Video: Conserving the Great Apes in a Changing World

Conserving species, particularly the “charismatic megafauna,” has been a focus of conservation efforts for many decades. With a growing human population, the protection of any single species—compared to the conservation of a landscape or ecosystem—can easily be questioned. Annette Lanjouw will discuss why the conservation of individual species is critical and how this effort enables us to connect with the environment in ways that make action and responses meaningful.

Annette Lanjouw, Vice President, Strategic Initiatives and Great Ape Program, Arcus Foundation

Co-sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and Harvard Museum of Natural History. Presented in collaboration with the Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine at the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, Harvard University

Recorded 3/30/16

Transcript

Conserving the Great Apes in a Changing World

[00:00:05.14] So I just want to say a few brief remarks. A few years ago, I was asked by Jon Stryker, who's the founder of Arcus Foundation, to join the board of the organization. At that time, I only knew about the significant support that Arcus had provided to projects related to LGBTQ issues in the United States.

[00:00:27.68] But as we talked, he told me that there were two large areas of programmatic work in the Foundation, LGBTQ issues and the great apes. And I, like many people, said, why the great apes? What's the connection? And Jon replied that he had a longstanding interest and commitment to conservation efforts with chimpanzees and apes.

[00:00:50.37] And I thought, well, that sounds good, but I still didn't quite get the connection. But I agreed to join the board. At my very first board meeting, our speaker today, who is vice president for Strategic Initiatives and Great Apes Program at the Arcus Foundation, gave a presentation on the conservation work that the Foundation was doing with the great apes.

[00:01:15.67] I was simply mesmerized. She gave a passionate, detailed presentation that simply opened my eyes to a world that I thought I as an educated person knew a little bit about. And I realized I knew nothing. I had no idea about the horrific pressure that has been placed on the survival of the great apes by human desire to exploit the natural resources in the places where they live. And I began to understand why we need to protect their habitats.

[00:01:47.24] But after her talk, and the many presentations I have heard her give since, I have learned and can now see the connections between the social justice work for LGBTQ people and trans people that the Foundation does with the work on the conservation of the great apes. I saw it most vividly when last summer the board went on a trip to Uganda, and we got to go into the forest and observe a family of chimpanzees.

[00:02:13.63] It was simply a transformative experience for me. As I watched the young chimpanzees play in the trees, I had the deepest sense of connection to them. And everything that Annette had described suddenly became real. And I realized that the Foundation's conservation work wasn't just for the great apes. It was for us as humans, as well.

[00:02:38.92] And I realized that we are diminished as humans if they cannot live their lives, and our work is simply about the survival of the planet for ourselves and for them. Annette has given me a great lesson, teaching me about the great apes. And this vital work has helped me grow as a person.

[00:03:00.99] I think Arcus has finally got a great statement about this work that captures my experience. And it says, "The Foundation is dedicated to the idea that people can live in harmony with one another and the natural world. We believe that respect for diversity among peoples and in nature is essential to a positive future for our planet and all of its inhabitants."

[00:03:28.28] So I was introduced to this incredible work by our speaker this evening, and I'm sure many of you will feel as I do when you leave this evening. So now I want to turn it over to Professor Richard Wrangham to introduce our speaker.

[00:03:42.12] Thank you, Evelynn, for those wonderful remarks. So it's just a real thrill to be able to introduce Annette Lanjouw, because she is in an extraordinary position of working with the foundation that has the largest private program for promoting the conservation of the great apes.

[00:04:05.56] And as vice president of Strategic Initiatives for this Great Ape Program, she is taking a very fascinatingly creative, long-term view to a problem that, for anybody who has thought about the great apes, is just huge. I'll let her describe the problems. But it is just amazing that here we are on this with half a dozen species that are our closest relatives, and we are letting them slide into extinction unless we work really hard to stop that.

[00:04:43.88] Annette is a native of the Netherlands. She holds a BSc in zoology and psychology from Victoria University in New Zealand and a Doctorandus degree in behavioral ecology from the Rijks in the Netherlands.

[00:04:58.16] She has had a very varied career. Among other things, she served as scientific advisor to the world-renowned wildlife filmmaker Alan Root. She was the Central Africa Programme officer for the Wildlife Conservation Society in eastern Congo. And she was project manager and field director for the Frankfurt Zoological Society's Chimpanzee Conservation Project.

