs of success more babies being born, more babies surviving to adulthood is wonderful.

Ian Redmond: 42:26

But the limited size of the park is a real constraint to recovering the gorilla numbers to what they were before the park was reduced in the early 70s, late 60s, early 70s. So the fact that the zoo ro under has taken this extraordinary decision the most densely populated country, africa has decided to restore some of the part that was taken to natural habitat. And there's the plan, which is it's wonderful, but the fact is that if those areas are occupied by the families, the success of the tourism means that they will. That land will earn more money than it could earn growing crops. So it is an extraordinary success story. And so the other apes, and indeed most other primates, are declining in numbers. So in 1996, I convened a meeting of NGOs that care about primates of the real organization, the around 10 foundation, ippl, international private protection, we and many others born free around a table in the Royal Geographical Society in London and we agreed we should work together in a sort of loose coalition and we wondered what we might call ourselves. This grew out of the UK elephant group, which had coordinated efforts to get the ivory trade to the land, and UK ape group now, and a polite lines was the name that was chosen and that's still the website. And we were gifted that website for apescom and if you go there you'll find a link to all the now nearly 100 organizations that are in the world, all working in their own way for apes and occasionally collaborating in shared campaigns and issues. So it's rather sad.

Ian Redmond: 44:17

What are the threats facing apes? Bushmeat is one of them and most of the countries where primates live naturally, they are seen by traditional hunters as another prey item and as more and more people live in cities but have their cultural values informed by either their childhood or their grandparents childhood in a village where they eat wild meat, this is normal. This is a bushmeat market in Pointe Noir in Congo, brazil, and the traders will say well, these are all legally traded species and there is a big sign put up by the Jane Goodall Institute saying that it's illegal to buy or sell, kill apes or elephants or other protected species. A few days after I spoke to the bushmeat traders there, there was an expose of how many gorillas per week were passing through that market under the counter. So the Apalines produced a significant report called African Bushmeat Trade Recipe for Extinction and then, nearly 10 years later, the second report, recipe for Survival, and you can find those on the foragecom website.

Ian Redmond: 45:43

And bushmeat if you're a primatologist and it's your study animals that have been killed is clearly a horrible thing, but when you meet the hunters and the families this lady is married to a bushmeat hunter. The future of her child depends on how many animals he kills and I wouldn't want that child not to have shoes and not to be able to pay school fees. So how do you employ a bushmeat hunter? Well, if you're doing research and there isn't an established research centre, you can transform the history of that village by hiring the hunters. So a leaky weapon behind will go into the forest and they won't like that. I've done that and this guy the husband of this lady didn't want to leave his gun behind. I said but I'm going to pay you to take me into the forest and I'm going to look for gorillas in chimpanzees and we're not going to kill them and that's his security. You're walking in a forest and they're big, dangerous wild animals. Having a gun is your security, unless you have the knowledge of those animals behaviour and can behave in a way that reduces their fear of you. And so you can influence the minds of hunters and see that there is another way of making a living from wildlife, by taking researchers or tourists out to see them. And that was the case here. Not that it grew into a project, but it could, and you're opening people's minds to that possibility.

Ian Redmond: 47:05

Otherwise, it's the traditional uses and with gorillas in particular and chimpanzees, people who live in their habitat know that they're really clever animals and the gorillas are really powerful animals and that is a belief that if you eat or use bits of their anatomy, you can gain some of those properties. So you eat gorilla meat and that's mainly for big, powerful men. You get something of the strength of the gorilla. You use gorilla hands like this. The reason this hand on the left is missing some things is that someone has brought them to make a charm to make themselves or their child better.

Ian Redmond: 47:43

If you're sick and your local medicine provider says go to the market by a gorilla finger. If it's a youth, he might say grind it, burn it black, grind it into a powder and then cut the boys arm and rub it in and I've heard the phrase used you're vaccinating the child with the power of the gorilla. If you believe that and that's what you're told to do by the person that you turn to for medical advice that's what you'll do, unless you have an alternative person saying actually no, take the aspirin or take this and your child will get better. So improved medical health is an important part of stopping people using these traditional remedies. And for people like that, if they've never seen a gorilla using their hand, never seen how curious other gorillas are about what one gorilla is eating. They're eating a sanctuary in Cameroon and it's fascinating to watch these interactions without the foliage obscuring it, and we hope one day these gorillas in Cameroon will find their way back into the reintroduce to natural habitat. But at the moment you can get some really good insights into gorilla behavior in a semi natural setting where you can actually see what's going on, and it's also an important educational tool because school parties come into Limbe and other sanctuaries. There's a Pan African Sanctuary Alliance, pasa, which has raised the standards about, I think, now 22 private sanctuaries across Africa to both care for the animals confiscated from the illegal wildlife trade and rescued from the bush meat trade and, where possible, return them to the wild and where not possible, use them as educational tools and the the T shirt this child is wearing Wouldn't know chop this kind of bush beef for them.

