>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:24 >> Well, good afternoon and welcome to the African and Middle Eastern division of the library. I am Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of this division. And I'm delighted to see you all. So thank you for being here. And as most of you already know, and I already say this because we are on tape, we're being videotaped. But as most of you already know, our division is made up of three sections, the African, the Middle East and the Hebraic sections. We're responsible for materials from 78 different countries in the Middle East, Central Asia the Caucasus, as well as from the entire continent of Africa, north and sub-Sahara. Our Hebraic and Judaic collections come from all over the world. We also serve these materials to patrons here in our reading room, and organize programs such as this one, exhibits. We've got one actually on the other side. The Hebraic section has an exhibit called "Words Like Sapphire." So I would suggest you all go there and see it after this program. We have symposia as well and workshops. And last year for example, the African section organized, with the poetry and literature center here at the library, as well as with the African society for the national summit on Africa, they launched a new program, a series called "Conversations With African Poets and Writers." And we've had exceptional people come and talk to us. And you can see the whole program on Ahmad's website. So you can see the interview, you can see it, and they are--they focus on African writers and poets. We in the African-Middle East division are reaching out to everyone who has researched and done work on our countries of responsibility to share with us their insights and their findings so that all of us attending and participating in the programs leave enriched with new information and better understanding of the countries and societies whose publications we collect. Today's talk is a case in point. Jeffrey Flocken, the DC Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare will be talking to us about leading conservationists and the animals they are trying to save. We do not often get this perspective, and it is so important for us to understand the environmental challenges that many countries face and the impact that has on everyone. And now to introduce our speaker is Eve Ferguson, Senior Reference Librarian for East Africa. Eve? >> Okay. Good afternoon and welcome to the African and Middle Eastern division in the African sections program Wildlife Heroes with our guest speaker and co-author of the book by the same name, Jeff Flocken. As Mary-Jane Deeb said, my name is Eve Ferguson, I am Senior Reference Librarian for East Africa. Now, please be aware that this program is being recorded, and by asking questions, you agree to be in the recording which will become a webcast on the loc.gov website as well as the Ahmad division page. And let me start a little bit about how I met Jeff Flocken. I believe we met almost two years ago at the National Geographic's launch of the Big Cat Initiative, before the book was released, and we agreed it would be a fantastic program for our section. In the past, we've had Will Travers from the Born Free Foundation. In May we had the Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, I'll just call him Dr. Kip [phonetic] because his name was very difficult. And of course many of you may know that a few years go, we had Jane Goodall to standing room only crowd. So, the interest is there and we feel that it is our responsibility to help inform people. People love animals but probably not as much as Jeff Flocken who is the DC Director for IFA, where he leads the organization's team of legislative professionals advocating for US policy initiatives on behalf of wildlife conservation and animal welfare, including efforts on behalf of species such as lions, whales and elephants. Before this appointment, he worked for five years as International Affairs Specialist in the US Fish and Wildlife Services Division of International Conservation, where he focused on international species conservation policy, outreach and global conservation grant programs. Jeff has served as a consultant on numerous movies, books and serves on the board of directors--sorry, and television shows, sorry, I left that out, addressing wildlife conservation topics. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Jaguar Conservation Fund and the Steering Committee for the IUCN Tapir Specialist Group. He can explain what that is. Jeff Flocken also is the founder and the board co-chair of the Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders Initiative which mentors and provides campaign training for up and coming leaders in the wildlife field. He is the co-author with Julie Scardina of this lovely book, "Wildlife Heroes" published in March of this year. Since then he's been traveling the world promoting this record of individuals who make a difference in the sustenance of wildlife worldwide. He holds a BA in English and Communications from the University of Michigan, and a Juris Doctor from Wayne State University School of Law. Please welcome Jeff Flocken. [Applause] >> It's a great honor to be invited to speak here today to speak at the Library Congress. And in particular in the African and Middle Eastern division. Africa is known around the world as one of the best places to see amazing megafauna, creatures that you can't see anywhere else. They've done a fantastic job of holding on to the biodiversity of that continent. And I'm also excited to be in this particular division because Africa is where I got my start in conservation and it put me in the direction where I am today. So, as Eve mentioned, I'm going to be talking about my book Wildlife Heroes. And speaking more specifically about what this book says in terms of leadership and wildlife conservation and also inspiration. The book was written in order to help inspire people around the world, or the readers or anyone we could, to become more involved in wildlife conservation and to make a difference in their own lives for animals. So I'm going to talk a little bit about where that impetus for the book came from and then talk about what leadership in wildlife conservation means. So to get started, I should probably tell you a little bit about myself. Eve did a wonderful job with the background, but the first thing I was going to mention was, everybody knows, I'm a complete slut to have my picture taken with animals. Anywhere, anytime if there is an animal, I make somebody grab a camera and run out and say, "Quick, get a picture of me." And I've always been like that. I've actually always, always loved animals. And I knew I'd end up being something in my life with animals. What I didn't know it would be this book that I'm currently doing which is exciting but I've had a long career in wildlife conservation before this, so it's not just coming from the perspective of an author but actually coming from a wildlife conservationist myself. As I mentioned, I got my start in Africa. