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Conserving Nature and Humanity—For the Good of Both · New Thinking for a New World

• 0:02
  Speaker 0: Welcome to New Thinking for a New World, a Tilburg Foundation podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 0: I am Alan Stoga, your host.
• 0:09
  Speaker 0: Each week I bring you conversations with people who think differently about the great issues that are shaping our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 0: Geopolitics, disruptive tech, mass migration, the changing climate, culture wars, all of it is grist for our mill.
• 0:24
  Speaker 0: I hope you enjoy listening.
• 0:26
  Speaker 0: I also hope you will let me know what you think.
• 0:28
  Speaker 0: and that you join the conversation at tellbergfoundation.org.
• 0:33
  Speaker 0: And now for today's episode of New Thinking for a New World.
• 0:40
  Speaker 0: It is a grotesque understatement that global political and economic realities are increasingly stressed and increasingly stressful.
• 0:49
  Speaker 0: Rising conflict, climate change, mass migration, the downside of accelerating technological innovation all generate anxiety and worse a kind of stasis.
• 0:59
  Speaker 0: that makes everything seem almost hopeless.
• 1:03
  Speaker 0: The high Himalayas offer a microcosm of the problem.
• 1:07
  Speaker 0: Border conflicts are always there but are heating up again, most recently between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
• 1:13
  Speaker 0: An internal conflict is rife in Afghanistan, in Nepal, and parts of Pakistan.
• 1:19
  Speaker 0: Because the region is cold, high, and glaciated, even small increases in temperature cascade into large ecological and societal impacts.
• 1:28
  Speaker 0: And something like one third or probably more of the population live below the poverty line.
• 1:34
  Speaker 0: And economic development in many cases is aspirational at best.
• 1:39
  Speaker 0: But today I want to introduce you to someone who embodies that famous British slogan, keep calm and carry on.
• 1:46
  Speaker 0: Which by the way was coined but not used by the British Information Ministry in nineteen thirty nine.
• 1:52
  Speaker 0: They may have been worried about the carry on part of that at that point.
• 1:56
  Speaker 0: Dr.
• 1:56
  Speaker 0: Shahruh Mishra is executive director of the Snow Leopard Trust that works to conserve that amazing animal and its habitat in ways that are in concert with the needs of the people who live in the dozen or so high Himalayan countries that are the Snow Leopard home.
• 2:13
  Speaker 0: Welcome, Dr.
• 2:13
  Speaker 0: Mishra, to new thinking for a new world.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: Thank you, Alan.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: It's a pleasure.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: A
• 2:18
  Speaker 0: good case can be made that Snow Leopards are one of the at least relative success stories in the conservation world, and a lot of that is due to your work and your colleagues work.
• 2:28
  Speaker 0: We'll get to the details, but let me start with the challenge.
• 2:32
  Speaker 0: In a high Himalayas, as I said a moment ago, you confront a witch's brew of risks in fragile landscapes with all sorts of border issues.
• 2:41
  Speaker 0: How have you managed to keep conservation on the agenda of governments and perhaps more importantly, of the people?
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: That's a great question, Alan.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: I think that... While one is labeled as a conservationist or as a conservation scientist, one needs to be wearing multiple hats.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: And I strongly believe that nature conservation needs friends, it needs partners.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: And so essentially what we do is invest a huge amount of effort outside of the science, outside of working with indigenous communities to actually work with governments.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: And so there's a whole bunch of diplomacy involved, but we were fortunate that because of a collective effort that we began in two thousand twelve, we were able to bring all the twelve countries that have snow leopards, their governments together into intergovernmental cooperation alliance called the global snow leopard and ecosystem protection program, which is represented by the twelve environment ministers.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: So that has given us a great platform.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: to actually push forward and continue with the Nature Conservation Agenda, even when times are difficult, and as you said, even when some of these countries are in armed conflict with each other.
• 4:02
  Speaker 0: Let's go back to what should have been perhaps the original question.
