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Gerry:
Welcome to Season two of Talking Apes. I’m your host Gerry Ellis. And to kick off our second season of exploring the world of Apes, I can think of no person more passionately committed to life on this planet, as my next guest. Once asked to summarize his work, he said, I’m a naturalist by birth, a biologist by training and a conservationist by necessity. My conversation this time on Talking Apes is with Ian Redmond, but conservation for Ian isn’t just about saving species. On a larger scale, he says the planet needs us to save functioning ecosystems. On a smaller scale, we must also recognize that species are made up of individual animals. For me, it became personal when I had the privilege of getting to know individual wild animals in the wild. Those were wild mountain gorillas.
Gerry:
Our conversation this time was ostensibly about the upcoming World Gorilla Day, September 24th. But as you will hear, Ian sees no species in isolation. Ultimately, our conversation pivoted to focus on the bigger picture. Forests, their ecosystem services and the role they play, and how keystone species like gorillas and forest elephants play a greater role than we ever imagined. Ian’s list of accomplishments would run on for half our podcast, but here’s just a hint of what he’s been up to over the last few years. He’s a tropical field biologist and conservationist renowned for his work with great apes and elephants. For more than 35 years, he’s been associated with the mountain gorillas through research, filming, tourism and conservation work. He has served as ambassador to the United Nations Year of the Gorilla and to the United Nations Environmental Program for its convention on migratory species since 2010. Ian is a conservation consultant and advisor for organizations such as Born Free Foundation, The Gorilla Organization and the Orangutan Foundation. To encourage APE groups to work together, he established and chairs the APE Alliance, a 95 member organization that works to ensure great ape survival. Ian was chief consultant and Envoy to GRASP the UN’s Great Ape Survival Partnership where he continues to consult on matters regarding apes, bush meat, forest, and related issues. Most recently, he is the tri founder of Rebalanced Earth, a new blockchain carbon Conservation Initiative. Oh, and one last thing, Ian was one of our first guests on talking Apes back in season one, so be sure to check out that podcast. And we found out in that one that he taught actress Sigourney Weaver, how a grunt like a gorilla back in 1987 for her award-winning role in the film Gorillas in the Mist.
Gerry:
Hi Ian, and welcome to Talking Apes. It is great to have you on, especially since it’s been about a year and a half since we’ve had a chance to say hello.
Ian:
It’s been a busy 18 months, but until last week I hadn’t been anywhere from this desk <laugh>, apart from a few trips around the uk. But yeah, you catch me as my batteries had just been recharged by a week in Africa.
Gerry:
Ah where were you?
Ian:
In Gabon for Africa Climate Week. So not a week in Africa, in the forest, but we did get out into Pongara National Park after the conference had ended, but it was a gathering of all the negotiators from across Africa organized by the UN Climate Convention so that Africa has a common voice, this year’s conference at the party or COP or up to COP 27 after COP 26 in Glasgow last year. COP 27 is being hosted by Egypt. So it is being described as Africa’s action cop because Africa wants the world to act on a lot of the things that have been promised over the years but not yet delivered on.
Gerry:
Was there a reason, specific reason it was in Gabon?
Ian:
Well, when these meetings are announced, countries volunteer, but I think Gabon has taken a leadership role in rallying the idea that Africa’s ecosystems are important to prevent dangerous climate change. And that whilst a lot of the talk in previous conferences has been the developing world asking for reparation, Africa is a continent that did the least to contribute towards our current climate crisis and yet is likely to suffer among the worst areas. So the talk this time was more, yes, that is true and that there needs to be a sort of just reparation for the damage that’s gonna be done to this and future generations. But also that the fact that Africa actually holds a solution to preventing dangerous climate change in its ecosystems, particularly the Congo Basin and Guinea and rainforests are still carbon sinks. They’re still absorbing carbon, whereas the changes that we’ve seen in the Amazon region, the deforestation, the roads have led to that now being turning into a source of carbon.
It’s extraordinary to think that a forest that big might be emitting more greenhouse gases than it is absorbing them. But the more roads you put in and the more farms you create out of forests, the less those forests can provide the ecosystem services that the world requires. And what’s really interesting, I mean unique in Gabon, is that the president appointed a British biologist as a minister at the environment forest and seas. And so Professor Lee White, who knows his onions as it were <laugh>, he’s a highly regarded ecologist, has studied elephants and gorillas and the role of Gabon’s forests, he’s now the minister, which puts a very different light on things because when he stands up and speaks, you know, you have a very clean scientific mind and a decades of experience behind it, it’s not a minister who’s been briefed by people with such experience and is trying to remember the meaning of this or that term.
