you could imagine my career has been a
series of jumps from one thing into
another but actually there is a common
thread linking them all together and it
started when I was a little boy growing
up in Melbourne in southern Australia
and Port Phillip Bay is is the the water
body that the city’s on and it was a
wonderful natural playground and I
discovered at the age of about eight or
nine that there were fossils in the bay
that were the bones of Wales and and a
fish and so forth that had lived six
million years ago in an ancient Bay that
had long since vanished and so it was
wonderful to be diving in the bay with
my snorkel and flippers finding these
remains of the ancient Bay in it somehow
fired my imagination to become a
paleontologist and so for a while I
studied paleontology and then practiced
as a professional and then became
interested in modern mammals and did
that for a while that grew out of a
paleontological interests
when I was in my late 20s I discovered
the island of New Guinea and it’s an
extraordinary place with amazing
biodiversity I initially went there
really cause of a interest in
paleontology in some ways the New Guinea
and rainforests represent an ancient
living relic of environments that
prospered in Australia four or five
million years ago but as I went there to
study I realized that the modern form of
New Guinea was very poorly documented
and the very first mountaintop that I
went to we discovered a gigantic rat
nearly a meter long and a wallaby which
was medium-sized animal both of which
were unknown to science and so that
fired my imagination it’s a very
difficult environment to work in malaria
is a major problem I’ve had arrows
pointed at me in anger from tribal
people it can be really tough at times
but the rewards are simply enormous and
I suppose the high point of my whole
career in New Guinea was in 1994 when we
discovered a kind of tree kangaroo which
lived on the highest mountains in the
island of New Guinea it lived above the
tree line in this creature so it’s in
the alpine herb fields and so forth so
it’s a tree kangaroo that doesn’t live
in trees and even more enigmatic sort of
thing and you would stand about that why
it’s probably the size of a Labrador
that’s sort of sized animal but looks
like a small panda black and white very
dense fur a very time because it lives
in a habitat where this very few people
and to think that that most
extraordinary kangaroo had survived
until almost the end of the 20th century
before had been discovered by science
was a humbling experience wonderful
experience some tree kangaroos are
considered sacred the beliefs varied
from place to place across the island
but in the case of dingy so that large
black and white animal that is
considered sacred by the money people up
in that area and they say that when they
come across the animal it raises its
hands in the air like that and whistles
goes that sort of noise and they say
that’s a recognition of kinship and that
it is saying I’m your ancestor and they
very much respect that they say that
even their hunting dogs creep past on
the ground because they don’t want to
of the very August ancestor animal but
you know as a biologist I know that tree
kangaroos do that when they meet another
tree kangaroo particularly males they
protecting their territory and you know
if you don’t move on you get scratched
and the whistle presumably is a similar
sort of a thing a territorial marker
working with the people of Papua New
Guinea has been one of the greatest
privileges of my life because I’m I’m a
biologist I’m interested in nature and
when you go into a village with those
people and they start talking to you
about nature you realize what you’re
getting is not just that man’s life
experience of a particular species but
his father’s experience in his
grandfather’s experience way way back
being built on because the stories are
told over and over again and the the
best of the hunters in New Guinea are
like walking encyclopedia of knowledge
about natural systems now of course
their culture is different in the way
things are expressed is different and it
often takes time to work your way
through that and sometimes is very
challenging that he knows religious
because they’re very different from
western lifestyle but nevertheless some
it was one of the great privileges ever
to to sit at the feet of those
professors really and learn what they
knew you know I should have understood
the threat that climate change
represents earlier than I did because
when I was working in New Guinea through
the 1980s and 90s every mountain summer
I climbed I saw evidence of the tree
line advancing so there was as good a
fingerprint as you could have ever want
to see of the warming of the planet you
know because the tree lines he’ll grow
it is by climatic constraint but it was
only really when i finished my fieldwork
and I’ve been at Harvard for a year came
back to Australia and was asked to
advise a state government on scientific
issues that i SAT back and read the
periodicals scientific periodicals for
the last few years and realized that I
had missed just what a major threat this
climate issue was and it was at that
moment I realized everything and I
helped precious all of the biodiversity
that the even perhaps the security of a
civilization was under threat by this
was then I decided to write a book about
the problem and wrote the weather makers
and since then I that’s been my life i
guess i’ve been involved with the
climate issue ever since
you
Oh
