“What animals know, and we don’t: exploring the lost wisdom of our animal cousins in light of today’s environmental crises.”

My favourite animals are elephants. I mean, they can sleep standing up, tell how full a cornflakes packet is by smell alone, and hear through their feet. If there is any more useful set of attributes out there, I’m yet to find it. But they are also the most complex, creative, clever, compassionate creatures you will ever meet. Let me tell you a story [Lawrence Anthony et al.]

Lawrence Anthony was a South African conservationist, and proud owner of Thula Thula game reserve. One day, he received a phone call: the sort of phone call you kind of wish you’d put down as soon as you accept. There was a herd of elephants several hundred miles distant in some pretty deep trouble- a matriarch gone rogue and killed, causing riot amidst the rest and threats of culling within days. In Africa, there’s no such thing as compromise. Once an elephant herd is out of control, it is inevitably shot.

So Lawrence was asked if he would take on this herd- give them a new home on his own property. To do so would be the act of a madman: risking his own life and those of his staff, a fortune in property damage and with an exceedingly slim chance of success. So of course he said yes. Long story short: the elephants broke out of the reserve twice and killed one of his rhino, yet still he persevered. Eventually he earned their trust- they saved his life during a wildfire, and came to mourn at his house after his passing.

The reason I tell this story- the reason it continues to astound me- is that it shows one man willing to put animals on equal footing rather than as primitive inferiors. This has become my own life’s work, my little way of saving the world.

Think about it: nature has had… ooh… well… all of 4 billion years to come up with the very best strategies it can for survival. 400 years ago, we as humans started taking it apart, and only 40 years ago did it occur to us that might not have been a brilliant idea and to think back to the start.

But we’re stuck: caught between our human vanity and the need to adapt. Evolution runs off selective pressures in one’s surrounds, but right now we’re creating these for ourselves which makes them doubly hard to accept. If we can reframe our human relationship with nature, then all that might change. We get an extra drive to act and all the means to set things straight. The process for getting there is what I describe as Conservation’s 4 C’s:

Firstly, connection. And this one if by far the most important for me. Jane Goodall speaks of her dog Rusty as her greatest teacher; in my case it was Ochre- my pet stick insect, but regardless of the specifics, it remains the case that behind every great environmentalist lies an even greater animal. Without exposure to these creatures from an early age, people grow further apart from natural spaces, developing disproportionate fears of the bush and its lurking dangers. That means they are excluded from environmentalism from the get-go, and it is familiarity that conquers fright, as any spider-keeper can tell you.

Secondly, curiosity, which is of course tied in strongly with the citizen science movement. This is all about bringing people to the point at which they can ask questions about the natural world and learn experientially. Our most recent estimate is that there are one trillion species on Earth, 99.999% of which we have yet to discover. That’s quite the knowledge gap for our 21^st century world, and
any one of those might show us a cure for cancer, for coronavirus or late homework submissions!

Third we have creativity, the business end of operations where the big ideas and new solutions are launched. Thankfully, there’s no such thing as plagiarism in “survival of the fittest,” and we as humans are just catching on to this. A new field of biomimicry has grown, bringing with it everything from whale-inspired wind-turbines to wetsuits inspired by otters, bee-bots for Mars exploration and de-extinction technology from bacteria.

Fourth and final is collaboration, and this is where things fly or fall. Right now, conservation is a shambles- and I say that having worked three years in the space. We hear of pandas being bred and released to restore China’s national pride, or so that our grandchildren might see them. Rather we do so as a feeble kind of apology for having hunted them into oblivion, with this an attempt at making amends. We need to work cohesively, but far greater than that, we need to work with nature- not against it. The esteemed biologist E.O Wilson has suggested setting aside 50% of our lands and oceans for Earth’s biodiversity, and given that Homo sapiens is only 0.0000000000001 per cent of life’s great abundance we could hardly claim more than that.

We live in a world that’s changing faster than ever. Hyenas have sued Disney for defamation of character, a monkey spent two years in court over a copyright case for a selfie it took, and just last year an Orangutan named Sandra was granted legal personhood. The human condition is one of needing beyond all else to define our separate existence, so it’s not going to be an easy change to make. I’m 17 and a human, both of which hardly help. But though I’m 1.3 in dog years, I’m 40 as a giant tortoise which I do believe defeats both counts. Thank you.