Translator: Iris Chin Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Good morning, everyone.
(Applause)
So, I grew up in Hong Kong,
which, as you guys all know, is a very densely populated, urban place.
As a kid, my daily routine was pretty much going from home to school and back again,
and I didn’t really venture much further than that.
But, for some reason, I really loved the idea of nature.
I always read books and watched TV shows,
anything I could get my hands on, about nature.
Even though I didn’t really have direct experience with nature,
it was just an idea that I really liked.
Fast-forward to after I graduated from university,
I decided to go to the Central African Republic,
which is in the middle of the African continent,
to work on a gorilla conservation project run by the World Wildlife Fund.
So, there I was working on a primate habituation program,
which basically means I was following around these gorillas every day
so that they could get used to human presence
so that tourists and scientists could observe them and they wouldn’t run away,
because truly, completely wild gorillas would just scream and run off
the instant they knew you were around.
This is one of my favorite photos that I took while I was there.
This is Sopo on his mom, Mopambi’s back.
I like this photo because it’s so human-like,
and when you spend time with the gorillas,
you really start to realize just how closely related they are to us.
Working with the gorillas was a huge privilege,
but what was just as big of a privilege was working with the Bayaka trackers.
Our trackers – meaning they’re the ones who helped us find the animals every day,
who were our guides in the forest – they were Bayaka people,
who are traditionally hunters and gatherers,
and they knew absolutely everything about the forest, and I mean everything.
You could plop them into the middle of the jungle
with nothing but the clothes on their backs,
and they would survive quite happily, indefinitely.
If you did that to me or most of us in this room,
we’d probably die within, like, a week.
So for me, as a city girl, it was really awe-inspiring and humbling
to work with these people who had such an amazing knowledge base and skill set,
and realizing just how deep our connection with nature could be
if we were just exposed to it.
And it made me realize that maybe why so many of us see nature as so hostile,
or foreign, or unknown, or scary is just because we’re not exposed to it.
So, near where I worked with the gorillas,
there was this amazing clearing called Dzanga Bai.
Dzanga Bai is a natural clearing,
not man-made,
and we’re not really sure why it exists, but what’s special about this place
is you can see up to 100 or more forest elephants gather at once,
and there’s nowhere else in the world like this place.
Scientists aren’t quite sure why elephants are attracted to this clearing.
They think maybe it’s because of the minerals in the mud,
maybe they like ingesting the mud and getting the nutrition from that.
It’s also a place where they congregate, and socialize, and play,
and there’s this really nice platform where you could stand and watch them
for hours and hours and hours.
This was a really special moment.
We came across this family of elephants bathing in this smaller clearing,
and you can’t see it,
but hidden behind all those legs is a tiny, brand new, days-old baby.
So, it was a really special day for me,
special enough to warrant a really happy selfie.
And it was just amazing to be able to walk on the same level
as dozens and dozens of elephants who were just ignoring us.
The same day that I took the selfie in that previous photo –
well, not in the same day – the next day,
we, unfortunately, were all evacuated from the project.
All of the staff were forced to leave because of a civil war
that, sadly, continues to this day.
About six weeks after we were evacuated,
we found out that gunmen came to this clearing,
came to the same platform from where I took this photo,
and they gunned down 26 elephants, all at once,
they just sprayed the clearing with bullets.
They sawed off their tusks and left their carcasses to rot.
And that ivory could have very well ended up in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong has the largest retail ivory market in the world.
It’s entirely legal, but it also probably – well, we know it does conceal
a large amount of illegal ivory that’s smuggled in,
and that’s banned by international law.
Hong Kong still makes a lot of seizures,
and the government has promised to ban the trade completely by 2021,
but that’s still a long way away from now,
and in the meantime, an estimated 33,000 elephants are killed every year.
It was really shocking to me –
at this point I was in Hong Kong, still adjusting to being back in the city,
and I realized that my city, Hong Kong,
and my country, China, was having such a big impact
on these pristine populations of wildlife halfway around the world.
And that was really hard for me to grapple with.