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do wildlife conservation work in Kenya during my undergraduate and it was amazing experience. It was actually--this is incredible as I thought it would be in terms of getting out in the field everyday and seeing animals in the wild setting of Africa. What I didn't expect, however, was that it actually changed the way I was going to be working on conservation. At first, I had planned on thinking that I'd spend my life being a biologist and doing field studies on individual animals. And it just took three months in Africa to realize getting up every morning, going out and watching giraffes eat, that it wasn't for me. When it was mind-numbingly boring, it turns out giraffes just eat leaves. Most people probably could tell you that before I went out there and spent the summer re-recording it. But I had to learn the hard way and I'd come back every night covered in bites and ticks and--everywhere. And even though it was amazing time to be there, it was a little bit like I said, mind numbing. But that wasn't the reason why I changed my direction. What really changed the direction on what I was working on was because I was able to see what was happening in East Africa, and see how complex the issues were in terms of wildlife living so close to people. In an expanding population of that region and the wildlife in turn decreasing. And I saw that it was going to take a lot to do something about this. So for me personally, I spend everyday working out on one species and going out and watching it eat leaves. I didn't think it was going to be enough for me to satisfy what I needed to do to help save animals. So, what I decided was that I would change my track and go into policy instead. And so when I got back, I went to law school, and that was when I started working in the way I am now doing policy to help save animals. Right out of law school, my first real job was to working for the National Wildlife Federation working on domestic species. I helped design their campaign--national flagship campaign for endangered species in the US. ^M00:10:04 Then I started to do more international work and as we've mentioned, I went on to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, working for the US government, doing species conservation, a suite of animals that the US Congress had deemed of special significance for saving by US citizens that included elephants, great apes, rhinos, tigers, and sea turtles and I love that job and it was very exciting. But after about five years of doing that and being in the US government, I decided again it was time for a change and I was lucky enough to get offered the position as the head of US Policy for the International Fund for Animal Welfare and that's where I currently work. IFAW, for short, is an amazing organization. It works around the world, helping animals in crisis. We operate in over 40 countries including offices in South Africa and Eastern Africa and the Middle East. And when an animal's in trouble, we're there. In this position, I've been lucky enough to be part of a team that got E-bay to ban the sale of elephant ivory globally, which resulted in literally thousands of pieces every month that were formally being advertised openly on the web for ivory, no longer being available. More recently, I was part of a team that drafted the petition to list African lions as endangered under the US Endangered Species Act and that was very exciting. Just this Monday, I don't know if any of you caught it in the news, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service made a positive finding, and the petition's going to move forward. And the species which has direly need a protection, they've declined by over 50 percent in the last 30 years, made new protection here in the US under the Endangered Species Act because of this. So IFAW has given me the ability to keep helping species and doing more and it's been very exciting. I find that my philosophy matches very well with the International Fund for Animal Welfare because they're concerned about saving species at a population level and habitat but also helping individual animals and for me, that's just in a perfect fit. But with the book, the story actually started about 15 years ago, back when I was at National Wildlife Federation and I got a grant from SeaWorld and Busch Gardens to do wildlife conservation and I met Julie Scardina and she, you may recognize her, is a celebrity spokesperson. She's been on The Tonight Show more than any other guest but Steve Martin, and she brings on animals and we instantly became friends because we both are probably obsessively committed to helping wildlife and animals. So--and I would say if my wife was here, would agree almost in unhealthy level. So we bonded over that and ended up for the next 10 years traveling around the world together and doing wildlife conservation projects and seeing what was going on in the field. And at one hand, it was amazing. We were seeing incredible places with incredible animals. But on the other hand, it actually showed us right to our face how bad the situation was. As everybody knows, wildlife is suffering. The number one leading threat to biodiversity is loss of habitat, inclusion , nd that's followed by overexploitation for consumption, for the traditional Asian medicinal trade, for pets, also followed by new disease transmission. Animals are being shipped and taken to places where they never were before and because of it, diseases are transferred to new areas. And the newest threat, climate change. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has just recently announced that climate change is said to takeover habitat loss as the number one leading reason for decline of biodiversity in our planet in the near future. So it's very sobering. And when Julie and I visited Africa or South America, and we'd go back 5 years or 10 years later, you could see right in front of you the lack of biodiversity that was there before. Animals that you'd see on the ground, that were there and all around were no longer abundant. They are no longer diverse, and it just happened in the last 20 years. That quickly we're seeing are making a problem. But at the same time, we're seeing these still amazing animals out there, animals that we really want to do something to help save, that we're committed trying to make a difference. So we started talking more and more about how can we do more? You know, we have our own private firms working out with their own individual companies. But how can we reach more audience and do more to save these species? And of course, we were inspired by Dr. Jane Goodall who you've mentioned here at the Library of Congress not too long ago. She is an icon. I've been lucky enough, as with Julie, to have met her now several times and every time I've ever talk to her, she has--or seen her speak, has completely inspired me again. No matter how depressed I was about seeing this loss of biodiversity occurring in the field, I would talk to her, see her and all of a sudden, "I'd be okay. What more can I do? How can I do something more?" And Julie and I actually talked about it. Well, you know, she's inspiring people everywhere. How can we do more of what she's doing and be more of inspiration? And we've tried to dissect this and say, "Well, what is it about Jane that really makes us want to do more?" And it was her story, her compelling work that she did in Tanzania, working at the Gombe Stream National Park for studying the sociology and the chimpanzees that were there that made such a compelling story and that inspired both of us and we though, "Well, how can we spread this further?" And that's the idea where the book came from. Last--she and I decided that we would go out and try to tell as many stories like Jane Goodall's. Jane Goodalls have different species that could get people excited about conservation, and teach them more about wildlife education. So that's where the Wildlife Heroes book idea came from, and the first thing we did is we sat down and we made a list of all of our favorite animals which got us down to about 600. [laughter] And that was a really bad place to start. So we started wriggling it down a little bit and tried to think, "Okay, what kind of things we want to relate in the story?" So we want to make sure we had animals that are found on the land, the ones that people saw in the ocean, as well as the ones that are found in freshwater. Additionally, you wanted to capture some birds seen in the air and in the canopy. We wanted animals that everyone is familiar with like tigers but we also wanted ones that people didn't really know much about. This is an Australian sea dragon, animal that most people don't even recognize. We had our own favorites. I'm a big fan of giraffe. As I mentioned, despite having to spend everyday going out at four in the morning watching it eat leaves, I still love them, and hippos. But actually, the editor ultimately had to cut some of those species like these last two. I