• 4:07
  Speaker 0: What is it about the snow leopard that so fascinates you that has led you to devote much of your professional life exactly to trying to help that species survive.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: The snow leopard is an incredible species.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: It's a beautiful animal.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: It is just so amazingly well adapted to the high mountain ice age environment.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Physically, they embody, for me, its nature at its perfection, the way they are able to hunt in these incredible vertical steep slopes and survive those incredible falls.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: And it's a very powerful, obviously, a very powerful animal.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: You know, it's the smallest of the large cats, but it can bring down prey species at a multiple times larger than its own body size.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: But I think that there's much more that the snow leopard symbolizes and represents.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: Obviously, it represents this incredible high mountain diversity of species that have evolved.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: to survive and thrive in this extremely harsh environment and cold environment.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: It's taken more than three billion years of evolution to be where these assemblages are.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: But snow leopard also represents, it's also a symbol of what we call the third poor region.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: The high Himalaya, the great mountains of Asia, the high Himalayas as you mentioned, but also the other great mountain ranges, including the Pamirs to the west, the Tian Shan to the north, and the Altai and all these other great mountain ranges and the Tibetan plateau.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: It's such a beautiful animal and it's a great conservation symbol.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: It's a great conservation flagship because because of the beauty, the power, and also the mystique associated with species, it's able to gather attention.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: So it is a symbol of the larger, high Asian ecosystem.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: And if we are able to protect snow leopards, that also means that we are able to protect the entire high mountain ecosystems of Asia.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: And finally, it has been rather integrated into the unique cultures that have evolved, you know, the pastoral and agro-pastoral high mountain cultures that live in these various parts of South and Central Asia.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: So for me, it represents a great symbol of the social ecological system.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Let's
• 6:49
  Speaker 0: dimension this for people.
• 6:51
  Speaker 0: How big a territory are we talking about?
• 6:54
  Speaker 0: I know it covers twelve countries.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: So the estimate of the global range of the snow leopard distributed across these twelve countries varies between let's say one and a half to two million square kilometers.
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: And the single snow leopard, for example, they need a large home ranges compared to many other species like the tiger or the common leopard and so on.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: They occur in relatively low productivity environments, so necessarily they patrol larger home ranges.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: The home range on average of a male snow leopard is more than two hundred square kilometers often of a single animal.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: And whereas the females home range is about half that size, it would be about one hundred square kilometers plus minus.
• 7:42
  Speaker 0: And in terms of the population size, the animal population, I know there's issues around measuring how many snow leopards there are.
• 7:51
  Speaker 0: What's your best guess?
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: So the belief is that there may be between four thousand to six and a half seven thousand snow leopards across these twelve countries.
• 8:00
  Speaker 0: And the good news is that numbers seems to be rising.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: There's a question Mark there Alan because definitely you know in places where you know we have long-term community conservation programs others are working with communities to protect snow leopards.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: At least in many of the sites where we've been working and we've been monitoring their populations over the long term, snow leopard populations have either remained stable or are even increasing.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: But then, you know, like our work directly impacts our community work, for instance, directly impacts about sixty thousand square kilometers.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: So what I'm saying applies to that.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: sixty thousand square kilometers, what's happening?
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: or the, you know, larger One and a half to two million square kilometers is anybody's guess.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: So it's, you know, there are stories of hope and success, but then there's a lot we still don't know.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: And of course, there are threats, like you mentioned in the beginning, partly related to global warming and climate change, as well as other threats that the species and ecosystem and its ecosystem face.
• 9:11
  Speaker 0: Let's go back to the politics.
• 9:12
  Speaker 0: In twenty thirteen, the big political breakthrough was the Bishkek Declaration.
• 9:18
  Speaker 0: which then gave birth to, as you already described, the global snow leopard and ecosystem protection program.
• 9:24
  Speaker 0: What was the Bishkek?
• 9:26
  Speaker 0: What happened there?
