Gorillas and Forest Elephants with Conservationist Ian Redmond - Part 2

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Gerry:

Welcome to part two of our conversation with naturalist and conservationist Ian Redmond. Part one of our conversation was the opening podcast for season two of Talking Apes, and a chance to celebrate World Gorilla Day. But after 45 minutes, it was clear we were just getting started. With a deeper conversation about the potential role of keystone species like gorillas and forest elephants in the economy of valuing intact ecosystems, and the services they provided. Hi, I’m your host Gerry Ellis, and it’s time to dig into the value and the importance of that cake. Ian was just talking about.

Ian:

My family just read a paper by an economist called Ralph Sharmi. Ralph, his day job is assistant director at the International Monetary Fund. So it’s kind of respected senior economist, but he spends his evenings and weekends working out what natural ecosystems are worth and he’d been on a holiday to watch whales and he’s sitting in a boat with a bunch of whale scientists being amazed by a blue whale near the boat and they’re all talking about carbon and he’s looking at the whale thinking, Look what? Look, there’s a blue whale. And he hadn’t appreciated the link between whales and carbon, but they told him the link and they gave him some papers and he went home and did calculations and found that over the course of his or her life, a great whale, a humpback or a blue is responsible for the additional sequestration of about $2 million worth of carbon.

And what’s the main cause of death of whales in the ocean these days now that there isn’t commercial whaling in most of the world’s oceans, it’s ship strikes this accidental whoop, Sorry, I didn’t notice that whale there it’s dead. Now, if the next day that ships’ Captain were to get a phone call from insurance companies, say, We hear you his whale, that would be 2 million dollars that were due to payout, and you’re not covered. We’re not covered?, that’s gonna change things. And Ralph is part of a thing called the Blue Boat Initiative off Chile where they’re fitting mechanisms to the front of ships, which in the past there was no motivation to do so. But given this knowledge that whales are so important, whales are important because they feed deep and they come up and poo near the surface and they don’t produce dung like elephants and big bulls. They produce, and this is lovely poetic word, fecal plumes. <laugh> fecal plumes. Big clouds of fecal matter which fertilizes the phytoplankton which feeds the fish. So fishery fisheries are boosted where there are whale populations and the phytoplankton as, scientists will tell us sequester store about half the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and produced about half the world’s oxygen. Maybe it’s 40%. Don’t quote me on it, but essentially every other breath you take, you should thank the phytoplankton and the whales that fertilize them. So that Fabio had read this and said, Okay, well I just discovered this difference that elephants make in a forest. Sent the paper to Ralph said, Can you tell me what elephants are worth? He did some sums and he’s crazy. So he sent it Ralph, his professors of economics colleagues and said, Are my figures right? And they said, What’s this about?

Ian:

He said, I’ll tell you after, just tell me are the maths correct singular the mathematics, are they correct? And then they came back and said, Yep, yep, that all that’s all fine. What’s it about? And he said, Well it turns out that each individual forest elephant over the course of his or her life, which might be 60 odd years, 65 years, is responsible for the additional sequestration and storage of 1.75 million dollars worth of carbon. Boom. That’s a lot of money. And that’s at the price of carbon as it was in 2019 on the European exchange. That’s more than tripled. So now you’re looking at 5 million dollars, upwards of that.

Gerry:

I was gonna ask you, looking forward into the next five to 10 years, you thought if there were a single thing that we need to think about in terms of how do we change the narrative around what we’re doing on this plan? it almost sounds from that, we need to take the time to put the of ecological environmental value onto every species we can. I mean if this is the story behind a blue whale and this is the story behind a forest elephant, beyond tourism, What is a gorilla worth? What is a chimpanzees worth?

Ian:

Really important phrase because if tourists come and see your gorillas or elephants, that’s fine, but if you’re being paid for what they do, tourists can come or not. That’s like the cherry on the icing on the cake. And we’ve been focusing on the cherry and ignoring the value of the cake, which is….

Gerry:

Let’s see. Exactly, I mean take Western Lowland gorillas for example, I mean, I’d say this often people and they’re kind of astounded is the fact that millions of people see a Western Lowland gorilla a year because those are the only gorillas in zoos. But very few hundreds ever see one in the wild and that includes researchers. So how do you put a value on this species that no one sees in the wild so that you ensure that it’s placed in the wild is, and you’ve just described it.