really wanted to have the freshwater dwarf wedgemussel. Talk about a sexy beast, this thing's amazing. And freshwater mussels are highly imperiled. They are falling, the populations all across the Americas. But unfortunately, our editor has said, "Sorry, people can't relate." We also wanted to talk a little bit about some of the bigger issues. So, of the 40s here are what we focused on in the book, eight of them actually are addressing individual animal, but they're looking at a bigger issue like climate change or consumption of wildlife or the wildlife trade. And then we wanted to get pictures and luckily, early on Julie and I decided that we would give a hundred percent of our profits to the wildlife conservation featured in the book and that opened up a lot of doors. We had some of the world's best photographers of wildlife offer to use our picture for free in their books and we said, "And what's going to sell the book?" So we said, "Of course, baby animals 'cause everybody loves baby animals." So we got just as many pictures of baby animals as we possibly could into the book and we think that really helped. Then once we had our animals, we narrowed it down to about 200. We had to start figuring out who the heroes were going to be and this ended up being even more challenging 'cause we wanted to tell just the right stories, stories that were about animals that were highly endangered but it'd still be uplifting. We wanted these stories to be ones that, in fact, really, really moved people. And we decided first of all not to include Jane in the book. Kind of a daring choice maybe but we thought most people knew her story, and we want to introduce new stories. We're very lucky she wrote the endorsement on the back of the book so it was still nice to really have her involved and she was very, very supportive of the project. So we started looking at the names people knew like George Schaller, famous for going to Africa and doing some of the first studies of wildlife comprehensively for biology. We talked about Richard Attenborough. We talked about Joy and George Evans Adamson who did the "Born Free" book, Roger Payne who was the first person to ever record the songs of whales on the water and what do all of these people have in common? That they were all in their 80s, they're mostly all white and that they almost all were American and from Europe. And we decided that wasn't the book we wanted to write. We wanted to write a book about people that--people who read it and relate to. This isn't what America look--this isn't what America looks like, this isn't what the world looks like. This is more reflective at that time. So we really wanted to get more diversities so the people who read it could relate to the people on the book and be inspired to do their own conservation, become part of this movement and realize that it's good for everybody to be part of the greater movement to help wildlife. So we looked for gender diversity. We looked for diversity in age. We tried to make sure that they're representations from different nationalities and just as many different kinds of people that we could possibly find. So we did all this and we thought, okay, the hard work's done. We got it down to 40, which was really a challenge and then we didn't--had no idea that the hardest were still ahead of us because trying to nail down 40 of the world's most altruistic and busiest people is really difficult. Many of them would be in the field for six months at a time on a boat. They'd have no email access from the jungle, they would be completely inaccessible by phone and many of them also were control freaks. So what we found [laughter] was that, you know, we'd write a draft and they'd want to see it and they'd want to see it again and they'd want to see it again but then they'd be gone for three months at a period of time. So the whole project took three years. From the time that we first sat down and decided that we were going to this to the time that the book came out was a three-year period. We loved it. We had a chance to talk to 40 of the best people on earth as far as I'm concerned. But it was quite an endeavor. And while we were doing this, we decided we want to do more than just put out a book. We wanted to kind of look and see what made these individuals special. But there are certain traits or characteristics that made them unique heroes for wildlife. ^M00:20:01 There's very little out there on this topic. If you go to a bookstore or a library, you'll see shelves and shelves of what makes a business leader great, what makes a government person great, what makes a politician great, almost nothing on what makes a wildlife leader great. So we want to kind of look at that perspective again because our hope was to inspire. There were the paper by Dietz in 2009 that interviewed 10 wildlife conservation leaders. Interestingly enough, nine of them were male, all were white, all were from North America. Five years later, Ogden and Fascione did a research--tried to look at the same project and expanded it. So it included 27 people and--of which half are women, which is very important. Actually in the wildlife conservation field, women are much more numerous than men. Actually in my office, there's nine of us and I'm the only guy right now [laughter] which makes an interesting everyday experience. But it would be really important if you want to reflect at these leaders can also be women and were women out in the field and at an international perspective. So, they did this interview and what they did when they combined both the two, when Julie [phonetic] and I combined both these two reports to have only we'd found out on leaders in conservation right now, we found out that majority of all these leaders who were interviewed had some kind of advanced degree such as a PhD or law degree. So if you, yourself, if you're interested in joining the conservation field, these are the kind of the baseline things to think about. They all knew they wanted to work the animals from a very, very young age. Almost 40 percent had mentors or role models who helped and guide them in their careers. And they all said that a passion for the cause is what kept them going everyday despite the fact that it's an uphill battle. They all felt that they were doing this because there was a dire need and if somebody wasn't out there saving wildlife, the wildlife would disappear. So, take a look at all these again and these amazing people. We wanted to say what does it all mean? What do all these people have and share in terms of their actual characteristics? So I've copied a list of the 10 characteristics that both Julie and I felt that the 40 people on our book most personified that they all kind of shared and that's what I'm going to walk through for the next 15 minutes or so. So first, dedication. This seems really obvious but the thing is that many of these people worked in incredibly, incredibly harsh, harsh realities where it's very difficult to do what they do and yet they continue to. This is, first here I'm going to feature is Felicity Arengo. Dr. Arengo works on flamingos and most of you think of flamingos, you think, oh, it's this fragile pink bird, probably kicking it in the Caribbean with a Mai Tai in their hand by the pool. In reality, of the six different species of flamingos, four live in the Americas and three of those live in the South American Cone and these flamingos are some of the hardiest animals that you're ever going to see or meet. It's Andean, the Chilean, and the Puna flamingo. Dr. Arengo has devoted her life to helping these species, all three of them are endangered. And these animals live in hot springs that are so hot they would burn the flesh of any human who stood in them and they'll stay all day in them. At the same time, they are up in two miles high in the Andes living in these hot springs where the outside temperature can drop 20 below. Dr. Felicity Arengo decided this would be her life's calling to help save these animals. So every time she goes up to study them where they spent