Episode 9 of Personable features Dr. Stuart Pimm who is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University and a globally recognized environmental scientist.
Dr. Pimm, renowned for his insights into current-day extinctions and strategies to prevent them, emphasizes that everyone can contribute to the planet's survival. In 2019 he was awarded the Cosmos Prize, joining the ranks of prestigious environmentalists like Jane Goodall and David Attenborough. His accolades include the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences.
Dr. Pimm actively advises U.S. House and Senate Committees and international governments on environmental and biodiversity issues. His work extends to National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative and conservation projects in Africa, the Amazon, and China. Authoring over 300 papers and several influential books, Dr. Pimm is a notable educator and mentor.
This episode delves into the urgency of biodiversity conservation, highlighting the recent COP 15 convention's goal to protect 30% of land and ocean. It showcases how technology, like the iNaturalist app, and individual actions can contribute to sustainability. The discussion also covers ethical lifestyle choices and celebrates the strides in conservation science and protected areas. Dr. Pimm inspires collective action for environmental change particularly at a local level.
This episode is a must-watch for anyone interested in making a positive difference on our planet.
Episode 9 of Personable features Dr. Stuart Pimm who is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University and a globally recognized environmental scientist.
Dr. Pimm, renowned for his insights into current-day extinctions and strategies to prevent them, emphasizes that everyone can contribute to the planet's survival. In 2019 he was awarded the Cosmos Prize, joining the ranks of prestigious environmentalists like Jane Goodall and David Attenborough. His accolades include the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences.
Dr. Pimm actively advises U.S. House and Senate Committees and international governments on environmental and biodiversity issues. His work extends to National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative and conservation projects in Africa, the Amazon, and China. Authoring over 300 papers and several influential books, Dr. Pimm is a notable educator and mentor.
This episode delves into the urgency of biodiversity conservation, highlighting the recent COP 15 convention's goal to protect 30% of land and ocean. It showcases how technology, like the iNaturalist app, and individual actions can contribute to sustainability. The discussion also covers ethical lifestyle choices and celebrates the strides in conservation science and protected areas. Dr. Pimm inspires collective action for environmental change particularly at a local level.
This episode is a must-watch for anyone interested in making a positive difference on our planet.
Hello and welcome to episode nine of personal. Today, I'm hugely honored to be joined by Dr Stuart Pym. Dr Stuart Pym is a professor of conservation ecology at Duke University. He is highly regarded within his field. In fact, in 2019, he won the internationally reclaimed Cosmos Prize, which is one of the most prestigious honors within the environmental field, with past winners including Jane Goodall, e O Wilson, richard Dawkins and David Attenborough. There are way more prizes, way more awards and way more amazing things that Dr Pym has accomplished, but I'll let us get into more detail on that moving forward. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for inviting me. So I wanted to initially ask what led you to this field? What led you to where you are today? How did you get into it? How did it spark your interest?
Speaker 2:You know, my earliest memories are hiking and camping with my parents. I grew up in Derbyshire, which is a wonderful place to get out in nature, and you know holidays in the Lake District of Scotland, and so from the earliest age I became fascinated by natural history. You know, I listened to Sir David Attenborough on the radio back then, and I think we brits are enormously fortunate to have the opportunities to see so much of nature. My very, very brief bio is that after my first year at Oxford, I went out to Afghanistan. I went out there two years later, became amazingly interested in deserts and so came to the United States to do my PhD in Desert Ecology.
Speaker 2:In the sort of way fate sometimes throws you around, I ended up very shortly after that going to Hawaii. I thought Hawaii was the place I would never go because it was so badly beaten up and so many, so many species had gone, extinct there. And when I went there I realized, yeah, that that extinction, the loss of biodiversity, is a major scientific challenge. It's a major ethical challenge, for and I felt that as a scientist I had both an ethical responsibility to do something to save the beautiful world around us and I also felt that as a scientist I had the skill sets bind with something practical.