Ian Redmond: 49:25

To finish all small time you can work out what that means if you speak English. Is pigeon English saying don't kill these kind of animals because they're going to be extinct? We finished in a very short time. How do you reach out to people and change opinion? That's very much what conservation is about and when I tried this before this talk this film played and it is of Jeremy, a Cameroonian footballer who plays for clubs in the UK and is seen as a kind of a national hero because he's made it out into is a star. He kindly did a little public service ad, which isn't playing, but you can find it on the Apple eyes website under the bush meat section, because we need to convince people that it's in their own interest not to kill the wildlife, certainly not to kill it unsustainably.

Ian Redmond: 50:16

And with apes in particular and elephants, their reproductive cycle is so slow that they cannot stand even a low level of hunting. And still one or 2% of us slowly reproducing apes, species and and you'll see the population decline. One or 2% a year is enough to see that population decline, but often it's it's species that it's legal to hunt and that's what the diker killed by someone who settled on the side of a road, and that picture encapsulates a lot of the problems that are facing what used to be remote areas where there wasn't access to market so you couldn't, as a hunter, get the animals you killed to make money in the city. You've got thousands of people living in a city who want to buy meat. That is part of their cultural background. So what happens?

Ian Redmond: 51:02

You put a road through and you're taking out logs and the drivers of these trucks know that if they buy this for $50 on the side of the road, they can sell it in town for $100. And they provide the transport and it's hard not to do that. I saw a car lemon interview to drive and he said well, if you were walking along and you saw a $50 bill on the floor, you'd pick it up. It's essentially a season money. I've got wheels, I'm going to town. There's somebody who can only get a small price here because there are other hunters with anti look to sell. But if you, if that anti look gets to town. It's a red diker forest species and one of the species that possibly can cope with a blue dike is a particularly good at coping with the level of hunting that you get. And most of the larger species are quickly wiped out. And that happens because human influence is spreading into the remote areas.

Ian Redmond: 51:55

The Congo basin that used to be needed major expedition to cross is becoming divided up by road, roads and railways and pipelines, and that little animation was part of a report that grasp produced grasp is a United Nations great ape survival partnership operated. The secretariat is shared by UNEP and UNESCO, but much of the planning is done in UNEP in Nairobi and in 2002, they did this report great apes the road ahead. You can find it online. The animation just shows how ape habitat is being impacted by human infrastructural development. And once you've built a road, ribbon development follows. People cleared on either side of the road and narrow road suddenly becomes a strip, perhaps one or two kilometers wide, of agriculture and apes that used to just live there are now crop raiding pests and will be killed if they raid plantations. So that was the prediction by 2030, only 10% of great ape habitats will remain free of those impacts. In Southeast Asia only 1%, and in fact, five years after that they redid the calculation for Southeast Asia and decided it would be by 2020, and pretty much we're on target.

Ian Redmond: 53:14

We are opening up a habitat to human activities. And who's to blame? Is it the man with the chainsaw? I mean, he's got a skill, he can feed his family, and this particular man with the chainsaw was actually clearing a tree that had fallen over the road, keeping open those channels to get the products of the rainforest to the cities and to ports so that they can then be taken to the rest of the world. And I would say, well, it's not the man with the chainsaw that is at fault, it's a man who pays the wages of the chainsaw, and that's essentially us, because we in the developed world are buying the paper, the palm oil, the other products, the rubber, and we're going to deforestation.

Ian Redmond: 53:54

And whilst there has been a huge push in recent years to end deforestation, it hasn't stopped, which is scary because we're getting to the point now where these globally important ecosystems are so fragmented that the function they provide in maintaining the health of the biosphere is being eroded away, and this in ecosystem collapse on top of the changes being wrought by climate change. So we're in a very critical period of our evolution and of our planet's evolution. We're now in the beginning of the sixth mass extinction, but, unlike previous mass extinctions, which are asteroids or volcanic eruptions, this is a sentient being which is causing it, and you'd think, having called ourselves homo sapiens, we might actually use that sapient ability to change that course of events, and that's why it better meeting in bond now. That's why the CBD, which should have meant met in 2020 and now, instead of meeting in China, is meeting in Canada later this year to develop a policy framework which would prevent this from happening, and why that's happening at the policy level, at the highest level of government and international negotiations.

Ian Redmond: 55:12

People on the ground are just struggling to get by, and one of the ways they can get by is to turn trees and bushes into charcoal and then plonker back on the side of the road. The people who do that haven't got transport, but people driving by have. So just like the bushmeat, if wheels are going by, the driver think, oh, I could charcoal, I could use that for myself or I can take it into town and sell it for twice when I buy it for here, because I'm providing the transport and all over Africa that's happening. In my other study site we're moving on now from gorillas to elephants. Just briefly, I'll get back to primates shortly.