most of their year in these Andes, she has to bring oxygen tanks on her back and bring enough gear that she can go up and live up there while she's studying them and still be able to survive herself in these freezing temperatures and see on the same time right beside them in these waters that, of course, are boiling. It's a hard life but she is incredibly committed to it. And this is Dr. S. Te Wong. S. Te Wong is a sun bear conservationist. He calls this bear the forgotten bear. Of the eight species of bear, it is the smallest. I would even argue probably the cutest. I know panda bear, people are hearing that. But it's an adorable little bear and it's very little known. They are arboreal and they are very rare. He has been studying them for 20 years. In that period, he has caught 10 in traps in which he has taken blood samples and set them all free. But he's never seen one in the wild, and has been working on them for 20 years in the jungle of the Borneo. He is of Malaysian descent but did not grow up in the jungle and when he goes out to work, he has quite the day. This is a very, very dangerous and very difficult environment. It's humid and it's hot. It's wet. I actually got to go out and visit him and see his station and when I came home everyday, I had leeches in horrible places. And he has that same problem everyday when he goes out there. But he love what he does. S. Te actually had a tragedy. One of his field researchers was killed when a flood tipped over the boat that he was going when he was out there and this is just one of the things that happen. Many of these heroes that we've talked to have expressed that they've lost friends and family and colleagues and co-workers in these environmental conditions and it's not just a freak accident like that but it's disease and these are the things that they have to deal with it on a daily basis. But he is the first person ever to have done a long-term study of the Malayan sun bear and he is really helping to find out the things that nobody knows about this species. And this is Dr. Gerald Kooyman and he works in the driest, windiest, coldest place on earth, Antarctica. He studies the emperor penguin which is the penguin that lives the longest on the ice in Antarctica and he goes out there every year and spends all of his time on the ice studying this animal. He has a unique way to adapt to this problem. He had a family and he started bringing his sons out with him at a very, very young age and now both of them are full time--one's a climatologist, the other one biologist and they work in the Antarctica with him and he's able to see them all the time because of this. But he is so committed that he continues to do this. He's been studying them now for over 40 years and has made great strives in learning about how they're able to survive for so long in this cold environment and live in these freezing waters. The next trait I'm going to talk about is trailblazing. These heroes, almost all of them are great trailblazers. Many might recognize Iain Douglas-Hamilton. He is the king of elephants. All elephants today owe a debt of gratitude to Iain Douglas-Hamilton. He was the first to alert the world of the elephant poaching holocaust that was going on in the '70s and the '80s. At the time, the slaughter of elephants in Africa was rampant for their ivory to feed the demand that was coming out of the US, Europe and Asia. Iain estimated that the number of elephants in the African Continent was halved between 1979 and 1989. That is how bad the poaching was at that time. He led the battle cry to stop the poaching and he worked with the governments of Africa and these ranch countries, the people who lived there and mostly with the media to really bring attention to this issue and to stop what was going on with these horrific killings. Unfortunately, due to a new prosperity in China and other Asian countries today in these markets, the demand has increased and the elephant crisis is back. Iain testified in Congress a couple of months ago and said this is almost as bad as it was back in the '80s which is really saying something. But he is in the fray of the battle again. He's been doing this for 50 years. He was a trailblazer when he started and he is today and as I said, I really believe that there are elephants in Africa today just because of him and his tremendous work working with his colleagues there to stop the poaching. This is Grace Ge Gabriel. I'm very proud to say she is a colleague of mine at International Fund for Animal Welfare. Grace was born in China during a very politically volatile period and when she was a young adult, she was working as a reporter for a TV station outside of Beijing and was sent on an assignment to go visit a bear bile farm. And when she got there, she was just so appalled by the atrocity of these poor bears that are being kept in order to extract bile from them--excuse me, to extract these medicines--their bile, excuse me, their bile for traditional Asian medicines that she was compelled to want to do more. And she went to the Chinese government and got permission to open up the first International Animal Welfare Office in all of China and that's where she works today and she runs this and she's become an incredible advocate against the Chinese consumption of endangered species and trying to stop the trade and their role in it. She's incredibly outspoken and has been a real, real asset to have someone like her in China, of Chinese descent working to stop the trade. Also, one of accomplishments--one of her many accomplishments while she's been there was she opened up the first government sanctioned Raptor Rehabilitation Center in Beijing in 2001 and what she did was she was able to start collecting raptors that they were confiscating. Prior to this center being opened in 2001, most of them were killed when they're confiscated. It's illegal to take raptors out of China but they were being sold in markets for food and being shipped to mostly to Asia being kept as pets. She finally opened this rehabilitation center in Beijing and since she opened it, they've actually treated and saved over 3,000 raptors, 60 percent of which had been released back in the wild which is an amazing number if anyone who works in rehabilitation systems. All right, and this is Dr. Amanda Vincent. Dr. Vincent works on seahorses and she is the absolute definition of a trailblazer. When she started this, no one had ever conducted a study of seahorses in their native environment. Everything we knew about them was learned from aquariums and captive settings. And she decided that she'd be the first person to study in the wild and she proclaimed it very loudly and told all of her colleagues, "I'm to go out--be that person to go out and study them in the wild." ^M00:30:00 And she went off of the Coast of Florida where there are sea turtles that we add and started where there were seahorses and we knew that, and then she spent two months there and didn't find a single one. And she went back with her head down low and went back to the aquarium and studied them there and tried to figure out how was it that we know they're there. Fishermen catch them, commercial harvesters catch them but she couldn't find a single one to study in the wild? And what she learned back in the aquarium was that she had to find the right way to identify them. Sea horses are amazing at camouflage. They blend in their environment almost perfectly. So what she did was she found out how to see them and what it is is if you can see this picture, if you follow, this is a kelp seahorse wrapped around a piece of coral and if you look starting at the head and follow the body back at the tip of its tail, it wraps around the coral and it's that little twist around the base where--that she learned that that's the only way to see them in the wild. And so whether they were holding on to a piece of see weed, debris, coral, they always had a little bit of a wrap there at the end which should not match beyond that piece. So seahorses can change color to match their