Compelling Models for Conservation | Explorers Fest
Loved it! I don't— I didn't really think about where it came from. Probably in the same way that you didn't really think about where your food came from when you were a kid too. I don't remember exactly when I decided to stop eating sharks in soup or when I asked my family to, but I do know it's because of the stories I read, the photos I saw, and the videos I watched. And now, as a storyteller, I'm trying to change minds.
This is a photo that I took in Sri Lanka not too long ago. This is my aunt. She’s over there in the middle. That's my uncle; he's talking to my mom. And my aunt is showing me where she keeps her expensive dried seafood goods, like fish water and manta ray gills. I had no idea that she had these things. She starts showing me other things she had. She had cow gall stone, which she takes when she feels headaches that are a remnant of a stroke she had a couple of years ago. And to my surprise, she also showed me a small nub of rhino horn that a friend had given her many years ago for a thyroid problem.
If you asked the English-speaking Internet, they would probably tell you that she were stupid, ignorant, barbaric, a monster. But I know she's not those things. Chinese demand is causing a lot of animals to go extinct. But when we make generalizations about China, this vast diverse country, it's not helpful. Even for me, I sometimes feel alienated, or that I'm being talked about like I'm not there.
As a visual storyteller, I've been exploring traditional Chinese medicine, its users, and where the ingredients come from. This photo is from a market in Guangzhou, where you can see that the amount of wildlife being sold, in this case sea horses, is absolutely mind-boggling. I'm hoping that my photos can help spark an informed, nuanced, and empathetic compassionate conversation about what's going on. If we're going to solve the environmental crisis, we need to talk to people; we need to invite them to the table, and we need to involve them in our solutions. We're gonna need nuance, compassion, and empathy. And that's why I'm so excited about our panel today, because that's exactly what it's about.
So please join me in welcoming our first speaker, Dominique Gonsalves. She's an ecologist working at Gorongosa National Park and she's a National Geographic fellow. Thank you! Oops, not yet. As a missing beacon women, it's a great honor to be here and to represent my colleagues in Gorongosa National Park. Gorongosa is known to some of you as a wildlife restoration success story. In the last decade, our large population animal population increased from 10,000 to 100,000.
But Gorongosa is not only about restoring wildlife; it is also about restoring people's lives. When we see our Park in the greater landscape, and we think about the challenges we face today, we also think about what can we do to ensure that people and wildlife have a healthy and safe future.
This is some of the reasons why Gorongosa is being successful. First: management. Gorongosa is managed in a 35-year private-public partnership between the government of Mozambique and the Greg Kot Foundation. This partnership gives us a lot of independence and flexibility. We can try new things and we can adapt quickly when we see that one idea doesn't work.
Second: conservation and science. Gorongosa faces many other wild places in Africa and around the world many threats, but we have been holding the line. Our poaching rates reduced by 72%, and we've kept the worst of the illegal wildlife trade at our door. So protection is critical, but you can't protect what you don't know you have. So we are constantly documenting and monitoring our biodiversity. We want to know our animals and plant species. We want to understand these relationships and how and what benefits they give us.
This is what we do at the EO Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory in Gorongosa. A month ago, we celebrated recording our 6,000 species and it's already going more and more. Third: benefits. Simply put, a national park is the opportunity cost to local people. The people can leave farm land there, and sometimes… elephants raid their crops. So you have to pay that opportunity cost back to people and give benefits. We provide decent jobs to 650 people, but not everyone can have a job, so we work with the government to deliver healthcare to people, agricultural assistance to families, and education support, especially for vulnerable girls.
We believe that when we give enough benefits, people listen. And if you listen back, you become partners. Fourth: funding. Of course providing all these benefits is expensive. National parks are often underfunded, so we look for partnerships with organizations and groups that normally don't do conservation but focus on human development. These groups want a reliable partner. We have the staff; we have the infrastructure; we know the place; we have strong relationships with the people and our communities. So it becomes a win-win for everyone.
But we don't want to rely on donors forever. We are starting now to think of sustainable financing funding sources. We are growing shade-grown coffee in Mount Gorongosa. It not only helps fund the park programs, but also gives income to the local farmer and helps protect the rainforest at the mountain. Lastly: think long-term. You know, we, as I said, we have a long-term vision; 35 years this way the people know that you're not just there one day and gone the next. They engage, they trust you.
And you also have to think about climate change. This was brought to home to us on the 9th of March 14th when Cyclone Idai smashed into Mozambique, taking more than a thousand lives, destroying most of my home city of Beira and local communities around Gorongosa. During the cyclone, the park observed 800,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water overnight. Our entire staff became relief workers. Since then, we have delivered over 390 tons of food to around 7,000 to 9,000 people.
We're now starting to give seeds to farmers to regrow their lost crops. We are now starting a multi-year effort to rebuild the schools, the clinics, the roads, the homes. So you can't just think small anymore. For us, it is more than just protecting a conservation area. Now we have to think more than our borders and see our place in the greater landscape. Because after all, all we want is also a long-term coexistence and balance.
And I believe that educating girls will take us there. The reason I’m standing here today is because of Gorongosa’s efforts to change gender norms and elevate Mozambican women. If you teach girls, or women, if you engage women and empower women, our potential will be unleashed. We will lift up our communities and we will protect this world and the places we all depend on for a healthy, safe future.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dominique. Thank you! Next up we have the Director for Latin America for National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project, Alex Muñoz. Thank you! How do you imagine a pristine sea looks like? Just all of us take a moment. I mean let's get a picture of our pristine seas in our heads. Do you have it? Well, this is the picture of a pristine sea that I have in my head. For me, it looks like the inside of a watch: you have big wheels, you have mid-sized, you have smaller wheels, and although they are all different, they all make sense together. And they enable this watch to give us the exact time. If you add a wheel or you lose one, this watch will be broken. It will never tell us the exact time anymore.
Let me show you a picture of this watch in the wild ocean. This is Mexico, the Riviera. A few years ago we went on a Pristine Seas expedition to these islands, and we found this incredibly healthy ecosystem with all the right parts. You have the big fish, the sharks, the mantas, the smaller fish, the algae. And let alone diving there, what an unbelievable experience it was to dive with those giant mantas that thrive in that place.
Now, let me tell you about a lateral watch in another place in the South. Just imagine a brand of a luxury watch. [Laughter] Let me tell you about Cape Horn in the south of Chile. A few years ago, we went again on an unbelievable expedition of Pristine Seas to the south. And in Cape Horn, we were diving in this kelp forest with my friend and colleague, Payo Salinas. We were going down this kelp forest, and suddenly we saw that the floor was moving. It was very strange. And then we got closer and closer and deeper, and we saw these thousands and thousands of crabs and dozens of different species eating each other in this phenomenal ecosystem—pristine, an intact ecosystem.