But it is very unusual for a British biologist to be appointed to be a minister in a francophone, an African country <laugh>. But Gabon’s forests are being managed. There is still some timber extraction, but Gabon now requires any company operating in timber concessions in Gabon to be up at FSC Standard. That’s a Forest Stewardship Council, which is a non-governmental initiative between NGOs and industry, to have the gold standard of certification independently verifying that forests sort of claiming to be sustainable are actually sustainable and Gabon is the first country to require that everyone meets that standard. So we’ve been trying to persuade them to include animals, which are obviously an integral part of forest ecosystems. If FSC wants to sustainably manage forest ecosystems, it has to have animals in its criteria in our view. But the environmental chamber, which worries about the environment, but again, hasn’t focused on the animals. And as you know, <laugh> I’m all about the animals and their habitats.
Gerry:
Exactly. <laugh>. Yeah. Well that’s, really interesting. Does the FSC think by having Gabon adopt that, does that put pressure on its neighbors? Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Congo DRC, others. They really look at each other and when one kind of starts going down a road, the others start, there’s this little bit of leadership guilt about, maybe we should be a little more like our neighbor.
Ian:
It’s an interesting concept and again, because FSC isn’t a UN treaty or anything, it’s individual companies saying, we want to do the best we can and we’re going to operate to these standards. It is not legal in the sense that a government will chastise them or prosecute them for not following the standards. And when you sign up to be an FSC member, you have to follow the rules, otherwise you’re breaking that contract and it’s really the public that holds them to account. So if a journalist investigates something to do with timber extraction in an FSC concession and finds it’s broken some rules, it’s splashed all over the newspapers, it’s really bad for fscs reputation. So if you set yourself up as the gold standard of forest certification, you’d better do it or else you’ll be criticized and then your name is tarnished. And I mean the point we’re making in our proposal for a motion to be adopted by the general assembly, which then means, okay, we’ve all agreed on this, and to get a motion adopted, you have to have a simple majority in each chamber and an overall majority of two thirds. And the previous times we’ve had the overall majority of two thirds and 90 something percent support from the environment chamber, 80 something percent support from the economic chamber, but just under the 50% in the economic chamber. And that’s really companies saying, hang on, we’ve agreed to this, you keep moving the goal posts and that costs us money and if we’re gonna be successful as a business, we can’t keep taking on increasing economic burdens to meet the FSC certification. But what we’re trying to persuade them <laugh> is that actually if you can stand up and say FSC is a cruelty free brand, it cares about animals.
Gerry:
Well the thing of it that’s interesting also about FSC and is the fact that as you alluded to a minute ago, the public is involved.
Ian:
And it’s supposed to reassure you when you buy your product that this is from a well managed forest. And if the companies haven’t taken steps to prevent abusive animals either through hunting or through capturing for the illegal wildlife trade or for that, but for the legal wildlife trade it damages the forest ecosystem if you take certain species out. And as this is a podcast to do with apes, obviously apes live in forests. There are FSC certified logging areas which have in Southeast Asia, Gibbons and orangutans and in Africa obviously Bonobos, Chimpanzees and Gorillas. And you don’t want FSCs name to be tarnished by bad things happening to apes which are illegal, and the first line of any sort of FSC principle is that you obey the law. So you cannot tolerate capturing or killing of apes or other protected species on your concession. But laws in some countries, particularly in areas hundreds of miles from the capital where there’s very poor enforcement, the timber company has to almost act as a law enforcement agency, which they’re not legally mandated to do.
But under fsc they sort of have to make sure that they are operating within the law. And on the whole it happens. And those companies involved in logging in the congregation will point to the fact that species a lot of the public care about the apes, the elephants, the antelope, the Umbongo or the Sitatunga or Capy. All sorts of different interesting species that might be in a forest naturally, if they are able to show using camera traps or surveys that those species are thriving in the forest, even though they’re taking out a small number of trees using a sort of low impact logging method, then it should be reassuring to the public. Now in his closing remarks or in one of his speeches, Lee White, Professor Lee White Minister for the Environment in Gabon said he had a concept that Gabon’s timber no longer, that the country no longer allows the export of raw logs because that’s sending the low value raw material somewhere else, and it even comes back to Gabon as made furniture. If you buy furniture, you want not just the wood from Gabon, you want the jobs in the factory that made the furniture to be in Gabon, that’s their rationale. So now Gabon export raw timber, it’s working on building a plywood factories and furniture factories to export high value products. And he wants there to be a sort of QR code on each product that when the buyer in a shop in America or in Europe or Japan or somewhere buys this product, they click on the QR code and you get taken straight to camera traps in the logging concession where the tree came from. And you can watch what passes by the camera trap and see that your certification isn’t just independently certified by FSC but you can actually see the animals yourself because of the utilization of modern technology. That’s an amazing concept.