Seven out of ten Chinese people
don’t realize that ivory comes from dead elephants.
They think that the tusks fall out like teeth, they think it falls out harmlessly.
So we may be losing one African elephant every 15 minutes,
just because of a simple misunderstanding of elephants and nature.
And, again, I was back in Hong Kong and shocked by this news,
and I was trying to understand how this could happen,
and I realized, looking around me,
that Hong Kong people are on the complete opposite side of the spectrum
of the Bayaka trackers I got to know.
They spend time in nature every day, they depend on the forest,
they know the forest, whereas us here in Hong Kong,
we’re just completely disconnected with the natural environment.
We spend all of our time inside;
we spend all of our time glued to screens;
we don’t like getting dirty in Hong Kong, we don’t like touching natural things;
we barely pay attention to anything five feet in front of us,
let alone what’s happening maybe on the other side of the world.
And when we’re not paying attention to the environment,
we’re not paying attention to the impact that we have on the environment.
And we’re having a pretty big impact on the environment in Hong Kong,
if you haven’t noticed already.
Take the ocean, for example.
Hong Kong people eat 71.2 kilos of seafood every year,
which is over four times the global average.
Half of the seafood, the live seafood, in Hong Kong
comes from unsustainable populations,
and it’s not uncommon to walk into a Hong Kong seafood restaurant
and find an endangered species on the menu.
Hong Kong is a global trading hub for ivory,
but it’s also a global trading hub for shark’s fin.
We import thousands of sharks’ fin every year,
and sharks are a keystone species,
so if we lose them, the oceans would probably collapse,
and if the oceans collapse, we’d be in a lot of trouble.
And if you walk around Chai Wan, not too far from here,
you’re very easily going to see dried manta ray gills,
or dried seahorse, which are both used in traditional Chinese medicine
and which are also threatened with extinction.
Now, when we look at the land, we’re very lucky in Hong Kong
because 40% of our land is protected under the Country Parks Ordinance.
However, that land is not very much valued by the people or the government.
A property tycoon said last year or the year before,
“If you have no house, it is no use having nice country parks.”
And the government seems to agree; they keep suggesting that we should start
building public housing inside country parks,
which kind of defeats the purpose of a country park, if you ask me.
This is a beach, also not too far from here.
This is near Aberdeen.
As you can see, it’s completely covered in trash,
and this is what happens when we don’t pay attention to the environment.
I think the sad thing about nature in Hong Kong
is that people think there is nothing left to protect.
They think that everything’s dead already,
or that there’s no more nature, so why even bother.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Hong Kong’s only a quarter developed, meaning the rest of it is undeveloped.
The primary color you see here is green, and living in those green spaces,
and in the waters around it is a very abundant wildlife.
So, for example, Hong Kong,
even though it’s 9,000 times smaller than mainland China,
you can see one third of all of China’s bird species.
We have 55 species of mammals, including monkeys, and porcupines,
and leopard cats.
We have red muntjac deer, which is actually quite widespread
around Hong Kong, it’s also called the barking deer.
We have the golden coin turtle.
The golden coin turtle used to be found all over southeast Asia,
but now, the only place in the world where you can see them in the wild
is Hong Kong because everywhere else it’s been hunted to extinction.
And we have other animals that are found nowhere else in the world,
like Romer’s tree frog, which was discovered on Lamma Island
and is also critically endangered.
We have more coral species than the Caribbean.
I took this photo in Hong Kong, believe it or not.
And living in those coral reefs are more reef fish species than Hawaii.
We also have pink dolphins;
we’re not sure quite how many there are in Hong Kong waters,
some say there’s around 60,
and that number is getting lower and lower every year.
I think if you ask your average Hong Kong person,
they might know there are pink dolphins, but they think they’re all dead already,
or that they’re impossible to see, that they’re some sort of myth.
But actually, you can go out on just about any day, and they’re quite easy to find.
So, because we’re not paying attention to the nature in our own backyard,
it’s slipping through our fingers.
The dolphins, for example,
people have already given up on when they’re still very much around.
Hong Kong’s also not that special in terms of urban wildlife.