environment. Many of them they evolved to perfectly match their surroundings, could only be identified that way. And by doing this, she unlocked an entire world that never been studied before. She learned that they are voracious predators in the wild even though they have no teeth and no stomach, that they are monogamous, that they are the only fish that can hold hands. They wrap their tails around each other and float often for long periods with their mates. She learned all this because she took the time to be the first person to really go out and say, "We need to see what's happening to these animals in the wild and not just in the artificial setting." She also is the first person to realize that seahorses are being harvested in an incredibly unsustainable rate to be used in traditional Asian medicinal trade. She started the Seahorse Project which, in fact, is working to try to work with communities and find ways that they can sustainably use seahorses without wiping them out of the wild altogether. Tenacious, which is another word for stubborn as hell. Many, many of these heroes are tenacious. This is Dr. Raoul du Toit who has worked--he is a native Zimbabwean and if we follow the region, this is one of the most economically troubled and politically turbulent places on earth and it is a very difficult place to work on conservation because the needs of the people are so great and there's so much trouble. But he has committed his life to helping to save rhinos. Rhinos are poached. All five of the remaining species of rhinos, two in Africa, three on Asia are in dire trouble, particularly right now, the poaching crisis for rhinos is almost as bad as it is for elephants and some people say it's even worst because there are fewer rhinos than are elephants. What he has done is when many of his colleagues left the country because of the political turmoil, he took root and he started working with local communities setting up conservancies that formerly were doing cattle ranching and turning them into wildlife conservancies, places that people would go and visit wildlife and see wildlife and the community altogether worked to own--have ownership in this property and to benefit from the visitors. And as result of his work, this is the only area in Zimbabwe that the numbers of rhinos actually increased instead of decreased. Because the political turmoil has actually continued to gotten worst, it'd been harder and harder to get ecotourism there so he's changed his tactic and now he's working with development institutions around the world such as USAID in trying to find ways to inspire local people to benefit from wildlife in a non-exploitive way, for example tying funds for development to successfully keeping rhinos in the region instead of like having them. And instead of just handing money to communities, using it towards education and building schools because his point is, no matter where you are in the world, everybody wants their children to be better. And if you can tie your children doing better in their lives and having an easier life to saving wildlife, they're going to succeed. And the project was just merely launched just a year and a half ago and it shows great promise and he's very excited that even without the ecotourism that they had before, they'll still be able to keep these rhinos. This is Claudia Feh. She is also tenacious. She had the gall to think that she could bring an animal back from extinction in the wild and she has. Dr. Feh was only 15 when the last Przewalski's horse was taken from the wild for a zoo exhibit and shortly died afterwards and since then, she has always been fascinated. She remembers seeing the story when she was growing up in France and she was actually fascinated by the animals. They are the last wild horse. All other wild horses are extinct. We still have a population of barrel horses but those are just domestic horses that have grown wild, and these are the only true wild horse. All of them left on the earth today are descendants of 15 individuals that were part of a private population. Luckily, they do quite well breeding in captivity but they're no longer found in Eurasia where they originally were found in the wild. What she decided to do was she really wanted the long-term goal of helping to save these species. She took a herd of domestic horses and setup a property in rural France where they could live naturally, no barn, no feeding, and started studying them and see what it took for them to survive. Then she took this research to a private zoo which had a population of Przewalski's horse. As I've mentioned, they do quite well in captivity and there is a remaining population of them in captivity and she said, "Let me take these animals that you've had here for decades and take them into this semi-wild environment in France and see how they do." And what she have found was they immediately started forming natural herds and forming different adaptation strategies that will allow them survive without living in a domestic setting where they're being hand raced or fed daily. So then she went back and said to the government of Mongolia, "I have this herd. Let me take them into Mongolia and put them back out there in the wild and see if they can survive." And in 2004, she brought back 29 of these horses to Mongolia and since then, they have gone back to the wild. They live in a semi-wild environment at this point. They still come enduring the harshest winters and she'll fight-feed if they're staving but they are birthing, they are having fowls, and they are running in the plains of Mongolia again. There have been projects now setup in China as well as another one in Mongolia so this animal is one that when we--most of us in this room were born, we're not in the wild and as we age, hopefully it'll be back in wild populations. Charismatic. Many of these heroes are rock stars. That's one of the messages that Julie and I want to get across that it's just as cool to really admire and want to be like a conservationist as it is to want to be like someone like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan [laughter]. For my daughter, I'd much rather have her want to aspire to be like Deborah Tabart. Deborah Tabart is the international koala woman and she is a character. And she's from a country of characters, Australia, but she even stands out there. NPR's--Alex Chadwick of NPR, he dubbed her the love child of General Patton and Mother Theresa. [Laughter] She wears fire-red lipstick as her trademark in business suits and she'll go in meetings toe-to-toe with the biggest developers in Australia and the most obsessive ranchers and land owners and politicians and tell them that they have to make room for koalas. And not only does she do this with the force of her personality, which is something, but she also is able to do this with science behind her. Deb Tabart developed a mapping technology never before seen but she's actually mapped over four million hectares of habitat in Australia. She is able to tell you to the tree where they can and can't sustain koalas. So she went to Australian government and said our koalas in trouble and they said, "No they aren't, we have hundreds of thousand of koalas." She said, "Show me where because I have the maps." And she laid them out and they were forced to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hand 'cause there was not enough habitat for the koalas they're claiming lived in this country. Since then, she has been called to NASA to teach them the technology that she developed for mapping and she won the Smithsonian Medal of Honor for her mapping work. And this is Leandro Silveira, the dude is a stud. He is doing jaguar conservation work in the Pantanal of Brazil. He is amazing and what he brings with him is a machoism that people respond to into that region. This is Pantanal, if anyone's been there in Brazil, is the wild west of their region. It's ranchers, it's farmers, the people who lived for years and kill jaguars on site. And what it took was someone like Leandro who could assimilate