[00:05:25.19] She's scientific advisor to the Trust for African Rock Art. She's a member of the Species Survival Commission, Primate Specialist Group, the Transboundary Conservation Specialist Group, the World Commission on Protected Areas.

[00:05:38.96] She's done all sorts of things. For 15 years, she was director of the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, that works to conserve the something like 800 or maybe 900 mountain gorillas inhabiting the forests on the border of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

[00:05:58.31] I was hoping that she was going to tell the story of how she ceased being the director of the IGCP, the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, but she said she wasn't going to, which is done just out of modesty.

[00:06:12.07] I think it's a wonderful story, because it tells what kind of person she is in a number of ways. And briefly what happened is that after for many years being a very successful director of a very complicated problem involving three countries and many conflicting interests, she decided that it was time for foreigners to get out of there, and for this program to be run by people who are native to the area. And she worked with a splendid Rwandan man who took over from her. And the program's been a success ever since.

[00:06:49.24] Here's was dramatic about the story. She just resigned and said it's more important for somebody else to be doing this job. And it was only after that that she wondered what she was going to do next. And fortunately, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation came along and found her and rewarded her for that sort of behavior.

[00:07:07.41] It's real fun for me to introduce this evening, because I've been studying chimpanzees in Tanzania and Uganda for many years. And my own contact with Annette goes back 29 years, I think it was, to when she was working in eastern Congo with a project where she was taking on the challenge of habituating chimpanzees as a possible ecotourism project.

[00:07:36.08] And I'd recently started my own chimpanzee project, and I put everything I owned into a small vehicle and drove for a couple of days on rocky roads and found Annette in the middle of a volcanic area, habituating chimpanzees and being amazingly successful after four years there, working in a really politically very difficult area indeed, one which most people would not want to risk.

[00:08:04.84] And a few years later, we were trying to develop our own ecotourism program in Uganda. And lo and behold, who was invited to do the advice about how to develop it but Annette? And that was almost 30 years ago.

[00:08:21.26] She's had a huge mark on Africa, in terms of conservation efforts with bonobos, as we'll maybe hear a little bit about, and gorillas and chimpanzees. And she's an extraordinarily influential person for a very important program. It's really wonderful to be able to introduce her. Annette.

[00:08:41.00] Good evening, everybody. I am very worried now that I'm going to disappoint you all, because that was an incredible introduction, both of them. Thank you so much for that.

[00:08:53.36] So yes. Tonight what I wanted to do was talk a little bit about the personal and the emotional and the intimate in conservation, but at the same time also talk about the very arrogant and coolly objective view that you take in conservation, and that you have to take in conservation.

[00:09:15.95] And I say arrogant. Why is it arrogant? It's arrogant because it's from the perspective of a human being. In my case, a European female from wealthy country, coming to Africa and having an opinion about what we want to see, and what conservation should look like, and what nature in its wilderness should be like.

[00:09:41.09] But it's also arrogant because it's the perspective of a human being, and we are but one of the species on this planet. And there are a whole lot of other species that we share this planet with. And we have our ideas of what the land is good for, and how we can use it, and how we can exploit it for our benefit. But I'm sure a lot of other species have very different ideas about how that land should be used and exploited.

[00:10:05.31] And so it's an arrogance that we have to be conscious of and we have to think about when we engage in conservation. And arrogance that is not just that we're coming from the outside to countries like the Congo or Rwanda or Uganda or Indonesia or Vietnam, but it's also an arrogance as our species and with our self-interest.

[00:10:29.89] We exploit the world and its resources for our benefit, for our exploitation, to enrich ourselves. And yet, but we do a huge amount of harm, as well. And when you look at the planet today, it really is in a catastrophic state. There are so many challenges that are existing on this planet due to our behavior. And sometimes, it's very hard to be optimistic. It's hard to be positive and to continue feeling like, yes, we can make change, we can improve things.

[00:11:06.37] But the world has seen challenging times before, geopolitically challenging times, socioeconomically, or social and environmental justice. There've been a lot of problems, ethical and moral problems, that we've had to face.

[00:11:21.56] And so what is different about the situation now? Well, we know that now we are facing an extinction rate that we have never seen before, that has never existed pre-human time. 100 to 1,000 times pre-human levels.

