[Applause]
so I’m standing in front of an 80 meter
fig tree in the Ugandan forest in front
of me there are two ropes that rise into
the canopy I can’t see the anchor points
they’re so high and then my mission on
this particular day is to climb up those
ropes get into the canopy haul up a four
foot by four foot steel tree platform
attach it to the tree and get back down
this tree before the troop of
chimpanzees that are arrived for their
daily feed come around the corner now
the timing is crucial because these
chimpanzees have never seen a human in
their tree before and we’ve spent the
last three to four weeks filming these
chimpanzees hunting very proficiently in
trees just like this one other primates
ripping them to shreds making a meal out
of them so you can understand that we
might be a little bit nervous about what
might happen to us given that they’ve
never seen a human being in their tree
before so I set up I get up my ropes I
get to the top of the tree
thirty minutes later I’m attaching the
platform I’m jumping up and down on it
to make sure it can hold the weight of
Bill my cameraman and his camera and
just as I’m about satisfied with the job
that I’ve done the radio cackles Jeff
now I should explain that I’m the least
experienced person in this team at this
particular point the chimpanzee research
scientists are on the ground bill who’s
very experienced the cameraman he’s on
the ground so I get on the radio and I
say okay what should I do
and there’s a silence and I can hear the
hoot calls of excited chimpanzees coming
through the forest as they’re heading
towards this great big tree full of food
the radio starts up again
it says we don’t know so I think okay
what are my options here I can descend
these ropes and end up freaking out
these chimpanzees and they might never
come back one option I could stay put
just go with the flow see what happens
but what if they become aggressive I
mean chimpanzees are very very strong
very well adapted to this environment
I’m not on a number of occasions when
I’ve been on the ground they’ve run past
and slapped my leg and it really hurts
and I don’t want that to happen at the
top of the tree but before I can make
any sort of informs judgment the chimps
have started coming up the tree I’m
still running through options I could
throw myself on my ropes and hope that
they hold if things get a bit crazy up
there but as I do and I’m trying to
think about what to do the chimps rise
up through the tree and they surround me
in pretty much a perfect circle 360
degrees 80 foot up in the air and they
get on with their feeding it becomes
really apparent very quickly that not
only is my presence acceptable but they
having a complete indifference to me
being there
I’d spend so much time and worry and
effort thinking about myself and about
how I would be the center of focus in
this particular situation that it hadn’t
even occurred to me that these
chimpanzees might not care and they
didn’t and that indifference was at
first shocking you know I mean as humans
we all like to think we’re the center of
our own universe but after a while that
indifference became incredibly
exhilarating these chimpanzees were
taking an almost egalitarian view of
their environment they cared no more
about me than they did about which fig
they were going to eat next
which ant was going to crawl up one of
their legs whether the hornbill that was
on the branch above was gonna steal a
fig and get away with it and that view
of the whole that these chimpanzees had
without me at the centre completely
changed the way that I see the natural
world just as I was having this epiphany
at the top of this tree as if to mark my
complete insignificance a steady shower
of hot sticky wet fig infused chimp
urine just started pouring down on me on
my 4×4 platform and I had no chart and
now since that moment I have traveled
the world and seen the same curiosity
and the same interest and fascination
from other species of their environment
as a whole from wolves in the Arctic
right down to Penguins in the Antarctic
and on a number of occasions I’ve also
experienced that indifference and the
key thing though is I see that curiosity
and that fascination for the whole much
much closer to home I see it in my own
children on a daily basis I whenever
they’re released into the garden or
whether than they’re released into a
woodland they go screaming past nature’s
best advertisements the Bluebell wood
the daffodil the giant oak majestic oak
tree and they come back to me holding
the most innocuous and the most
unremarkable seed head bit of bark but
crucially they come back holding it with
such eagerness and such wonder it rivals
any Victorian explorer of age so if we
all have that fascination ingrained
within us innately about treating the
natural world with equality then what’s
going wrong our culture our adult
culture is increasingly fetishizing the
large iconic glamorous predators the
beautiful ungulates the fascinating
primates time and time and time again we
train our telephoto lenses
in our televisions and our attention on
the same couple of dozen of species we
award prizes to photographers who very
skillfully take beautiful portraits of
the same 12 animals year after year
after year after year and that worries
me because by being so blinkered to the
beauty of the natural world as a whole
we could stand to lose it all and not
even notice now when I was having my
year in soaped epiphany at the top of
this tree being completely ignored by a
troupe of chimpanzees I became
increasingly aware of hundreds and
hundreds of tiny tiny tiny little
insects and they were burrowing into the
figs and these are fig wasps and fig
