Dazed In The Life

I have just finished watching the BBC series “Last Chance To See”, featuring Stephen Fry and conservationist Mark Cawardine. I had recorded the episodes when the series was broadcast back in the autmun but only got around to working through them in the last few weeks. As with most programmes featuring Stephen Fry, they are beyond brilliant: Excellently filmed, informative, touching and, perhaps most importantly, imperative.

20 years ago, the late, great Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” and an extremely clever man accompanied Cawardine on a trip to see some of the rarest animals on the planet. Originally slightly skeptical of the process of chasing down a flightless parrot in New Zealand or sitting up all night to catch sight of the ugly Aye-Aye on Madagascar, Adams was a total convert to the cause of wildlife conservation from then on.

The result of the trip was a radio documentary series and book of the name “Last Chance To See”, not to mention many lectures delivered by Adams who supported wildlife causes such as the WWF in the guise of someone who was definitely NOT of the sandal-wearing, tree-hugging ilk, but an intelligent, respected and authoritative voice from the world of “celebrity”. His status as an iconic author gave the causes he supported added weight among the generation who grew up reading his work, hanging on his every utterance.

The word “untimely” is often chucked in front of the word “death” when someone dies young, often with little thought for the weight of that word. In the case of Douglas Adams, his death at the age of 49 on FA Cup Final day in May 2001 was untimely indeed. I remember the day vividly. I was ensconced in the sitting room of a boarding master at school with several other Liverpool-supporting friends, watching Michael Owen snatch the cup from under the nose of Arsenal, when the news headlines scrolled across the screen. I had only that year read the entire Hitchhiker trilogy of five and fallen in love with the silly science, brilliant wordplay and parody, fantastic intergalactic landscape and sheer imaginative freewheeling which resided in the pages of Douglas Adams’ books. His name and the words “dead at 49″ struck me very deeply as being untimely – how could he be dead when I’ve only just discovered why his life is so precious to us?

He was the voice for the computer age, championing the Apple Mac. He was the voice for science and intelligent debate with religion. He was the suit of armour which many endangered species would be donning in the new millenium. He was Stephen Fry without the television exposure, more reserved and less flamboyant. I admire Stephen Fry greatly and I think Adams and he were certainly kindred spirits, sharing many passions and interests, as well as enormous intellectual and literary abilities.  I have no doubt that, were he alive now, Douglas would be right up there with Stephen, tweeting from the pantheon of internet gods, worshipping the iPhone and educating us with incisive and engaging broadcasts, be they on television or radio or from the lectern.

So it was entirely appropriate that Stephen Fry attempted to fill the massive void left by Adams by taking up the challenge set by Cawardine, to retrace his journey with Douglas two decades on. They tracked down the Amazonian Manatee, the Northern White Rhino, the Aye-Aye, the Komodo Dragon, the Kakapo and the Blue Whale. Fry points out that these are a mere six of more than 4,500 endangered species across the world. They encountered many others along the way and came across the remains of some already long gone. I found myself in tears as I watched the re-union of two rescued chimpanzee babies with their own kind. The primitive link between them and us, the joy of seeing a child being saved, the thought that our closest relation in nature is slowly being killed off, touched a nerve.

But perhaps what most caught my attention was a moment in the final episode when, on the trail of the blue whale, Cawardine pointed out that he and Douglas had actually tracked the Yangtze river dolphin on their original travels but, while planning this new series, the animal had been declared functionally extinct.

While I was in primary school in the mid-nineties, the giant panda, the orangutan and the Yangtze river dolphin were the figureheads of endangerment and names casually tossed at us by teachers during classes tentatively called Nature. At that age, most children are susceptible to the calling to “Save The Animals” and many lose that enthusiasm as time passes. I could not quite grasp the enormity of what it all meant back then. But, with my more adult worldview, I was shocked to hear that the freshwater dolphin which became a familiar figure in my early childhood was from now on only to exist in photos.

It is rather like being told that Santa definitely doesn’t exist or seeing a grandparent die or losing your virginity. In that moment, a massive upheaval in whatever life you have lived before takes place. You have lost something childlike but gained some new knowledge. It is that transition from innocence to experience. Hearing that something which existed in my childhood as a living symbol of our natural world which ought to be cherished and saved was now, actually, beyond saving…that stuck in my throat.

What it did was what the purpose of this programme was, I feel. It made me realise that we human beings, we almighty rulers of the planet, we who are so bloody ingenious, aren’t quite as clever as we thought. We may think we are the most advanced creature around but that does not apply insofar as our savage abuse of the planet, its resources and our cohabitants demonstrates our destructive capabilities. Not only that, but the notion that that we are able to do anything is rubbished by the evidence of these programmes, by the death of the Yangtze river dolphin: We have singularly FAILED to save creatures we all knew we were eradicating.

If one steps on an earwig, fine, it happens, we may not have seen it and there are plenty of earwigs to go around. We might hit a badger crossing the road – again, sad, but not disastrous. But when some of us cut swathes through ancient rainforests, others pour bile and poison into our oceans, still more spew fire and brimstone into the clouds and the rest sit idly by and do nothing – that is a travesty. It’s all very well for us to KNOW that the Yangtze river dolphin or the rhino or the tiger are endangered, stare at pictures in books or at our flickering television screens and say “Dear me”. It is very much a different thing for us to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

In this month when the world is coming together in Copenhagan to try and solve the problem of climate change, it strikes me as baffling that the only concern – certainly in the media coverage of the summit – seems to be for the implications for humanity. The whalers still whale; the rainforests still fall; the rhino and elephant still sacrifice their lives and the medals of our vicious regime are struck in their ivory. It’s times like this when you want to pull your hair out and scream “Fuck trade agreements and quotas and targets and pussyfooting around multinational companies! They’re killing the planet, killing the animal kingdom, killing beauty.”

I’m in danger of sounding very sandal-wearing and tree-hugging myself. I’m not going to go vegan or stop wearing leather – I understand how nature works and we are, even in our technological way, part of that. But there was no need for hundreds of companies to pour pollutants into the Yangtze and knowingly do away with the dolphins. There is no need for the hunting trade which cuts through hundreds of species across our planet purely for sport. There is no need for the deforestation which will kill the tiger and the panda and the orangutan and the gorilla and many more. “Last Chance To See” was, I said at the start of this blog, an imperative piece of television. It said “Look. Now act.” Very simply, we must act now and not just throw words and cliché at the problem. Otherwise Cawardine and Fry may, in twenty years time, have nothing left to see at all.