[00:11:40.96] And we're also aware that there are a whole range of stressors on this planet, stressors that are acting on the resources, on the land, on the climate, on water. And we can sometimes, as scientists and as an intelligent species, spend some time trying to understand what is the impact of these stressors.

[00:12:01.86] But we look at the stressors singly. What we have no idea about is how these stressors work cumulatively and synergistically, and what will happen when all these stressors are coming together. How will that affect our planet and our life?

[00:12:19.77] We have no idea what we're doing to this world, not really. And we will look at the extinction of a species and say, well, it's a rhino, or it's a polar bear. And yeah, it's a pity. They're lovely. But what difference does it really make if there are no more rhinos on this world, or if there are no more polar bears on this world?

[00:12:41.66] It's hard to say what the difference is. It's hard to say whether it will make a difference if there are no more rhino on this world, except from an ethical perspective. Is any one species essential?

[00:12:55.01] And for that matter, is any species dispensable? If we think that every individual human's life is essential, then can we really say that the life of a non-human is not essential? And an entire species is not essential?

[00:13:14.12] So these are some of the reflections that go through my head when I'm thinking about what I'm doing as a conservationist. Because as a conservationist, we tend to talk about populations and species. We don't talk about the individuals, per se.

[00:13:31.73] I started, as Richard said earlier, with bonobos in 1984. And at that time, it was a relatively little-known species. And they were hugely intriguing. They're very similar to chimpanzees in many ways, and yet they're also, curiously and interestingly, very different. And I study their behavioral ecology for my degree at Utrecht. And then after that, I spent three years working with chimpanzees in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, as Richard said, habituating them and looking to see what the impact and the effects of the habituation process was on their behavior. But at the same time, habituating them so that we could potentially take tourists to visit them.

[00:14:17.24] And when I say habituation, what that actually means is being doggedly stubborn and following them every single day in the forest in the hope that slowly with time and with determination, they will lose their fear of humans and come to accept you as part of the environment.

[00:14:35.84] And not as an interesting part of the environment. What you're trying to achieve is that they find you as an exceedingly boring part of the environment and pay no attention to you whatsoever, so that they continue with their normal and natural behavior. And then you can study it.

[00:14:49.56] So you don't want to have any interactions. What you really want is for them to totally ignore you so that you can observe them as though they didn't know you were there.

[00:15:00.11] After that, I spent 15 years working with mountain gorillas, as the director of the International Gorilla Conservation Programme. And during all those years of working with bonobos and then with chimpanzees and then with gorillas, gradually I realized that that which had been motivating me, which was getting away from cities, and living in the forest in these beautiful places, and spending my life studying and understanding the behavior of animals, that actually what really was the most essential thing that I could and should be doing is conservation and protecting these landscapes and protecting these species in these forests.

[00:15:40.51] And that needs to be seen in the context of behavioral ecology, but not just the behavioral ecology of those animals and how they are influenced by their environment, but also the behavioral ecology of humans and how we impact on the environment, and how we respond to changes in our environment.

[00:15:58.30] People have to be part of the work. They are definitely the problem. But they are also part of the solution. And that's the only way we're going to achieve conservation, if we don't look at working with people and changing people's behavior and addressing some of those different stressors that are together impacting ape survival and the survival of other species in these forests.

[00:16:23.22] So what are these stressors that I keep talking about? And there's so many of them. I mean, the list goes on and on. But obviously, we have climate change, warming of the climate. We have crowding, urbanization, human population growth. We also have the enormous amounts of toxins and chemicals and plastics that we find in all our rivers and in the food systems that we are dependent on.

[00:16:50.36] We have water stress in areas. We also have land stress in other areas. We have a phenomenally powerful extractive industry that is extracting minerals and oil and timber from sites all over the world. We have extensive industrial agriculture that is clear-cutting enormous swaths of forest to produce food and other commodities for our consumption.

[00:17:14.08] And we have the infrastructure development that accompanies all this human activity, roads, and dams, and bridges, and train tracks. And all of these activities are all stressors.

[00:17:27.16] Looking at them singly, you can try and see how it impacts areas. But do we really understand how all these things together are impacting ecosystems and landscapes? And I think it's extremely complicated.

[00:17:40.44] A lot of these stressors have to do with human population growth. We know that. The human population on this planet is increasing and very, very rapidly. But just looking at it in terms of human population growth is far too simple. We have to understand that there are a number of indirect drivers.