Hong Kong’s famous for its –
not famous – everyone’s heard of the wild boar, I think, the wild pigs,
and in recent years,
there’s been a lot of news of them getting inside malls and hotels
and wreaking havok.
Well, in Berlin, as well, there’s a vibrant wild boar population.
So there’s urban wildlife everywhere.
As urban areas expand and sprawl,
and as climate change and other factors increase the range of a lot of species,
there’s only going to be more and more urban wildlife interaction with people.
So, it doesn’t matter where you live, there’s always going to be nature.
And even though nature is coming all the way to our doorsteps,
people are spending less and less time in nature,
especially children.
In the UK, one in four British children spend less than half an hour outside,
in America, children are spending half as much time as they did 30 years ago,
and in Hong Kong, kids spend less than two hours a week outside.
So we’re spending less and less time in nature,
just as nature needs us more than ever, as you guys know.
We’re entering a period of mass extinction;
species are going extinct 100 times faster than they would’ve if people weren’t here.
85% of fish populations are overexploited, or depleted, or recovering from depletion,
because we’re basically eating them out of existence.
By 2050, some scientists think
there will be more plastic in the ocean than there will be fish,
and half of the world’s forest cover has already been destroyed.
And of course, most –
well, half of the world’s species live in tropical forests,
so losing them is a really big deal,
not to mention all the other benefits they give us.
And of course, there’s climate change, which I won’t go into.
And, nature really needs us, but I think we really need nature, too.
Besides all of the material benefits that they give us,
there’s a lot of mental and social and psychological benefits.
We evolved in nature, we are meant to be in nature.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you’re outdoors-y,
we’re just better people in nature, and the science shows that.
We’re healthier when we’re outside;
we heal faster;
it helps with all sorts of mental health illnesses;
it helps with depression, it helps with anxiety, ADHD;
it makes us more creative, more confident, just happier in general.
There’s been a couple studies that have even shown
that it helps children with nearsightedness.
So it’s not actually all that time looking at books
that’s making kids nearsighted in Taiwan, one study suggested,
it’s actually the fact that those books are keeping them from playing outside.
For whatever reason, playing outside helps them with their eyesight.
Perhaps most importantly, spending time in nature makes us want to protect nature.
It’s quite obvious, but a lot of studies have shown
that direct experience with nature is the most-cited factor
for later activism in environmental issues.
If we want to protect the planet for generations to come,
then we need the generations to come to have experiences with nature
so that they can care enough about nature to protect it.
And since the theme of tonight is uncertainty,
I think there’s also something to be said for exploration in itself.
Exploration is what has driven human civilization,
it’s what made us explore, it’s what made us look into the unknown
and discover things, and stay curious and engaged,
and I don’t think there’s any better way to do that than to spend time outside.
So, having realized all of this,
this is why I decided to start a project called the Hong Kong Explorers Initiative.
I got a grant from the National Geographic Society,
and the basic idea is just to encourage people
to explore and appreciate Hong Kong’s wild side.
So here, we went snorkeling in Deep Water Bay, believe it or not.
We did actually see fish and crabs, and the kids had a great time.
This is from a beach cleanup we did; it’s actually from that same beach
that I showed you the photo of earlier, the one that was covered in trash.
And I love this photo
because we’re at this place that seemed like it was damaged beyond repair,
that was disgusting,
but these kids, we all got together, we cleaned it up the best we could,
it looked fine, actually, and they had a great time,
and they still managed to find nature.
Here, this kid, he’s showing us a little crab he found.
And so the idea behind the project is that kid by kid, and adult by adult,
we can start fostering these connections with nature
so that they can want to protect it down the line.
This is a quote from a Senegalese conservationist, Baba Dioum.
He said,
“In the end, we will only conserve what we love.
We will only love what we understand.
We will only understand what we are taught.”
I would like to add to that.
I think, “In the end, we will only conserve, love,
and understand what we explore.”
So, I invite all of you to not study this weekend –
don’t tell your teachers in the front row that I just said that –
and grab a friend or two and go exploring a part of Hong Kong
you’ve never been to before.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Good morning, everyone.