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: The Bishkek Declaration was a landmark agreement where, for the first time, governments of all the twelve snow leopard countries came together at their highest levels and endorsed the Bishkek Declaration which essentially is about cooperative nature conservation, sometimes trans-boundary nature conservation as well across these twelve countries.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: And very importantly, it provided a platform where civil society organizations like ours, including scientists, conservationists, you know, the multilateral agencies like the United Nations and others, they were all able to come together and interact and work together with governments.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: And so that has been a hugely enabling platform for us.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: We continue to manage and support the secretariat.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: It's been now thirteen years of cooperative conservation across these twelve countries.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: Together, the countries, the governments have self-reported.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: have enhanced under this program snow leopard protection and working with for indigenous community welfare across one hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers over twenty three landscapes.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: So twenty three different habitats within these twelve countries.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: governments have enhanced snow leopard conservation efforts across one hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: So that itself is very significant.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: The other thing that this has done, Alan, this platform has provided us is an opportunity to start and sort of cooperative multi-country programs, including trainings and capacity enhancements, which we are able to provide to frontline conservationists across the twelve countries.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: It's also helped us start Pretty ambitious program called Paws, a population assessment of the world's snow leopards.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Going back to your question about how many snow leopards there are.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: For the first time, the twelve countries, across the twelve countries, uniform methods have been used.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: And in the past, before this program started about five years ago, we had been able to sample properly, statistically robust, scientifically robust sampling.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: for snow leopard populations only over one and a half percent of the habitat.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: and today thanks to this cooperative effort the sampling has increased between twenty five thirty percent.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: So it's allowed us to kind of you know undertake these cooperative conservation efforts and capacity enhancement efforts across the twelve countries and it's been very significant.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: This program in fact got recognized, it got International Award, the BBVA Worldwide Award for Global Biodiversity Conservation in twenty twenty
• 12:37
  Speaker 0: two.
• 12:37
  Speaker 0: You've used the word cooperation several times, which is not one of the words that I would typically apply to several of the states that make up those twelve in India, Pakistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia and others.
• 12:56
  Speaker 0: What is it about either conservation in general, the environment, the snow leopard in particular?
• 13:03
  Speaker 0: What is it that allows cooperation?
• 13:07
  Speaker 0: And as you pointed out, it's not just at the scientific level.
• 13:10
  Speaker 0: Scientists are pretty good at cooperating across borders.
• 13:12
  Speaker 0: They actually tend not to care about borders.
• 13:15
  Speaker 0: Ministers tend to care about borders.
• 13:18
  Speaker 0: And they don't like to show up in meetings with somebody that they're at war with or could be at war with.
• 13:24
  Speaker 0: Why have not how, but why has the politics worked?
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: That's a difficult question, Alan, but let me first tell you about what happened just a few months ago, earlier this June.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: Earlier this June, we had senior government representation from eleven of the twelve snow leopard range countries, including since the the change of the administration to Taliban in Afghanistan.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Including Afghanistan, we had senior government representation from eleven of the twelve range countries coming together and all coming together for snow leopards at a place called Cholpanatha in Kyrgyzstan.
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: Now, that included eight environment ministers.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: That whole meeting happened Probably between two and three weeks after India and Pakistan fought a war and they bombed each other's, you know, across the borders and sometimes even cities.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: And yet, you know, we had minister from India and we had the minister from Pakistan.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: We've had down conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the last one and a half or two years.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: We had the minister from Kyrgyzstan and the minister of Tajikistan and multiple such.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: you know, countries, you know, or pairs of countries that have hostile relationships and sometimes no bilateral relations at all.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: But nature conservation and snow leopards have been able to bring them together and, you know, a few months back they were again able to bring them together in a very, very hostile geopolitical environment as you were aware.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: Now, what enables it?
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: I am not so sure.
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: Obviously, it is a relationship that we have to invest a lot of time and effort into building and maintaining with the political offices in each country, with the senior bureaucracy in each country, and so on.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: So that plays some role.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: But I have a feeling that nature conservation is from... If you look at it, it's a bit of a soft subject where countries that actually can come together, even hostile countries can come together, perhaps because they care for nature, perhaps because they are wanting to come together, but the environment is such, the political environment is such that they are not able to, the political pressures both domestic as well as international pressures are such that they are not often able to.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: But nature conservation provides them that avenue.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: So maybe it's a combination of things, but it's a difficult question for me to answer for sure.
• 16:22
  Speaker 0: Part of the problem, of course, is that snow leopards probably don't recognize borders.
• 16:28
  Speaker 0: They probably go where they want to go.
• 16:30
  Speaker 0: And some of those borders are disputed.
• 16:33
  Speaker 0: Some are heavily mined.
• 16:36
  Speaker 0: Some are heavily fenced, all of which is probably bad for a snow leopard.
• 16:44
  Speaker 0: the natural corridors, we have the same problem in other parts of the world, obviously, that nature's corridors and man's corridors don't always coincide.