Gerry:
It is an amazing concept but I think it also addresses this need by the public. I think the public is becoming more and more aware of products in general. And I think with the technology we have the opportunity to do things like that which just seemed dream world 20 years ago, but now…
Ian:
It certainly puts the purchasing power of the public to the fore. And there was a competition that GRASP organized for interesting ideas to help save apes. And the winner, I can’t remember the person’s name, forgive me was someone who came up the idea of an app which would allow you while shopping, to point your phone or other device at the product and it would tell you the name of the company and whether they’re using palm oil or not and if they are using palm oil, whether it’s from certified sustainable sources, so deforestation free palm oil. Now imagine how if you are the CEO of a company and you start getting messages from people saying, Well I was gonna buy your product, but I can see no sign as to whether you are being careful with your procurement of your raw materials or not. And therefore I’m not gonna buy it until you can reassure me. That’s a really powerful tool.
Gerry:
Well, absolutely, and it’s interesting because you and I have both been involved in conservation for a very long time, and this has been putting the power in the consumer’s hand has been something that we’ve talked about for decades. But we seem to now be in a place where we have these tools that can function globally that can actually show the consumer.
Ian:
And in fact, you don’t need an app for that these days. You can look at the produce if you’re not satisfied, you just send a tweet and if you tweet the company, the media department of the company or social media department, will see the tweet. And again, how many times does such tweets have to be retweeted or such posts on Instagram or whatever social media channel, platform you prefer? They’re very, very aware of their reputation and it puts a huge amount of positive power in the hands of the customer, because there are certain products that you know you like, but suddenly you have to be aware of where they get their raw materials and whether it’s cocoa, cause obviously lots of cocoa grown in ape habitat and I just bought some Gabonese chocolate, which is delicious and I’m pretty confident that although the plantations must be on land that a hundred years ago was rainforest, it won’t be recent deforestation because Gabon is still 85% forest and wants to stay that way, but still to develop so that its population has a better standard of living. And you can’t begrudge people wanting jobs in a better standard of living. But if it can be done in a way that keeps the ecosystem intact enough that it’s providing the services we all need, then that’s why it’s important. And that’s why this connection between apes and elephants and the climate talks is so important. And I’ve been saying since 2007, I went to Bali at side events and in conversations with negotiators, if the health of the planet depends on the tropical forest continuing to sequester and store carbon and the health of those forests depend on the keystone species such as the primates and the elephants that disperse the seeds and prune the trees and do all that they do create light gaps, help the forest regenerate, then clearly the money that the developed world is offering to stabilize a climate doesn’t just need to protect forest, meaning a lot of trees, it means to needs to protect forest ecosystems including the apes and the elephants that are my particular interest. But if you’re interested in Tapiers and Spider Monkeys in Latin America, then of course those are the seed dispersal agents and the gardens of the forest there. So, hashtag ‘gardeners of the forest’ is a theme I use throughout social media, and on YouTube and my Ted talk is about gardeners of the forest and some people think, is he still banging on about gardens of the forest? And I continue to bang on about it.
Gerry:
Well I would actually like to bang on about gardeners of the forest for a second because, it’s a half century almost since you met your first gardeners, which were <laugh> a mountain gorillas in Rwanda. And I wanted to, since we’ve got World Gorilla Day coming up in a few days and this is going to be the first podcast that we launch the new season. I wanted to talk a little bit about gorillas and we’ve been talking about where I wanted to go with that conversation with, which is how do they play a bigger role? I mean we sort of think of them as I think the world thinks of Mountain Gorillas in particular as this sort of tourist attraction, but they’re much more than that. And I think looking back almost a half century and for those of you listening, you can’t quite see this, but any current picture of Ian will tell you he, he’s sort of looking like a silver back himself at this point or a silver beard I guess I <laugh>. Yes I’d love for you to talk a little bit about how you got started with Gorillas, but also how that experience and your experience over the years, how it’s evolved over these 50 years.