Ian Redmond: 55:46

This is on Mount Elgin where a few years ago I was out with a team of Rangers and we were finding charcoal kilns in the forest. This pile of earth was just so damp down the flames, so the wood isn't consumed, just turned into charcoal, and what the Rangers have to do is to open that up and let the wood burn so that the people who made the charcoal kiln don't profit from it. But it's such a waste because this is El Gontique, it's a tropical hardwood. If this is more logical, the poachers, the illegal woodcutters, would be cutting down the teak and selling it as hardwood. But that's not what they're being asked to do, the only thing that has to make charcoal, because that's what the demand is, so valuable hardwoods have been turned into charcoal. I mean, it's just ludicrous, but those gangs of workers are faced with elephants and they chase them away, and sometimes the elephants are killed for ivory Not so much for meat in Kenya, but sometimes also for meat.

Ian Redmond: 56:46

And so, which are the ones that I studied, starting in 1980, are unusual in that most of them don't have very big tusks, and yet they're normal African elephants. They're not even forest elephants, I learned after I first got there. They're Savannah elephants that live in forests of forest, dwelling elephants. But the reason they've got short, stumpy little tusks is that these are the only salt mining elephants in the world that go deep underground into caves. That's how extraordinary. Look at this. This mother keeping a trunk on a calf so it doesn't get lost in the dark.

Ian Redmond: 57:18

This is taking with a flash, with elephants that had become habituated to my presence, observing them with a torchlight and taking photographs. But seeing elephants deep underground, hearing them rumble, feeling them rumble is elephants speak to each other using infrasound, which travels for miles through the forest and you probably don't hear it because you haven't got the capability to hear that frequency of sound. But if you're in a cave and that sound is reverberating around, you feel it with your skin. Just talking about it gives me but goosebumps because that memory is so sharp. Oh, I am vibrating to elephant rumbles in a cave 160 meters underground in total darkness. So it's wonderful to see phenomena like this and to study them and the dependence of the elephants on on the sodium ions in the mineral rich layer of rock and the fact that this normal elephant behavior of geophagy not just elephants.

Ian Redmond: 58:14

I've photographed black and white colobus monkeys in the same cave chewing a rock because they're fully of walls, and these plants on top of the mountain are growing in soils that have been leached by the rainfall that the mountain generates, so they're low in sodium salts and we all need our dose of sodium ions. We like to put salt on our food and the reason that tastes good is because we've evolved to say, yes, eat that, your body needs that. This isn't sodium chloride, so it doesn't taste salted to the tongue, but it's sodium sulfate which, once digested, it produces sodium ions, so that your physiology gets what it needs and the elephants feel better. But how extraordinary to have an African elephant 150 meters underground tusking in darkness, feeling the surface of the rock for bumps, leaning on the point of the tusk. Imagine three or four elephants on a point that size and there's a huge amount of pressure. That's why the rock here is covered in stripes which are tuskings where tusks have scraped across the surface. It's just amazing. So I encourage you to go to the Vico tourism website and click on the salt money elephants and take the virtual tour and learn about this. And it doesn't always go as smoothly as as that last picture where the elephant in the cave tolerated me taking photographs in the dark. This was a crash course in conservation when a very strong elephant, not this one. This was a really nice encounter with a slightly nervous but not more curious than frightened elephant, and I think it's a really good fieldwork, especially if you're an elephant habitat, because elephants, as you will know, are very large, and that makes them very heavy, and it's really not a good idea to get under their feet.

Ian Redmond: 1:00:04

Sadly, though, far more elephants are killed by people than people are killed by other things. It's sad in both cases and in both species. The surviving members of a family mourn the loss of the individual who's died and it remains of adult male elephant called Big Tempo. For those of us why? He's not very imaginative name, but it's what the, the Rangers, call him because he was the biggest and maybe he didn't do so much mining. He picked up rock off the floor and didn't do the tusking, so his tusks had grown quite big, as a result of which he was killed by every coaches, and the irony is he was killed just days after China closed its ivory markets. So we've been campaigning since 1918 or since before 1989, but 1989 is when cities listed African elephants on appendix one, which prevents international trade for primarily commercial purposes. But the illegal traders continued, and every time there's some limited legalized sale of ivory, it opens the floodgates to purchase.