Ian:

We don’t have the data yet. Fabio of primatology who has found a forest where there used to be gorillas and another one where they still are and work out what the measurable difference is. And given that gorillas are sympatric with elephants it’s hard to tease out the two. We know, this is what I was gonna say about Goze Byega, the malicious poachers, sometimes the same thing have taken out most of the forest elephants. So the forest is changing, vines that used to be kept in check by elephants are now covering trees which are causing the trees to die. Some of those gorilla food plants. So it’s changing, making the habitat less good for gorillas and less good for carbon. Super frustration cause big old trees are dying and the ones that rush in and grow fast, there are the fast growing ones, the ones that have light wood.

Ian:

And of course if you’re thinking of forest’s, carbon storage, you’ve got a cubic meter of wood that is denser, then that’s more carbon. So trees that grow slowly and have a lot of carbon are the ones that give you the permanence. And so where a forest has been cleared and then pioneer species have rushed in and grown quickly, that’s all rapidly growing light wood. And they’re the ones that elephants and gorillas will actually feed on and sort keep down until the slow growing ones come up and become the dominant ones. So that ecosystem is being damaged. But just to answer your question about gorillas, back of an envelope calculation, read about it in my article in Primate Eye <laugh>, I did a follow when I was the ‘dung boy’ <laugh>, aka ‘worm boy’ of Beetsmee, a Black back gorilla and he was on the edge of the group so it was easier to follow him and not get his dung muddled up with the others.

So I followed him from the night nest, stayed with him all day, he knew me so it wasn’t a problem in terms of the social interaction. And I collected all of his dung until the night nest. And he produced just over five kilos of dung as a black back, silver back, be much more than that probably, I don’t know, seven to 10 kilos. It depends what they’re feeding on too as to how much the weight of the dom is. But females similar to black back, the younger gorillas obviously less, that would suggest that if you have a big family of 20 to 30 gorillas, 25 gorillas, the dung output is gonna be similar to a medium sized elephant, forest elephant, smallish elephant. So if a family of gorillas was being paid the same as just working elephants equivalents at the moment, cause we don’t have the hard data to do it accurately, but the concept is there gorillas are feeding on vegetation, often herbaceous growth and small stuff and producing dung, which then sits in the forest floor and decomposes and feeds the big trees.

So they’re part of that process of gardening and they disperse seeds. And what they do that elephants don’t do is they build nests in trees. Very few elephants climb trees and those that do don’t build nests in them. You will know this <laugh>. So what does a gorilla nest do? It pulls in the branches into a tight ball and forms the sleeping platform. It’s a bit like folding an umbrella. All that canopy is tightly packed into a ball. So it produces a light gap. And what does a gorilla do in its nest or when it gets up in the morning produces a huge pile of dung, often full of seeds of the previous day’s fruit that it ate. So seeds land on the forest floor, wrapped in fertilizer in a light gap. What better place could they be to start your life as a seedling?

Ian:

So gorillas do things that elephants don’t do and vice versa. And they’re sort of interdependent. And I almost don’t want to tease out those separate relationships because that’s a very mechanistic reductionist attitude. We want a holistic approach to ecology. So that holistic approach would be perhaps recognizing just in terms of biomass, the biomass of a big family of gorillas might be equal to one small elephant. And if the elephant is being paid, not the elephant itself isn’t worth that, but the work the elephant does is making these species into a part of a service economy. And if someone’s in the service economy, if you work in a call center in India, you’re not valued for the work you do for yourself as a person. That’s you as a human, but you agree to sell so many hours of your time to work in a call center.

Ian:

Now gorillas and elephants are hopeless at call centers, but very good at dispersing seeds and fertiliizing forests, for which they have never been paid or even really been recognized. And in our new carbon conscious world where companies warn to offset their unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions while they change the technology, it’s not an either or. Offsets aren’t. Instead of changing the technology just buys you a bit of time. So right now we’ve got this window opportunity where conservation finance can come from the private sector, not philanthropy, not government aid, which is our taxpayers money, which always has higher priorities in education, defense and all those things. But through a business. So when you buy your mobile phone or your bottle of wine or whatever it is that you’re buying, the company that manufactured it has cause they’re signed up to the Paris Agreement, they want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and those that they can’t reduce they’re prepared to offset.