Gerry:
We’re gonna take a short break from Talking Apes will be right back in a few minutes. One of the things that’s going on behind the scenes here at Talking Apes is trying to make this the best possible podcast we can make it for you. That starts with having great people working on it. And one of those is the newest member of the team Demelza Bond, she’s our new assistant producer and I’d like to welcome her to the show. Hi Demelza.
Demelza:
Thank you Jerry. Hello and hello to all our lovely listeners.
Gerry:
<laugh>. As you can tell, Demelza’s got a bit of an accent, that’s because since the pandemic we’re kind of spread out all over the planet, but I think it gives us a bit more of a global perspective on what we’re doing with Apes and so it’s really great to have you on board.
Demelza:
Thank you. Yes, it’s great to be here and I hope people can understand my accent.
Gerry:
I’m sure they can. Listen, I know you have been working really hard with our website development team and all the other people behind the scenes to make the launch of season two an amazing one. Why don’t you tell everybody what we’ve been doing?
Demelza:
Yeah, that’s right. So we’re both really excited about this. We’ve just launched a brand new website for Talking Apes. It’s got a beautiful visual new look, features lots of Gerry’s lovely photos from around the world, his adventures with Apes. We’ve got a gorgeous new logo that I am absolutely in love with. It is so cute. We’ve got lots of new features like a search option, we have blogs and we’re gonna have teases for upcoming guests.
Gerry:
Oh, that’s fantastic. I’m really excited about the whole thing. The look of it is amazing and you guys have been really brilliant. Where can people share in how amazing this thing looks?
Demelza:
Okay, it’s really easy. Just head over to talkingapes.org.
Gerry:
Okay, that’s talkingapes.org so they can find it there. You have also, I know, been really cranking on the social media side of things as a way to allow our listeners to engage with what we’re doing.
Demelza:
Yeah, exactly. It’s really important to us this season that we try to connect a little bit more with our listeners and hear their voices. So this season we have got a brand new Instagram account set up. You can find that @TalkingApes_ podcast or we’ve got a new community group on Facebook where we all get together and chat about primates and the podcast. And you can find that by searching for Talking Apes Podcast on Facebook. What we want is for you guys to come over and send us a message. I’ll leave a comment and give us a review. Tell us what you thought of an episode, tell us what your favorite episode was or give us a suggestion for a future guest. We just want to hear from you and we’d love to read out your comments on a future episode.
Gerry:
Thanks very much Demelza, I appreciate it. I appreciate all the work you and the team have been doing to make this an amazing new season two.
Demelza:
Thank you so much and thank you to all of our listeners. We love you and we really appreciate you.
Gerry:
That was brilliant, thank you so much. And now back to Talking Apes.
What over the last, starting with Gorillas and then expanding from there, kind of take us on that rollercoaster of conservationists. I mean you have seen and experienced maybe more than almost any human on this planet.
Ian:
It’s true. I’ve been both at the sharp end of conservation, literally <laugh> and at the highest level of policy making of conservation and all stations in between. So I do have an overview, perhaps
Gerry:
You have a very unique perspective on it all because of all of that. And that’s what I would like to dig into a little bit because I think most of us sit in our armchairs and we see wonderful David Attenborough pieces or something by the BBC or National Geographic and you’ve been a part of actually making some of those productions and being the consultant or in front of the camera.
Ian:
Yeah, it’s an exciting phase we’re in with increasing outreach to people and ways of informing them and so the potential to do more good and get more things right, which we’ve sadly been lacking over the past 50 years evidently.
Gerry:
One of the things that we have gotten right is saving Mountain Gorillas and you know, were there when it looked like Mountain Gorillas may not even survive today. I mean we could have easily been talking with you right now about what it was like to see a Gorilla, a Mountain Gorilla and because they disappeared years ago, but that’s not the case. So talk a little bit about your experience right there in the beginning as ‘worm boy’ from our first time we had a chance to talk but what you learned from that, what you have learned since and maybe walk us a little bit through what’s happened with Mountain Gorillas and how that has expanded and applies to other species. And specifically I’d love to get into forest elephants a little bit because forest elephants have a unique role on this planet.
