Transcript

TEDxCSU 2012 Shermin de Silva

[Music] thank you a second time um so my talk is going to Echo a lot of the ones you've heard or will hear today but I'd like to transport you to another part of the world so for the past seven years I've been studying uh secret society this is the shy and thecid Asian elephant it's uh the largest land mamal in Asia but also one that's very endangered I'd like to tell you about this mysterious animal and the challenges for wildlife in adjusting to human dominated Landscapes but first there seems to be a common misconception that Asian lants are somehow domesticated I've even met people who seem surprised to hear that there is such a thing as a wild Asian elant I wonder maybe it's because in the west people are used to seeing elephants as these captive performers of tricks for entertainment or maybe it's because Asian elephants have actually had an association with people for 5,000 years they've been as important in the east as Horses have been in the west civilizations and empires have risen and fallen on the backs of elephants but unlike horses elephants were never domesticated in the sense that they were never bred for generations to serve human needs in fact in many parts of the world Asian offers are so shy and wary of humans that they come out only at night making them very difficult to observe and even in broad daylight they're actually quite good at hiding can you figure out how many are in this vo ref in fact there are seven in just this Photograph so before I tell you about Asian alphs let me show you that elant used to come in a bizarre ARA of shapes and sizes and they used to be found throughout all the continents all the different many of them anyway but today they're just found on Asian and Africa and a lot of what we know about elephants is based on some very detailed long-term studies of the African Savannah elephant what we know from this species is that females and Cals form these very tightly knit family groups that associate with other families and form a highly structured society that is matriarch based the adult males don't form such tightnit groups but they have relationships of their own and together they seem to be one of the most complex in the animal King Societies in the animal kingdom until recently people pretty much assumed that Asian elant behave the same way but if you look at the evolutionary history Asian and African elephants along with the now extinct woolly mammoths diverged about 6 million years ago this is a pretty long span of time considering that's about the same span of time that separates us and chimpanzees in fact a little research that had been done on asan seem to suggest that they prefer to live in these small Loosely connected groups so I was interested in finding out the truth so now let me take you halfway around the world to this little National Park called bway in southern Sri Lanka uh I work in Sri Lanka because it seems that Sri Lanka seems has quite a few elephants and also because I happened to be from Sri Lanka now I hadn't originally intended to start my own field site but I had an experience that I that put me on that path so it was my first year of graduate school and I knew I wanted to work on elephants but I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do or where I was going to work and on my very second day in in oi I met Raja Raja means king in zing and he's just one of four adult males with tusks in the park so Asian um Asian elephants the females don't have tusks and in Sri Lanka a lot of the males don't either so this was quite a rare site and with his one broken tusk he reminded me immediately of Ganesh in the Hindu tradition Ganesh is known as a remover of obstacles now even though I'm a Muslim and also a scientist who doesn't buy into the notion of a personified deity this mental Association was very powerful so I decided to stay in odal and I started by learning to try to identify individual elephants by their most distinctive feature which is their ears we started with the females and then moved on done to the Mal and and the Cals and before we knew it we were we found that there were over 800 animals using this one tiny little Park which is about double the number that anyone had previously expected by watching them for long periods of time we got quite an intimate understanding of their social relationships we found for example that some social groups like The Kay here Kamala Ki and a number of other um adult females and their calves are very tight meaned they went practically everywhere together and they formed from these social networks that are very tightly connected and occasionally they would associate with others and form larger groups but other individuals seem to change their companions almost every day some social units met up with others to form larger interconnected social networks whereas others like Natalie and Nina down at the bottom here tended to be more isolated if you look over time you see that these networks actually change quite a bit individual Switcher around and in fact it's a very Dynamic and fluid Society over the years we saw a lot of births and we also saw several deaths and we saw interesting and sometimes moving Behavior like the fact that they show concern over dead or dying individuals even if they don't know them now I'd like to bring you back to Raja we saw Raja every year until about 2009 and Raja was most definitely an animal of Flesh and Blood because he had a problem he was addicted to human crops to food crops and every year he showed up with gunshot wounds in 2009 he showed up with a particularly bad injury on his trunk now the trunk is an elephant's most important appendage and we never saw Raja again which brings me to the human side of the story you see that people that there are less than 100,000 Asian elephants in the world that means that there are more people in just for Collins than there are Asian elephants in the world and there are more people in just a few Villages surrounding UD National Park than there are elephants in all of Sri Lanka even though they look like they might be existing quite halfway side by side here in this picture they're in fact in reality separated by just a thin thread of electricity that runs down the length of the fence as our population grows we are quite literally running out of space for wildlife and this gives rise to conflict a lot of the conflict is over agriculture because a lot of the people there are farmers and things like rice and banana are typical crops this is a fairly typical scene although it looks idilic the stage is set for conflict and the reason is because food crops are also really attractive to Wildlife and often these things exist side by side providing obvious Temptation people usually have to live nearby or have shelters nearby to defend their crops and this raises the chances that one or other gets hurt every year people kill elephants and elephants kill people what we