So how are they gonna offset them? They could pay for a machine in Iceland that sucks carbon out of the air and puts it underground. Well that balances the carbon. It doesn’t do anything for biodiversity, doesn’t help heal the ecosystems that we need to sustain life on earth. But this is the pretext of rebalanced earth. It’s a new initiative set up by Ralph Sharmi, by me and by Waleed Al Sakaf. And Waleed is a blockchain specialist. So blockchain is a means of transferring money in tokenized form from one end of the world to the other where the chain of custody is visible to all participants. So you can’t scan it if, you’ve agreed that X percent is gonna come to your community in the forest because you are keeping the elephants or the gorillas safe. And we’re proving every day or every few days when you see the known animals that become the clients of rebalanced earth. So our client’s elephants, let’s call one, I dunno, let’s be unoriginal, call him Jumbo <laugh>. So Jumbo, the elephant is known cuz he’s got a big hole in his right ear and funny shaped tusks. You can’t miss him. Every time he walks past a camera tracker, every time he walks past a member of the community hey jumbo! he logs it into his mobile phone that’s been provided with. And that generates a credit for a day’s work, 24 hours works. And if the elephant hasn’t been seen for 10 days, that’s 10 days work. But it turns out if you divide 1.75 million by 60 years, that’s about $30,000 a year or $80 a day. So potentially that elephant at the 2019 price of carbon is worth that amount. And woah, that means that if there’s a herd of elephants, maybe there’s 20 in this herd and they’re all together and you recognize certain individuals. So you can say yes, I counted 20 elephants. We know some of them, that releases a lot of funds because you’ve just proved that they’re alive and well and in their forest. And if they haven’t been seen for a period of time, that number of days of tokens, asset back tokens is what he calls them. He knows about this stuff. I’m just saying the words. But the concept is that that companies can actually know who is sequestering their carbon in the sense of which elephant or which gorillas as we expand outwards taxonomically and geographically, until people are more aware of the benefit they get from you perhaps know I’ve been banging on for years, but the rain that the Congo basin generates, the rainfall, trees through evapotranspiration pump water into the atmosphere, and then it spreads around the world and it falls in Amazonia. Until I saw this wonderful animation that you can find by searching for T 3 4 1 rain, then the top of the list and I’m sure you’ll use Ecosia to search it because that’s the search engine that plants trees as you search T3, 4, 1 rain and you’ll see this wonderful animation of global precipitation speed it up. So every day is just a second and the orange pulsing in the Congo Basin, and you can get this off YouTube so you can even drop it into this to show people it so they don’t have to look it up themselves. The orange pulsing is the rainfall and the white is supposed to be water vapor, which of course is invisible, but they just show it. And you see how if you like your wine from California, you can trace where the weather patterns come back from Southeast Asia. So it’s a right of towns that are planting the trees that produce the Californian wine. But do they get any of the money from the price of a bottle of Californian wine? Nope. Likewise South African wine or New Zealand or Australian wine, you can see that the rain system, rainfall systems that bounce off the Andes and sweep across South Africa and go across to Australia and New Zealand, all these ecosystem services are being provided to everyone on the planet and yet none of us give them a thought.

It’s nature, it’s natural. So Ralph Sharmi has written some very highfaluting economic analyses describing what he calls a new economic paradigm where the economy, this great global construct that humans have made doesn’t regard nature as an externality separate from the economy. It’s integral to the course any economists will tell you. And economy ecology have the same roots eco from the Greek for home. It’s a home. So economy is sort of home economics and ecology is home, how the species interact with each other. But it’s the same route. And if the economy were to recognize that everything it does is based upon the ecology and that’s when the ecology is alive. In other words, at the moment, the only way you can make money from a tree is to cut you down and sell as timber. Living tree is worth nothing unless you can get a tourist to come photograph it and then you might get some money off a tourist and likewise an elephant or a gorilla.

Ian:

And the mountain gorilla story has been turned around by the economic benefits of ecotourism and there was a civil war in Rwanda and a genocide, tourism stopped. Or two and a half years ago there was a pandemic, tourism stopped. So if your whole conservation model is based on revenues coming in from tourism, it’s very vulnerable to those kind of events. And some people are very nervous about going to Africa or a continent of 53, 54 countries. If there’s a bond goes off in one country, it’s like being worried about going to California because someone sneezed it in New York. <laugh> as relevant, the chances of being involved in a disease or a terrorist outbreak on the other side of a very large continent and you could fit the USA into Africa and have half the world left over. You’ve seen that math I’m sure of or how many countries you can fit into.

Ian:

But people base their decisions on whether to travel or not on not necessarily rational thoughts but on fears. And they’re very real fears for them. So if you don’t wanna go to Africa, because in one country there’s a civil war, it makes the tourism based on those visits very vulnerable. And of course you’ve got the literal elephant in the room, <laugh> of climate change being affected by your flight. So we’re all supposed to be trying to reduce our flights and I feel very ambivalent about having gone to Africa Climate Week by plane <laugh>. But it’s important to get these ideas into the minds of the negotiators that the animals matter. It’s not just the trees, the ecosystems, what we have to focus on. And that includes the animals and the fungi and the microorganisms. But that’s even harder to get people excited about <laugh>. So key message, animals really matter.