wasps are one of the most impressive of
nature’s wonders a truly remarkable
animal now figs have evolved to put
their flowers within the body of the
fruit and fig wasps have evolved to have
inverted mouth parts and hooked legs the
females have at least and they burrow
into the figs in search of the flower to
lay their eggs now when a female
Figaro’s into a flower it loses its
wings it loses its antennae such that
when it’s done it can’t reach another
fig it only has one go so she lays her
egg inside the fig the larvae develop
but crucially the male larvae develop
first and they go on to fertilized
and the female wasps then develop at
exactly the same time as the male part
of the fig flower starts producing the
maximum amount of pollen so that when
these females have reached their point
of maturation they exit the fig covered
in pollen and had to go and find another
fig and the cycle starts again now this
millions of years of evolution has gone
into this beautiful symbiotic
relationship it’s almost a cornerstone
of the entire habitat that I was sitting
in there are thousands and thousands and
thousands and thousands of species which
are reliant on this relationship between
this fig wasps and this fig and the
chimpanzees wouldn’t be there if this
relationship didn’t happen in fact one
might argue that because in our
evolutionary history the ability to eat
FIGS
and therefore to hunt because the energy
that you get from figs gives you the
ability to take on much more energetic
roles such as hunting might have even
lead to our own evolutionary paths so in
some weird way I was there to film the
chimpanzees simply because this wasp had
there no association with this fig now I
find that absolutely amazing the idea
that it’s the environment the whole as a
whole that counts and not the apex
animal the chimpanzee that really
now the conservation world have been
using the idea that the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts for a long
time now for a few decades they’ve been
putting forward biome specific targets
which look to preserve specific
ecosystems if there’s an entire
conservation movement which is very
prevalent and very present right now to
do just that the conservation movements
are nothing without the passion that
people bring to the equation NGOs and
governments cannot achieve anything
unless we public believe in the targets
that they are putting forward so what
I’m saying is we now hold a
responsibility all of us here to find
beauty in the everyday to find passion
for the small things as well as the big
things to bypass the iconic take off our
blinkers and open our eyes to the beauty
that the natural world has to offer
at every step and then and really only
then have we got a chance to save this
remarkable planet of ours thank you [Applause]
so I’m standing in front of an 80 meter
fig tree in the Ugandan forest in front
of me there are two ropes that rise into
the canopy I can’t see the anchor points
they’re so high and then my mission on
this particular day is to climb up those
ropes get into the canopy haul up a four
foot by four foot steel tree platform
attach it to the tree and get back down
this tree before the troop of
chimpanzees that are arrived for their
daily feed come around the corner now
the timing is crucial because these
chimpanzees have never seen a human in
their tree before and we’ve spent the
last three to four weeks filming these
chimpanzees hunting very proficiently in
trees just like this one other primates
ripping them to shreds making a meal out
of them so you can understand that we
might be a little bit nervous about what
might happen to us given that they’ve
never seen a human being in their tree
before so I set up I get up my ropes I
get to the top of the tree
thirty minutes later I’m attaching the
platform I’m jumping up and down on it
to make sure it can hold the weight of
Bill my cameraman and his camera and
just as I’m about satisfied with the job
that I’ve done the radio cackles Jeff
now I should explain that I’m the least
experienced person in this team at this
particular point the chimpanzee research
scientists are on the ground bill who’s
very experienced the cameraman he’s on
the ground so I get on the radio and I
say okay what should I do
and there’s a silence and I can hear the
hoot calls of excited chimpanzees coming
through the forest as they’re heading
towards this great big tree full of food
the radio starts up again
it says we don’t know so I think okay
what are my options here I can descend
these ropes and end up freaking out
these chimpanzees and they might never
come back one option I could stay put
just go with the flow see what happens
but what if they become aggressive I
mean chimpanzees are very very strong
very well adapted to this environment
I’m not on a number of occasions when
I’ve been on the ground they’ve run past
and slapped my leg and it really hurts
and I don’t want that to happen at the
top of the tree but before I can make
any sort of informs judgment the chimps
have started coming up the tree I’m
still running through options I could
throw myself on my ropes and hope that
they hold if things get a bit crazy up
there but as I do and I’m trying to
think about what to do the chimps rise
up through the tree and they surround me
in pretty much a perfect circle 360
degrees 80 foot up in the air and they
get on with their feeding it becomes
really apparent very quickly that not
only is my presence acceptable but they
having a complete indifference to me
being there
I’d spend so much time and worry and
effort thinking about myself and about
how I would be the center of focus in
