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[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] my mission and theme is simple we all love the mountain gorillas we all when we look at these pictures we are so inspired and of course if you see a mountain gorilla face to face it's a life-changing experience it's not something that I've just dreamt up as a marketing slogan David Attenborough said that Jane Goodall of course has talked about the chimpanzees it is a very very special experience and I'm sure many of you in this room have seen pictures about it heard about the Fosse story or actually seen the gorillas and my message tonight is simple if you want to save the gorillas focus on communities and in a way that's an interesting message because all day today we've had different examples of community issues and that's the same in the middle of Africa so the paradigm of gorilla conservation and tourism looks wonderful it looks like your utopia a magical landscape and iconic species local communities celebrating what looks like paradise in reality it's very complex like all communities are it's a fragile tiny habitat it's 700 square kilometres to put that in perspective the Serengeti which of course is Africa's possibly best-known park is 30,000 square kilometres and to put it in greater perspective the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is 70,000 square kilometres so we're talking about a tiny habitat in the heart of Africa where Ron de Uganda and the DRC meet it is also amongst the poorest areas in the world the communities in this area often on less than $2 a day so the economics is which is what this talk is about is really really important all the way through and then population density is another issue it's a very crowded area it's six to seven hundred people per square kilometre now in Bend I think in certain parts you'd be lucky to find one person in square the u.s. average of course is a hundred people per square kilometer and also this area has seen some of the greatest are people's in Africa in the last in the post-colonial year era which finally ended about twenty years ago the borders of Rwanda Uganda and the DRC are exactly where Africa meets where the different communities of Africa meet where the watershed meets and where of course the different boundaries that were ramped up in 1884 meet so it's had tremendous change in upheaval but luckily for all of us about twenty years ago it started to stabilize and about twenty years ago in a moment of madness I thought it was time to go and build lodges in this area so I don't know what quite happened but it was partly because of course I was born in this area and I first saw this I first saw the foothills of the villages which you saw in the film when I was a young boy about fifty years ago when I walked in this area with my father so the gorillas are there the forest is there the tremendous magical landscape is there but do you know what like I said before the local communities have no intrinsic interest in the gorillas they're an inconvenience they need this land for cultivation they need crops they need to feed their kids so how do you change the different elements of this paradigm well tourism is one element which I'd like to discuss but tourism brings money but if you have too much tourism it can cause stress and health issues for the gorillas and Dian Fossey herself actually I'm sure you know wasn't very keen on tourism because she thought the impact would be too negative but in my opinion if you have no tourism I don't think the gorillas would survive so let's look at a few elements of this story as I said I first saw this a very long time ago and I gave up Africa my family became refugees from Africa in the 1970s and I went off to England and did other things and then suddenly the randy's genocide just reminded me how fragile this area was how complex it was and how it was important to do something there and it's what inspired inspired me to go back well it wasn't as I said easy in all the middle of this conflict but we started we first started building a lodge in Ganga in the late 90s and then I built Verona Lodge which you from which you see the views in 2004 it was the first international lodge to be built after the randy's genocide so the genocide as you know was in 1994 and by about 2000 the area started finally settling and that's when we really started working in this area so my theme is that if you want the Gorillaz to survive you need to make conservation part of an economic mainstream and let's discuss the pros and cons of this issue because on the one hand you have tremendous romantic ideals in many of us in this room and best summarized by Ansel Adams who is a great hero of mine and as you know who captured some of the most amazing wilderness areas of North America and Ansel Adams said wilderness is a religion an intense philosophy a dream of an ideal society and these are tremendously powerful words that I'm sure have inspired many of us in this room many of you who've come to live in this area because of wilderness these were the values that I was inspired to have by my father wilderness may be precious but I don't think we can be romantic about it in my opinion it has to produce an economic return now this might be controversial especially in North America especially given the recent debate about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge I'm very conscious about about the debate that says you can have oil oh this pristine place but not both but is this will is this valid for wilderness in Africa I ask for the poor who lived there how are we going to feed them how are they going to get economic benefit from what is happening in the world they don't study flora and fauna to them it's an unthinkable luxury to go and see gorillas and $1500 a pop and governments of course need land to feed their poor there's an increasing population increasing development increasing western-style consumption so I don't believe we can put wilderness and conservation on a pedestal when oil minerals logging can produce greater returns we need to