need instead is a buffer a barrier with trees to provide a shield and habitat for other wildlife and an understory that also provides a barrier in habitat all of this could be planted with non-subsistence commercially valuable crops although it simple seems a simple idea in practice it's difficult to implement and the reason is this this is a typical farmer put yourself in his shoes he works really hard to support his family on very tight margins and he plants only what he knows to plant only grows what he knows to grow often they get in debt Sri Lanka has one of the highest rates of suicide in all of Asia and the number one reason and the number one method is pesticide poisoning so these issues are connected we need to work with people like this to find solutions that work for them rather than simply imposing what our view on what they should do as we try to figure out how to work with the grown-ups we're also working with the kids these kids some of them live directly across from the park they can literally see elephants from their front doors but some of them have never even been inside the park by taking them there and teaching them a bit about ecology and biology we hope to increase their appreciation and and awareness of the amazing wildlife and Wilderness that's l literally on their doorsteps now let me zoom out as you may have heard our population hit 7 billion last year and still growing this puts an incredible amount of pressure on every other species on earth and the bottom line is we have to strike this delicate balance large long ranging animals like elephants Force us to face the question is there space for all of us and this is the challenge of our time elsewhere in East Asia elephants and lots of other species are losing habitat wholesale to plantations like these which are oil Palms an article in the journal Nature last year pointed out that 80% of the deforestation is due to conversion into agriculture 30% of our greenhouse gas Ms are due to agriculture today practically all of the land available for cultivation is already under cultivation the areas that are left are either deserts or areas that are really so full of biodiversity that we shouldn't be converting them anymore and it's not just for food it's for things like animal feed and biofuel and just look at this headline it's tragic beyond words that something as mundane as toilet paper is taking out ecosystems now I warn you that the next slide is going to be graphic so any parents in the audience may want to have our younger members of the audience look away so somewhere in Africa at this very moment elephants are being killed for their tusks this is not for food it's not for self-defense it's in the name of Trinkets and ornaments and this is all the more appalling and tragic because this is history repeating all of this happened 30 years ago the first time it was driven by demand from the West this time is being Dred by demand from the East the first time they stopped it because massive publicity campaigns made the demand collapse and it won't stop this time either until the elements are all gone or the demand disappears this message is for everybody but in particular Asians asian-americans we need to talk to our friends and family we need to communicate that these are nor not status symbols to be proud of people have looked up at the stars for a long time and asked are we alone and there are two answers to this question the first is yes as far as we know this precious plantet is the only one that has life the second is no because intelligent life is all around us these are our brothers and sisters we're related in every sense of the word we're companions in The evolutionary Journey there's so many non-human societies and we're just starting to understand their beautiful complexity but they're unraveling before our eyes and it's not just the cute charismatic animals we should care about either sure allant are cute and cognizant that's not why we should care about them or anything else these are seedlings sprouting out of Elephant D you see elephants are creators and destroyers of habitat for other species they're a central component in a dynamic hole and this hole is like a machine in which we ourselves are embedded it's not about saving the planet new things will always replace what's lost but the question is will we survive all of our most brilliant Engineers can't replace with technology the interactions that maintain life on Earth as we know it now all this may seem a bit overwhelming so I'd like to share with you some principles I came up with for myself first think clearly learn about your world inform yourself understand and most importantly learn to think for yourself and then feel deeply let yourself be moved by the things you learn find that one little corner of the universe over which you can have an impact and then act on it don't waste any time because you don't have any time to waste but remember not to leave any one thing out either because to rush into action without understanding or empathy is sure to do more harm than good now in case you feel far removed from all the things that I'm talking about remember that you are having an impact just by being alive everything you buy everything you consume comes from somewhere and that today that's somewhere maybe halfway around the world you the consumer you are powerful exercise your power but if you think that keeping track of every little purchase is absurd I agree with you that's where regulation comes in and that's not the only thing that this body is supposed to do they fund science and research and we need to let them know that that's important a lot of my work guess who funded it it was taxpayers like you and programs like the multinational species conservation fund fund International research and conservation all kinds of different species not just in the US we need to let our legislators know that programs like that are important to us you the citizen you're powerful exercise your power and finally think carefully about the way that you spend the waking moments of your life we don't all have to do the same thing but seek your passion as though your life depends on it because it does you the individual you the person you're powerful exercise your power these are the Next Generation little Fang in front here we've known him since he was about three we don't know what happened to Raja but he certainly left descendence and little thans is probably one of them they're waiting their turn to take over the landscape just as your children will what you leave behind but also remember that it's not just about future Generations because if you're under the age of 60 guess what you've got a front row seat to whatever's coming next and the Challenger is going to be greater the younger you are I don't have a single solution because there isn't just one it comes down to all of us to figure out how to live together on this little blue planet we call home [Applause]