Ian Redmond: 1:01:05

I think, oh good, back in business. And Big Tempo was killed, and these are his remains. And these men who? I'm with? David Kipparenke, who was actually born in Kitsum Cave when it was not a national park and people live there and spent his life in conservation. He was in tears and other members of the team an elephant they had been monitoring for years killed like this and I'm sad that it was just at the tail end of the ivory trade, but it's still happening and it can still be killed by poachers and everyone thinks oh the poor elephants and all the poor members of the family who are grieving the loss of that member of their community. Not so many think oh the poor forest. Big Tempo was probably 45. He had 15 years of life.

Ian Redmond: 1:01:55

Big Tempo would have been producing roughly one metric tonne of dung every week, 52 weeks a year, spreading around the forest, and that dung, when he's been feeding on fruit, will be full of seeds. This is actually not in a Mandel and this is in northern Congo, near the border with CAR and Central African Republic. Thank you very much for your time. And what you see is seed dispersal. These are seedlings and we didn't really understand the ins and outs of this process, except that elephants disperse more seeds, more individual seeds of more species, and take them further than any other animal. So they are really important in the maintaining the health of the forest.

Ian Redmond: 1:02:43

But most of these seedlings they're dispersing thousands of seeds every week. Most of them are not gonna grow into mighty trees or there wouldn't be any room in the forest. They, of course, feed the antelope. The animals that feed at ground level are eating these small seedlings. A few of them will survive to adulthood, but most of them won't, and all the animals that are feeding on those. So these, including elephants when these get big enough for an elephant to eat, they'll eat the seedlings and saplings and produce dung, and the dung is fertilizing the soils and the competition for nutrients in a rainforest is intense. So when a tree falls like this long here, very quickly it's broken down by wood-borne beetles and fungi and the nutrients are returned. And rainforest soil is very poor quality soil because there's so much demand for the nutrients. Nothing stays there long. So these dollops of fertilizer are seized upon, metaphorically speaking, figuratively speaking, by the big trees that are already established, and they get bigger. We'll come to that later. So apes, elephants and all the other species have a role to play in the ecology. They're big, they're impressive.

Ian Redmond: 1:03:52

This is not a charging silverback, this is a yawning silverback, and you can see that one of his canine teeth is missing, because in fights with other silverbacks sometimes they slash with their teeth and snap off their canine tooth. Really exciting to watch his kind of behavior. But their response to a threat to stand up and go wah very loudly. If that threat is someone with a projectile, either spear or bone arrow or gun, that's just the wrong threat. It's like a hedgehog rolling up in the face of oncoming traffic. It works for predators you've got prickles. Doesn't work for lorries you're killed. So gorillas, if you have a gun, enough courage to face a charging gorilla and use the gun, are easy to kill. And if there's a demand for their meat because officers in the army or chiefs in villages want to impress their friends and invite them around for a meal of gorilla meat which happens then silverbacks will be killed.

Ian Redmond: 1:04:51

And when there's a breakdown in law and order, as happens when there's a civil war this was during the Congo's Civil War, the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, then even known named gorillas are killed by poachers and there's a great fear. If you habituated gorilla for research or tourism, you are lowering his or her guard. Next time a poacher comes, they won't be so afraid and they're more likely to die. So you cannot habituate animals unless you can guarantee their safety. That means that some populations of gorillas have not been habituated. Cross river gorillas, the most endangered subspecies of gorilla, have not been habituated. The people studying them follow them the day after and they're using camera traps and dung analysis and studying their nests. But they don't want to habituate them until all the hunting communities have come on side to conservation and they won't be in danger because you don't want to lower their guard.

Ian Redmond: 1:05:48

No one predicts that a civil war is going to break out and that there will be a breakdown in law and order and that militias will hire hunters to feed the troops and kill all the large mammals. That's what happened in Kahuzibiega National Park. What can NGOs do? They can help provide vehicles. They don't provide the weapons. That's the government's job. But you're helping people effectively defend nature and every year I'm a trustee of the Thin Green Line, which is a charity that helps rangers and helps the widows and orphans of rangers killed in the line of duty. It's a very precarious job and literally hundreds are killed in the line of duty, giving their life to protect nature, just as effectively dying forcians and many other foreign researchers and conservations have done? And is it enough that NGOs will have a fundraising campaign and raise a few tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of pounds or dollars and put it into conservation, when what you're pushing back against is big industry that wants to build a pipeline or a road and extract the timber or the minerals and they're prepared to spend billions of dollars to prospect Africa to find places to put a mine, because they'll know they'll make many more billions of dollars from extracting from that mine and there's no pushback against that. But if there wasn't, we'll come to that in a minute.