[00:18:00.38] Economic growth is a huge piece of that. It's predicted that the global economy will grow two to four times in the next 40 years, depending on the policies and the international and national communities in those places.

[00:18:19.18] But we also know that a vast majority of that economic growth is going to happen in countries that we are currently calling emerging economies and developing countries. And so there's going to be a real shift in the economic power that currently is in the rich countries to those countries that are going to become the rich countries that are now considered the poor countries.

[00:18:45.85] We also know that human demographics and human population growth is going to increase and continue to increase. We're now at about 7 billion. In 2050, we'll be about 9.3 billion. And we estimate that in 2100 we'll be over 10 billion people.

[00:19:07.38] In 2050, about 85% of that human population growth is going to be happening in developing countries, across Africa, Southeast Asia, and in some parts of Central and Latin America. And 70% of that human population is going to live in urban environments, compared to about 43% today. So it's going to be a dramatic shift in where people are into the areas that are currently much less densely populated.

[00:19:41.88] And the biggest challenge isn't just the number of people. Yes, the number of people is a challenge. But the biggest challenge is also that as populations get richer and we are successful in helping people out of poverty-- and that's a great and wonderful achievement-- but as we help people get richer, they consume more. And their footprint gets larger.

[00:20:05.33] And so there's going to be a real, strong increase as human population grows, and as that population gets richer, we will be consuming more and more and more. And where is that all going to come from?

[00:20:21.08] We're also seeing shifts in technological developments. And that's enabling globalization to work in a manner much more effectively than it has in the past. Just by trade routes happening, and the internet, and all sorts of other technological developments are happening, allowing capitalism and globalization to be pressures that are going to mean that anything that we are doing in one country will have impacts in other countries.

[00:20:50.13] And that globalization means that we can't just talk about local conservation or nationally-based conservation. But things that we need here in Europe or in the United States has an impact on the source country where we are extracting the resources from. Or things that we are producing are moving into other countries and creating expectations and desires in those other countries.

[00:21:15.02] Infrastructure is a huge driver of habitat loss and some of the challenges that we're facing in the conservation world. We're living in the most explosive era of infrastructure development that we've ever seen on this planet.

[00:21:32.65] There's an expectation that by mid-century, 25 million kilometers of new roads will be built. That's enough to encircle the globe more than 600 times. Most of that is going to happen in these countries that are currently the emerging countries and developing countries.

[00:21:53.66] China alone is planning to invest $100 billion annually in infrastructure development, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. And at the World Economic Forum, the G20 agreed to commit $60 to $70 trillion dollars worldwide in new infrastructure, just in the next 15 years.

[00:22:20.10] So we can just imagine what the impact is going to be of all that investment and all that development. And that development is happening in Southern America, in Africa, and in Southeast Asia, where currently there isn't that much infrastructure.

[00:22:35.90] And where you build a road, we also know that people follow. And then that leads to the direct threats to the biodiversity in these forest habitats, which have to date been relatively protected and intact, because there weren't roads and access into these areas.

[00:22:54.96] So we'll come back to the apes specifically. What are the three main threats that are leading to the challenges to apes' survival? And as Richard was saying earlier, the risk that we're going to lose apes across the world?

[00:23:12.76] The first one is habitat degradation and habitat destruction, as we were saying earlier, through all these different stessors and development. The second one is hunting, both for food as well as parts, as well as live capture for trade.

[00:23:30.92] And the third one is disease, and disease and increased mortality, from new diseases emerging through increased contact with humans, through changes in climate, through pollution and toxins in water. There's going to be all sorts of other pressures on ape populations.

[00:23:49.26] But by far, the greatest threat is habitat destruction. And it's where we are anticipating the most damage to take place.

[00:24:01.57] Agriculture is estimated to be the driver of 80% of habitat destruction that we see worldwide. And if we compare that with the growth of the human population, and this increase in demand in agricultural products, we can see that we're going to need to increase agricultural production by about 60% in the next 20, 30 years in order to meet that demand of that growing human population.

[00:24:31.59] Now, that means if we want to increase agricultural production by 60%, another 700,000 kilometers squared of forest cleared for agricultural productivity. But we know at the same time that agricultural productivity is decreasing in Europe and in the United States. So actually what it means is 1.3 million kilometer squared in Africa and Southeast Asia and South America.