Speaker 1:Did you think? A lot of you said you noticed about the problem with extinction? Do you think that was going unnoticed by other scientists? Why do you think that you needed to come in and solve that? Why was that not already being solved?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it was. I mean, people who had gone to Hawaii were aware of the fact that species were going extinct there, but it really wasn't attracting the kind of international attention that I thought it deserved. I mean, in the first I can't remember whether it's life on Earth or life of birds, or one of those programs that's been there there's this, you know, 8, 9, 10 episodes showing how wonderful life on Earth is, and the fact that you know somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of all species are on the verge of extinction wasn't covered. And you know now. You know, david Ambrose is not the only source of information about our planet. But it struck me is, if you were going to do a really thorough job of talking about our world today, you needed to make the loss of biodiversity prominent, and so that's what I let Mike, we're doing, and I think an important part of what I and other conservation scientists do is to say look, there's something we can do about it. You know, I like to say that, lord, like Lord Elorond in Lord of the Rings, I was there at the beginning and I was along with a lot of other wonderful people at a meeting in Michigan when Michael Soleil very much. The father of conservation said you know how many of you think we should form an international society for conservation and you know I raise my hand along with everybody else, and that was 1985. So I think since then we began to realize that there are a lot of things that we can do, and earlier on you mentioned COP 15.
Speaker 2:There's a very famous COP convention that the parties, which is about climate, and they meet every two years, but the biodiversity convention beats every four years, except before, maybe every three, and so hundreds of countries come together and decide what they can try and do from a perspective of saving biodiversity. The last convention of the party was held in Montreal, in Canada. It was supposed to be held in China. Covid and the nations of the world agreed that they needed to protect more. They came up with what I call the 30% solution, the idea that we should pretend to take 30% of the land surface, 30% of the ocean.
Speaker 2:Political leaders as different as Boris Johnson for American readers, boris Johnson was an English Prime Minister about three or four years ago. We've gone through about a dozen since then, but even Boris Johnson's mind on to thank you for smiling signed our faith of this solution. So did President Biden, so did President Xi Jinping of China and lots of other nations too, so there is a clear understanding that we need to protect more of the land, and we need to protect more of the ocean too, if we're going to save biodiversity.
Speaker 1:Why do you think? I mean, it seems obvious, but why do you think saving biodiversity is important?
Speaker 2:You know there are many reasons. I call them the three E's ethics, aesthetics and economics. And yes, I can spell. The middle one is quite interesting and quite personal for me. In the early part of almost a hundred years ago, a group of men who were working in the factories in Lancashire in New Yorkshire did a very famous trespass it's called the Kindestoucher and they very deliberately climbed over fences and started walking around the uplands of Abdubshire. These were young men who my mum described as her friends my mum was a known associate of cellans because they were all rounded up and put in jail and a lot of people in Britain felt that that was an absolute outrage that these people were getting access to nature, and that idea of having access to nature is still a current debate in the British Parliament now.
Speaker 2:In the United States we have a tradition of making sure that our national parks are accessible to people. Apart from a few special places that are set aside, you can hike, walk, ride, cycle, canoe, even drive through larger tracks of a US protected area, so there's everything you need. So I think part of it is that we all enjoy nature. The first reason I mentioned is it's an ethical one. Who would want to tell their children that lions and tigers and bears had gone extinct. I came across Wizard of Oz when I moved to the States when I was in my 20s, and I watched Wizard of Oz with my two young daughters and Dorothy says oh, lions and tigers and bears, oh my, will there be wild things out there? And I think if the answer were no, we would have a problem. I think most people feel that there is an ethical and religious compunction out there to protect nature, and I think that's a very powerful one. It varies from culture to culture and place to place, but in the Bible, in the Gospel of St John, it says God so loved the world, and in the original Greek it's God so loved the cosmos, and some pretty significant stuff that goes on after that. If you're a Christian, you know that. And so there's this sort of sense that we have a compunction, a conviction, a determination to love the cosmos. We have a responsibility to love nature.
Speaker 2:But then I think there is this sort of certain thing that as we destroy the natural world, we are causing substantial economic harm, and we see that with climate change, climate disruption, that we globally put out about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. 10% of that is from from burning forests, particularly tropical forests. That's, you know, more than all cars and trucks put together. So land use change is a significant contributor to global climate disruption and you can put a price on that, and indeed we do put a price. I run a non profit, saving nature, wwwsavingnatureorg. Please go and visit my website and we're selling carbon, carbon dioxide. So $25 a tonne. It's a steel. We have the most beautiful carbon dioxide on the planet and many people want to buy our carbon and see our partners plant trees. So there's there's a very close economic connection that is becoming ever more tight.