This is how the oceans should be like. But is this the image that we usually see in today's oceans? Fortunately not. This is bottom trawling—one of the most evil inventions of humankind. This is how they're fishing hake very near Cape Horn in my country, Chile. This is a coral reef that must be a thousand years old that was cut by one of these trawlers. And in the north of my country, the fishing vessels of the world fishing and charting saw these dolphins feeding in this place, and they decided to throw their nets anyway. All these dolphins died. And very near, only two months ago, they found this dead dolphin that was a victim of fishing with dynamite.
And you know the story of the vaquita in Mexico, the most threatened marine mammal in the world. Some scientists anticipate that this species will be extinct this year because of the bad fishing practices and ineffective conservation efforts. So the oceans are in big trouble. And we have one more chance to save them.
Enric Sala, a National Geographic explorer, created Pristine Seas ten years ago, and we have an amazing team from different fields and countries that most of them are here in this audience. We have one goal in mind: protecting the last wild places in the world's oceans.
And the way we do that is by creating large marine reserves that not only protect rich biodiversity, but they also bring the fish back, they bring jobs back, they feed people, and they make these marine ecosystems more resilient to climate change. So it's a pretty good solution if you think about it. Sometimes I get the question: what's the right approach for doing that? Is it a top-down approach? Do you just shake hands with the President and then just order the creation of a marine reserve? Or is it a bottom-up approach? Do you work with our local community and then wait until the rest of the society understands their proposal?
Actually, we think that it's both. At the same time, we work with different actors, different groups that usually are on opposite sides of the street, opposite sides of a debate, and just make them be aware of scientific facts and make them listen to each other, so they can build a common solution together.
This is Juan Fernandez, a fishing community. Juan Fernandez is an archipelago in Chile, and it's one of the most environmentally advanced communities I've ever met. In the 1930s, they already figured out the way to manage their lobster fishery, which is rated one of the most sustainable fisheries in the world. We have worked with them for many years, and they understood the facts, the science that we brought, and they proposed the creation of the two largest marine reserves in Chile.
We have worked with many communities, young indigenous peoples in different parts of Latin America to do the same. Also, we work with scientists from our team and local scientists that usually know more about the place than us, and we work together, and they perform these great explorations to build the scientific support for these proposals.
We use technology like this amazing marine drop cameras that were invented by National Geographic and that enable us to know the seafloor and to see the deep sea like never before. And we put together these amazing documentaries, and these are so important because, unfortunately, information doesn't move the world; emotions move the world.
When people see our shows, they just fall in love with these places. Press events—communities, everyone want to protect these places once they see our shows. Recently, we have incorporated a new tool: satellite images. We have one mayor here that does this amazing analysis to estimate the economic impacts of closing an area, and we work with visionary leaders like former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, who was brave enough to create three large reserves that are the largest in Latin America.
So is this enough? Now we're going even further. This is something we should be very proud of: Chile and Argentina, two different countries, working with National Geographic together on a joint expedition to Antarctica Peninsula. Just remember that both countries almost went to war 40 years ago because of a territorial dispute, and now they're working together for science and marine conservation, and they have jointly proposed the conservation and protection of the Antarctic Peninsula.
That's really outstanding in terms of the relationships that we're building. So what has been the result of this? In a period of eight years, Chile went from almost zero to 24% of its waters protected, creating four marine parks fully protected, covering nearly 1 million square kilometers of ocean. Mexico created the largest marine reserve in North America, 150,000 square kilometers protected in their original islands.
Argentina just created two reserves, jumping from 2% to 9% of its waters protected, adding 100,000 square kilometers of ocean. Ecuador created the first large marine sanctuary in the Darwin and Wolf islands in the Galapagos Islands, which is the sharkiest place on Earth. Colombia expanded its marine park from 7,000 to 27,000 square kilometers that is fully protected.
So that's what has been done in Latin America. In total, 11 big marine reserves—7 of them in the last few years. And our impact has been even global. We have done 30 expeditions; we have helped create 21 marine reserves covering over 5 million square kilometers of ocean that today are totally protected.
Of course we didn't do this alone. Nobody can—the National Geographic, no other country, not an NGO, not a group of scientists. We have to work all together and be very smart and strategic about this. And don't get me wrong, that doesn't mean that we don't see our differences and tell everybody what we think about the problems. We have a responsibility to tell the world what their problems are. We have to be faithful to the truth. But the house is on fire, and at the end of the day, we only have each other to put that fire out.
We have to work together. That's why we have decided to throw a more ambitious project: National Geographic together with the Wyss Foundation have launched The Last Wild Places initiative to protect 30% of the planet. And we need to keep working together. We need each one of you in this room and everybody outside this room to be involved. Your support and your engagement really matters.
Thank you.
Our final speaker is an ecologist working for the American Prairie Reserve and a National Geographic Fellow. Please welcome Ray Wynn Grant! [Applause]
Thank you! I grew up in big cities, and it wasn't until I was 20 years old, a young adult, that I had my first experience in nature. I went on my first hike, I pitched my first tent, and I saw my first wild animal. And without a doubt, it changed my life. Because ever since then, I have dedicated my life and my career to the study of carnivore ecology, mainly African lions.
And now I'm a National Geographic photographer, so these are my own pictures of lions I collared and black bears in North America. And when it comes to bears, some people view them as vicious, ferocious animals that have something against us. But through my work, I've come to view them as quiet, dignified ecosystem engineers that have a lot in common with people. We like to eat the same foods, fortunately or unfortunately; we like to live in the same places; we're concerned about raising our offspring in safe, nurturing environments; and we all like to sleep a whole lot.
And when it comes to bears, like many carnivores all over the world, some of the biggest conservation challenges surround their interactions with people, and that has informed a lot of my work and focused it in many ways. So my ecology work on carnivores largely surrounds those populations at the human-wildland interface or at the spaces where people and wild animals overlap.
And it's this expertise that helped to develop my fellowship with the American Prairie Reserve. APR is on a mission to create the largest protected area in the continental United States, located in eastern central Montana. APR is working to rewild part of the American Great Plains, and at the same time to work with cattle ranching communities to create wildlife-friendly ranching practices—something virtually unheard of in many parts of the world. APR is also on a mission to diversify local economies to support people and give communities a very bright future, and most importantly to me, we're working together to solve human wildlife conflict problems and even prevent them before they start.
Now, a fully restored ecosystem in the American Great Plains requires the conservation of grizzly bears and other threatened species in the ecosystem. These bears, in particular, are my focus area right now, and as part of a conservation success story in the United States, they have been growing in population size and migrating out of protected areas like Yellowstone and Glacier National Park faster than many of us thought was possible. They are quite literally walking over to their historic habitat in the prairie.
And as a conservationist, this makes me very excited. However, there are a lot of people who aren't as excited, and the American Prairie Reserve and I, and my colleagues, along with state wildlife agencies, small and large NGOs, local stakeholders, and entire communities, are coming together and working together to answer a lot of questions that are arising and to create really effective action plans to make sure that we are protecting wildlife where there are people and protecting people where there is wildlife.