[00:24:57.99] And primarily the two sites that have been identified as potential and suitable for agricultural expansion are the Amazon Basin and the Congo Basin. Two of the most biodiverse and most valuable, intact landscapes that still remain today. So the threat to those sites with infrastructure and with agriculture is phenomenal. And we know that that will lead to enormous damage.

[00:25:27.45] Much of what we know about the impact of industrial agriculture comes from the oil palm, studies that have been done on oil palm, and also the data that's been collected on what happens when you clear-cut forests for oil palm. Far less is known about some of the other agricultural products that are grown on an industrial scale, like coffee, and tea, and rubber, and sugar, and cocoa, and sorghum, and rice, and corn, and wheat, and all sorts of other products that we're all consuming. And with trade happening, it's being grown in one country and traded, and bought, and consumed in other countries.

[00:26:08.96] Palm oil and coconut oil are probably the only two vegetable oils that are grown exclusively in the tropics. And that's why they are of particular concern to us, because they cannot be grown anywhere else but in that tropical belt, that highly biodiverse and important area. And palm oil accounts for 40% of the vegetable oil consumed worldwide.

[00:26:36.94] So in the Amazon Basin, they've already identified 290 kilometers squared-- 290,000 kilometers squared, I'm sorry-- of land that's considered suitable for cultivation. But in Africa, 2.5 to 3 million kilometers squared of land have been identified as suitable for the growing of food crops. And that will mean destruction of the remaining areas that still have elephants, and apes, and rhino, and all the other highly endangered species that we have on this planet.

[00:27:15.45] So this is all very negative, very dismal. And I'm sorry, but it is the reality that we're in today. This is this convergence of multiple stressors that we are facing. And conservation has to adapt to those stressors.

[00:27:32.77] We can't continue to do nice, small projects and protect them locally. We need to take into consideration these drivers. We need to look beyond the local, and the immediate, and the site-based to understand how this is going to change over time, and to prepare, and to prevent what's happening.

[00:27:51.81] The world is changing, and it's changing fast. And humans are having an enormous impact on all the species of this planet, but ultimately on ourselves, as well. And we know this. I don't need to make the case for it. But it's very hard to explain to people and to really understand these huge issues, these huge phenomena.

[00:28:13.76] And when you talk about biodiversity, it's hard to understand biodiversity, because basically biodiversity means everything that's alive. It's the entire range of species that we have on this planet.

[00:28:25.65] And that's why it's important to be able to look at a species and understand individual species and taxa, whether it's orangutans, whether it's gibbons, whether it's chimpanzees, because then you can make sense of how these stressors are actually impacting them, and you can use that understanding to explain to people why these changes are happening and why we need to do something about it. So sometimes you just need to take a piece of this enormously complex, difficult, and large challenge that we're facing and look at that piece in depth.

[00:29:04.96] And so that's what we do it the Arcus Foundation. We've been looking at the apes specifically, and documenting the impacts of all of these different stressors on apes and ape populations, and trying to illustrate using those examples and using an example of a group of animals that people tend to relate to and feel moved by, because we are so similar to apes, and because they are endangered, and because they are our closest relatives. And there's a natural empathy that we have when we look at apes. But it counts and is just as valid for frogs, or for crocodiles, or for any other species that we can talk about.

[00:29:47.16] Apes have also been very well studied for many decades. So we have a lot of information about apes, and we're able to use that information to understand and document these changes. Relative to other species, they've been far better studied to the point where some people are even saying the presence of apes pulls research and attention to their presence and away from other sites that don't have apes. And sites that don't have apes are far less well studied because of this interest and curiosity that we have about apes.

[00:30:19.64] But they're also similar to us, and we can understand why it's important to protect them much more easily than when we talk about tree frogs or when we talk about some of the other species. So it's important to use that, because it's hard enough to communicate this complexity.

[00:30:38.72] All of the threats that I was talking about earlier affect different apes in different ways. When we look at the gibbons-- and this is a cao vit gibbon from northern Vietnam-- there are probably the most affected by changes in their habitat. They're highly arboreal. They only move through the canopies of the trees. They don't come to the ground.

[00:31:02.27] So when you break apart the forest and build roads through it or whatever, they become trapped in these little islands of forest that they can't escape from, because they don't come to the ground. And so they're very, very vulnerable, and we have many species of gibbons that are in tiny remaining numbers.