look at the relevant relative benefits of these different things and the relative cost and the relatively negative relative negative consequences to find a balance otherwise I think we're going to get problems because local communities will not support the gorillas in the future at the moment it's been a tremendous success story the Ugandan government the randy's government the DRC government have made great efforts to stabilize the area to look after these parks to have Rangers who protect the gorillas and the wildlife and who have invested vast amounts of money to make sure we can all share the gorillas with the global community and so they have done a lot in comes in in consultation with the conservation nonprofits many of them as you know are based in the US so it's been a great success story the mountain gorillas was possibly at 300 in the 1960s and now there are about 900 so it's been a great success story for the gorillas but it's not going to be enough in the future we need to find a way of making sure tourism and other sensitive industries can protect Africa's forests put bread on the table and give the children of Africa a chance to have an education and a better future they too want the share of the growing wealth and health and and in wealth of the world and this is not some new thought you know sometimes you come to these very amazing places like Ted and there's a lot of thinking about what is new well actually most of life is often not new it's looking at it again again to take a u.s. example in the 1830s which is almost two centuries ago the American romantic painter George Catlin champion national parks in the US as you will know and he talks about talked about parks containing man and beast equally john d rockefeller who was very involved in setting up parks in this country he said that every write implies a responsibility every opportunity and obligation these should be the values that should be central to working in this in these areas to balance the different needs unfortunately life doesn't seem to work quite like that in the video that we showed I there's a picture of the Batwa but were community the Batwa are the oldest inhabitants of central Africa they are our forefathers these are the indigenous people of this area and until 25 years ago they lived in the shack in the volcanoes in the National Park but when the National Park was created they will marched out at gunpoint and made conservation refugees and this is a story of course that's happened again and again in different parts of the world in North America and in Africa and this is something we need to change we need to respect our communities as much as we respect wildlife I'm pleased to say that next month we have made available land for the Batwa neighbors that we've had for the last 20 years to have a village of their own because for the last 20 years they have lived landless and without rights and without any land or economic activity so in May there will have a village 400 people and homes and somewhere where their children can play and hopefully they can move on with the ladder of life and this is one of the great central themes that we have in our ecotourism model and there are many in the world and we should build on them which involve the private sector which involved public-private partnerships so if we're taking if we're to change the paradigm there's your habitat there's the wonderful landscape there's the Ranger taking you into the forest to see the gorillas and which of course everybody wants to see and this is the habitat the forests of this area are unique they are very very special and very diverse and this is the Batwa community that are getting ready their new homes together and so if we look at how we put this to historically this is how we all perceive the issue that in this pyramid the gorillas at the top of the pyramid there's the ecosystem of course there's tourism there's communities but rather than have the gorillas at the top of the system I would argue that we should have communities at the top of the system and they will then look after the the wildlife with us because that's what's very very important that they participate in this process as equals they drive it it should not be imposed on them in closing I would like to say two or three things each of you can make a difference you can think about plastic can think about consumption this continent still consumes vast amounts of things the waste the waste that we are producing in the industrial world is huge we all need to think what we do about that we all need to lobby our governments to support the disappearing forests to protect ecosystems and diminishing species but also of course to look after the communities so I view an argument this would this is meant to be provocative but not judgmental that we should not do conservation we should not be conservation activities as private playgrounds for ourselves for the privileged we should not just do guerrilla tourism for entertainment just for the privileged we should do this to give the communities the freedom of life the freedom to support the area around them we need to bring them into the economic supply chain and this is very very central I think if we are to have these amazing ecosystems survive and also the gorillas in them and I'm sure this can be done the communities of Africa are some of the oldest in the world and they have lived in partnership and harmony with their habitat more closely than we have managed and we need to learn from them in closing I would just quote from Ibn Battuta who some of you may know eben Battuta was one of the earliest global explorers and he was born in Morocco and in the 14th century set off from Morocco and went to Asia and went to Europe went to China and he wrote in his famous Travel meant for him kinship with humanity and I think that should be the central message if we remember up if you remember different people around the world especially communities who are not as privileged as we are I think we'd get more out of protection of the ecosystem and the gorillas thank you very much [Applause]