Ian Redmond: 1:07:10

There's some good news to this bleak story. Unfortunately, we were all implicated in the death of some of those gorillas. Now these are teenage lads down a mine mining not for mineral salts to eat, but mineral salts to be made into mobile phones and laptops. We are talking to each other across continents because of tantalum capacitors. Tantalum is a heavy metal. It's heavier than lead. So when you find a rock which is tantalum, all you think whoa. That's surprisingly heavy. And the people in Eastern DRC were surprised to find that foreigners with briefcases full of dollars would come and buy bags of these heavy rocks. Okay, let's go and find heavy rocks and then digging holes and eventually making mines, with no knowledge of pit props and mining safety. So a couple of lads, flashlights strapped to the head with a bit of material, lump, hammer and chisel, chipping away for hour after hour after hour underground. These guys said they were doing it in the summer holidays to earn a bit of money, and I believe them. This was in a mine that was safe for me to visit.

Ian Redmond: 1:08:19

Other mines that are in occupied territory with militias. People are forced to work down the mines. Terrorism is used to terrify villages to provide labor to dig out the minerals. But it all gets into our mobile phones because, despite the fact that phone manufacturers and computer manufacturers are among the wealthiest businesses in the world, they haven't sorted their supply chain and there is no certification system that can reliably say I know the tantalum in my phone has not come from forced child labor. I don't mind kids earning money for pocket money on their summer holidays, but this is organized crime of the worst kind, involving rape and murder and child labor and all kinds of human rights abuses exercised by criminal gangs who somehow get their bags of minerals not just tantalum, also tin and wolframite and we're buying it and we're not taking care, which is why UNEP, grasp and Interpol produce history report. Again, you can find it online, last Stand at the Graveller environmental crime and conflict, because the crime is feeding the conflict. Criminals don't care if their purchase of minerals leads to arms purchases, which leads to further instability. It's probably easier for them to operate in that environment than it is in a well-ordered country where there's rule of law and the police are on side. So it's a serious stuff and it involves primatology, because the primates that we want to study are in this kind of habitat.

Ian Redmond: 1:09:56

In many parts of the world, civil unrest, civil wars affect conservation and research and you have to say well, who's to blame? And you see where the minerals and the timber is going, and it's going to Europe, australia and Far East China and then it's exported as products, especially to China. And the timber which used to mostly go to Europe is now going mostly to China. And China has this incredibly ambitious scheme called the Belt and Road Initiative, which is building railways and roads and ports all over the world to effectively make it easy for raw materials to come to China's factories where they make stuff to provide gizmos for the world, furniture and computers and what you name it. It's likely to be made in China with raw materials that have come from Africa or Latin America or Southeast Asia and, sadly, not always responsibly sourced, although China, as host to the next conference on Convention of Biodiversity, has a lot of political leverage to do the right thing, and they are cleaning up their act. They then current five year plan, talks about creating an ecological civilization. That's the high level policy. The guys driving the bulldozers, who were paid by the entrepreneurs, have not necessarily bought into that yet, so we have to persuade them.

Ian Redmond: 1:11:21

So this is Bakken Kauhisi, biege National Park, where the gurus have been killed. This is Mugurukauh, who just recently died of natural causes, but he lived a long life eating Marie-Anthe's fruit. Marie-anthe's fruit is eaten by people too. It's very tasty. It looks like it's sort of mini pineapple and quite tangy, but tasty. We don't tend to swallow the seeds Gurus do, and chimpanzees do and elephants do and that's why when you look at their dung the next day, you'll find it's full of seeds the next generation of Marie-Anthe's trees.

Ian Redmond: 1:11:52

At the launch of Grasp, the UN Great Ape Survival Partnership or project as it started out in 2001 in September, the Rwandan ambassador who attended the launch, saw that video and said, ah, I remember that fruit when I was a girl. She'd grown up near Nyingwei forest and she had that as part of her childhood. Oh yeah, she'd find the Marie-Anthe's fruit, see them, but not anymore because the trees have all been cut down and there are no elephants and chimpanzees that never were gorillas in Nyingwei to disperse the seeds. So it's a living example of how our generation is seeing the last of certain things happening. These are cross river gorilla droppings with seedlings growing out of it. I still haven't seen a cross river gorilla. I've seen the camera trap footage and I know they're there and I've tracked them with the WCS trackers and Nigeria is trying to protect these last and Cameroon are trying to protect these last gorillas, but some members of the communities living around there are still on the poverty line and see a gorilla as potential meat and they're not thinking but if I kill the gorilla, he won't spend the next 20, 30 years dispersing seeds for the trees of tomorrow. He's thinking I need money now and food now.

Ian Redmond: 1:13:08

So how can we push back? Well, there was great excitement when the UN developed red RE-DWD reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation of forests, and the plus is supposed to represent the co-benefit biodiversity and livelihoods, and rainfall, et cetera. Can the carbon markets help protect forests? And the answer is well, they could, and there was great optimism that this was to see a huge transfer of wealth from the wealthy North to the developing South in a way that protects rather than destroys forests. And in places it has worked. But it has been rife with corruption, because once you start talking about billions of dollars, it attracts the attention of people who are really interested in billions of dollars and not necessarily interested in primates in their habitat. And that's the world we live in. We have to deal with that. And what can we do? As citizens in the global North, we can demonstrate and persuade our politicians that this really is a matter.