[00:31:21.45] The Hainan gibbon has 28 left. That's all. That's all we have left on this planet of the Hainan gibbon. And there are a number of other gibbon species where the numbers are really tiny, and their conservation is an enormous challenge.

[00:31:40.67] Chimpanzees on the other hand, are probably the more adaptable of all the apes. They're very intelligent. They learn how to manipulate their environment. They've become quite good at exploiting crops that people have farmed. And they'll go in and they'll raid sugar cane or go into a banana plantation and rip the trees apart and take the bananas.

[00:32:02.12] And that's good in the sense that they've learned how to adapt to their environment. It's bad in the sense that they've become a target for farmers who can see their entire crop devastated in a couple of hours by a few chimpanzees. And so then they get hunted or killed because they're seen as problem animals.

[00:32:23.14] Orangutans are complex, because they tend to be much more solitary than many of the other apes we were talking about. And we've always thought for many, many decades that orangutans need perfect, primary forests to survive. They cannot survive in degraded landscapes. They need intact forests. And so all the emphasis was put on creating protected areas to ensure that orangutans were saved.

[00:32:51.82] However, we're now finding that more than 60% of orangutans actually live outside of protected areas and can adapt relatively well to degraded forests. What they do need is to have trees that they can nest in. And this tree has an orangutan at the top of it.

[00:33:07.80] And you can see that that's not a viable solution for orangutans. They need to enough habitat and enough forest for them to be able to eat and to build their nests, because they build their nests in the tops of trees, and to find other orangutans, because although they're solitary, they clearly need other orangutans occasionally.

[00:33:30.95] So the changes in the landscape that we are producing is affecting each of these apes in very different ways. And what happens is you find these orangutans trapped in these little islands of forest. And then people have to go into those areas, and dart them, and immobilize them, and then carry them out, and try and bring them to other areas of forest where they can reintroduce them. Now obviously, those other areas of forest also have orangutans in them, or it might not have orangutans in them because they were hunted there. So it's very difficult to find suitable habitat to bring those animals.

[00:34:10.13] So what we are left with is this changing landscape with small islands of forest, surrounded by, in this case, oil palm plantations. So we have to ask ourselves the question, is this conservation-- tiny, little patches of forest like this, that we protect, and we put up fences around them, and we keep the animals in there, and then we destroy and use the rest of the land-- is that what we're looking for? Is that the ideal that we want to see? Or are we actually looking at something much more integrated, and where the wildlife and the people are living in these mosaic landscapes where they can live together?

[00:34:59.42] One of the things that the mining industry has developed, with the help of conservationists, is what is called the mitigation hierarchy. And it's where, when they want to go into these countries, say for example, Guinea, where they are mining for bauxite and iron ore, they will look at the site that they want to exploit, they'll have their mining concession. And the mitigation hierarchy helps them through a process where they first look at how to avoid doing any damage to the wildlife and to the environment.

[00:35:34.06] When they realize that they've avoided everything that they can avoid, the next step is how do we minimize any further damage. And then, when they've minimized everything that they can minimize, then the next step is to look at what can we restore. Where we have damaged, how can we restore it?

[00:35:52.92] And then the last option-- once you've done your avoidance, and your minimization, and your restoration-- your last option is offsets. And that's, how do we offset the damage we do. So if we clear-cut this forest here, we can offset it by protecting another piece of forest somewhere else. That means that we will consider it acceptable to decimate a population of whatever species you're looking at, in this case chimpanzees, because we'll offset it somewhere else and protect those chimpanzees in another forest.

[00:36:30.27] Now, I think this is a deeply problematic process, because it basically means that we consider it OK, after you've gone through all those previous steps, to offset the lives of these individuals, the lives of these chimpanzees. We would never consider doing that for humans.

[00:36:48.19] You would never say, well, we want to build a hydroelectric dam. We're going to destroy these villages. Unfortunately, these people will be sacrificed. But that's OK, because we're going to build a school, and a dispensary, and a really nice town over there for those people. So we've offset the damage.

[00:37:05.63] We would never consider doing that. And yet, we find that a completely acceptable process when it comes to intelligent, sentient, and emotional species like apes.

[00:37:17.15] So I'm going to give you a little anecdote about mountain gorillas, where in the year 2000 we observed a silverback called Luwawa, who had learned the danger of poacher snares on his family. Clearly, some of the gorillas in his group had been trapped by these snares.