Ian:
Yes, well 50 years ago now I think probably right now, I was hitchhiking across America as an 18 year old. I worked in a summer camp, Camp Watitoh in Massachusetts and the Camp America scheme that I managed, at went onto younger than most Camp America counsellors, gave you two weeks at the end of the summer when the camp ended, to do what you wanted. And I just stuck out a thumb. Actually I got a lift with another counsellor from the camp who was driving west nonstop, and he dropped me off in Kansas and then I just kept going west. I thought, how far west can I get in one week? And then turned around and head back. Well I got to California. But I passed through Yellowstone, and Yellowstone in 1972 was celebrating its 100th anniversary. So the National Park system, I purely by chance I learned, started in 1872 and I guess Yellowstone this year must have celebrated its 150th because I can count <laugh>. So I wrote that out.
But that sort of introduced me to the national park concept as first conceived in the USA, which has then been applied all over the world, and which now is coming under a lot of criticism because by forcing people who live somewhere off their land where they’ve been for generations thousands of years and say, No, no, this is now a national park, humans have to leave except for those who can afford to come on holiday or who work here. It has protected a lot of natural habitats around the world, no doubt about it. But it’s not enough. Countries aspire to have maybe 15% of their land area as protected areas, some of which have been national parks, some of reserves or lower category. In Britain where I am now, I live in the UK and the national parks here are full of farmers and even mines.
Ian:
But the activities that they do within national parks, which are areas of outstanding natural beauty and have ecosystems, some of them dependent on human activity. So if a national park was created because of the way the land has been grazed by sheep or cattle over thousands of years, that’s how it has to stay. So the farmers stay there but they operate under restrictions. But when the national park concept was applied to developing countries, it was people out save it for the animals except in some countries, and the DRC, which we both care about a lot, was then the Belgian Congo. The Belgians in what was at once a sort of far sighted ecological thinking and the other appallingly racist thinking considered that the pygmies were part of the forest. So they were allowed to stay well in one sense, wonderful, but regarding pygmies who are people like we are as animals in the forest is ugh, very, it is difficult to conceive.
But from our 21st century cultural lens, it’s no good looking back and judging people on what decisions they were taking a hundred and something years ago. But now we’re going back to the idea that actually indigenous people who manage the forest in traditional ways that don’t destroy the forest, are actually our allies in the fight against biodiversity loss, which is at least as an important, an existential threat as the fight against dangerous climate change. So no one’s thinking we should go back to that idea, they are just animals and absolutely not. They’re wonderful people with rich cultures that who respect and who I find fascinating and they need to be part of the conservation solution. And that may mean that this idea that you kick them all out the land so that the land is left pristine without human context. Humans have been part of nature since we’ve, we are part of nature.
There’s no question of that. And the fact that many of us lock ourselves in little rooms and just have token bits of nature like a plant in a pot behind me, and pictures of nature and any other bits of biodiversity that come into the house, open the window and try and waft them out. Flies, wasps, spiders. No, this is human terrain get out except for our pot plants and our pets, they’re allowed in. And that’s separation from what we, I suppose perceive as the chaos of nature. We want our lives ordered and clean and free from other species except for the ones we like. That is a very recent and in many respects, misguided view of what humanity is. Because for most of our existence since we went on our separate evolutionary pathways from our cousins, the Chimpanzees and Bonobos, and bit before that the Gorillas and a bit before that the Orangutans, a bit before that the Gibbons, the other apes just carried on in their habitat living in a way which is entirely compatible with the ecosystem’s survival.