Speaker 1:Could I, could I come in and ask when you've had with the COP 15, and you've got all these countries agreeing to these sweeping not sweeping, but these goals? These goals often mutual in that they need the other countries also to improve their biodiversity. So how do you ensure that countries like China and the UK and all these different countries actually stay true to their word and instead it's not just the US and not just the UK they're doing it, but that China are actually trying to improve and step towards these goals as well?
Speaker 2:And that's a really great question and doubtedly the most scary one hour of my academic career was having the opportunity to talk to Dan Goldin, the then administrator of NASA, the space agency in the US. This is about 20 years ago. And I said you know, please, mr Goldin, sir, I'd like the world twice. I'd like to have global satellite coverage of Earth in 1990 and 2000. And you might say why? I mean, don't we have all that? Can't we just go to Google Earth and look at what's going on? And the answer back then was no, that if I wanted to know what was happening in a forest in Brazil or in March, I would have to buy satellite images. It would cost me $2,000. I'd want two of them so I could make a comparison. And if I had two images and you had two images, I wasn't allowed to share my images with you. But it was very hard to follow what was going on. And a Goldin said well, we don't do that at NASA. And I said well, this is why you should do that at NASA. Now I was backed up by a team of really stupid people and they prompted me what its responses were likely to be. But just over 20 years ago we didn't know what was going on, and now we do. I mean, you can go to Google Earth. You probably do what most people do, which is to look at your house on Google Earth, but you know you can also look at other places.
Speaker 2:So the important part of this is that we have much better knowledge of what's happening than we did so, for example, in the Amazon. The Amazon is the world's largest remaining tropical forest. We can look in very great detail how the forest there is changing from week to week, months to months, year to year. Well, when somebody like Jair Bolsonaro, the previous Brazilian president, decided they are going to go and chop down a lot of the Amazon, we know that they're doing it. We know where it's happening, why it's happening, and so, when Lula comes back into power, we know that the rates of deforestation are dropping. So we now have a very, very much better idea of where the countries are meeting their biodiversity goals. But there's something else. This is make sure I get a picture. This is the most extraordinary tool for surveying biodiversity.
Speaker 1:The iPhone, just to make sure, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:And the idea behind an app called Pine Naturalist was conceived in my lab a while ago and then put into implementation by a now-format intermining spot, scott Larry, and that is that it's not just land cover. We want to know where species are and we want to know what the species are. So you can install an I-Natuist on your iPhone for free and you can be wandering across the countryside, whether it's Brazil or Argyle, and if you see a species and you're not terribly sure what it is, you can take a photograph of it, upload it to I-Natuist and lots of he-in-people will identify it for you. There's even software that will do that too, so we can begin to record the species and see whether species are coming back Gain.
Speaker 2:To use a British example, there were species in Britain that were incredibly rare. When I was a teenager, I played truant from school one lunchtime to go off and look for a bird called a little egret on the Trent just the Adabi with the permission of my housemaster, because he wanted to see it too, and he said you go and see it and when I finish teaching I'm going to look for it too. And now you know little egrets all over the pulse in Britain, and that's a reflection of how we in Britain and Western Europe have begun to look after nature better. So all of that you can document with your biodiversity monitoring tool. So we are becoming much better informed at how we're treating nature.
Speaker 1:With a lot of these. I mean just from my point of view, less so on the biodiversity side, because I'm learning more about that now, but more on the environmental side. We often hear about how we, that, all the things that we should or shouldn't be doing to protect the environment and the impact that we're personally having on the planet. But even, as you said, with the rainforest the tropical rainforest being cut down and that contributing to 10% of CO2 emissions, what can the everyday person do to actually have an impact on biodiversity? Is it possible, or is it simply just voting and changing legislators or, you know, going on strike and try and push things forward? What can the everyday person do to have an impact on biodiversity?
Speaker 2:First of all, I wouldn't in any way minimize the importance of holding our political leaders feet to the fire. Right, yes, you should go and visit your MP. Mps hold surgeries where they meet people. They do it in Britain, they do it in the US and even in countries that are much more authoritarian than either the US or Britain. You know you can go and give your politicians, you know, an earful. So we shouldn't minimize that. And I think, as Greta points out and makes a wonderful case, politicians are scared out of their wits by young people, Right, you know, if they see a 60-year-old lobbyist, you know, turning up in Westminster or turning up in DC, that's one thing, but if they see a group of 10 or a dozen high school kids turning up outside their office, that really concentrates the mind. So, yes, particularly young people should exercise their democratic rights, give their politicians an earful.