Ian Redmond: 1:14:07

This is on a climate march in London and orangutans are important because they are seed dispersal agents in Southeast Asian forests or borne in Sumatra. Well, some forests, tiny fragments of forests of borne in Sumatra, and bees are important because, of course, they pollinate, and that sort of imagery is really good to persuade the general public that this matter is not just all the nice animals are going extinct. What a shame. It's the ecosystems that sustain us all are being destroyed. And just briefly touching on orangutans, I haven't studied orangutans but I am a trustee of the orangutan foundation UK and I have visited and made films about them and you can do a virtual tour of Sumatra and orangutan habitat on the Vico tourism site. And they are extraordinary animals, the largest arboreal animal on the planet, and yet they're losing their habitat.

Ian Redmond: 1:14:56

I visited the TRIPA swamp on the Northwest coast of Sumatra because I wanted to see this destruction in action. And it's a low lying area which, because it's Pete's swamp, it's illegal to convert to plantations. And yet and this is in the little plane that flew us up to the nearby town, mulibo and looking at the window, you can see beautiful rivers meandering, a bit of rainforest and then a grid of plantation, and these are drainage canals because they need to lower the water table to expose the Pete to plant the palms, and so when you get there it's no forest. When that orangutan was a child, this was all forest.

Ian Redmond: 1:15:45

And what Indonesia and Malaysia have done in the past few decades is what we in Britain and most of Europe have done over the past few hundred years. It's taken us hundreds of years to convert a wooded island into an island of agriculture with hedges and corpses, and that's what's happening in Borneo and Sumatra and Peninsula and Malaysia, but in decades, not centuries, because we have the machinery to do it fast now. And this is replacing rich, biodiverse habitat with what I've been described as green deserts single species plantations, in this case of oil palm, an African species, which is actually a food plant for African apes, but here, if orangutans feed them, they're seen as a crop pest and they are often killed. And yet Grasp commissioned this report, which looked at the economics of sustainable forest management in Sumatra and concluded that, per unit area, you can make more money from the carbon markets and tourism than you can from cutting down the forest and growing palm oil and selling the timber. But different people would make that money and the people who are making this money are not part of that solution. So how do you get the bad guys into the room and say look, I know you want to make money, but this is how you do it more effectively and we still have a forest with orangutans and conveying that the importance of that to people on the other side of the world who are funding it by their purchases of items like lipstick and ice cream and biscuits that contain palm oil is difficult. That's why we did this virtual tour.

Ian Redmond: 1:17:22

This is me up in an orangutans nest in a little pocket sized patch of forest in Sumatra, looking out over the oil palm plantations, and the nest was built in this last remaining tree, and the adult male who built the nest would, as a child, have learned about his habitat and where the females live and where the fruit trees are during the long orangutan childhood of eight years, and all that knowledge is now lost. It's irrelevant because he's clinging on in little pockets of forest and his kids might well be entertaining people in circuses and shows in Southeast Asia, which tourists visit and think what a giggle, and orangutans wearing clothes and doing daft things. Or oh, we can have a picture taken with the family and an orangutan not realizing that the orangutan is forced to do this and leads a miserable life and doesn't have a future, whereas he should have been spending the next 40 years dispersing seas in a rainforest. And this question of stolen apes keeps coming up and the site is a conventional international trade in endangered species does not yet really grasp the importance of this pun intended. So this is another report you can find online stolen apes just looking at my not going to go through it now and look at global primary distribution, and you're familiar with it and you're in the most northerly country that has indigenous primates, so you're very fortunate that you have and that's why Japanese culture is so respectful of primates very different from the the Judeo Christian attitude to other primates.

Ian Redmond: 1:19:01

But where there are primates, there are rainforests, and this is not an accident, and whether a rainforest there is change. There's an interactive map produced by the UK Met Office meteorological office where you can see what the predictions are for the changes in temperatures around the world as average global temperatures rise, the impact it has on rainfall, and what it shows is that where the tropical rainforests were or still are, are going to become arid zones. So all our efforts to protect the species that live in rainforest primates and non primates will be to no avail if we cannot prevent this rise in average global temperatures. The good news is, though, that those forests are so critical to the stability of the climate that, if we protect them, that won't happen.

Ian Redmond: 1:19:59

So what you're looking at now and I encourage you to look this up, not necessarily this one, but if you're making notes, write down T341, t341,. This is T170, the top of the screen, and that's actually maybe you like this one because Japan's near the middle. This has Australia and the Pacific at the center of the map. The T341 version has a more conventional world map with Africa in the middle, but what you can see on the left of the screen here, look this is Africa and look at the clock.