And so these three protected areas that are—or will be—strongholds for grizzly bears and other wildlife are very, very important. One of the most important things is that there's some type of connectivity between the three. Dispersal isn't effective unless—sorry, conservation isn't effective unless there's some type of sustained, safe dispersal. I am particularly interested in corridors that might be found between these three areas. Those three strongholds create essentially a triangle, and we believe that with safe corridors for wildlife, as well as stepping stones of high-quality wildlife habitat, we can maintain effective dispersal of individual bears as well as genetic material between these three protected areas.
This will lead to conservation success and ultimately the persistence of populations of grizzly bears and many threatened wildlife species in Montana. And so I did some work to fuse technical science with fieldwork, with basic bear biology, and I collected a lot of information about the landscape, everything from tree and forest cover to waterways, and things about the human landscape, like the distribution of roads and highways, human population density, cities, and towns. Coupling those things that represent the landscape with basic science about bears and carnivores, their pure biology, I used this information in a statistical framework that uses circuit theory from electrical engineering to make predictions about how the landscape looks to an animal—what are the most resistant parts of the landscape to move through and what are the most accessible or least resistant parts of the landscape that an animal might move through.
And the most important thing about conservation statistics, of course, is data visualization. Nobody wants to look at a lot of numbers, and so I used some mapping software to make these results into maps that we can look at, and the maps show the easiest spaces that bears might use to leave Yellowstone and Glacier and recolonize their historic habitat on the American prairie. That's what you see in this image: the outline of the state of Montana and these beautiful white lines that, if you focus on the center of the image, create that triangle once again.
It's proof of concept. We knew it from our local understanding of the landscape, and now we knew it through a very rigorous statistical design. It's there. These pathways are possible. And using this type of statistical framework and all these different knowledge sources allows us to even ask further questions. What if we overlaid some of those pathways with human land-use variables? Let's try one that's really important to bears, like agriculture and ranching. If we put the locations of agriculture and ranching landscapes onto this image, it might look something like this. And all of a sudden, that beautiful triangle of potential pathways for bears to disperse between protected areas is slightly obscured.
And this isn't new information; Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks and many of the stakeholders and collaborators we work with have been addressing what to do in these spaces. But in particular, myself and my colleagues at APR are interested in those red and green dots that you see around the American Prairie Reserve. Grizzly bears are on their way to our space, but they're not there yet, and it gives us a tremendous opportunity to go into the communities that we think will be most affected by wildlife and prevent conflict before it starts.
We're bringing our ideas with us, and we're sitting and we're listening to what people have to say, the land that they have owned for generations. So the next step of my work is to iterate the statistical modeling approach and involve the community even more than before to get to the real stuff—attitudes, tolerance levels, belief systems—and include that in an actual statistical framework to make further predictions and to do a better job at addressing people's needs and wildlife needs on this landscape.
And so no matter if I am being hands-on with animals or if I am analyzing their landscape from a distance, I am very concerned with making sure that science is addressing the needs of people. Because the community is the future of wildlife conservation, and what I've learned through my fellowship thus far with National Geographic and the American Prairie Reserve is that there is this beautiful balance between technical, rigorous science and heart and soul and a compassionate listening ear.
Thank you! Thank you! My first question to you is: What is it like to hold a baby bear?
I love getting this question, Laura, and baby bears always steal the show. So I usually like to have the attention and then pull out a bear cub and no one's looking at me anymore! But a lot of folks don't know that bears and dogs have a common ancestor, and so little baby bears are a whole lot like little puppies. So when you pull them out of their den—for scientific work only, of course—they're really cold, and so they want to snuggle. You just have to put them in your jacket. They like to lick your neck a little bit, and it really couldn't be cuter. I could talk about baby bears for a long time, but I'm going to invite the rest of our speakers back on stage.
Thank you! Thank you all of you for your very insightful talks. So, all of the stories you shared were pretty positive—they were about working with people; the people are happy, the animals are happy, we're all happy. But I'm sure it's not actually that simple, right? Can you talk about some of the challenges you've had in your work? Would you like to start, Dominique?
Challenges? I think we can talk about it a lot all afternoon! If I say a challenge for me as a young woman working in the communities in Gorongosa, the first thing I'll say is my size apparently counts a lot, because people—especially in the community—first question is, "How old are you?" But then when we pass that, of course, there's a lot of healing still to be done for the people, especially in Africa. Say, to the people who live near protected areas, there's a lot of work. So people start to understand more about the value of having it instead of looking at it as a cost.
So for me, being in the field, for example, talking to communities, is always about how I present myself and how I respect the traditions. And I do! And the most fascinating thing is seeing other girls and women, and general people in the community, just looking at me fascinated because I'm wearing pants! Yes! But then after that, they also look even more surprised when they see that I know the traditions and I follow them, and it’s very genuine, because if they also mind traditions so well.
In our case, the degree of the commercial fleet is really immense, and we have to deal with that every day. The fishing industry today fishes in 95% of the world’s oceans, and every time that we want to protect a place, they are with their lobby, and they get to the governments, and they make phone calls. So they try to stop us every single time. And if it was for them, they would fish everything out. I mean they just don't care about sustainable fishing, so there's a big pressure—like political pressure and power—to stop us from achieving our goal.
So imagine how it's gonna be in the next years when we want to protect 30%. We are very aware of that, and that's why we will have to be more effective and smarter than ever if we want to win.
Yeah, and I could talk about challenges. Of course all of us as conservation scientists can. But one main one is, you know, we're in the business of restoration! And the landscape where I'm working with the American Prairie Reserve, the wildlife were extirpated from that landscape deliberately. Right? It wasn’t an accident that we have local extinctions and that we’re trying to rebuild a wildlife community.
And so along with this goal of rewilding comes a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of cultural differences. So for many people in the landscape, cattle ranching or agricultural production means something very deep in an identity way. And I may be a scientist who lives on the East Coast, has a lot of education, and can do the modeling and create some proof; I might see a lot of potential in the landscape.
But what's most important is understanding where people's hearts are, and that's a challenge for both of us on both sides—for us to all realize that we have the same goals. We want to see people thrive and we want to see wildlife thrive without any feelings of disrespect or mal-intent. So I found that, you know, I find math and science and statistics really challenging, but even more than that, it's just getting to the heart of things with people and building trust.
Speaking of where people's hearts are, Dominique, you talked about how you're almost incentivizing people to support the park by offering benefits like healthcare and education. And Alex, you talked about how hard it is to get people to care. So my question is: is there a difference between incentivizing people to support something and getting them to care? And does the difference matter if it maybe leads to the same result or maybe it doesn't?
Well, in and around Gorongosa, people do care. You know, this place is not just something that someone brought and put in there. It’s always been there, this deep connection between the people and the environment, the forest, the wildlife. It has always been part of our beliefs, our totem. But, as I said again, there is this need for healing.
So not only incentives, but benefits actually provide decent benefits that, you know, help not only for people— I wouldn’t say care because they do care to support—but really creates a virtuous cycle, because if we talk about a benefit like education, it’s not something that you receive today and it’s over in a month or so. It’s something that builds up, and we’ll only see the return of that in maybe five, ten years. So that’s where I stand: it’s not just incentives, it’s really real opportunities in life that will create a virtuous cycle for us all.