into the folks there and talk to them as a native Brazilian and say, "No, actually jaguars are part of our heritage. You shouldn't be killing them." And he learned that they are being killed because people were claiming that they were killing all the cattle. And so, "Well, how about if I prove to you that they're not killing your cattle?" And he set up a system where he did in that [inaudible] anytime there was cattle killed and there was a claim that it was being done by a jaguar, and he and his team of field researchers would go out there and then actually what they found was, was before they did the study, ranchers claimed that about 90 percent of their losses were attributed to jaguar. When they actually did the study, it was like five percent. Most of the jaguars were dying because of disease, they were dying because of poor husbandry techniques, they're being attacked by feral dogs, by cougars, and sometimes, by jaguars but they weren't the overall killer of all cattle that are being seen before them. And he convinced the ranchers of this and since then, this is one of the only place in the world, in the Pantanal we can go now and see jaguars during the day. I looked for jaguars all over South and Central America and I've never seen them and the Pantanal's the one place that you can go and actually see them. And it's because of the dude, he's the man. [laughter] Sometimes, it helps to have the charisma to backup what you're talking about. Community-based. Community-based is the one thing that every single one of our 40 heroes stressed when we talked to them. They also said that they could not do what they would doing if they were not working in the community. Part of the community in relating the needs of the people, we have to live by these animals everyday. ^M00:40:05 And many of them are impacted by them. There is human-wildlife conflict in many of these species. This is Shivani Bhalla and Shivani is the youngest of all of our heroes in the book. As I mentioned, we really tried a range of folks but she is also one of the most accomplished. She started the Ewaso Lion Project in the Ewaso Nyiro region of Kenya and she grew up in the city. She is Kenyan, native born and she decided that if she really is going to make a difference in helping to save lions, that she had to go out there and live amongst the lion that amongst the people who were living with the lions all the time. So she gave it all up and now she lives most of the year in a tent with no running water, no electricity, but she is in there with the Samburu people who have to live by the lions and lions do attack people and they do attack livestock. They are a threat in these regions. So she wanted to work with these people and learn more from them. She taught herself Swahili, French, Hindi, and Samburu so that she could speak with people in the tongue that they are most comfortable speaking and as a result, it's been a fantastic endeavor. She is working very well. Their population is completely stable. Kenya is having a real problem with lion killing right now by local people and in her region, not at all. Her most recent project was she bought GPS units or she raised money to buy GPS units for different guards from the locals. They call them the lion guardians, local men who go out and track lions and bring back the information. They'll take tours out and show them to her and they are part of the citizen science monitoring project. She'll take the information and help to find out why are the lions are being successful and why they're breeding and doing well, whereas in other parts of Kenya, they aren't at all. ^M00:41:41 [ Pause ] ^M00:41:46 And this is Dr. Luke Dollar. Dr. Dollar works--he's a National Geographic resident and explorer. And he has been studying carnivores on the island of Madagascar almost 20 years. He first went out there studying lemurs and while he was doing it, he found one of his--while he was monitoring a radio-collared lemur and realized that the radio-collar stopped moving and he went out and found a big pile of bones and tendons and disgusting stuff that was his lemur and he asked the local people, "What was this?" And they're like, "Oh, the fossa got it." And he was like, "What is the fossa?" And at that time, this is one of the least studied carnivores and it was the largest carnivore on the isle of Madagascar. It's crazy. I got to see one in the wild when I was out there. It looks like the cross of a cat and a dog and a bear and it's just amazing, but no one knew anything about it. So again, we followed the same man I talked about. He went and he started living with the local people and finding out all he could both about the biology and ecology of the animal but also about how the animal related to the local people. And what he learned was there was folklore growing up in Madagascar that if a child was bad, his parent--his or her parents would tell them that the fossa is going to sneak into your room tonight and steal you away. Now I tried this on my daughter, it actually works. [Laughter] So I did appreciate that part of it. But the downside was people grew up fearing the fossa and they were killed on site when they entered villages. So he'd set about trying to figure out how he can change this and what he learned by his biology part of his research was that fossa actually don't just eat lemurs, they also eat wild pigs and rats, the two largest vermin and the problems with crops that these people faced on a daily basis and he developed a slogan that said, "No fossa, no harvest." And by this, he was able to show them that if you appreciate and let this animal be part of your environment, and in this case luckily fossa do not attack people. They would, in fact, be a benefit and would help them by killing these deadly predators that are eating their crops on a regular basis. Since then, fossas are doing better in the region where he's working. They still face the problem of habitat loss, but the retaliatory killing and the killing on site have gone down tremendously. Sacrificing. Many of these heroes have made great sacrifices for the work they do. This is Dr. Vera da Silva and she studies Amazon River dolphins, a very little known species of fresh water dolphin and there are only two wholly freshwater dolphin species left right now in the planet. When she started doing this work, she was a grad student. She actually was a single mother, a widow at a young age with two small children and she was tasked by the government to go out and she was doing fish work in Fish Ecology and the government was having her on a fish study and she learned that they are going to be doing a massive culling of the Amazon River dolphins because the local fishermen have been telling the government that they were eating all the best commercial fish, that they're eating the largest fish, the fish that they needed to be profitable for their livelihoods. So the government reacted and nobody had ever done a long-term study of these specifies and said, "Fine, we will go out and have them killed," and she intervened. She said, "Actually, let me study them. Let me make sure that this really is the problem." And so, she took a canoe and she went out in a boat and this is before there was email, this is before there was internet or cellphone and she studied them during the flooded seasons in the Amazon where she worked. She had to leave behind her two small daughters who she left to stay with family and friends for months at a time without contacting them. But she felt it had to be done 'cause nobody knew if in fact these animals were related to this depleted sources of fishes or in fact if there was another cause. And what she learned was that they're opportunistic eaters, that Amazon River dolphins do not go after the biggest, healthiest fish. In fact, they go after the sickest, smallest, and weakest, that you'll typically find with carnivores and they weren't impacting this. In fact, there was overfishing problems and it wasn't the fault of the dolphins and as a result, the dolphins were very