Speaker 2:But there are all sorts of other choices that we make. We can tread more lightly on the landscape. We can, we can. I'm not vegetarian, I'm not vegan, but I don't eat a lot of meat and that's an ethical choice. I minimize the amount of meat that I eat and I minimize the amount of driving that I do. This morning I went out to my coffee shop, but it's, you know, a three kilometer walk there and a three kilometer walk back, and I walk it. It's good for me, it's good for the environment, and I thought it was not shopping or biking, and all that With a backpack on my back. You know, and there are lots of things.
Speaker 2:We can try and minimize our use of fossil fuels. We can try and eat sustainably. We can go after our politicians. We can tell our politicians that the natural world matters, that we need to be protecting more, both on land and in the oceans, that we need to be, we need to be setting aside more of the ocean protected, that we ought to be excluding fishing from sensitive areas. But we have, we have consumer choices. I mean, do I, do I eat in a restaurant that serves shark fin soup? Hell, no. And you know I don't eat in restaurants that serve bluefin tuna, and you know, and all the rest of it. So there are a lot of consumer choices that we can make and we can make a lot of life starved choices and I think amongst the young people that I meet, those choices are becoming more, you know, more and more commonplace.
Speaker 2:I'm sure some of my students are horrified that I eat meat occasionally not that they eat it very often. But I think, Professor Fenn, why aren't you eating? Why aren't you eating? The long answer to that is that are parts of the world where you can't be a vegan. You know it's hard to it's hard to be entirely vegetarian if you're, you know, visiting many remote parts of the world. I'm going to be talking about the Tibetan Plateau at a conference in a couple of weeks time. It's kind of hard to be vegetarian if you're the only livelihood you have is rearing the axe. But be that as it may, there's a lot of things, a lot of things.
Speaker 1:I think in recent years, particularly throughout my life being 19, particularly in the last 10 years, there's been a lot of press around the environment and around biodiversity and how the planet's failing us and how well how we're failing the planet. But I think there's also a presumption that something's happening, that because we're getting more press, that stuff's actually going on. But reading a little bit of your research, you were saying that the extinction rates are some of the worst they've ever been. So how, you know, compared to actually raising more press, are we actually doing anything beneficial and are we going to make a way forward, or are we just going to be able to talk about how we could have done something and not actually achieve anything?
Speaker 2:You know that's a version of the question that I get asked in almost every interview I gave, and it's you know. How do you get up in the morning? Yeah, how do you get up in the morning when the world's going to hell? And the answer is I get up in the morning because I know that there are a lot of things that we can do. A study is done by my opposite numbers at Cambridge in the UK have shown that we are reducing the rate at which some species go extinct, mostly birds and mammals that we know best. But we are making a difference.
Speaker 2:30 years ago, I don't know quite how much of the planet was protected probably a few percent, probably less than 5%. The target by 2020 was 17% and we more or less achieved that. There are a few sort of fiddles to get to 17%. We're now asking for 30%. So it's clear that we are protecting more of the planet and while the extinction rate is still high, it's coming down. So I think there's some mischief out there with organizations telling us that the news is uneventingly bad. I think that's good for them when they're trying to raise money, but it's not terribly helpful scientifically. I think we are learning this craft.
Speaker 2:As I said earlier, I was there at the beginning when we started scientific conservation, and I think what we've learned in that 40 years is there are a lot of things that we can do. We can bring back red kites to Britain. We can bring back many water birds to Western Europe. We can do the same thing in North America. We can set aside more of the world's forests as protected areas. So is the news good? No, but on the other hand, you don't want to throw yourself off a tall building.
Speaker 2:There's a lot we can do and there's a lot of progress we're making, and a particular piece of that is that I run an unplophic, a staining nature, and what our science tells us is that many species go extinct not because they've lost all of their habitat, but because the habitat that remains is in little pieces, little fragments. You know a hectare here, 10 hectares and a hundred hectares over there. So what we can do to get over that problem is we can reconnect the fragments. I mean, the issue is it's the PhD to understand it. If you've got, you know, a fragment of 10 hectares you know over here and 10 hectares over there, and in one fragment there are only females and in the other fragments there are only males. They're not going to get any babies.
Speaker 2:So the idea is that we work with local partners to get them to buy the intervening land and reforest it. It helps with global warming because we're soaking up lots of carbon, and it also helps with establishing viable populations. So there's a lot of practical things we can do to stick together nature. We know which areas are important thanks to apps like iNaturalist, and so if we start restoring the right places, we can bring biodiversity back. So yeah, a lot of things we can do.