Well, my experience is it's very important that people feel some ownership of their marine reserves that we propose. I really don't think that there can be like an external force or maybe a just a top-down approach where people just order things and then they’re as follows. In our case—and I think this is going to be even stronger in the future—we have to make people participate very actively, participate and you have to listen to them, and you have to incorporate many of their visions.
So the final solution represents a whole. Of course we cannot satisfy everybody, because some people may say, you know, everything should be open to fishing, and that is not what we want. We have to explain very clearly the facts and the signs and what are the impacts of each option, and then be persuasive so everybody is on board of one single solution.
And we believe that marine reserves, when they are fully protected and they are well located, they can satisfy things in a way that everybody wins. Like fishermen, for example. When they oppose these reserves sometimes, they most of the time realize that if they protect one place, then they will be able to fish more outside the reserve and so on. So everybody has to understand what their share is and how they can win, and then they feel actively involved and actually proud of the reserve that is finally created.
Well, I have a great story to tell, and I'm so excited to tell it. And it's about my first trip to Montana to the American Prairie Reserve for the beginning of my fellowship. There's a big dinner that was created up on the reserve, which is really hard to access, and it was for ranchers. So it was a big dinner just for cattle ranchers on the American Prairie Reserve, and one of them stood up and said, "It is against every value and principle that I have to be here and to be a fan of APR, but I am."
And the reason was that this individual and their family had tried out some of the American Prairie Reserve’s wildlife-friendly ranching techniques. APR has created a whole program called Wild Sky Ranching, and it incentivizes ranchers to adopt some environmentally friendly procedures. And in turn, they get some extra funding on their ranch, and the trade-off is that they're doing something great for the environment, in particular for large mammals—so for black bears, for mountain lions, for some of the larger bodied mammals that are there already.
And this person is making more money than they were before and also facilitating the restoration of the prairie. And they didn’t want to like it, you know? And so it's exactly what you said: where an incentive for an individual actually was able to change their action and their dedication to a cause. And it's a wonderful model that APR has developed that I'm trying to just shout from the rooftops, and we're hoping that I can serve as a model for other organizations within the Last Wild Places initiative.
Earlier, Dominique, you talked about how when you go into those communities, they're surprised by the fact that you know the culture because it's your culture too. And on the other hand, you've also talked about how you work with people that you might completely disagree with, or you might not understand who might not understand you. So what's—it is it important to have locals working in conservation, and if you're not a local, how do you bridge those differences?
Then we need to honor locals. As I said, I'm here and I'm from there, and I know the tradition. I didn’t just learn to be able to do the work, but I grew up following those traditions, which makes it very genuine. But it is important also that artists—and they come, they follow—because people need to feel respected. People want to feel heard, and when that happens, they open many, many doors.
One of the things that happened was, as I also work with human and wildlife coexistence, I like to build mystique. When I first times I went there, there was just a lot of, you know, a lot of trauma, a lot of just hunger. But it starts to just listen, listen more, and follow the traditions more. For example, instead of just going there wearing my pants, I’ll put my traditional coat, and they start to see that actually, she knows what she's doing, she's part of us.
So it became the last thing; it became that it’s not anymore your elephants or our farms; it’s our elephants in our landscape. So this is a big change that takes time. Whether if you're from there or not, take time and invest in listening and learning and really just pay tribute to the local people, because they're gonna be the ones doing the thing on the ground.
Yeah, and as you can imagine, I'm the opposite of Dominique in a lot of ways, where I am quite non-traditional in the landscape where I work in terms of identity. And so it's something that I'm constantly learning, is how to be effective with my identity in my presence in the space. I know everything about bears; I know everything about them. I don’t know everything about Montana, and that’s really important. I can’t pretend that I do.
And so coming with humility and with sincerity and authenticity is important. And one cool thing is intersectionality: just as an individual, you know, I am who I am, but there are things that I have in common with some of the folks that I’ll be working with or some of the people that I hope to, you know, come into cooperation with. Whether it’s, you know, we’re both interested in a certain type of outdoor activity—I’m a mother, and there are lots of mothers in Montana—so that has been a really great entryway into just getting people to build trust and to just find some common ground in order to start those hard conversations.
I like spite of your experience has been working with local communities and especially indigenous people is fundamental. It's all about very sincere connection with them. You have to work with them in a very authentic way. This is not about just bringing a manual and trying to apply a formula. This has to be tried and made, and you have to build up trust. And that means being with them in the good and the bad times.
In front, Fernandez, for example—who are Fernandez, Silas in Chile—I worked with them for ten years, and the change in the relationship I had with them had nothing to do with the marine conservation. They were hit by a tsunami, and they lost half of the town, and a lot of people died in that tragic event. And I decided to stop my work, my campaign, and raise some funds with the organization I used to work for, Oceana, and we launched a big effort to hire all the local divers to get all the marine debris from the water so we could start rebuilding that place.
Then they said, "Okay, now we can work together." Finally, after eight years, we created the Juan Fernandez Marine Reserve and this adventurous reserve that added 600,000 square kilometers of ocean protected.
Thank you! Unfortunately, that's all the time we have. I want to thank you so much for everything you've shared, and can we please give them one last round of applause?
Thank you, Laurel! Thank you, Dominique, Ray, Alex! Do you all realize that every half an hour we are taking you on a journey across the planet—from Gorongosa to Montana?
Well, a moment ago, after I introduced the VR session, I realized that I forgot to mention two very important people: the folks right here at National Geographic, Jenna Pirogue and Kate Mullen, who actually took all of that rubbish footage I had shot and actually made that program for you. So thank you to them if they’re watching it on livestream.
Now, with VR, it might be limited to these goggles here, or these headsets, but the National Geographic Channel that all of you, I'm sure, are very familiar with reaches 173 countries, is transmitted in 43 languages worldwide. The next group of speakers are responsible for the content on this channel, and I'm thrilled to introduce Chris Albert, Executive Vice President, Global Communications and Talent Relations for National Geographic Partners. Let's welcome Chris and his panelists!
[Applause]
All right, how's everybody doing this afternoon? I am super excited about this panel! To put it simply, it is about storytelling and how we, at Partners specifically, bring the natural world to life for our audiences all over the world with some of the best filmmakers and storytellers in the world, like the ones sitting next to me. I’m thrilled to introduce Vanessa Berlitz, Martha Holmes, and Chris Riley.
I'm not going to read their bios because there's nothing worse than a moderator reading bios, but I’m going to ask you guys each a question, and if you can give us a little bit of your background as you answer my first question, that would be great. And one of my favorite questions to ask everyone who is here this week is about their passion—their passion for what they do.
So I would love to understand and have you explain to us where your passion for storytelling comes from. You want to start, Vanessa?