happy, they didn't kill them. It was wonderful. The government called off the culling and since then, Dr. da Silva has gone on to do the longest and most intensive studies of this. She has now both teams of researchers that go out and study Amazon River dolphins, so she gets to spend more time by her daughters who she assures me had forgiven her at this point. And one of my all-time heroes, Dr. Wangari Maathai. She was the first woman from Africa and the first environmentalist ever to win the Noble Peace Prize. As somebody who worked in this division, we're probably very familiar with her work. She is amazing inspiration. She did won this Noble Peace Prize for her work empowering women to rebuild their environment. After growing up in East Africa and seen the natural world changing around her rapidly because of development, she adopted a plan, a plan to empower women and empower children to planting trees and this allowed disenfranchised women and children to take control of the situation and an opportunity to shape their own destinies and be part of what's going on around them, making a better situation. She was also very outspoken and when I talked about sacrifice, she was, in fact, persecuted and imprisoned for her belief that she was very, very strong and adamant about. I highly recommend reading her autobiography called Unbowed which talks about her work. I'm very sorry and sad to say that unfortunately Professor Maathai passed away last year, but she'd leave behind an amazing, amazing legacy. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement and as a result of it, 40 million trees have been planted and over 30,000 women have received training and gotten jobs, working to help the environment. She made tremendous personal sacrifices but has left an incredible legacy. Resourceful. The heroes in this have all been resourceful, many of them doing nontraditional tools in order to save wildlife. This is Dr. Merlin Tuttle and Dr. Tuttle is a bat expert, loves bats. He did research on bats and went out and started--when people thought these are just a scourge of the earth, vermin that needed to be killed. In caves, they used to actually put smoke bombs and light fire to them to kill the bats because they're in the region. He went out and started to research them and then showing that bats, in fact, were a benefit. Again, it goes back to crops and livelihoods. Bats are voracious eaters themselves. They can eat up to a thousand insects in one hour and they tended to be insects that in fact harm crops. But it still wasn't enough for him. He wanted to go beyond just this and what he did was he decided that he was going to try to make the world appreciate bats and he became a photographer and a very accomplished photographer just at bats. He has thousands of stunning images of these animals that show that these are creatures that are gorgeous and in fact, should be revered. In 2002, he had unique honor. Four of his images were used on US Postal Service stamps than ever before and the world got to see that bats can be beautiful, which was a new message. This is Dr. Kassie Siegel. She is a lawyer and I love her 'cause she's a lawyer. She used her power for good and not evil, which is what I hope to do, and what she did was something astounding. She forced the US government to acknowledge climate change. In 2006 when she was working on different biology issues as a policy expert and lawyer, at that time the US government did not acknowledge climate change publicly. I know that. I was with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and anytime I put forward a memo or statement that had climate change or global warming, it was sent back to me without redacted. I was told forcefully never to include about any statements I make as a US government employee. What she did though was she found a unique way to force the government to talk about this issue. She went to the Endangered Species Act and she wrote along with her partner, Brendan Cummings, a 130-page technical petition to list the species endangered because of climate change. Now today, everybody relates polar bears to climate change and the threat they pose. In 2006, nobody did. That was a completely unique idea and when in 2008, the US government announced the fact that the species was going to be listed as endangered because of her petition. It made the front cover of Time Magazine. It was a five-page article interviewing her and her idea to take the law and make it--and help the species in a way they had never been done before. ^M00:50:09 Another unique way for helping animals. This is Dr. Alison Jolly. She is known as the "grande dame" of Madagascar. She is one of the world leading primatologists, studying lemurs in the wild doing some of the first long-term studies and while that's not as unique, what she did do that's unique is that she took what she learned and she applied it in a way that the world could see. She's a famous author. Many of you may have read her book, Lords and Lemurs, which made the conservation issues in the biology and the unique endemic species of Madagascar accessible to the world. It was a best-selling novel. And today, she has authored a series of children's books about lemurs all in Malagasy language so that children in Madagascar growing up can learn more about the natural environment and appreciate it and understand how valuable it is. Ingenuity. Some of these people think outside of the box. They have to do whatever they can. This is Rogerio Cunha de Paula who works on Brazil on the maned wolf. He was studying this animal in the Serra da Canastra National Park and notice, he's a veterinarian by training and noticed that the population was declining even though it's a protected area with no habitat loss. And what he learned was that these animals, although they never attacked people, in fact are never above taking a chicken dinner either. They are down to the habit of going out and raiding all the farms on the outskirts of the park and some inside the park with the multi-use park and so, the farmers have decided they need to eliminate them so they were killing them. And Rogerio, being a very creative person, said, "What can I do about this?" He's not an engineer but he sat down and he designed a wolf-proof chicken coop and he got funding to build models of it and distributed it to all the farmers in the region, got them in board and invested in this. Folks built these wolf-proof chicken coops and as a result, the chickens' not getting killed. Rogerio got to go back to being a veterinarian and studying zoonotic disease with maned wolves. The farmers no longer were losing chickens. The wolves are no longer being killed. And of course the chickens were happiest of all 'cause they're no longer being eaten by the wolves. It was a win-win in a very creative way that he was able to apply the skills and we found that many of the folks will be able to do this. This is Dave Wiley. He works for the US government in the Stellwagen National Marine Sanctuary off of the Cape Cod Coast. What he did was really I thought very exciting and innovative. The Stellwagen National Marine Sanctuary works is a mixed used sanctuary and there is a lot of traffic there from vessels going in and out of ports along the Eastern shore including Boston. Unfortunately, it is also a migratory pathway for calving northern right whales, which the North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered whales in the planet. They think there's less than 400. So every time one of them is struck by a vessel and killed, it actually diminishes the chance of the over a whole species to continue. So Dave went about trying to figure out how to settle--to solve this problem of ship strikes in his national marine sanctuary and what he did was he pulled together a group of government agencies, academics, and not-for-profit. So I'm very excited to say IFAW was one of them. And they developed an acoustic satellite transmitter system which announces when whales are in the shipping lanes. Many took it one forward further