And we went off on this different path which has led to industrial eco economies and technology that allows us to have a conversation across oceans and land masses, which is extraordinary. We couldn’t be having this conversation 20 years ago. And it’s extraordinary how technology enables this sort of thing to happen. But the raw materials in the devices that allow us to speak have come from nature. And speaking of the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo that’s where most of the world’s Tantalum is found. And Tantalum is an important component in our mobiles and laptops because if you code a capacitor with a fine Tantalum powder, its properties are enhanced and it doesn’t get too hot. So Tantalum went from being a kind of obscure metal, heavy metal on the periodic table that some people might vaguely remember seeing when they were at school to something that we all carry in our pockets, because we’ve all got some sort of mobile device that we talk to our friends on and we’re using it devices which depend on this mineral. And that led us all to be implicated in the destruction of gorilla habitat in the east of the DRC. Much of it being done by organized criminal gangs who are armed malicious and terrorists in the very real sense of they terrorize a village, kill a few people, do unspeakable things to others, and then round up some workers and force them to work in mines. Not mines with pit props and machinery, but holes in the ground with lump hammers and chisels and bags to get the heavy lumps of rock out, that the crazy white people will pay really good money for. And that whole economy of getting minerals out of the earth that we want in our developed world and not being careful where it comes from, it’s another reason why we need certification of minerals as well as timber. And it’s coming. And there are efforts to, and I recently went with a couple of journalists from British Paper, The Mirror that wanted to do this story of the threat of our mobile phones and devices having on gorillas and where the conservation of Eastern Lowland Gorillas is working like, in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, a national park in the montane sector. But in the lowland sector, cause it’s so big and difficult to patrol, there are still gangs of bad guys with guns trying to control the land because you control area of land then you have control over the minerals and the timber and the ivory and anything else of value. And in those, I wrote a report in 2001 called Coltan Boom Gorilla Bust because it didn’t seem like the bloom in Coltan prices was leading to a catastrophic decline of the Eastern Lowland Gorillas. And fortunately Mountain Gorillas don’t live where there’s Coltan underground, they have other threats. But the Eastern Lowland Gorillas are closer related to the same species Eastern Gorillas cause we no longer just think of Mountain and Lowland, we think of Eastern and Western. And in the Eastern there’s a Mountain and the Eastern Lowland and then the Western Lowland and the Cross River Gorillas, those are the four subspecies, it’s the Eastern Lowland that has a misfortune to live in forests that grow above deposits of Coltan and other valuable minerals including gold.
And so how does the world respond to that? What is the system of certifying that the Tantalum capacitor in my phone didn’t come from child labor, human rights abuses that you don’t even wanna read about and battles over turf by some of those military groups have political aspirations. Some of them are just bandits. And that’s the second biggest tropical rainforest in the world after the Amazon largely within not just the DRC but the other Congo and Republic of Congo and Thero Guinea and Central African Republic and Gabon, Cameroon. All those countries that form the central African forest block are essential to the stability of our climate. We are not gonna win the fight against climate change without protecting the bulk of those forests. And if they’re gonna be exploited, it has to be done in a way that keeps the carbon sinks absorbing carbon and not starting to let off more than there is, which means protecting the Gorillas.
Ian:
And gorillas are found in 10 countries as from Rwanda and Southwest Uganda, Westwoods as far as Nigeria, the bottom right hand corner of Nigeria where it meets Cameroon is where the Nigerian Gorillas live, the Cross River Gorillas. And they’re only found in that little bit between Nigeria and Cameroon. But across those forests gorillas play a role as keystone species. But they’re also interdependent ecologically on forest elephants because in Kaholi-Bega where most of the forest elephants were killed during the 20 years of turmoil coming up to 30 years of turmoil, it actually really started to get very bad after the Rwanda genocide and the refugee crisis and hundreds of thousands, millions of people fleeing Rwanda and living in camps, which became mini cities for hundreds of thousands of people strong with no facilities except what the UN refugee agency could quickly put together. And then this sort of flux of competing interests. There are people trying to do conservation. I think some of the most courageous and inspirational conservationists on the planet, most of them Congolese and a few of them expats.
Gerry:
That’s true. I think that’s an important point to drive home too. Is that many of those people, and we’ve, if anyone who’s been even remotely connected to that area knows how many rangers, hundreds of wildlife rangers who are there, ostensibly to protect gorillas but other wildlife as well, but have been literally gunned down by these rebels.
Ian:
Yeah. Because they’re not just dealing with the occasional poachers who are setting a snare to feed the family or even a commercial poacher who’s trying to kill an elephant, sell the tusks to a dealer they’re dealing with armed malicious. And it is very dangerous work. I don’t know, there’s so many stories that come to mind though. During some of the worst times when militias were attacking rangers, I happened to be in Kaholie- Bega and I sat in on their Monday morning meeting, and a lot of companies get their staff together and have a Monday morning meet and talk about what their plans are, who they’re meeting, what they’re hoping to achieve, and what didn’t go right last week. And these people were saying because they’d been an attack a few days before and some of their members were killed and some of the officials were killed.