(Applause)
So, I grew up in Hong Kong,
which, as you guys all know, is a very densely populated, urban place.
As a kid, my daily routine was pretty much going from home to school and back again,
and I didn’t really venture much further than that.
But, for some reason, I really loved the idea of nature.
I always read books and watched TV shows,
anything I could get my hands on, about nature.
Even though I didn’t really have direct experience with nature,
it was just an idea that I really liked.
Fast-forward to after I graduated from university,
I decided to go to the Central African Republic,
which is in the middle of the African continent,
to work on a gorilla conservation project run by the World Wildlife Fund.
So, there I was working on a primate habituation program,
which basically means I was following around these gorillas every day
so that they could get used to human presence
so that tourists and scientists could observe them and they wouldn’t run away,
because truly, completely wild gorillas would just scream and run off
the instant they knew you were around.
This is one of my favorite photos that I took while I was there.
This is Sopo on his mom, Mopambi’s back.
I like this photo because it’s so human-like,
and when you spend time with the gorillas,
you really start to realize just how closely related they are to us.
Working with the gorillas was a huge privilege,
but what was just as big of a privilege was working with the Bayaka trackers.
Our trackers – meaning they’re the ones who helped us find the animals every day,
who were our guides in the forest – they were Bayaka people,
who are traditionally hunters and gatherers,
and they knew absolutely everything about the forest, and I mean everything.
You could plop them into the middle of the jungle
with nothing but the clothes on their backs,
and they would survive quite happily, indefinitely.
If you did that to me or most of us in this room,
we’d probably die within, like, a week.
So for me, as a city girl, it was really awe-inspiring and humbling
to work with these people who had such an amazing knowledge base and skill set,
and realizing just how deep our connection with nature could be
if we were just exposed to it.
And it made me realize that maybe why so many of us see nature as so hostile,
or foreign, or unknown, or scary is just because we’re not exposed to it.
So, near where I worked with the gorillas,
there was this amazing clearing called Dzanga Bai.
Dzanga Bai is a natural clearing,
not man-made,
and we’re not really sure why it exists, but what’s special about this place
is you can see up to 100 or more forest elephants gather at once,
and there’s nowhere else in the world like this place.
Scientists aren’t quite sure why elephants are attracted to this clearing.
They think maybe it’s because of the minerals in the mud,
maybe they like ingesting the mud and getting the nutrition from that.
It’s also a place where they congregate, and socialize, and play,
and there’s this really nice platform where you could stand and watch them
for hours and hours and hours.
This was a really special moment.
We came across this family of elephants bathing in this smaller clearing,
and you can’t see it,
but hidden behind all those legs is a tiny, brand new, days-old baby.
So, it was a really special day for me,
special enough to warrant a really happy selfie.
And it was just amazing to be able to walk on the same level
as dozens and dozens of elephants who were just ignoring us.
The same day that I took the selfie in that previous photo –
well, not in the same day – the next day,
we, unfortunately, were all evacuated from the project.
All of the staff were forced to leave because of a civil war
that, sadly, continues to this day.
About six weeks after we were evacuated,
we found out that gunmen came to this clearing,
came to the same platform from where I took this photo,
and they gunned down 26 elephants, all at once,
they just sprayed the clearing with bullets.
They sawed off their tusks and left their carcasses to rot.
And that ivory could have very well ended up in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong has the largest retail ivory market in the world.
It’s entirely legal, but it also probably – well, we know it does conceal
a large amount of illegal ivory that’s smuggled in,
and that’s banned by international law.
Hong Kong still makes a lot of seizures,
and the government has promised to ban the trade completely by 2021,
but that’s still a long way away from now,
and in the meantime, an estimated 33,000 elephants are killed every year.
It was really shocking to me –
at this point I was in Hong Kong, still adjusting to being back in the city,
and I realized that my city, Hong Kong,
and my country, China, was having such a big impact
on these pristine populations of wildlife halfway around the world.
And that was really hard for me to grapple with.
Seven out of ten Chinese people
don’t realize that ivory comes from dead elephants.