Thank you! Thank you very much for having me here. It's a great honor to be in these fantastic buildings and meet you. My passion for storytelling probably started as a kid with my mother, who I think probably, if she'd had her time again, would have been a film director. But she weaned me onto American cinema really early, so while my friends were watching Thomas the Tank Engine, I was being shown things like Papillon, Midnight Cowboy, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Godfather. As I got a bit older, then Blade Runner—were you when you were watching Raging Bull? She was getting bootleg copies.
I don't know how she had friends in the industry, but that’s how I got my passion: this, these were great character studies and amazing storytellers. And tell us a little bit about where you're working now, what you do now.
So I'm very lucky; I've started a production company in Bristol, which is the mecca of wildlife filmmaking—well, it has been for many of us—and we are currently producing two series for National Geographic, very honored to do so. America and Queens, and a feature-length documentary on wildlife for Disney. Prior to that, I had many long years working at the BBC, working on series like Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, Planet Earth II, and many other hours of single hours of television.
We're very excited about the shows you're working on for us, so we'll get to those in a second. But Martha, I'd love to hear about your passion for storytelling.
I had a very different experience through Vanessa. So I was animals first and foremost, and the outside world. So I grew up on the shores of the Middle East and Africa, so the sea was my playground, and I loved escaping into stories, as we all do, I'm sure—dramas and so forth. So I never really thought about the marrying together. So I chased my ambition to work outside with animals, and I tried being an academic. I’m sure you know all of you are academics, and it just didn't work for me because I wasn't clever enough, and I just didn't feel that any artistic side in me was coming out.
I hated the data crunching, and I just wanted to be outside more, so then I looked into television. And I then thought, "I'll just have a nice time being outside with animals, thank you very much." I wasn't very imaginative, and then I guess your life builds—I’m sure you haven’t had this experience—you get layers and layers of interest as you mature and grow and find new things. I just—I went into the business just wanting to be outside filming, and then the storytelling almost eclipsed that.
So now my absolute love is being in the cutting room, crafting the stories when people come back from the field with the footage. So I would say it's a latter thing. I grew up on films and loved it, but I never thought my love of wildlife would marry that; luckily they have.
So yeah, I’m really blessed to be in the cutting room crafting stories and trying to give the audience the best story we can possibly give them. Thank you! Tell us a little bit about where you are today.
So I am Head of Natural History at a company called Printful Productions. It's not an entirely wildlife company; we do all sorts of—we call it fact and you call it reality shows I think, and science docs and all that sort of stuff. So we're a broad range, but a large chunk of it is natural history. Like Vanessa, I had a history 25 years in the BBC, for my sins. But it's a very, very good learning school, and you can—you know, you start at the very bottom and you learn everything, and then you can decide what if you want to specialize—what you specialize in. So I was very lucky to have that as my hinterland.
Chris?
Well, I was about two years old when Neil and Buzz walked on the moon—almost 50 years ago, coming up this summer. And by the time I was five, people were routinely living and working on the moon, driving electric cars, deep into the mountains; three people even went there twice. It seemed like a really kind of regular thing—an extension of human exploration. And by the time I was about eight, there were robotic probes landing on Mars and Venus sending back pictures. I had them all over my bedroom wall.
And I guess it's hard to think of a bigger, more exciting story that captures you as a child at that age. And then Star Wars came out in 1977; I was 10. And what George Lucas had managed to do in terms of visualizing exoplanets almost 20 years before they were actually discovered blew me away. I mean, I still get sort of shivers down my spine when I remember sitting in a dark room like this and those curtains had moved slightly wider on this screen, and then on would come the kind of edge of this exoplanet there.
And so it was really a passion for planetary science that I was sort of injected into there through that storytelling, I guess. And then there was a really seminal edition of National Geographic magazine—I never told anyone this story, actually—and it's perhaps the best place to perhaps tell people for the first time the January 1985 edition. And it sits on the board just outside those doors there; it's got Coco the gorilla on the front cover. It had the most fantastic article on the planetary geologists that were exploring the solar system, the moons of Jupiter, and a little bit about what we knew about the moons of Saturn at that time.
So all over this article—and that was a seminal year for me because I was deciding what to go and study at university and I went straight into applied geology and planetary science after that article came out. And I kept it; I read it dozens and dozens of times over the next few years. It was really life-changing for me, and I went into science after that, thinking I was brainy enough to perhaps do that. And what a mistake that was because, actually, you've got to be so gifted to make a career in science.
And what I realized I’d mistaken, actually, was a love of storytelling for a love of science. And I have a love of both, but what I really found I wanted to do was tell other people's stories. And like you, Martha, I got into the BBC soon after that, and I spent 10 years there. It is a wonderful, wonderful apprenticeship there to learn how to tell stories, and I’m still doing it today.
Do you want to give us your quick where you are right now?
Well, yes, I've sort of got stuck in lunar orbit a little bit. So I've just finished a children's book on all of the Apollo missions, which comes out next month, called Where Once We Stood. And I've written a big live show that's going to happen on the Mall here in Washington on the 19th and the 20th of July, outside the Air and Space Museum, and up and down the Mall. We're just cutting the film at the moment as I speak, and if any of you can get a chance to come and see that, I really urge you to. It will be, in every sense of the word, awesome, and I don't always use that word.
So we were talking earlier, you know, the Natural History world or the natural world is not the same as it was 50 years ago, ten years ago, even last year. And obviously, as this group well knows, you know, climate change is playing a huge role. So I'm curious how specifically our changing world and climate change have affected your filmmaking and storytelling when it comes to telling stories about our natural world. Martha, you want to start?
Yeah, I think I think someone's invitational interest might be somebody else's turn-off. I think so it's horses for courses, you know? Some programs you want to address it fully; some programs you want to accept it but not blame—it blame some programs if you want another audience just don’t mention it at all.
So I think it's very no—In a Hostile Planet—which we made recently for National Geo—we stated very much as a fact, but we weren't pointing any fingers that the cause of climate change was never addressed. It was just this is what the animals are facing now.
So I just think it's horses for courses. I think it's who your audience is, who you're appealing to; you’ve got to bring people in. You don’t want to turn them off. If they're interested in engaging with it, and if they’re not, then do a different kind of programming.
Chris?
Well, this is something we really grappled with when we were thrashing out, you know, what kind of beast One Strange Rock would be. And I think there's been a massive disconnect, somehow, between the storytellers and at least half the audience—those that still perhaps come to these shows that they appreciate the kind of riches of the natural world—but then they go and vote at the ballot box for the opposite. And our job is trying to bridge that gap—a chasm, if you like, as it is these days.
How do you do that? Is it something—is it a flaw in the stories and how we are constructing them? When we first started asking ourselves these questions for One Strange Rock, what we came up with together was an attempt to try and connect the lives and ecosystems of the animals that are featured in the series with the lives of those watching—in a way, a little bit like Pete Melson was talking about this morning—a sense of what home is and how these creatures' lives feed into our own lives absolutely and utterly directly. There’s no disconnect with that.
And that was why we ended up with this approach of using astronauts to connect us to it—to try and examine the world with this overview perspective. But an overview perspective is a very difficult and intangible thing to try and communicate; most of us haven't flown above 60 miles, 100 kilometers above the atmosphere, and we don't really know what that feels like, however many times we're told.