Speaker 1:You've touched on that just now and you've touched on it throughout this entire interview. But if you had the ultimate control not saying something ridiculous, if you could make three wishes for three different things that could be done on the whole planet, in China or the US or the UK three things, what would they be? To improve biodiversity and or improve the extinction rates, or anything else?
Speaker 2:In a sense I have that power now, but I have that power at a local level, not at a global level. So the issue is how do I expand globally? So, as an example, in nature, we work with a community in the western Andes of Kalani. This is a spectacularly beautiful place, you know, I think, Andean Mountains, but it's also a biologically rich place, one of the biologically richest places in the world. There are hundreds of species of birds that occur there, the birdwatching Catholic world, the world.
Speaker 2:There are all sorts of orchids, including an orchid called Dracula. There really is a genus of orchid called Dracula and it's a beautiful sort of purple and black orchid. And this particular orchid is called Dracula urmalina, and I think it was urmalina and it's Leonardo Ticaprio's mum, because Leo was very kind to give us some money to buy the land where the orchid occurs. You know, very, very rich place biologically. But what's the solution? Well, the solution means that there will be very large numbers of native trees. Who plants the native trees? The husbands and the brothers and the sons and their wives and mums and grandmothers and daughters collect the seeds and plant the little arbalitas or the baby trees in pots. So when the big enough that the husbands can take them up the mountainside to plant them.
Speaker 2:The local school when I first visited it was a wreck it had been blown apart by automatic weapon fire. Now it's a beautiful school that holes have been patched, the walls have been painted with butterflies and birds and orchids and the kids are in school. So you know, acting at that level, you can give people a livelihood. That land is worth more planting trees and sequestering carbon than it is as a cattle pasture. You can empower local communities. You can soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. You can give local communities a future. You know there's a package there that you can put together that's good for people, good for the environment, good for biodiversity.
Speaker 2:So you know, what do I want to do in the future? I want to do a lot more of that 16 projects around the world in Colombia, in Brazil, in Africa, in Asia. We need to do more. We need to engage local communities and if you look in Britain with these various efforts to rewild, they've got to work at the local level. So I think the message is yes, there's a lot of things we can do. We need to do it from the right places, but we also need to recognize that it's always going to be a local issue. This is not something that we can achieve by sitting in, you know, our fancy glass buildings inside the M23 or the Washington DC Beltway. We have to, you know, we have to get out there and get mucky, as we would say in my part.
Speaker 1:But what about trying to influence foreign governments, such as trying to stop them from deforestation? I think in the past other governments have given them money to not cut down trees. Does that seem like a potential solution? You know?
Speaker 2:all politics is local. I'm in that, you know. Yes, we need to engage governments, but I think we all understand that governments are very imperfect entities and you know it's gonna work. It's gotta have to work at the local level. And my point is that if we can engage local communities, help them with the solutions that work for them, that that was going to, in the long run, be more sustainable, more effective than you know trying to. You know, try to give millions or billions of dollars to governments and hope they will do the right thing. I think we all understand that top-down government control can be hugely ineffective. All can be hugely ineffective, and that's in countries that are not corrupt. Many of these countries are corrupt. So, yes, we have to engage governments, but we also have to make sure it works for local communities.
Speaker 1:You've mentioned about the amount of extinctions you know per species. But is extinction inevitable? Is it just something that we're slowing down, or can it be reversed, and how have you seen the impact of that?
Speaker 2:I mean we've got a long way to go. When Al Gore, in An Inconvenient Truth, talks about species going extinct a thousand times faster than they should, he's quoting my research. So you know, we've gotta bring that down and we've gotta bring that down a lot. But, as I said earlier, we are. We are not bringing it down enough, but we are bringing it down the clearly clearly things we can do. And I mean Western Europe is an unlikely place to be able to do conservation. We have modified so much of the landscape, there are so many people, and yet we brought a lot of species back, a lot of wetland species back. Organizations are protecting more of the land. Organizations are bringing species back like beavers, you know, and there's also some good stuff going on. So you know we ought not to, you know we ought not to, you know, constantly think it's terrible that we need to concentrate on what we can do.
Speaker 1:How have you found the benefits? Because you've written over or contributed to over 350 academic articles, which often be cited by a lot of other people. How influential do you think writing those articles are and contributing to the academic conversation really is?
