Retracing the wildlife quest of his friend Douglas Adams
Stephen Fry, The Guardian 2 Sep 09;
I first met Douglas Adams some time in 1983. I can't imagine what we actually did for the first seven months of our friendship – twiddle our thumbs and yawn, I suppose – but at last, in January 1984, the first Apple Mac was launched, and from then on we visited each other every day to swap and play.
Our interests for the next year or so centred entirely around inanimate electronic equipment and its habit of not working – if we gave the natural world a second thought, it was when we looked out of the window and wondered if a thunderstorm was brewing. Lightning strikes could cause a power outage or even a spike or surge in the line that might damage our precious toys. So much for nature.
Time passed. One day, much to my surprise, Douglas went off to Madagascar on a peculiar journalistic mission that had to do with a rare species of lemur. On his return I began to notice an alteration in my reliably geeky-nerd companion. He read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker and gave me copies, telling me that my life would be changed. Which it was. What Niels Bohr said of quantum mechanics is true of evolution: "If you're not shocked then you haven't understood it properly."
I had been sharing a place in Dalston at this time with a group of friends from university, but we were now at the stage where it was possible to consider splitting up and buying our own flats and houses. I wanted to find a place in Islington, but also felt that I needed time to look around and wait for the perfect property. Perhaps I should rent first? I offloaded my tedious residential worries on Douglas one afternoon as we sat in his study staring at a Mac and wondering, for the thousandth time, if we could stop it going "boing" and closing down whenever we tried to do something unusual with it.
"Why don't you stay here for a year?" he suggested. "You can house-sit for me. I've decided to go round the world for 12 months seeking out rare animals."
"You've de-whatted to go round the what, whatting out whats?"
Douglas explained that his journey to Madagascar had lit a fire within him that would not go out. In the company of a zoologist called Mark Carwardine, he had found and photographed the elusive lemur known as the aye-aye, an experience, together with reading Dawkins, that had made him realise that the technology that now most excited him was the one that had evolved over millions of years and resulted in him and me and, ultimately, the device that wouldn't stop going "boing". He really wanted to understand this business of life and extinction. He and Mark had hit it off straightaway, and the plan was now to find seven more species like the aye-aye that were in imminent danger of disappearing for ever.
The result was Mark and Douglas's Last Chance to See, a book and a BBC radio series. While the intrepid pair were travelling the globe, I duly stayed at Douglas's house fielding the occasional call and request. This was the time before faxes were in general use, let alone emails or texts, so communication and flight reservations and other travel details had to be expedited by landline and telex. It was not unusual to be awoken at three in the morning by a Douglas too excited by what was happening around him to have worked out time differences. "Can you telex Garuda Air and tell them we want to change our flight?" he would yell down the phone. I would copy down the names of islands, ports and towns I had never heard of and make calls to countries I couldn't point to on the map.
The book was a remarkable success. I do not believe it has ever been out of print, a testament to the importance of the subject and to Douglas and Mark's natural storytelling abilities, charm, wit and unforced writing styles. Alarm about the environment, issues of conservation, pollution, habitat degradation and species endangerment existed before Last Chance to See, but they were far less the common currency of concern than they are now.
Mark and Douglas's book focused general worry into a particular understanding of the clock that was ticking on the future of wildlife in so many corners of the planet. Every campaign needs heroes, faces that represent the issue at stake. Icons, we would say now. It was typical of Douglas and, as I later found out, of Mark too, that their icons should be such strange and (at first glance) unprepossessing animals as the Amazonian manatee, the aye-aye and the kakapo.
There is something in the solemn oddity, the idiosyncratic earnestness of these species that tears at the heart with greater urgency and pathos than the more photogenic and glamorous pumas, dolphins and pandas. Nature admits of no hierarchy of beauty or usefulness or importance. We like to think, entirely wrongly, that we, mankind, are nature's last word, at the summit of evolution, or that animals "at the top of the food chain" are somehow more important than animals at the bottom. Last Chance to See showed us all that a bumbling earth-bound parrot is as good a symbol of the beauty and fragility of the natural world as a soaring condor and that a plug-ugly nocturnal lemur with a Twiglet for a middle finger can represent the glory of creation quite as aptly as a meerkat or an orang-utan.
I was proud to know Douglas, pleased to have been even tangentially connected with his and Mark's great and pioneering project, but I cannot honestly say that over the following 15 or so years I gave Last Chance to See much more thought. I re-read it once, I think, and began to develop my own small wildlife interests – involving myself in two films and a book about the spectacled bear in Peru.
On 11 May 2001, I was shocked and heartbroken to hear of the sudden and wholly unexpected death of Douglas Noel Adams – the DNA at the core of so much that I loved and valued in the world. He was just 49 years old. The years since have passed and every day I have missed Douglas as a friend, teacher and companion. How can I know what to think of iPhones and iMacs, compact cameras, GPS devices and Blu-ray players without Douglas here to offer his unique sideways view?
Then one day in 2007, out of the blue, I had a phone call. Might I consider travelling, with Mark, back to those animals that had formed the principal cast list of Last Chance to See, this time filming the experience for television? I sounded myself out, I sounded Mark out and then I sounded the BBC out. We all seemed to be in agreement that the time was right. Out of the eight species Mark and Douglas had originally chosen, it seemed that two were already functionally extinct (the northern white rhino and the Yangtze river dolphin) – in other words, a quarter of their almost random snapshot of vulnerable species had been wiped from the map of creation. Mark told me at our first meeting that he believes whichever eight critically endangered species they had chosen back then, the chances are that a quarter would now be extinct.
And so, in January 2008, I flew from Miami, Florida to Manaus, Amazonia, to join Mark and start work on the first film, which was to feature the Amazonian manatee. There is no length to which Mark will not go in order to observe an animal, photograph it and, if needs be, save it from peril. He has put his own life in the severest possible danger time and time again in his work for anti-poacher patrols in Africa and Asia, all at the service of protecting rhinos, elephants and tigers from those who would slaughter them wholesale for gain. Not only that, but he will encourage, belabour and enthuse any large, sweaty unwilling companions who happen to be lumbering at his side wishing there were better phone signals and air conditioning available.
I embarked on this whole project honestly believing I had bitten off more than I could chew. I am no physical hero: I am clumsy, overweight, unfit and uncoordinated. The first episode of filming began with me falling off a floating dock and smashing my right humerus. Yet somehow, a year and a quarter later, I had lost much weight and was happily hurling myself into physically demanding conditions that I would have wept and gibbered at before. The life-changing benefits of the filming experience I owe to the animals and to Mark. That he and I never quarrelled is testament to his extraordinary good temper and sweetness of nature. He tolerated the presence of an amateur, idler and dilettante and proved a perfect teacher and matchless travel companion.
If our adventures have any purpose it is to help with the conservation conversation. Are the animals worth saving because they hold an important place in the great interconnected web of existence? Are they worth saving because they might one day yield important clues and compounds to help us with medicine or some other useful technology? Or are they worth saving because they are the beautiful achievement of millions of years of natural selection? Extinction is a natural part of creation, this is unquestionably true: yet no matter what one's views on climate change or global warming, it is impossible, impossible, to deny that man-made alterations to habitat are threatening thousands of plant and animal species across the planet at an unprecedented rate and scale. So the question is perhaps not "Why should we save them?" but "What right do we have to destroy them?"
Let us never stop talking about the creatures we share the planet with. The first step is to know them a little better.
Last Chance to See by Mark Carwardine and Stephen Fry is published by Collins (RRP £20). To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.