So our approach was to kind of connect these small, personal, often human stories. Our natural history sequences were often led by a human being with the next breath that you take, for example. In "Gasp," connecting you to the diatoms—our heroes of that episode—or the nitrogen cycle in the salmon bringing the Pacific nitrogen to feed the forests around the Pacific Rim which maintains the entire nitrogen cycle that keeps us alive—another of our crucial life support systems. That was our approach.
Now have we achieved anything that others haven't with that? I don't know; that's for the audience to decide. There were certainly lots of people that came and watched it and said they liked certain people that hadn't come to this kind of subject matter before. Will that translate actually to the sorts of wonderful projects that we've been hearing about this week here? I sincerely hope so, but we're still waiting to find out.
I think Vanessa...I think—I mean, I agree with everything you’ve both said. My feeling is that we need to use our best storytelling skills and our best advocates for the natural world, which are our animal characters. And I think what we’re trying to do on the America series that we're working with for National Geographic is to use those heroes—those animal heroes—to convey the experience that they’re going through today. So instead of looking at how their experiences would have been, it’s to say this is the real world for animals today.
And particularly in America, the animals that succeed here are incredible at reacting to opportunity. And that comes from living in a uniquely dynamic continent where change is an everyday process—every day is a brave new world. So it's actually a great way to build the changing environment into the storytelling and see it through the eyes of the animal characters.
And I feel that, you know, we just have to get cleverer and better at bringing the reality of our changing environment into our storytelling. So let's dive into some of the shows specifically that you all worked on for us, and I think I’m going to start with Hostile Planet. I think one of the things people don’t realize is when we set out to do one of these shows how long it takes Hostile Planet—you shot over 1,800 hours of footage, 82 shoots, 1,300 days of filming! I think you're tired just thinking about it!
I think some of you maybe have seen this trailer, but let's take a quick look at what was accomplished during those 1,300 days. [Music]
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This madness! Madness! I love that trailer! I think I have seen it maybe a hundred times—our creative team did such a good job on that, and I think it touches on what I think sets this series apart, which is sort of the tone of the series. Could you talk a little bit about the tone of the series and the creative choices you made?
Sure! So Nat Geo hadn't done a big blue-chip natural history show for a while, and the BBC had been doing them and doing them very beautifully, and it's all very lovely across the board. Nat Geo wanted to set themselves apart and say, "We want to do this differently," and the brief was to make it different: raw, hostile—and that's the term we came up with—visceral, granular truth.
And rather than not sugarcoat it—because that's a bit unfair and judgmental, or pejorative—but anyway, so that was—that's what we set out to do. So I know in the series you didn't shy away from difficult moments. I've watched it with numerous audiences, and there were moments where they would shriek at watching; but you didn't—you didn't hesitate to keep the camera just locked on what was happening. And sort of what was the decision behind that?
Well, there’s a lot of debate about it, obviously. I mean, we wanted to tell the truth, not only about climate change. Again, I said earlier, and we didn’t point any fingers. But this is the situation, and the critical thing for the animals is—the world is changing, and it’s changing very fast. Animals do evolve, but they can't evolve quick enough to keep up with the time of climate change.
So it’s how are they doing as a sort of—it was a mark on the same saying, "How are these animals doing?" And things are tougher for them. And some survive and thrive and do incredibly well, and others have a tough time of it. We had chosen not to pull back from the reality of how hard they’re finding it and how hard they find it in a river in a normal year when things are lovely and wonderful and they're used to it all, but things aren't lovely a wonderful, as they are—it is changing very fast!
So we just wanted to be honest, technologically wise, in storytelling-wise. We very much wanted to—even kind of touch on it! On the side of the animals, we wanted to be on the animals’ shoulders. It’s very easy in natural history—and historically, we used to do it where an animal would be over there, and you’d have a long lens, and you would sit back and you’d watch the behavior unfold. I think audiences expect more now, and we needed to do—we really wanted the audience to engage and feel that they were with the animals.
So where we could, we’d been with the animal rather than just watching it as if you're watching it through binoculars or something. And that's partly in the camera techniques we use, and it's partly in the words we use! I mean, we—some, you know, a word—not saying elephants do this, but it's almost like—let me just think of an example. A lion might be thinking, "It's a hot day," and rather than say, "Well, the temperature outside is whatever it is, 40 degrees centigrade," and the lions are feeling hot, you say, "It's hot! You know, shade is really welcome!"
That could be in the lion's head. It's very subtle, but you're saying the same thing and you're trying to experience it through the animal. So we were doing—obviously, we were working very hard on the scripts to make you feel like you're embedded with the animals or the camera shot to make you feel that, you know, traditionally you might have a POV, but we tried to really embed the POV point of view shots with the—‘with the watching the animal shot.
So is a lot of—there's a lot of work that went into that. And then technologically-wise, you know, for example, we used a racing drone very effectively, particularly in two shows, one being a golden eagle flying over mountains—and you know how birds of prey stoop. So we had this racing drone literally fly unbelievably fast and these—these razor-edged edges of mountains—things, and you really felt you were with the golden eagle.
And again, in the jungles program, we had this tiny little hummingbird being battered by drops of rain that kind of were true, and knocked off balance, and then we had the racing—going to tell this very funny story—but it's a racing drone, and flying through the forest as if it was a hummingbird. And at one point, we were trying to endlessly wipe the lens of that racing drone. And then you told, actually, "No, a hummingbird is flying through this water; it wouldn't be perfect!"
So then we let bits of water stay on the lens, and suddenly it’s a bit blurred, and the drone—you do feel—it’s more visceral. But, no, no, the guy who runs this—does this racing drone thing, he was doing it through—but you know, he can’t see where his drone is. The drone is going through the plants, so he's doing it all from a camera on his headset. So he’s what he’s—literally flying with his eyes, and he has a little control mechanism he’s amazingly good at it.
But this little control panel has a little red light, and one of the hummingbirds—a hummingbird in the forest—thought, "Oh, that's a nice bright light; that must be a flower; I'm gonna get some nectar!" So this guy’s blind to what's going on. He’s flying through the thing; he’s twiddling all the loom of this thing—landing here; and suddenly, the drone goes, "Whoa!" And its drone went flying off into trees. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t because it’s free. It’s a controlled way; there must be so few people in the world who actually had the skill to buy a drone like that—I mean, you really have to see these people in it!
And if you want to break into a new technology, you really have to get into the scientific world and find these people who are developing these things, often for their scientific research, nothing to do with filmmaking, and then you try and adapt it for filmmaking.
So one more quick question about Hostile Planet, and then we'll talk about something else. You know, there was a little streaming service that dropped a natural history program at the same time as we launched Hostile Planet. It was beautiful, but it was very traditional; had David Attenborough. You guys went with—yeah, you went with Bear Grylls, which I thought was an interesting choice as far as his narration and his voice. Can you talk a little bit about that decision and how he came to that idea?