Speaker 2:At the beginning, when conservation was being formed as a science, I think there were sort of two attitudes that people had, you know. One of them was, you know, really ecologists did really ecology and conservation was for, you know, for the intellectual second class that you know, this was just something that other people did, and I think what we've seen in the last 40 years is a conservation is a challenging scientific discipline. It requires us to do good science. It requires us to use the very latest technologies to develop technologies, you know, like iNaturist, to do computer mapping, satellite. There's a whole bunch of technical scientists, but there's also the recognition that none of that's gonna work unless we engage the local people, you know. So we have to engage them and work with social scientists and economists. So I think I've been rewarded for, you know, for making conservation safe for scientists, that we now realize that there's a lot of pretty serious science to be done if we're going to be effective. So I think that's part of it.
Speaker 2:The other argument that was made at the beginning well, if you're doing ecology, you're helping conservation. That's not true either, that a lot of ecology isn't really relevant to the conservation. So it's wonderful to celebrate, you know, bizarre behaviors, bizarre ecologies that you see in the Cedavids. You know fantastic documentaries, but not everything we know about natural history is gonna help us. So we have to get serious about learning. You know, learning the things that matter. My opposite number of Cambridge, professor, bill Sutherland, has been very energetic at trying to codify what we know. You know what are the techniques we can use. Do they work? What happens if they don't work? You know we need to know what we're doing. And then parallels discussions in medicine. When you go and see your physician, you hope that she is recommending a treatment or drug or whatever that will make you better. How does she know that? So we're at that stage in conservation. We want to have a catalog of what works and what doesn't.
Speaker 1:But how do you balance that out? Because I understand the need for further research, because yourself and your opposite number at Cambridge will have the best knowledge, or anyone in the field will be able to get to the best knowledge possible. But, as we've talked about prior, there's a massive well, at least from my point of view, there's an information gap between yourselves and politicians. How do you balance out being able to feed them the present knowledge and actually being like listen to this before giving them even more? And they still didn't even understand what you said 10 years ago and have actually enacted change?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, the first thing is turning up. We do need to go and engage our politicians and tell them what we know, and I think that goes back to that first argument for saving biodiversity, which is an ethical one. As a scientist, I believe I have a very serious ethical responsibility to share my science. Now we only have to look at how knowledge of the predictions about how COVID would spread to realise that politicians don't always listen. Working with a fellow Brit at Princeton, andy Dobson, and Ari Bernstein at Harvard Medical School, we've been trying to tell political leaders that COVID wasn't a one-off.
Speaker 2:20 years ago it was HIV. There will be other zoonotic diseases. These are diseases that spread from animals and if we're going to prevent another HIV, another COVID, keep Ebola, other things like that monkeypox under control that some of those interventions are going to be ecological ones. We get diseases from tropical forests. When people go into tropical forests, some butcher chimpanzees or gorillas, or people have wet markets where they bring animals into captivity as a prelude to eating them. There's a lot of things that we need to do to minimise our environmental impact, and I will concede that many of those actions have to be implemented by politicians. The costs involved of stopping deforestation in the Amazon fridges are probably measured in terms of a few tens of billions of dollars. Now, I don't have those kind of resources, but governments do. So I do think there are places where we need to look at what's going on and make sure that our science is being able to do it.
Speaker 1:How have you found over the years, how have you dealt with contradicting views to your own from fellow academics?
Speaker 2:It's not always easy. I mean, at the moment in Britain there is a knockdown drug out fight about whether hunting in Africa is a good or a bad thing. Many people find the idea of shooting elephants or lions or leopards to be absolutely appalling. I'm one of them. On the other hand, I have a great deal of sympathy with the view that Professor Amy Dickman, opposite number of Cambridge at Oxford, has, that you know, if we don't set aside lands for people to hunt, those lands are probably going to be destroyed. That's an emotive and very, very difficult issue that pits people who don't like hunting, like me, with people who realize that hunting can be the only way of protecting a landscape, like me. So there are many of us who are very conflicted about that and the challenge is to find a way forward. The solution that's been promoted at the moment is to say you know, okay if you're going to hunt, but you must prove to us that that hunting is benefiting the local community and benefiting local wildlife.