• 16:54
  Speaker 0: I assume that's a huge problem in your space.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: It is, Alan, and it is going to become a bigger problem for snow leopards.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: Obviously, it is already a huge problem for people, but it's going to become a bigger problem for snow leopards.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: And I'll explain that in a moment, why.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: Now, our most recent research in collaboration with Stanford University has shown that snow leopards have amongst the lowest genetic diversity, amongst all the big cats around the world.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: And for example, cheetahs are known for their very low genetic diversity.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: And for the first time, we are finding that the diversity in snow leopards is even lower.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Their populations, the reason for that is that snow leopard populations over the last nine hundred thousand years or so, almost a million years, they seem to have been relatively small.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: They've never been a huge snow leopard population, maybe less than thirty thousand animals across their range.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: But they have been able to survive this low genetic diversity.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: And part of the reason they've been able to survive this low genetic diversity is because, and part of the cause of the low genetic diversity as well is because these are, they've been able to move around, you know, they've been able to interbreed.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: So there's been genetic kind of exchange across these populations.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: Most of these great mountains are connected with each other and in places where they are not snow leopards, our research shows, our coloring research shows that snow leopards are able to cross.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: you know, sixty-seven kilometers of step landscape, flat landscapes between one mountain range and the other, dispersing small areas do that.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: So I think that has enabled them to survive over these several hundred thousand years, despite a relatively small population and low genetic diversity.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: But now things are changing.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: Like I said, many of these borders have uncrossable fences.
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: It's interesting, I'll give you an example, share an example with you where our GPS coloring study that we have been doing now for fifteen years in the South Gobi of Mongolia.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Couple of our snow leopards have actually in search of a new home range dispersing snow leopard.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: We have been able to track them, so we've colored them in these Tosanbomba Mountains which are not very far from the border with China, the Mongolian border with China.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: The snow leopards have tried, these individual snow leopards have tried to move from Mongolian mountains into the inner Mongolian mountains of China.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Headed straight towards those mountains, at some point in time they have encountered the border fence.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: Then they have, you know, the individuals have walked several kilometers, let's say, ten kilometers along that border fence to try to look for presumably to try to look for a place to cross the fence, have not been able to, and they have come back to the original, their native home ranges, the original mountains.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: So it's very clear that these fences are actually now fragmenting genetically, fragmenting populations of a very precarious and vulnerable species that already has a very low genetic diversity.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: Add to that, the new infrastructure, the linear infrastructure, once upon a time mountains used to be considered remote and they have been spared the kind of roads, railways and the modern infrastructure, but all that's changing.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: There's mines, there's new railroads and things like that, which have been further fragment the populations, not just the border fences or the land mines.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: And then finally, you have a changing environment, these areas.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: As you mentioned in the beginning, These areas are warming at, on average, at twice the average rates of warming across the northern hemisphere.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: So the climate's changing.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: And because of this increasing pollution and because of warming, there's the increase in risk of new disease outbreaks.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: So there's a whole bunch of new pressures and whether small efforts will be able to survive all these onslaughts, you know, which are related to our kind of geopolitics and our modern lifestyles.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: Only time they'll tell, but they are facing a lot of challenges today.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: What do war lessons from Gaza, rethinking education, peace in Ukraine, and visionary leadership have in common?
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: They are all themes from recent episodes of this podcast.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Check out more episodes on tellbergfoundation.org or on a platform of your choice.
• 21:59
  Speaker 0: I want to shift to what's called ethical conservation.
• 22:04
  Speaker 0: You've been one of the driving forces behind the ethical conservation alliance.
• 22:10
  Speaker 0: The obvious question when I first heard that is perhaps too simple.
• 22:15
  Speaker 0: What would non-ethical conservation look like?
• 22:18
  Speaker 0: It almost seems that conservation is by definition ethical, but I suspect it's not.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: You're absolutely right, you know, that conservation has a very strong by itself, a very strong sort of moral and ethical dimension to it because, you know, ultimately it is about values and it is about, you know, maybe making some sacrifices to be able to protect biodiversity and nature for the future.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: However, if you were to look at the modern history of nature conservation, which kind of, you know, if I have to put a timeline to it, let's say with the establishment of the Yellowstone National Park.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: in the United States and then soon around the same time or soon afterwards perhaps the Yosemite and others.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: How were these nature reserves created?