and worked in the same group, designed an app, an application for iPads that shippers can download for free and with just using an iPad, they can put it on top of the front of their vessel when they're steering and then alert them when there are whales in the area and they are able to slow down. So by doing this, he had set up a system that actually helps whales and is innovative and free. And there's actually southern Atlantic whale, but right ones are hard to get in the water so. And this is Laurie Marker, one of the final heroes I'm going to talk about. Laurie actually works on cheetahs in Namibia and she has taken the idea of being ingenuitive to a whole new level. She has developed programs that help cheetah. She actually was working and living in a zoo in California. She heard that cheetahs were in trouble in Namibia, visited, saw that local farmers were killing them as predators and came back and built the whole suite of innovative ways to save these animals. She started raising dogs that were cattle herders that would keep the cheetahs away. She also introduced better husbandry techniques that protect cattle from predators. And lastly, she created cheetah logs, which is taking an evasive scrub taking over habitat of cheetahs and it compresses them into firewood. So not only are they getting rid of a destroyer of habitat for cheetahs, but it is allowing for a product that keeps people from having to go out and cut down trees and lastly, it's giving a livelihood for local people who can build them and sell them. So, her work on cheetah have changed them from being a feared predator to actually a beloved animal in the region. Again, no longer are there predator killings in this area. So I'm going to wrap this up 'cause we're going to the end but the overall thought I wanted to take away from this is that there are certain traits that conservationists, that are successful, have brought with them to where they work. They're dedicated. They're trailblazing. They're stubborn, charismatic, they work in communities, they sacrifice, they're resourceful and they're ingenuitive. These are things that have made them successful and I think that this goes outside of the wildlife conservation field and actually can be applied anywhere. But for my interest, I'm both happy to say that it's something that conservationists can do and use and hopefully, this is inspiring as I hope that it might be, that people in the audience would take this and be able to use it and become part of the conservation movement to save wildlife. So I'm--that's it for me. [Applause] And is there time for questions Eve, or--oh. >> Yes, because I did put an extra 15 minutes in there in which you can also buy this lovely book for yourself and get Jeff to sign it. But also I'm sure some of you all have questions. I'm happy to know that, you know, it's not too late for me to be Jane Goodall. I always wanted to be, maybe not quite her status but are there any questions for Jeff? Any question? Well, I have a question. Okay. So my question is I know I spoke to you about it a little bit earlier. It's kind of two-part. One is that I lived in Uganda. When I lived in Uganda, I went to Murchison Falls Park. It was full of animals. I went back in 2010, the animals were gone. There are no rhinos. There are no zebras there. They have no African wild dogs there. And it made me feel kind of powerless. Is there anything that an individual can do in situations like that? And the second part of the question is something I discussed with you earlier and that is, I'd like you to talk a little bit about keeping exotic animals as pets. >> Excellent. Thank you, Eve. The first part of the question. Wildlife disappearing everywhere. Unfortunately, it's the absolute truth. It's a phenomena that's happening. I mean even if you go to where my parents live in the rural Michigan, they had wild turkeys and deer and foxes there six years ago, they're gone today. It's happening in a very, very quick time frame and it's frightening. But at the same time, there are heroes like these, doing incredible things. The last chapter of the book which is significant, is actually devoted to what people can do to help wildlife with all sorts of ideas of how to get involved and it has the websites for all 40 of the heroes. They use this thing to become a supporter of people who are out there doing it everyday. So I highly recommend that. If you don't want to buy the book, our website, www.wildlifeherobook.com also has links to all 40 of the heroes for free. You can go and find out more about them and try to help them. As for exotic pets, it's a no-no. As much as I love having my picture taken with pets, I like it having taken with rescued animals. Wildlife belongs in the wild. So if you do see an animal being kept in a private situation, particularly one that might be dangerous, it's important to find out what the laws are in your area. IFAW is working to try to stop the private ownership of big cats in the US. We have thousands and thousands of tigers being kept in backyards and basements and garages which is completely inappropriate. It's a wildlife animal welfare issue, it's a human health and safety issue, and it undermines conservation efforts in the wild. ^M00:58:15 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:58:53 Sure it's-- ^M00:58:55 [ Inaudible Question ] ^M00:59:00 Great question. We're an international organization so we trend to try to influence policy at a very high level. We work with Congress and the administration here on how they both help wildlife in the US but also how their policies impact wildlife on the world. As a super power, the US has tremendous ability to assert themselves. Secretary Hillary Clinton, two weeks ago I believe, gave a speech which committed the US to being a champion for stopping the illegal wildlife trade which is revolutionary. As far as I know, nobody ever that high level in the US government has made such a bold proclamation that we are going to partner with the world to try to stop wildlife trade. So also--I mean I--the organization's small for being international so we don't work so much on the state level and the local level but there are great groups everywhere in the country that work on the wildlife as well as around the world. So I highly encourage folks to get involved. >> Anymore questions? Yes? >> I thought it was absolutely fascinating and I wanted to ask you about educational institution. Is there in the country [inaudible] are being carried? Are there educational institutions that teach, not probably to preserve the environment but meaning--I'm going to use a word which may not be direct with the [inaudible]. People who would go out there and actually protect, they know what they're doing. They know the environment, they know what they're doing. So, is there a wide range training program or [inaudible] or [inaudible]-- >> Yeah. I would say it varies. I think the resource of that are fairly low in most countries. Africa has about six wildlife ranger and guard activist training at universities. But they're fairly small. And then in Asia, there are even fewer. However, there are lot in Western Europe and the US. A lot of organizations and academic institutions that specialize in this and they put a lot of money towards scholarships to bring in people from the field and then make sure they go back there and you know, train the trainer, bring the information back and implement it on the ground. So, it's being done by capacity building and probably one of the biggest weaknesses in our fields right now. It's a good question. >> Any other questions? If not, I would like you to buy your copy of Wildlife Heroes which Jeffrey can sign for you because [inaudible] is out and I want to thank Jeff Flocken for this really wonderful talk today. I know we all love the animals and I hope it encourages people to become more conservation-motivated. Thank you very much, Jeff Flocken and please buy a book and thank you for coming. [Applause] >> Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.