Yeah, well Bear Grylls, like him or not like him, is a survivalist par excellence. And these animals are surviving, and they are resilient, and they’re everything that Bear stands for. He stands for everything that they do day in and day out, and actually he was kind of outside the natural history world and—and a bit of a surprise. But I think really, really fitted the show in terms of what these animals—They were trying to achieve.
Getting back to your narrative tone for my survival show was a really long journey, and again, a fascinating one! So he kind of stood up for the first sentence, and he's this warm up a little bit. And it took a long time, but anyway, we just said—my initial thing was, "Bear, just pretend you're reading to your children at night and you want them to go to sleep." But I'm trying to get in from over here to over here! And just soften the tone! Deepen your voice—just relax! Be really warm and invite the audience in, invite your children into the story!
So he kind of went there, and I'm still expecting him to get over here from over there. Anyway, we got there! And to do him credit, he worked really hard at it, and by the last few commentary records he was...that he pretty much nailed it! I mean, we had to do retakes and retakes and retakes and retakes, but we weren't over here anymore at all; he did. He worked so hard to get it as far over here as he could say, "He was great! Good to work with."
So live! Obviously, live television is obviously another storytelling approach that we take. And Plimsoll is actually working on a show that we're airing in two weeks called Yellowstone Live. Last August, we went live from Yellowstone for four nights, and we’re doing it again starting June 23rd. So we'll take a quick look at a tape, and I'm going to ask you a couple questions about that!
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This is real; this is live! That's the magic in Yellowstone!
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So, 4 nights, 25 live cameras, a large number of remote cameras. How do you even begin to prepare for such a massive production, then?
Ask me! I might, well really own this; it’s kind of guarding the wildlife in terms of the message and making sure that we get that right. How do you do it?
Well, it literally is baby steps! You have—I'm basically going to walk you through this. You have a sheet of paper with five acts on it, and there are little bricks. And in this one, brick over time, we want to start live, and we want to cut to amazing wildlife; we want to see some scenery, and we have to keep thinking, "We have to see the glory of here." I certainly want some live, and I want in a studio.
And it’s just... it’s painting by numbers because that sounds too simplistic, but it’s building a wall of bricks. And you literally fill out that wall of bricks with "We need to come back to that here, and that’s there, and we’ll round up the wildlife here." And you've literally filled it in like that. And we know the animal characters—the bears, the wolves, the eagles—and you need a taste of all of them. You want it live and I want in a studio!
And it’s just painting by numbers—in that you have to know it. And then the real thing is that—the knowledge, the technical knowledge of bouncing—hiring! You go hire a satellite for a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there, and we have teams all over, and between this hour and that, we’ve hired satellite time as you do, and you bounce all of that signal.
They’ve been filming all day, and you get all needed—not a lot—and back down to the truck, and then suddenly, the editors—the moment it all starts coming in, they’re quickly packaging, and this is what we filmed earlier, and they're making these little short things, so that's all happening.
And the build-up for the live show and then those cameras are also live in a live show. So we’ve had what we filmed earlier packages, and you have the live cameras going satellite and down, but I’m not technically-minded, so don’t challenge me on this!
I just know it kind of goes up and down, and out I run on PR—that’s about my knowledge too! It sounds right!
Let’s shift for a minute to a more science-focused series, which is our series One Strange Rock, which we're incredibly proud of! Eight astronauts, six continents, forty-five countries, and something I had never seen in a science natural history series— a large portion of it from the International Space Station. Let's take a little look at One Strange Rock, and then Chris, I’m going to ask you a couple questions.
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No, like you're walking on it!
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Our planet is literally bursting with life!
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So, as the trailer shows, Darren Aronofsky was involved in the show, and for those that may not know who he is, he’s the director of Black Swan and Mother. I mean, those are some trippy movies! Well, what was the sensibility and what did he bring to this series? Because he’d never done a television series before like this.
No, you're right, he hadn’t. I mean, I think what was clever about Jane Root, our CEO at Nutopia's idea, was in approaching him to help us with the storytelling. It plays back to what I was saying earlier about this challenge we had of weaving stories together in a way that just made you sit up and think, “Why, I’ve not seen anything like this before!”
Just in an attempt to reach out to an audience that perhaps hadn’t engaged with it before. So I think bringing him on boards—and that happened before I was involved with—was really smart because he and his writing and co-producing partner, Ari Handel, who’s got a PhD in neuroscience and has a great science background, proved to be really instrumental in helping all the producers and directors shape their stories.
And they've really wallowed themselves in some of these big ideas and these deep, philosophical feelings about the cycles of life and death that keep and maintain the planets’ fragile biosphere. And they were all themes that we wanted to include but not obviously—vertically—kind of bosh viewers over the head with, so we needed some way of engaging on a very human level these subjects and connecting people to them that way.
And letting them make their own connections and their own minds up, I suppose. But by showing them, as I said before, I think about how these deep connections between these small moments in, you know, in a few hours on Earth trunk, fur, translate into their own lives utterly directly.
So yeah, he was a useful partner! Right from the start, they were involved, the two of them particularly, Ari, in the script meetings with us and helping us weave our beat sheets together and rewriting them. I think I wrote 36 versions of my script before we went out shooting. That was quite a lesson!
I mean, it was like being at film school for a year! A lot of people would pay a lot of money for that!
Well, yes, yes! The master classes were great; I learned a lot making this series, and it was one wonderful two years! You talked about this earlier, but maybe we just touched on it too quickly, which is the out—using the astronauts as our storytellers, which was sort of a unique way in. Nicole Stott, if you all were here yesterday, she was actually on our opening panel, who was a big part of the series. Talk about the astronauts as storytellers.
Yeah, so I think actually, Vanessa, you were involved early on before we came—before I joined—with the initial discussions with Darren about how to frame the series. I mean, you might want to say something a bit about the astronauts initially?
Yes, it was—I was invited out by Jane to spend a week with Darren and his team, which was an amazing experience, as you say. Lots of film students would pay or give their hind teeth for that! And at that stage, they’d done huge amounts of research on the science—it was an incredible body of work to take that much, you know, it’s very complicated ideas and distill them down. But Jane had said to me, “I don’t know what you’re going to bring to this, but you might have an idea or something.”
And just see what happens! And I was absolutely terrified, you know, partly in awe of Darren Aronofsky—not quite sure what I was doing in the room, and I sort of stayed up all night thinking, “There’s something wrong; it needs a kind of framing for this series; it needs a point of view.”
And that’s when I was looking at, actually, through my love of David Bowie, who I’ve often returned to—and Chris Hadfield and spiders, you know, because he sang in space. I suddenly thought, "It has to be through the astronauts' point of view for the overview effect." And he loved it!
I think it's an idea that you immediately got. It’s a sort of format, but it's one thing to have that idea and quite another thing to translate it into kind of eight really compelling astronauts' personal stories that interweave with the planetary science, and that was a real challenge. And I made a film with Apollo astronauts a few years ago in the shadow of the moon, and was well aware that with the right preparation and casting, you can find and tease out the most wonderful personal stories from these characters.
