David Cohen, New Scientist 12 Aug 09;
Over 20 years ago, Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and zoologist Mark Carwardine travelled the world to find its most endangered species. Now Adams's friend Stephen Fry has retraced his steps for a TV documentary. David Cohen meets the comedian, techno-geek and accidental environmentalist to talk about extinctions and iPhones
You're not known for being interested in ecology. So what got you interested in wildlife?
That's true. I was never a bug hunter or a collector but I have always been curious about wildlife. This series is all down to Douglas: I house-sat for him in the year he and Mark Carwardine went travelling to research Last Chance to See, the book it's named after.
Then Douglas's brother got in touch [Douglas Adams died in 2001]. It was nearly 25 years since Douglas and Mark had decided on their first visit to Nosy Mangabe, an island off Madagascar, in search of the aye-aye, which propelled them to write the book. He asked if I thought the BBC would be interested in Mark and me revisiting the same places to see what had happened. After a lot of hard work, here we are.
Had things got worse since Adams's visit?
Each place has its own unique problems. In Madagascar a slash-and-burn policy over the past 60 years has devastated four-fifths of one of the most remarkable forests there ever was. That is what threatens the lemur population in Madagascar, as opposed to the [central African] northern white rhino, now extinct in the wild, which has more to do with poaching and the cross-border incursions of whatever war is going on.
Did anything fire you up in particular?
The problem of the oceans. So many species of fish are in such appalling danger. I won't have children, but I'll have nephews and nieces, and great-nephews and nieces, and I can't see how they will ever eat a fish. They may see one in an aquarium, but the oceans are being fished out at an appalling rate. It's terrifying.
Did you bone up on the animals before you went, or did you want to be a naive pair of eyes?
Naive, but not in a disingenuous way. I'm not trying to be another David Attenborough. I have a sticky memory so I tend to remember things even though I haven't experienced them. So I couldn't pretend I'd never heard of a pangolin or didn't know what "pelagic" means. But I can ask on behalf of others.
Do you think our efforts at conservation are taking us in the right direction?
The will is there. The problem is that there are people in the natural history world who are not particularly scientific. It's easy to get hung up on your pet species and forget where that species fits into its habitat. Sometimes empiricism can get ditched in favour of a sentimental view. I'm not saying I'm not prone to burst into tears at some sights nature provides: watching turtle hatchlings run into the sea is an extraordinary spectacle that fills one with joy and excitement. I'm not saying one should hold back from an affection for a particular species. I just worry that charities jostle for our attention to push their species at the expense of habitat, which is really the key.
So what should we do?
It's not only the habitat and the animals, but also the humans in that habitat that need to be understood. For example, you can't tell people in Borneo not to cut rainforest or plant palm oil trees unless you also address the issues of population, poverty and the whole nature of the economies of developing countries.
Did the journey change you in any way?
Take the spectacled bears, Tremarctos ornatus, that I visited in South America for a different TV series a few years ago. Now, if I was to visit them again I would try to understand the hill farmers in the cloud forest in Peru and Ecuador, rather than just saying, "Let's rescue these bears." It's not as if we're going to expel man from any country. It's about coexistence.
Do you want to inspire people to follow you?
Let's not be cute about it: if people don't go to Uganda then the gorillas will die. Because of the vagaries of television I have a voice. I have half-a-million Twitter followers and a website with a million unique visitors every month, and I guess that has an influence. Tourism is not the enemy - in most places it's part of the solution. Let's not get all righteous about climate change and say that just because you like travelling the world you are a hypocrite. Take the example of the mountain gorillas. There are only a few hundred of them left: the only way of paying for the mountain rangers to keep them alive is for people to go to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda and see them.
You have a phenomenal following on Twitter, and you're famous for being a bit of a gadget fiend. Where does your techno-lust come from?
It started a long time ago. I had early computers: the Sinclairs and then a BBC Micro, which I liked. Then I was the second person in Europe to have an Apple Mac, after Douglas - who was the first. I was on the internet in the late 1980s when it was a world of WAIS and FTP and Gopher, but obviously no web. Then when the Mosaic web browser came out in 1993 I built a website. I won the Lipton Ice Tea cool website award in 1996. In 1997 I wrote the occasional speech for Tony Blair, and Peter Mandelson [then Labour Party election campaign director] came to stay with me and I showed him his first website. Blair was about to make a speech about "access to computers for every child", but they had absolutely no idea about the web and computers.
I see you have an iPhone...
It's unbelievable. I wrote in a blog that I have never seen a smartphone I haven't bought. I have cupboards and cupboards of them. I particularly love the convergence of wireless technologies in smartphones: GSM, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It's amazing, but we're nowhere near perfection yet.
In the 1960s the clever chaps who went on to work at PARC [Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in California] posited a thing called the Dynabook. It was a sort of Platonic ideal of what a device could be, an all-in-one device that you could interface with in whatever way you wanted. It was your source of literature, communication, art and music. The iPhone is the closest we've come to that so far.
Is the time we're all spending online or with our gadgets taking us away from nature?
Yes, but it's not the case that everyone just sits in front of a computer. They do both. It's equally a pity if someone just goes on nature rambles and never tries to play a computer game. They are missing out on what it's about to be alive now. You don't have to like it, but you might try it out. These technologies are phenomena we barely understand in terms of their social impact. To characterise it as people shutting off from the world and sneering at them is a gross disservice to the technology, but more importantly to the people who use it.
Can humans and technology coexist happily?
I admit the change is strong and may seem bewildering, and it probably should seem bewildering. It's a bit like what Niels Bohr said about quantum mechanics: "If you're not shocked by it, you don't understand it." If we're not shocked by the way our world is changing, then we probably haven't grasped how much it's changing. Taking a view that technology somehow muffles the human spirit is like saying that concrete is bad because it destroys grass. Anyone who's seen a pavement knows that grass can push up through concrete. The human spirit is the same - it can push up through any amount of sealing-off.
