The Archive

“I remembered that when I read the news that the world has lost 52% of its vertebrate wildlife over the past 40 years(2). It’s a figure from which I’m still reeling. To love the natural world is to suffer a series of griefs, each compounding the last. It is to be overtaken by disbelief that we could treat it in this fashion. And, in the darkest moments, it is to succumb to helplessness, to the conviction that we will keep eroding our world of wonders until almost nothing of it remains. There is hope – real hope – as I will explain later, but at times like this it seems remote.”

In deciding to rebrand—change the name—of the great ape project to Great Apes 2020 I considered a number of things, primary among those was the that this project was far from over and the reality was 2020, the end of this decade, was the deadline from the start, even if I hadn’t fully wrapped my head around the idea of an eight-year project.  But affirmation came from the outside and not where I expected: acknowledgment by Philadelphia Zoo that both I and this project were worth a public and institutional commitment the likes of which the project had thus far not received. Simply put, I was extremely shocked, but proud

Disease outbreak, especially infectious disease, is largely an environmental issue. According to EcoHealth Alliance, whose researchers and scientists are solely focused on the ecology of disease eruption, or spillover. Seventy-five percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic — they originate in wild animals, livestock or environmental disruption

Knee deep in planning #GAD2015 journey and prepping for conference call with Phily Zoo. Over a bowl of pasta I decided to review a couple pdf docs out of the pile stacking up on the distant right of my desk — I swear they are self-replicating. One an overview of lowland gorilla populations in Congo Basin spanning past three decades (below) and the other a 2012 post palm oil-deforestation exhibit survey of visitor opinions (above). From each doc a charts leapt out. Juxtaposed they ushered a sobering conservation commentary

It’s Friday and it feels like a much longer week than five days. For folks of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, on the front line in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Nigeria where the Ebola herorrhagic virus has now killed over 1,200 and struck another thousand, the week must feel like an eternity. What must also feel like an eternity is the time it is taking to correct all the media mistakes and resulting public hysteria. Just to be clear here are a few points from this week’s news—

Today – August 19th, is INTERNATIONAL ORANGUTAN DAY! Woohoo! Celebrate!! 

Awesome, great! Wild orangutans, let’s invite them all. Do you think one of the… ummm… let’s see… hang on let me check…

ahhh… Wikipedia no, GRASP database no, IPS no, WWF no, a couple dozen or so various orangutan specific NGOs no, gosh, appears no one really knows how many orangutans are left in the wild. Well crap, that makes it tough to have a party if you don’t know how many guests you are inviting. I mean how much cake do we need?

GAD GLOBAL JOURNEY 2015: With less than six months to go before I depart for a year on the road – a journey crossing all the great ape range states from Sumatra to Tanzania as well as locations where activities push great apes towards extinction – the serious work of defining new equipment and travel plans has begun. This journey is a huge change of logistical strategy as I will carry everything I take in one reasonably small pack on my back (starting here.)

Imagine you are writing a script for a science fiction movie. The concept is a virus that escaped to planet Earth long ago, and has lived untouched within tropical forest of the Congo Basin. Now it can only be controlled by the creatures from the planet from which it has escaped. These are (of course) advanced creatures and can form-shift to liken themselves to humans on Earth. They do, and come in the form Earthlings will recognize while assuming roles as senior medical staff with Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, to access the emerging infectious disease. The aliens that have come to save people on Earth transport themselves to a small village in the heart of the disease chaos, in the Kissidougou District of forested rural Guinea, Equatorial West Africa.

A posting this morning on the website Mongabay.com hit a bit closer to home. The story highlighted the ongoing decline of the Kinabatangan River ecosystem, one of the most biodiverse in Borneo, in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Like much of the biodiversity loss on Borneo—three countries share the world’s third largest island: Indonesia (Kalimantan), Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) and Brunei—deforestation through logging and for industrial scaled oil palm plantations is to blame.