[00:37:39.37] And so Luwawa had learned to destroy snares. And he would deliberately destroy snares whenever he came across poacher snares in the forest. He would walk up to them and break them in half, and then his family would be allowed to pass.

[00:37:52.90] And we found this incredibly interesting, fascinating. This one animal had learned how to do this.

[00:38:01.30] In 2012, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund observed two young gorillas in Rwanda, Dukore and Rwema, and a young male, Tetero, also systematically breaking snares in the forest. Now clearly, they had learned it somehow. Whether they learned it from Luwawa, whether that, from one generation to another, was transmitted. But what we saw in 2000 and then saw again in 2012 was learned behavior, that they were realizing and understanding how to break these snares and destroy this danger to their lives.

[00:38:37.16] Gorillas frequently get caught in snares. And it can kill them or cause very severe injuries, and they can lose their hand or their foot or whatever. And the injuries, if they become infected and gangrenous, the gorillas lose their life.

[00:38:50.44] So what we see is that one individual learned something, shared that learning, and it was transmitted through the gorillas from generation to generation. So the live of an individual matters. It's not just a question of a species or a population. If we had lost Luwawa-- and we did actually lose Luwawa to poachers years later-- then that knowledge disappears.

[00:39:16.32] So when you start talking about offsetting one population with another, you're talking about numbers. You're talking about animals, as though they're all the same. But they're not all the same. Each individual animal learns, and has experiences, and can share that learning and those experiences with others. And so they have value. Those individuals have value.

[00:39:40.18] And as conservationists, we tend to speak of species and populations, but we learn how different each individual is. And you get to know the characters of every individual when you spend many years working with them.

[00:39:54.33] Conservation has not always been as effective as it could and as it should be. And there's been a lot of waste of effort and waste of money in doing things in ways that are not that effective. For example, doing an education program when knowledge isn't the problem. It's not that people didn't know. It's just that there were other issues that were causing them to hunt or to destroy the forest.

[00:40:21.15] Or another example is when people are hunting in order to sell the meat for cash, that well-intentioned conservationists provide them with a project to raise chickens or fish. Food isn't the problem. They needed the cash so that they could buy the medicine for their child who needs to go to a dispensary.

[00:40:41.42] So you need to adapt the conservation intervention in such a way that it really responds to the issue and the problem. It's important to go much, much deeper into the analysis of the problems.

[00:40:55.64] And so what does make a good conservation project? It's understanding and doing the science, so that you really understand the issues, and the needs, and the dynamics of that group. But then it also means that you need to understand the drivers of the threats, both the direct threats as well as the indirect threats that are causing the problems, and that you address your responses very specifically to those drivers. And building incentives for conservation, and trying to get people to understand the value of conservation.

[00:41:31.31] So really, the message that I wanted to leave you with is that we are facing enormous problems, and we are going to need to change our behavior if we want to save apes, or elephants, or rhinos, or polar bears, or any of the other incredible species we have on this planet.

[00:41:51.96] And that change of behavior won't come from each and every individual just saying, well, I'm going to have to make my little bit. It's going to need to be a combination of policy and legislation. It's going to need to be a combination of education and information. It's also going to need to be involved with each and every one of us taking responsibility for what we do, and becoming engaged. And all of those different things have to come together.

[00:42:19.43] But the only way, I believe, that you can really become engaged, and become concerned, and get involved is when you see this as an individual animal, an animal with a life, and desires, and enjoyment, and pleasure, and the potential for grief, and the potential for happiness, and very strong emotions. It's not just an animal. It is an animal that has depth and has value. And each individual has depth and has value.

[00:42:53.33] I've spent so many years of my life with animals in the forest, and studying them, and just being astounded by the different behaviors, the different characters, and personalities. And there have been some really amazing, and remarkable, and exciting things that I've observed. There's also been countless hours of very mundane things, but things that still touch you and still are meaningful to you, because you see that their mundane behavior is so similar to our mundane behavior.

[00:43:25.93] So I think these are the things that I wanted to just leave you with, and hopefully give you some food for thought. And I think it's just important to remember that all lives matter. And it's the lives of every individual human, and it's the life of every individual animal or non-human that's on this planet. And we all have to live on this planet together.

[00:43:50.40] But it is going to take a lot of work and a lot of commitment from our end to change that wave of destruction that we've brought to the world. So we do need to take responsibility for those actions.