They think that the tusks fall out like teeth, they think it falls out harmlessly.
So we may be losing one African elephant every 15 minutes,
just because of a simple misunderstanding of elephants and nature.
And, again, I was back in Hong Kong and shocked by this news,
and I was trying to understand how this could happen,
and I realized, looking around me,
that Hong Kong people are on the complete opposite side of the spectrum
of the Bayaka trackers I got to know.
They spend time in nature every day, they depend on the forest,
they know the forest, whereas us here in Hong Kong,
we’re just completely disconnected with the natural environment.
We spend all of our time inside;
we spend all of our time glued to screens;
we don’t like getting dirty in Hong Kong, we don’t like touching natural things;
we barely pay attention to anything five feet in front of us,
let alone what’s happening maybe on the other side of the world.
And when we’re not paying attention to the environment,
we’re not paying attention to the impact that we have on the environment.
And we’re having a pretty big impact on the environment in Hong Kong,
if you haven’t noticed already.
Take the ocean, for example.
Hong Kong people eat 71.2 kilos of seafood every year,
which is over four times the global average.
Half of the seafood, the live seafood, in Hong Kong
comes from unsustainable populations,
and it’s not uncommon to walk into a Hong Kong seafood restaurant
and find an endangered species on the menu.
Hong Kong is a global trading hub for ivory,
but it’s also a global trading hub for shark’s fin.
We import thousands of sharks’ fin every year,
and sharks are a keystone species,
so if we lose them, the oceans would probably collapse,
and if the oceans collapse, we’d be in a lot of trouble.
And if you walk around Chai Wan, not too far from here,
you’re very easily going to see dried manta ray gills,
or dried seahorse, which are both used in traditional Chinese medicine
and which are also threatened with extinction.
Now, when we look at the land, we’re very lucky in Hong Kong
because 40% of our land is protected under the Country Parks Ordinance.
However, that land is not very much valued by the people or the government.
A property tycoon said last year or the year before,
“If you have no house, it is no use having nice country parks.”
And the government seems to agree; they keep suggesting that we should start
building public housing inside country parks,
which kind of defeats the purpose of a country park, if you ask me.
This is a beach, also not too far from here.
This is near Aberdeen.
As you can see, it’s completely covered in trash,
and this is what happens when we don’t pay attention to the environment.
I think the sad thing about nature in Hong Kong
is that people think there is nothing left to protect.
They think that everything’s dead already,
or that there’s no more nature, so why even bother.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Hong Kong’s only a quarter developed, meaning the rest of it is undeveloped.
The primary color you see here is green, and living in those green spaces,
and in the waters around it is a very abundant wildlife.
So, for example, Hong Kong,
even though it’s 9,000 times smaller than mainland China,
you can see one third of all of China’s bird species.
We have 55 species of mammals, including monkeys, and porcupines,
and leopard cats.
We have red muntjac deer, which is actually quite widespread
around Hong Kong, it’s also called the barking deer.
We have the golden coin turtle.
The golden coin turtle used to be found all over southeast Asia,
but now, the only place in the world where you can see them in the wild
is Hong Kong because everywhere else it’s been hunted to extinction.
And we have other animals that are found nowhere else in the world,
like Romer’s tree frog, which was discovered on Lamma Island
and is also critically endangered.
We have more coral species than the Caribbean.
I took this photo in Hong Kong, believe it or not.
And living in those coral reefs are more reef fish species than Hawaii.
We also have pink dolphins;
we’re not sure quite how many there are in Hong Kong waters,
some say there’s around 60,
and that number is getting lower and lower every year.
I think if you ask your average Hong Kong person,
they might know there are pink dolphins, but they think they’re all dead already,
or that they’re impossible to see, that they’re some sort of myth.
But actually, you can go out on just about any day, and they’re quite easy to find.
So, because we’re not paying attention to the nature in our own backyard,
it’s slipping through our fingers.
The dolphins, for example,
people have already given up on when they’re still very much around.
Hong Kong’s also not that special in terms of urban wildlife.