Speaker 1:To what extent? I mean, I won't offer my view on that issue, but to what extent do you think that people what do you think?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm nodding my view. But to what extent do you think that people in the UK or in the US should be able to give their views on what people are doing in China, or doing in Africa or doing in Brazil? To what extent do you think that, just because they think something should happen, that it should actually occur when those local people might be? Hey, this is our business. Back off.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a complicated issue because, first of all, yes, if conservation is going to work, it has to work locally.
Speaker 2:So it's very good as, sitting in our frankly offices inside the DC Beltway telling people in Brazil what to do, brazil is going to make that choice, but equally, there are ways in which we can intervene. What we do at Saving Nature is to work with local communities. We say, look, you know, it's true, you could go to that hillside and chop the forest down and if you do, the oils are going to wash away, you're not going to get a very good yield of crops, but we've got this hillside over there that you cleared two years ago and we'll pay you countries and that's going to give you a much better lifestyle for you and your people. And it's up to you. I mean, we don't force people to take our money and we don't buy the land ourselves. We let local groups do that. So there's no reason, I think, why we can't look at our engagement with people in other countries and see if we can help right-minded individuals make good local decisions, of people with sustainability.
Speaker 1:How do you deal with those issues? When you have, you know you've managed to convince that community to work alongside you. But when there's individuals that have ulterior motives, such as wanting to take money away or, you know, wanting to use the land, regardless of whether you want to use it or not, or if there's war or something in the area, how do you deal with those ulterior motives when trying to push forward this change?
Speaker 2:I mean there's no simple answer to that. But on the other hand, you know we can work with our local partners to try and find the best possible solutions. I mean, we've got some examples in South America where we work, where people are hanging on to landscapes which have been deforested. There's massive soil erosion, the buildings on these lands are falling apart and we say, look, we can give you a part of local partners can give you a lot of money. You can go and live in the nearby town and live a very comfortable life. And these people hang on to their land as it erodes away and their houses fall apart. And at times, you know, you hold your head and say good grief. You know why don't they see the benefit of what we're offering them? But you know it's their land and it's their choice and you have to treat them with respect and love and kindness and hope. Eventually they will work with us to create areas that are going to be better for their grandkids.
Speaker 1:What would you like? I mean, you've made tremendous progress within the years that you've been working towards this, but what would you like the next generation, or over the next 50 years? What would you like the next generation to accomplish in this field, both academically and, you know, with policy and change across the world?
Speaker 2:I think the next generation will have and can have a must have in the optimism. You know, the last thing out of Pandora's box was hope. And as much as I've got a lot of respect for Greta, you know she is an angry young woman and I think she has a good reason to be angry. But what I hope to see in the next generation is not anger but action. You know, what are the things we can do, what are the actions we can take? I believe that's a lot of those actions. So let's get out there and do things, and I think the current generation is well informed well informed about how beautiful and interesting nature is. You know, sir David, to thank for that Many other people too Dane, jane and OK, so we know that nature is beautiful and it's at risk, but I hope we'll get the message across to young people that there's a lot of things they can do.
Speaker 1:Is there anything that I haven't asked you today that you would like to? Would like to mention or talk about?
Speaker 2:I don't think so and in fact, you know, the point that I would have wanted to have made had you not given it me is hope. You know there's a lot we can do. I think young people realize that young people are able to see the world in a way that was almost unimaginable. When you know, when I was a teenager growing up in Derbyshire, you know we can experience the world around us or we can see what's going on, and that, I think, gives us both a opportunity to look at what's going wrong, what's going right, but also to find a niche whereby we can make the world a place.
Speaker 1:Final question what's next for you?
Speaker 2:Oh, I very much want to expand what we're doing at Saving Nature. Saving Nature is now supported by a very great deal of good science. We're beginning to understand what actions work, what actions don't work so well. I want to see, as I expand these local connections we will have I don't know a dozen, 15 different restoration projects around the world. You know, I hope in the next five or 10 years we'll be able to double or trouble that, not just because that's more biodiversity save, but because it's clearly a model that could be applied very, very extensively if people embrace it.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I feel like I've learned a tremendous amount even within the short amount of time that we were able to talk, from the biodiversity to extinctions and actually be able to get a real opinion on what it's really like. You know, you often see two sides one side being the world's ending and the other side saying it's fake news and to actually be able to get a realistic perspective, both showing the problems there are in the world, that we should also have hope and that we can move forward and that things are positively happening. And I hope that in my life that there's more action over anger, as you mentioned. So thank you so much once again.