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: The nature reserves were created or modern nature conservation movement has its origins in genocide.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: There have been people, there have been the indigenous communities who have lived and use those lands for more than ten thousand years.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: But then nature conservation started by driving them out, by killing the people who were living or in those landscapes, and we could dismiss that as being our past history.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: But if you look at the nature conservation movement even today, Even as the colonial era ended, even as nations became independent, became sovereign nations, what most of the countries have done is they have kind of strengthened that colonial top-down approach to nature conservation, which is largely being driven by governments and societal elites.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: They have actually strengthened those structures, which means that even today, The indigenous peoples, the local communities, the poorest of the poor, who have actually a strong relationship with the lands or with the waters, they continue to be marginalized.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: They continue to be evicted from their lands, which they have used for thousands of years.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: Those lands where wildlife still survives.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: So they must have had something in their lifestyles that the wildlife and nature still survive in those lands.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: It's disappeared.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: The forests have disappeared from most of the places where we kind of with our modern lifestyles live.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: But there are still areas where indigenous communities live and continue to live, which are rich in biodiversity.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: But what we have done is we have kind of been completely blind to our own failures to protect nature or, you know, sort of do our economic development alongside protecting nature.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: And then we pretend that those communities, the poor and the marginalized, are the ones who are the problem for nature and biodiversity, and that they should be moved away from these last remaining biodiversity-rich areas of the planet.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: So the entire, coming back to your question, the entire history of modern nature conservation has been highly unethical from that perspective.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: And there are other aspects to it, other nuances to it.
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: It has been a very... If I may say so, a very Western, white, alpha male driven movement around the world.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: Of course, you have exceptions.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Dr.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Jane Goodall recently passed away, bless us all.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: But it's largely been a Western driven movement, the modern nature conservation.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: And because of which, the ideas, the approaches are Western.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: But also, I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but then, you know, it is kind of, it has originated, it has its roots in colonialism and a very top-down approach to nature conservation.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: So all those things make the predominant model of nature conservation, in my view, highly unethical.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: And there are many things that we can and need to do to make it more ethical, both in terms of how we view people.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: as well as how we view animals and plants in conservation.
• 26:54
  Speaker 0: But Bishkek is sort of that same model, isn't it?
• 26:58
  Speaker 0: It's a top-down model where twelve governments got together and said, for all sorts of good reasons, we need, in fact, to work together, and they succeeded in working together as you described, to preserve this ecosystem as well as we can preserve it.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: That's a great question, Alan.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: So I'll tell you my own experience.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: So I got trained and I'm very thankful for it.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: I got trained in, I had a lot of educational opportunities.
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: I got trained in science of nature and studying nature now, you know, obviously Western science and I'm very thankful for it.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: But my real journey in nature conservation began when as a PhD student and I lived for four years completely out of convenience.
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: I lived for four years in a inside a community in a high Himalayan region.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: And the reason I lived with the community is because it was just convenient in this harsh cold environment.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: It was just safe and convenient for me to live inside a village while collecting, being out in the field collecting data for my PhD.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: But then when I started living with them and started seeing their kind of associations with nature, their suffering, their kind of, you know, generosity, everything, you know, that impacted me a lot.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: And that changed my view completely about how nature conservation needs to be done.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: That changed my view completely from the kind of fortress conservation approach that I had been trained in to really start focusing and, you know, look, just inverting the whole approach and making it more grassroots, working directly with communities.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: But soon enough, what I realized was that I could be doing or we could be doing, let's say, twenty years of amazing work with the community, you know, or multiple communities working for their well-being, supporting them and enabling them to protect nature around them and things like that.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: But one bad decision by the government, giving license for a new mine or a new road that has to, you know, instead of benefiting people it is passing through let's say a critical prime snow leopard habitat or tiger habitat or whatever it might be.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: One bad decision can mess it all up, mess up twenty years of your work.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: And that was the motivation to actually start working with governments.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: The motivation to start working with governments was not to enable or further strengthen that top town fortress conservation model.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: But to kind of influence government approaches and policies, national approaches and policies to focus more on grassroots conservation rather than focusing solely on enforcement and guns and fences.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: That was the whole motivation.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: But you're absolutely right that when we brought these various agencies together, I mentioned some of them, the World Bank, the WF, a whole bunch of multilateral agencies as well.