Hong Kong’s famous for its –
not famous – everyone’s heard of the wild boar, I think, the wild pigs,
and in recent years,
there’s been a lot of news of them getting inside malls and hotels
and wreaking havok.
Well, in Berlin, as well, there’s a vibrant wild boar population.
So there’s urban wildlife everywhere.
As urban areas expand and sprawl,
and as climate change and other factors increase the range of a lot of species,
there’s only going to be more and more urban wildlife interaction with people.
So, it doesn’t matter where you live, there’s always going to be nature.
And even though nature is coming all the way to our doorsteps,
people are spending less and less time in nature,
especially children.
In the UK, one in four British children spend less than half an hour outside,
in America, children are spending half as much time as they did 30 years ago,
and in Hong Kong, kids spend less than two hours a week outside.
So we’re spending less and less time in nature,
just as nature needs us more than ever, as you guys know.
We’re entering a period of mass extinction;
species are going extinct 100 times faster than they would’ve if people weren’t here.
85% of fish populations are overexploited, or depleted, or recovering from depletion,
because we’re basically eating them out of existence.
By 2050, some scientists think
there will be more plastic in the ocean than there will be fish,
and half of the world’s forest cover has already been destroyed.
And of course, most –
well, half of the world’s species live in tropical forests,
so losing them is a really big deal,
not to mention all the other benefits they give us.
And of course, there’s climate change, which I won’t go into.
And, nature really needs us, but I think we really need nature, too.
Besides all of the material benefits that they give us,
there’s a lot of mental and social and psychological benefits.
We evolved in nature, we are meant to be in nature.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you’re outdoors-y,
we’re just better people in nature, and the science shows that.
We’re healthier when we’re outside;
we heal faster;
it helps with all sorts of mental health illnesses;
it helps with depression, it helps with anxiety, ADHD;
it makes us more creative, more confident, just happier in general.
There’s been a couple studies that have even shown
that it helps children with nearsightedness.
So it’s not actually all that time looking at books
that’s making kids nearsighted in Taiwan, one study suggested,
it’s actually the fact that those books are keeping them from playing outside.
For whatever reason, playing outside helps them with their eyesight.
Perhaps most importantly, spending time in nature makes us want to protect nature.
It’s quite obvious, but a lot of studies have shown
that direct experience with nature is the most-cited factor
for later activism in environmental issues.
If we want to protect the planet for generations to come,
then we need the generations to come to have experiences with nature
so that they can care enough about nature to protect it.
And since the theme of tonight is uncertainty,
I think there’s also something to be said for exploration in itself.
Exploration is what has driven human civilization,
it’s what made us explore, it’s what made us look into the unknown
and discover things, and stay curious and engaged,
and I don’t think there’s any better way to do that than to spend time outside.
So, having realized all of this,
this is why I decided to start a project called the Hong Kong Explorers Initiative.
I got a grant from the National Geographic Society,
and the basic idea is just to encourage people
to explore and appreciate Hong Kong’s wild side.
So here, we went snorkeling in Deep Water Bay, believe it or not.
We did actually see fish and crabs, and the kids had a great time.
This is from a beach cleanup we did; it’s actually from that same beach
that I showed you the photo of earlier, the one that was covered in trash.
And I love this photo
because we’re at this place that seemed like it was damaged beyond repair,
that was disgusting,
but these kids, we all got together, we cleaned it up the best we could,
it looked fine, actually, and they had a great time,
and they still managed to find nature.
Here, this kid, he’s showing us a little crab he found.
And so the idea behind the project is that kid by kid, and adult by adult,
we can start fostering these connections with nature
so that they can want to protect it down the line.
This is a quote from a Senegalese conservationist, Baba Dioum.
He said,
“In the end, we will only conserve what we love.
We will only love what we understand.
We will only understand what we are taught.”
I would like to add to that.
I think, “In the end, we will only conserve, love,
and understand what we explore.”
So, I invite all of you to not study this weekend –
don’t tell your teachers in the front row that I just said that –
and grab a friend or two and go exploring a part of Hong Kong
you’ve never been to before.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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