Gashaka

Transcription

[ Music ] >> My name is Volker Sommer. I'm a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology in UCL's Department of Anthropology. I'm interested in anything which may shed light on human evolution and of course, because we are apes and I am proud to be an ape, much interest is also focused in human evolution research on our closest living relatives, which are monkeys and apes. Since about 12 years, I am the founder and director of a project which is one of the largest conservation and research initiatives in West Africa, which is called the Gashaka Primate Project. We were looking for a place where primates would still have a chance to survive for a long time into the future and we came up with a place in north-eastern Nigeria in a very remote area where there are no roads, there is no email communication, there are no cell phones, and it's called the Gashaka-Gumti National Park, about 7,000 square kilometres. We have a fair chance of preserving quite a bit of that big chunk of nature if people work together and that means we as scientists work together with the Nigerian National Park Service and with people from the local communities. The Gashaka-Gumti National Park is at the northern tip of what is a particular biodiversity hotspot and for that reason, if we focus our studies and our efforts on preserving, lets say, chimpanzees - that's one of the flagship species there - then of course if we succeed, we would preserve many, many other species too. And over the years, our focus has broadened tremendously and now we are also studying plants, we have people from the US who look into amphibia, into birds, we work with people who study insects, people who study human-wildlife conflict, and so on. Human influence is dramatically altering the biological landscape on Earth and I don't think that we will stem that tide at all. I think there is no point of fooling ourselves into believing that we could preserve biodiversity beyond, let me say, certain islands, which will survive. So the pressures from our modern lifestyle, from our very, very deeply ingrained consumerism which we in the western countries are taking for granted, these pressures will increase dramatically if people in other nations, let it be China or India, or so on, only want to have a fraction of what we have in terms of commodities, if they only want to consume a fraction of the calories we consume each day. In some ways, it's a little bit of a paradoxical situation for an evolutionary biologist, because of course evolution's about change, so if we now say that we want to conserve, that basically means that we are arguing for the status quo to remain, which is a little bit paradoxical because of course this is not what happens in nature. There is no ecological balance. There is always extinction and new species emerging and so for us as conservationists to say, oh this is now really the place which should be preserved, that's good for enough for one single lifetime, but in that sense it's very selfish and very shortsighted because I say, look, I want this place to be there for me and perhaps my children and my grandchildren, but really, I mean, in the long term it wouldn't be there. And so this is not easily reconcilable with the philosophy of evolution.