So we spent some month casting to find the eight perfect posts that we ended up with. And I think Eloise and I looked at a hundred initially— a hundred astronauts—we screen-tested, and we distilled it slowly over the course of several months down to those eight, of which Chris Hadfield was very, very much at the top of our list from very early on given his communication skills.
And then we worked very closely with them over those coming months to absolutely deeply weave their stories in with our stories. And they had to be believable as characters; you absolutely had to believe that they weren’t just sort of telling you stuff.
And the great, wonderful thing about, you know, 60 years of human spaceflight now is that you’ve got a pool of 550 people who've flown into space, all with different backgrounds in science, technology, and medicine, and the arts sometimes as well.
And they all brought something to the science show by fine-tuning our selection to the episodes that way. They were a fascinating group! I'd say we did a press event where we had all eight astronauts on a stage with 200 television journalists, who half the time could give a about anything and they literally all stopped and paid—they were solely focused on these eight astronauts!
And they see celebrities all the time, and these eight astronauts stopped them in their tracks! It was fascinating. So for season two, which I’m excited about—if you don’t know, we are hard at work on pre-production for season two. Our storytellers are actually going to be explorers, which we’re super excited about, and we’re in the process of talking to a lot of people now and figuring that out, which I think is going to really bring a whole different perspective to the series.
So I want to touch on something you mentioned, which is point of view, which brings us to the series that we just announced a month ago, I think, called Queens. And I think we have a slide for that because we have no footage! We haven’t even started shooting yet.
But tell us a little bit about Queens because I’m super, super excited about this show.
I’m so excited to be doing this show, and it came about in a really interesting way. For a long time, my background’s a combination of anthropology and biology. So I've been very lucky to spend time with indigenous peoples around the world. I was often documenting what the males were doing and particularly rites of passage and all the kind of sexy staff of guys having their heads shaved and going through dramatic rituals with bullet ants and things like that.
But it was often what the women were up to that would intrigue me, and the sort of power play that would be going on. And as I transitioned into more natural history work, the same thing was playing out. So I spent time in Gombe with the Gumby chimps, and again there’s lots of kind of shouting and screaming with what the males are doing, but as you dug into the depth of the studies that are going on there with people like Bill Waer under Jane Goodall's auspices, you realize the kind of complexity of the female alliances and leadership and actually how they’re actually calling the shots.
So this was, again, happened with gelada baboons, and recently I’ve been working for two years in Africa filming elephants and extraordinary behavior amongst the matriarchs—not all of it cuddly. For example, we saw a rival herd coming into a waterhole; we've been documenting the—the particular herd in front of us, and suddenly the atmosphere changed, and it was war!
And these females came in, and they were like, "It’s flapping!" And they rushed forward and took a new calf away from our matriarch. And it, you know, just as dramatic as any kind of males in must that you might have seen! They were full-on battling to get this calf back; our matriarch went in and got her calf back.
And it was incredibly dramatic! And then it’s another turn—you’d see extraordinary tender behavior from our matriarch, where she would, you know, rescued a stuck baby that wasn’t even hers from certain death! So I’ve become more and more intrigued, and instead of looking at what the females within animal societies are doing—in this series, we’re taking the kind of animal societies—matriarchal societies or matrilineal societies—and we're looking at how females compete, rise to power, hold on to power, and then what happens when they lose power.
Why do you think this series has never been made before? It’s kind of mind-boggling, actually, when you think about it.
Maybe I think it starts with Darwin. Yeah, genius that he is, I think the centerpiece of Darwin’s theory is obviously sexual selection, and it was very much slanted towards the way males compete for females. And that again is quite easy to document and to see because it’s dramatic; it’s heads butting! And I think that has skewed science, and in turn a lot of our filmmaking.
So to really look at what the females are doing, you need to spend a lot of time; you need to recognize individuals and follow how the relationships develop. And, you know, this story actually developed out of a relationship that I have been developing with Janet and Visser; we've been talking about this subject matter and both of us feeling there was something there.
And I had a smaller idea, which was Knight Queens, which was to look at the kind of battles between lionesses and hyenas on the savannas at night. And I said to Janet, you know, I think there’s something here, and she went in classic American style, "We need to supersize this! Let’s do the six-part on Queens of the animal kingdom!"
So the Queen’s idea isn’t just gonna be what we see on screen, but it’s gonna manifest itself largely behind the scenes as well?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it’s great today to be sitting here with another matriarch—I hope you're not offended by that! [Laughter] It is going—I think—but actually, there aren’t many female leaders in natural history filmmaking. It's—I looked around in the sort of when I was developing and learning my skills, and there weren't many women amongst us.
So I think it’s important to try and get more voices into our industry. And it’s not just about female voices, and we're trying to get—we’re really trying to get indigenous voices from the cultures in the countries where we film, because these are the voices we need to hear. As Steve Boyce was saying earlier, they are the guardians of biodiversity!
So the—we very much have a bigger mission for this series so that we incorporate more types of people into the production team and work with more types of scientists and field assistants so that we increase that diversity.
Well, I know the reaction when we announced that series, both internally and within the community, was just incredible excitement. So I know it may be we’ll have you back in like two years once we have something to show and we can share it with everyone.
So I just want to end on one last question for you all because we're out of time, and I said I'd try to be finished on time. I didn’t promise, but answer for me in a tweet-type sentence: if you guys could make any natural history series you wanted, what would it be? And then Courtney Monroe, our president, will pick the best one backstage and fund it. No, I'm kidding! But Chris...
Okay, well, I guess for me, being a planetary scientist, it would be perhaps the first documentary about the extremophiles in the depths of the Martian basins. So fund that!
I’m going to give away my secret! I mean, I’m a biologist, so I still feel there’s an awful lot to be done in the oceans that we haven’t—you know? I think that Blue Planet and Blue Planet II were fantastic, but I think for a certain audience they were—and I think there’s a lot more we could do in the oceans that will bring a lot more people to the marine world and the importance of it!
Yep, Vanessa?
I’d like to develop the first game that takes on the environment and evolutionary theory, so— for tonight! So take the storytelling into the space where kids are obsessed—that’s on my bucket list!
That’s a different department! So now we can find two things, right? We—the work you guys do and the time you spend and the patience you have to deliver these amazing stories to our audiences all over the world—we’re incredibly lucky to have you all working with us, and I just want to thank you all for—I couldn't find any American panelists, so thank you all for flying across the pond to join us today!
We really, really appreciate it! And again, we're so honored to be able to showcase the incredible work you guys do! So thank you so much and thank all of you!
We just walked off this guy, Vanessa, Martha, Chris! Well, now you know some of the faces behind the spectacular programs going on across the world. Now, our next group of speakers will highlight solutions to biodiversity loss and the different ways rewilding can be used in conservation work. Please welcome the founder and managing director of the American Prairie Reserve and National Geographic Explorer, Sean Garrity, Chief Marketing Officer for African Parks, Andrea Hardlock, and founder!