this particular situation that it hadn’t
even occurred to me that these
chimpanzees might not care and they
didn’t and that indifference was at
first shocking you know I mean as humans
we all like to think we’re the center of
our own universe but after a while that
indifference became incredibly
exhilarating these chimpanzees were
taking an almost egalitarian view of
their environment they cared no more
about me than they did about which fig
they were going to eat next
which ant was going to crawl up one of
their legs whether the hornbill that was
on the branch above was gonna steal a
fig and get away with it and that view
of the whole that these chimpanzees had
without me at the centre completely
changed the way that I see the natural
world just as I was having this epiphany
at the top of this tree as if to mark my
complete insignificance a steady shower
of hot sticky wet fig infused chimp
urine just started pouring down on me on
my 4×4 platform and I had no chart and
now since that moment I have traveled
the world and seen the same curiosity
and the same interest and fascination
from other species of their environment
as a whole from wolves in the Arctic
right down to Penguins in the Antarctic
and on a number of occasions I’ve also
experienced that indifference and the
key thing though is I see that curiosity
and that fascination for the whole much
much closer to home I see it in my own
children on a daily basis I whenever
they’re released into the garden or
whether than they’re released into a
woodland they go screaming past nature’s
best advertisements the Bluebell wood
the daffodil the giant oak majestic oak
tree and they come back to me holding
the most innocuous and the most
unremarkable seed head bit of bark but
crucially they come back holding it with
such eagerness and such wonder it rivals
any Victorian explorer of age so if we
all have that fascination ingrained
within us innately about treating the
natural world with equality then what’s
going wrong our culture our adult
culture is increasingly fetishizing the
large iconic glamorous predators the
beautiful ungulates the fascinating
primates time and time and time again we
train our telephoto lenses
in our televisions and our attention on
the same couple of dozen of species we
award prizes to photographers who very
skillfully take beautiful portraits of
the same 12 animals year after year
after year after year and that worries
me because by being so blinkered to the
beauty of the natural world as a whole
we could stand to lose it all and not
even notice now when I was having my
year in soaped epiphany at the top of
this tree being completely ignored by a
troupe of chimpanzees I became
increasingly aware of hundreds and
hundreds of tiny tiny tiny little
insects and they were burrowing into the
figs and these are fig wasps and fig
wasps are one of the most impressive of
nature’s wonders a truly remarkable
animal now figs have evolved to put
their flowers within the body of the
fruit and fig wasps have evolved to have
inverted mouth parts and hooked legs the
females have at least and they burrow
into the figs in search of the flower to
lay their eggs now when a female
Figaro’s into a flower it loses its
wings it loses its antennae such that
when it’s done it can’t reach another
fig it only has one go so she lays her
egg inside the fig the larvae develop
but crucially the male larvae develop
first and they go on to fertilized
and the female wasps then develop at
exactly the same time as the male part
of the fig flower starts producing the
maximum amount of pollen so that when
these females have reached their point
of maturation they exit the fig covered
in pollen and had to go and find another
fig and the cycle starts again now this
millions of years of evolution has gone
into this beautiful symbiotic
relationship it’s almost a cornerstone
of the entire habitat that I was sitting
in there are thousands and thousands and
thousands and thousands of species which
are reliant on this relationship between
this fig wasps and this fig and the
chimpanzees wouldn’t be there if this
relationship didn’t happen in fact one
might argue that because in our
evolutionary history the ability to eat
FIGS
and therefore to hunt because the energy
that you get from figs gives you the
ability to take on much more energetic
roles such as hunting might have even
lead to our own evolutionary paths so in
some weird way I was there to film the
chimpanzees simply because this wasp had
there no association with this fig now I
find that absolutely amazing the idea
that it’s the environment the whole as a
whole that counts and not the apex
animal the chimpanzee that really
now the conservation world have been
using the idea that the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts for a long
time now for a few decades they’ve been
putting forward biome specific targets
which look to preserve specific
ecosystems if there’s an entire
conservation movement which is very
prevalent and very present right now to
do just that the conservation movements
are nothing without the passion that
people bring to the equation NGOs and
governments cannot achieve anything
unless we public believe in the targets
that they are putting forward so what
I’m saying is we now hold a
responsibility all of us here to find
beauty in the everyday to find passion
for the small things as well as the big
things to bypass the iconic take off our
blinkers and open our eyes to the beauty
that the natural world has to offer
at every step and then and really only
then have we got a chance to save this
remarkable planet of ours thank you [Applause]
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