There’s a new book just about to be published. I’ve got a pre-print here that I will give a free plug for. It’s called ‘Wildlife in the Balance’ by Simon Muster. And it really I wrote the cover blurb and Simon’s used it as a forward because he said that just encapsulated it. And what I said was, how when you’re looking at an optical illusion and you’re looking at it and then suddenly you see the illusion and then you can’t unsee it and it’s the same information going into your eye. What changed? Oh, you’re looking at a piece of bark and there’s a gecko on it and you’re seeing bark bark and then just you see an eye. Oh, okay, same visual input and now you see the gecko. So I liken reading Simon’s book to seeing gecko after gecko after gecko because he just explains it so well, why animals matter and why we just need more of them because there are so few left on the planet compared to humans in their lifestyle.

Gerry:

It took a few minutes to get there, but I think that answered my question. And I think maybe that’s the best place to end the podcast today is when I said I was thinking in the next five to 10 years, like what gives you hope? And maybe that is the ultimate challenge of, especially people like you and me, which I mean we’re communicators. I mean we’ve spent a lot of our career trying to communicate what’s happening to this planet, to other people. And maybe that’s it. Maybe much of nature has been an illusion and we need to get them to ‘see the geckos’,

Ian:

See the gecko. That’s great, obscure for some people. Yes, but no, it is valuing animals for what they do. Never mind how much DNA they share with us or how much we like them. It’s what they do. And that really applies to the less attractive species that attract beauties in the eye of the beholder. But most people don’t get as excited about ugly species although that’s beginning to change. Some species that were traditionally considered ugly or just horrible are not being recognized is actually really, really important. And if they happen to be keystone species, then you better start protecting them because we need them. We need the ecosystem that they are a part of. And it’s not a luxury item that you might get round to eventually, it’s actually central to our future survival on the planet. And that really is a message from this year and even from this pandemic, which most people…

Gerry:

I think so

Ian:

Came out of our mistreatment of nature. So we got to do better.

Gerry:

And the diseases that keep erupting out of it over the last even 12 months or so. Ian, thank you so much. I know you have to rush off because this is, I always say about this podcast, I would love to do it in a pub over a pint of beer and just chat. And if we were in that pub, you’d say, I’ve gotta run home and cook dinner cuz I’ve promised to cook dinner, which is the truth. You do have to rush and cook dinner. So Ian, I wanna thank you so much for doing this. It’s always great to catch up with you and you are always normally flying all over the planet, but you are involved with people all over the planet.

Ian:

Yes. The last three years of international UN meetings and FSC journal assemblies have all consulted together to the next three months. So I, I’m sorry, gonna have to fly, but as soon as we rebalance earth of the ground, people can offset their carbon by protecting elephants. That would be something on it. And lifting communities out of poverty.

Gerry:

Well hopefully we’ll embrace technology a little more so that we also, which we did over this pandemic so we could have communication like this rather than always jumping on an aeroplane.

Ian:

Yeah. Yeah. and virtual travel on vicotourism.org <laugh>. And if you wanna know more about the elephant carbon equation, rebalance.earth is the website. Easy to remember.

Gerry:

All right, Ian, again, thanks. Go cook dinner and we’ll see you very soon. Stay healthy. Safe travels. Cheers. Bye-bye.

Gerry:

You’ve been listening to part two of my conversation with Ian Redmond, naturalist and conservationists as we focused on valuing the role of gorillas and other key forest species like elephants in maintaining the carbon health of the Congo Basin.

This is Talking Apes, the podcast dedicated to raising awareness about the magic and wonder of apes like us. Our goal to create greater understanding about the threats apes face and the importance of their ecosystems on which we all depend. Before we go, a quick reminder to check out the new Talking Apes website @talkingapes.org. That’s talking apes.org. And there you’ll find over 20 episodes from season one, information on future guests and a link to all our social media activities. Talking Apes is supported in part by non-profit GLOBIO and by listeners like you. While on the website, if you’d like to support Talking Apes podcast, you can do so with your tax deductible donation. Just click on the red donate button in the upper right hand corner. I’d like to thank assistant producer Demelza Bond for all of her great work behind the scenes on the podcast and all of our work on our online activities as well.

And I’d especially like to thank you, listeners like you for joining us as we start our second season exploring the world of Apes, primates, and the forest homes they live. From everyone at Talking Apes. I’m Gerry Ellis. Thanks for listening. And tomorrow challenge the world with curiosity and a smile.