Ian Redmond: 1:20:31

So the days are ticking by about one a second and that pulsing that you see in orange orange represents rainfall or precipitation, snowfall in the north and south, so the daily precipitation looks like a pump and in the Congo basin the pump sets up weather systems that you can watch travel west across Atlantic to join the bigger pump of Amazonia, which then every day rain, rain weather systems build up and they sweep up and get and water the Midwest in North America, where the corn belt is, and sweep across Atlantic and water Britain and Europe and some of the ones here will see systems bouncing off the Andes and sweeping across and watering South Africa and Australia and New Zealand. It's extraordinary seeing the interconnectedness of global weather systems. The white represents water vapor which, of course, is invisible. Only becomes visible when it condenses and you see the clouds and the oranges are rainfall and you can see how this daily rainfall in the three tropical forest blocks Africa, amazonia and the Southeast Asian Forestry Islands are driving these weather systems that water our crops and fill our aquifers and power our hydroelectric schemes. So if you turn off the pumps, what's going to happen to global weather patterns? Well, we're seeing extreme weather events, changes in seasons, so we have to protect those pumps. They are integral to the future of life on earth.

Ian Redmond: 1:22:05

I believe that now is fun to watch, but I'm supposed to be talking for an hour and I think we've gone away beyond that, so let's try and wrap up. What can we do as individuals? But we can direct our work towards solutions. So, if you're studying primates in Africa, talk to the local people. Go into schools and talk to them, get them excited, because these kids here the words of the forest are in the local language or chimpanzee, or monkey, and sometimes they see them as food, but they don't necessarily see them as gardens of the forest that provide the rainfall that water their crops, and yet you can see rainfall patterns changing locally as far as so clear. So what Rwanda is doing in restoring some of that forest to the vermin is it's actually ensuring a better future for the agriculture in the surrounding area where so much of Rwanda's food is grown. So you have to have that ecological understanding.

Ian Redmond: 1:22:57

How can you get kids who live in a village where they don't even have electricity to understand this? For one method that we've been using through the Apple Ions is pedal power cinemas. You can see up at the top of this hall is a guy on a bike and he's one of the students who's peddling to produce the electricity to show the screen. And most of these kids live so far from a town with the electricity that they've never seen moving images. Imagine you're going to school and instead of just paper and books and a teacher and a blackboard, you're taken into the church hall. They've covered up the windows as far as they can with cloth and you've got an impromptu cinema and for the first time in your life you see moving images and what you see is gorillas.

Ian Redmond: 1:23:36

And a good friend of mine, the director of the gorilla organization, was standing at the back of a hall one of these presentations, and one of the mothers have come in to watch and she said eh, that is my sister looking at a gorilla breastfeeding her baby. And she's right. They are our cousins and we should respect them. And when you see that that penny dropping is not to do with all, you mustn't do this. It's just turning on the light and people understand their similarity and once again they get the idea that oh, wait a minute. Gorillas is perceived seeds going to trees, trees, bridges, rainfall and timber and fruit, and they all benefit from those. Don't kill the gorillas. They're the gardeners of the forest.

Ian Redmond: 1:24:15

So getting that message across, people who live a long way from those ecosystems that do have electricity can use the internet, and that's why we developed this website, vika tourism, the V for virtual Go to it, vika tourismorg. Click on the taker tour. This isn't live, so it doesn't work. If you click on taker tour, you can choose a destination and you can go and visit primates in the wild, and I've said this before at primatological conferences. This is a great way of teaching primatologists to spend time in the field as if they're looking at behavior and the kind of counting the number of interactions or or feeding food items consumed, and test the students who have watched the videos in a virtual setting and then done their their homework.

Ian Redmond: 1:25:03

Most mainstream TV channels think natural history is an entertainment. They don't necessarily see it as an education, and if it gets difficult because it's depressing or involves subjects that are not popular, it's very hard to get those subjects on TV. It's changing a bit because of the pressure that the campaigns for climate change and biodiversity loss are having. We've been trying for years to get a channel that is dedicated to the planet and, thanks to an American philanthropist called David Castleman, we now have that. It's called ecoflicks. Have a look ecoflickscom and you subscribe. It's a charity, so your subscription is actually a donation to charity and it'll be used to rescue animals and protect habitat. But you can learn about behavior in this way, and this is more for the general public than for the scientists. But if you're in the field and you're using camera traps or you're shooting video for research purposes, we will provide a platform for that material, so you can get your material onto ecoflicks and get a global audience, as well as publishing your papers, and that way you inform people who don't necessarily read the scientific papers.