And they were saying, Well, well my family didn’t want me to come to work today, but I came because I really care about this job. And you think, well, how many Monday morning meetings start with a resolve to potentially face death at your work place of work because you think conservation is important. It really, it is, as I say, inspirational and the council of my oldest friends in Africa are among those who do this, and when war breaks out or the terrorist attack and the expats NGOs largely withdraw their staff for obvious reasons for their security. The people who live there don’t, they just get on with it and survive as best they can. And they’ve lived through these terrifying experiences the equivalent to what London has lived through in the second World War in the Blitz. And what currently people in Ukraine are living through just unspeakable things, bombs falling on buildings and blocks of flats and apartments are being destroyed. And it’s sometimes much more basic that they don’t have the technology to send guided missiles, they just send people with guns and machetes. And if you wanna terrorize…
Gerry:
Exactly. Well since World War II, I think it’s been called the deadliest place on earth is Eastern Congo. And yet here is, you’ve got this collision of incredible wildlife and under the ground you’ve got, as you were mentioning earlier, some of the rarest minerals on earth. I mean, most Americans, for example, would be, I think shocked to know that the uranium for the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War II came from the Congo. So it’s, this isn’t something that just started a week ago or last year or a few years ago. This has been going on for well over half a century. There’s been a concerted effort to go after the riches of Eastern Congo, and yet you’ve got juxtaposed against that, some of the most incredibly biodiverse places on earth and some of the most iconic species on earth.
Ian:
And many of your listeners will care passionately about the fate of the animals. And I hope also about the fate of the people. So I don’t think you can be species specific in your compassion, and I want people to care as much about other people as they do about other species. But I think we’re kind of at a potential turning point because the world is realizing, that protecting these animals can’t just be because they’re nice. A lot of my motivation comes from those early experiences at Karisoke with Dian Fossey and the Gorilla who’s looking over my shoulder, that’s a portrait of Digit by a British artist is called Frank Lummos I think it’s wonderful. When I eventually finished my biography of Digit, and sorry for all those who are still waiting for it, including my publisher, I won that as a front piece. I told Frank that.
Gerry:
We’re spending time on podcasts like this and writing.
Ian:
But the death of digit, who when he was alive, sometimes did come and sit behind me and look over my shoulders as I was taking notes on gorilla behavior, was one of the motivations that pushed me from wanting to study gorillas into wanting to conserve them. And then 10 years later, the same thing happened to the elephants. I was studying the ones that go underground and mount Elgan in Kenya into caves to dig salt, imagine elephants, deep underground in total darkness, tusking the rock with their front teeth and then eating lumps of rock to make up the salt deficit in their diet. Amazing phenomenon. And 10 years after I stood beside the body of Digit who had been decapitated and hands cut off because some dealer knew he could sell a skull in a pair of hands to some tourist or visiting foreigner who wanted a gruesome souvenir. Ten years after that incident, I stood beside the body of one of my study elephants who I named Charles, almost certainly it was Charles, but his face had been sliced off with the chainsaw to get his front teeth. And that pushed me into elephant conservation. And I’ve been trying to keep up with both spheres, conservation of apes, conservation of elephants ever since and trying to make stuff happen, largely down to the personal motivation of having got to know and trust and be trusted by a free, wild animal who I was interested in and who it turned out in digits case was quite interested in me. And so we became friends and I think that’s not an exaggeration, I think it was an interspecies friendship. And when you’ve had an interspecies friendship, not based on dependency, he didn’t depend on me for food like those in captivity do or for anything other than just mutual curiosity and a recognition that in some senses we were kind of kindred spirits.
Ian:
Both young males not yet found a place in the world, and he didn’t find his place in the world he was killed. So I spent a lot of my time trying to ensure that he and his kind do have a safe place in the world. And when the same thing happened as one of my elephant study animals, it kind of pushed me off the research path and into the conservation path. And I guess if I had an ambition, it’s to go back to just being a naturalist and studying animals and film me and photographing them for their own sake, but with the half decent chance that the animals that I get to know are gonna live their full life in their natural habitat. That’s the big goal. And now because of the climate crisis and also the linked biodiversity crisis, we have a chance to make that happen because instead of wanting to protect them just because they’re nice, and just because some humans have got to know them and recognize them as autonomous beings, gorilla beings or elephant beings who arguably have a right to exist on our planet and a role to play in our planet’s ecology, that’s the key now, because we’ve created this climate crisis and this biodiversity crisis so that we’re getting close to ecosystem collapse.