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: It actually took some pushing back because all these people came together, but the predominant idea there still or in their minds was this fortress conservation, top-down conservation.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: So it took a lot of pushback and a lot of engagement and things like that before everybody got aligned with the idea of the importance of more ethics and grassroots and empowering communities to support Snorripert conservation.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: So if you actually look at the text of the Bishkek Declaration, there is a huge amount of emphasis on grassroots bottom-up conservation and not just top-down.
• 30:45
  Speaker 0: In practical terms, could you give us an example of what is consistent with the approach you just described, top-down as well as bottoms-up?
• 30:56
  Speaker 0: It's both.
• 30:57
  Speaker 0: It's both sides now.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 30:59
  Speaker 0: an example of that might not have been done before Bishkek in this particular case.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: So before the Bishkek Declaration, I think that we as individual conservationists or small conservation organizations, we were going through, like I said, I had my own learning, I had my own journey, and like me, many others.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: Well, this is not just about small lepers, but there's so many conservationists around the world.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: now many of them are now a part of the Ethical Conservation Alliance who were going through their own personal struggles and journeys and dilemmas because we were realizing that what we were trained in did not sit well with us in our minds and in our hearts and that that approach needed to change and we were experimenting in small ways to see how we could actually effectively work with communities.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: But there's just so many examples of.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: even today, I mean one of the well-known examples Alan is the.
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: you might be aware that you know more than sixty thousand or Maasai have written to international or you know heads of states, multilateral agencies and so on where nearly two hundred thousand Maasai stand to be affected because of nature conservation or new initiatives in nature conservation for instance.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: and this is a particularly tragic example because today Maasai are being evicted to create more nature reserves and protected areas.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: They are being evicted from lands that they moved to after they were evicted in the nineteen fifties or whenever that was when the Serengeti National Park was created.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: So it's like a double kind of tragic situation for them.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: But that is happening in pretty much large parts of the world, including the country where I live and work out of, which is India.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: So I think that there are plenty of such examples, and it's still a predominant approach to nature conservation continues to be that top-down approach.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: It's not like the Bishkek Declaration by itself is going to change everything.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, Bishkek Declaration is, gave us a tool.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: that document helped us bring together governments, helped us to start getting them to cooperate with each other, helped us really push these grassroots and bottom-up agenda with the results that, you know, multiple governments, you know, under their... Jeff funding, GEF funding, multiple star allocations have actually invested funding into snow leopard conservation through bottom up community welfare.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: So there are these kind of changes that it has enabled by itself, not the bishop declaration, but the follow.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: And I think the most important thing to understand here is that these kind of cooperation platforms or a declaration or whatever it might be.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: It gives us conservationists and opportunities to move the agenda forward, to make use of it, to be able to encourage governments as well as to a smaller extent hold them accountable.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: I think it's presumptuous to say we can hold governments accountable.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: We cannot.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: But at least to be able to kind of encourage them to kind of follow more ethical practices.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: And I think to some extent we have been kind of able to move the needle in that direction.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: And the latest big news for us is that I mentioned the recent intergovernmental meeting in June in Cholpanatha in Kyrgyzstan.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: And at that meeting, the governments in as a resolution, the final resolution of that meeting, it clearly stay in that resolution, the governments have agreed in collaboration with the Ethical Conservation Alliance to review their snow leopard conservation policies and practices from an ethical perspective within a period of two years.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: So these are the kind of things we are able to do because of bringing the governments together.
• 35:22
  Speaker 0: Why didn't we end there?
• 35:24
  Speaker 0: Because that is a very positive and hopeful note in and of itself, the commitment to actually do something really in a quite ground truth way.
• 35:36
  Speaker 0: And I say that particularly because we're on the eve of the annual UN Gabfest on climate, of which I'm not a great fan anymore, since I suspect, I think there's too much talking and too little acting.
• 35:51
  Speaker 0: And it is performance art, it's not actual practical politics.
• 35:56
  Speaker 0: So congratulations on the approach that the Himalayan countries have taken, which sounds much more practical and much more focused.
• 36:03
  Speaker 0: And perhaps, no, certainly much more impactful.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Alan's been privilege and an honor talking to you.
• 36:10
  Speaker 0: Thank you.
• 36:14
  Speaker 0: Thank you for listening to this episode of New Thinking from New World.
• 36:17
  Speaker 0: I'm Alan Stoga, podcast host, and I look forward to your joining our next conversation.
• 36:23
  Speaker 0: Remember, tell us what you think at tellbergfoundation.org.