series of jumps from one thing into
another but actually there is a common
thread linking them all together and it
started when I was a little boy growing
up in Melbourne in southern Australia
and Port Phillip Bay is is the the water
body that the city’s on and it was a
wonderful natural playground and I
discovered at the age of about eight or
nine that there were fossils in the bay
that were the bones of Wales and and a
fish and so forth that had lived six
million years ago in an ancient Bay that
had long since vanished and so it was
wonderful to be diving in the bay with
my snorkel and flippers finding these
remains of the ancient Bay in it somehow
fired my imagination to become a
paleontologist and so for a while I
studied paleontology and then practiced
as a professional and then became
interested in modern mammals and did
that for a while that grew out of a
paleontological interests
when I was in my late 20s I discovered
the island of New Guinea and it’s an
extraordinary place with amazing
biodiversity I initially went there
really cause of a interest in
paleontology in some ways the New Guinea
and rainforests represent an ancient
living relic of environments that
prospered in Australia four or five
million years ago but as I went there to
study I realized that the modern form of
New Guinea was very poorly documented
and the very first mountaintop that I
went to we discovered a gigantic rat
nearly a meter long and a wallaby which
was medium-sized animal both of which
were unknown to science and so that
fired my imagination it’s a very
difficult environment to work in malaria
is a major problem I’ve had arrows
pointed at me in anger from tribal
people it can be really tough at times
but the rewards are simply enormous and
I suppose the high point of my whole
career in New Guinea was in 1994 when we
discovered a kind of tree kangaroo which
lived on the highest mountains in the
island of New Guinea it lived above the
tree line in this creature so it’s in
the alpine herb fields and so forth so
it’s a tree kangaroo that doesn’t live
in trees and even more enigmatic sort of
thing and you would stand about that why
it’s probably the size of a Labrador
that’s sort of sized animal but looks
like a small panda black and white very
dense fur a very time because it lives
in a habitat where this very few people
and to think that that most
extraordinary kangaroo had survived
until almost the end of the 20th century
before had been discovered by science
was a humbling experience wonderful
experience some tree kangaroos are
considered sacred the beliefs varied
from place to place across the island
but in the case of dingy so that large
black and white animal that is
considered sacred by the money people up
in that area and they say that when they
come across the animal it raises its
hands in the air like that and whistles
goes that sort of noise and they say
that’s a recognition of kinship and that
it is saying I’m your ancestor and they
very much respect that they say that
even their hunting dogs creep past on
the ground because they don’t want to
of the very August ancestor animal but
you know as a biologist I know that tree
kangaroos do that when they meet another
tree kangaroo particularly males they
protecting their territory and you know
if you don’t move on you get scratched
and the whistle presumably is a similar
sort of a thing a territorial marker
working with the people of Papua New
Guinea has been one of the greatest
privileges of my life because I’m I’m a
biologist I’m interested in nature and
when you go into a village with those
people and they start talking to you
about nature you realize what you’re
getting is not just that man’s life
experience of a particular species but
his father’s experience in his
grandfather’s experience way way back
being built on because the stories are
told over and over again and the the
best of the hunters in New Guinea are
like walking encyclopedia of knowledge
about natural systems now of course
their culture is different in the way
things are expressed is different and it
often takes time to work your way
through that and sometimes is very
challenging that he knows religious
because they’re very different from
western lifestyle but nevertheless some
it was one of the great privileges ever
to to sit at the feet of those
professors really and learn what they
knew you know I should have understood
the threat that climate change
represents earlier than I did because
when I was working in New Guinea through
the 1980s and 90s every mountain summer
I climbed I saw evidence of the tree
line advancing so there was as good a
fingerprint as you could have ever want
to see of the warming of the planet you
know because the tree lines he’ll grow
it is by climatic constraint but it was
only really when i finished my fieldwork
and I’ve been at Harvard for a year came
back to Australia and was asked to
advise a state government on scientific
issues that i SAT back and read the
periodicals scientific periodicals for
the last few years and realized that I
had missed just what a major threat this
climate issue was and it was at that
moment I realized everything and I
helped precious all of the biodiversity
that the even perhaps the security of a
civilization was under threat by this
was then I decided to write a book about
the problem and wrote the weather makers
and since then I that’s been my life i
guess i’ve been involved with the
climate issue ever since
you
Oh
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