And if there’s a point where we need the keystone species at whole ecosystems together, this really is it. So the UN declared this, the UN decade of ecosystem restoration. And what do we mean by restoration? It doesn’t mean humans planting trees. I mean sometimes it does, but you have to be careful in the tree species that you plant and you plant the species that will encourage the natural tree planters, the birds and the primates and the whoever eats fruit and swallows seeds or chew and spits out seeds like what orangutans do, big seeds. Those are the ones you want in your human planted forest so that they take over. Humans sort of evolve doing some seed dispersal by eating. We eat tomatoes, and we, behind me, that’s a seed dispersed avocado plant. I didn’t swallow the seed and poop it out, but I did chew it and scarify it and then threw it in the compost. And later that summer it had germinated. Now animals are doing that all the time, every day, hundreds or in some cases, thousands of seeds per day being spread around the forest. And most of them are just gonna get to seedling and get eaten by something else. But some of them will grow to be the trees. And when you look in a forest today and you see these amazing rainforest giants, big emergence that stand above the canopy of the smaller trees, and it would take 10 people, arms outstretched to reach around with those. And you think, whoa, that huge organism is a result of an ecological event, when a seed dispersal agent might have been an elephant, or if you’re in Latin American, might have been a tapier or merque or some primate or a toucan took a seed that either swallowed it or chewed off the flesh and spat out, and it landed and it germinated. It was one of the few out of the thousands that each tree produces every season that actually made it to adulthood. All the others were fed upon. And this is what’s really interesting about this moment in time because two years ago three now, right, 3 2019 and Italian biologists called Fabio Bizagi published a study of two areas of the Congo basin rainforest. One which still had a population of forest elephants and one which didn’t, they’ve been extubated decades ago. And Fabio found that the above ground biomass, the wood and the leaves and the trees was 7% more where there were elephants. So why are elephants making that difference? Well, he concluded and he subsequently did more research into this not only do they plant the trees, but they garden the forest. They’re eating the small plants, the fast growing big tree falls and lots of fast growing pioneer species colonize that gap rushing for the light and that most of them get eaten by elephants. And then the elephants digest some of the nutrients out of it and the rest comes out in poo. Elephants produce a lot of dung. You called me the worm boy because that’s what Dian put in her book. In fact, Dian called me Totoya Marvi, not Totoyam Yoka. And if you look it up in Swahili, you find that’s the ‘Dung boy’, not the work boy. But for some reason she felt it wasn’t appropriate in a book that she hoped is gonna sell all over the world, to have me nicknamed the ‘Dung Boy’.
Gerry:
Which it has sold all over the world. And now you’re the worm boy all over the world,
Ian:
But we in our Western clean world, think dung is a problem, get rid of it, but it’s actually what makes the world go round. Anyway, Fabio found this 7% difference. Now, if you’re looking at the gigatons of carbon at the Convert Basin, possess 7% of a gigaton is still a lot of carbon. And given that carbon has a value now because companies that can’t yet get rural zero are trying to offset their unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions by buying carbon credits that potentially makes the work done by elephants worth a lot of money.
Gerry:
Looking forward into the next five to 10 years, you thought if there were a single thing that we need to think about in terms of how do we change the narrative around what we’re doing on this plan, it almost sounds from that we need to take the time to put the of ecological environmental value onto every species we can. I mean, if this story behind a forest elephant, what is it? What is beyond tourism, what is a gorilla worth? What is a chimpanzee worth? What is…
Ian:
Exactly and beyond tourism is a really important phrase because if tourists come and see your gorillas or elephants, that’s fine, but if you’re being paid for what they do, tourists can come or not. That’s like the cherry on the icing on the cake. And we’ve been focusing on the cherry and ignoring the value of the cake
Gerry:
Inspired by this idea of focusing on cake. My conversation with Ian turned into a longer and passionate discussion on the climate value and carbon and species diversity, with gardeners of the forest like gorillas and forest elephants at its core. You can catch that in part two of this Talking Apes podcast with Ian Redmond.
You’ve been listening to Talking Apes. As we launch season two, we’re the podcast that is dedicated to raising awareness about the magic and wonder of apes like us. Our goal to create greater understanding about the threats that face apes and the importance of their ecosystems on which we all depend. Before we go, a quick reminder to check out the new Talking Apes website at talkingapes.org. That’s talking Apes dot o r g. And there you’ll find back episodes, future guest lists, and a link to all of our social media. And while on the website, if you’d like to make a donation to Talking Apes, you can do so by clicking on the little red button up in the upper right hand corner, and of course your donation will be tax deductible. I’d like to thank assistant producer Demelza Bond, for her great work behind the scenes and I’d especially like to thank you for joining us as we start our second season exploring the World of Apes. From everyone at Talking Apes, I’m Gerry Ellis. Thanks for listening and enjoy part two of my conversation with Ian Redmond.