Ian Redmond: 1:26:09

The message is getting out there. This is a guardian in 2015, so not a new story. Loss of monkeys and birds in tropical forests are driving up carbon emissions, because forest degradation isn't just hacking down small trees, it's actually killing animals, and forest degradation is destroying parts of the ecosystem. So word is getting out, but no one had valued that until 2019.

Ian Redmond: 1:26:35

Literally three years ago, an Italian biologist called Fabio Bazzaghi his name is the last author on this paper he studied two areas of Congolbation forest one with a population of forest elephants, one where they've been extirpated years ago, decades ago and he found the above ground biomass where there were elephants was 7% more, and he attributed that to the fact that elephants are feeding and trampling on many of the small plants and turning those small plants into manure that feeds the big, mature trees.

Ian Redmond: 1:27:08

So if you look at estimates of carbon in the tropical rainforest, you'll find that a surprisingly large percentage is in the big trees. But if you look at the volume of the forest, most of it is air and then some of it is leaves and twigs and stems, and then every so often you hit a cubic meter of carbon which is wood. So what elephants do is they do the weeding. They weed out the small plants and turn them into compost, which are into manure, which feeds the big plants, and that results in that 7% difference.

Ian Redmond: 1:27:38

And what Ralph Charme did, the leader of the PC assistant director at the International Monetary Fund. He calculated the value of that 7% difference and attributed it to the work done by each elephant over the course of his or her life. And it turns out that each elephant is responsible for the additional sequestration and storage of $1.75 million worth of carbon per elephant, as long as they're allowed to live their full life Now roughly 60 years. Let's say 1.75 million divided by 60 is 30,000 a year. If each elephant can earn 30,000 a year for a community, they're going to protect those elephants. That's $80 a day. So we are setting up a system called Rebalance Earth.

Ian Redmond: 1:28:22

Rebalance Earth is a website where companies that want to offset their unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions. We all want to hit real zero, but in the interim we have to offset those that we can't avoid. But as well as just offsetting the carbon, they're getting biodiversity value, they're getting lifting rural communities out of poverty. They're hitting several of the UN's sustainable development goals in one credit. So it's not just a carbon credit, it's a biodiversity carbon poverty reduction credit and the companies we're talking to. Last night, I was at a big event in London talking about this and the way this is going to be done. Better than than red, which was subject to so much corruption money just disappeared into other bank accounts and turned into villas in France or new Mercedes Benz. Isn't going to happen here because of the magic of blockchain.

Ian Redmond: 1:29:15

Now you may have heard of blockchain in the context of cryptocurrency. This is a very different use of blockchain, one that doesn't use huge amounts of power. So it is a green way of transferring money in a digital way that is transparent and traceable. So the villager has access to the blockchain, as does the company that putting in a million dollars to offset its greenhouse gas emissions, and it's done per day's work, per elephant starting with elephants, because that's what the calculations have been done for, but I want you, as primatologists, to start looking at working out the difference that primates make in habitat. I reckon that a family of 20 to 30 gorillas equals one elephant, and that 1.75 million was based on the price of carbon in 2019 on the European exchange, which was then about $24 per tonne. Now it's more than tripled. So actually now we're talking about upwards of $5 million per elephant, or per big group of gorillas, or perhaps a bigger community of chimpanzees, but if a community of 18 chimpanzees equals one elephant in terms of the nutrient cycling and role in the ecosystem.

Ian Redmond: 1:30:24

And, of course, apes do things that elephants are, I hope, as they're climbing trees and building nests, but apes do that, and that creates a light gap which allows light down to the floor. And what apes do in a nest is, of course, poo when they get up, so they drop the seed filled droppings beneath the nest, which is like a folded umbrella, because it's created a nice, comfortable platform to sleep on and that opens up a gap in the canopy, so those seedlings have light. It's wonderful the way that these ecosystems work, but we have underappreciated it, and when we have appreciated it, we've been told. Well, that's nice, but it's of academic interest. Thanks to Ralph's work, he's developed this new economic paradigm where living nature is worth money and at the moment, to make money out of nature, you've got to cut down the tree or kill the animal.

Ian Redmond: 1:31:15

And with Ralph's new economic paradigm we have an alternative that can push back against those destructive forces, and we're hoping that's going to really help. And we're hoping also that the calculations will work for Savannah elephants and other habitats which, in their own way, are sequestering and storing carbon. So that's the message from this talk to value the forest, protect the gardeners and now we have a valuation of the daily work done by each gardener and it's going to transform conservation. And it's exciting to be telling you this, because you may not have heard any of this. But go to rebalanceearth. You can read how the ideas have evolved If you click on that. And and and please get involved when you're designing or a search projects. Have a mind to how that might have a practical application, because it's wonderful to satisfy our curiosity about primates just because we're curious, but we do actually need to ensure that they're around in the future for their sake and for ours.