Dr. Ellen K. Rudolph
What exactly is 'True Conservation?'
Dr. Ellen K. Rudolph
What exactly is 'True Conservation?'
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Dr. Ellen spent nearly a year in Australia’s Outback during 1999 and 2000. You can find our more about her Outback trek with Dr. Nicole Duplaix at www.2DocStock.com. Her comments are meant to inspire dialogue about the issue of conservation and what approaches to conservation seem to work best.
Humans have long viewed wildlife as resources to be used to their own advantage, without regard to the needs of the wildlife itself; an attitude that has brought a great many species of wildlife to the brink of extinction. As humans now rush to stop the onslaught, conservationists around the world have begun arguing about which approach to conservation is the most meritorious; meaning, which approach works the best? Many argue that good science and education are the primary tools needed in the battle to save our remaining wildlife, and it is hard to argue with that. I agree whole-heartedly on every level except one: as a psychologist I know that humans need to be passionately engaged with wildlife before they will put forth even an inkling of effort to do their part to save them. Without a hands-on approach to wildlife where wildlife is felt and we are touched by them in turn, conservation falls on deaf ears. We do not feel a need to save something that we know nothing about. Even when we see wildlife on TV or read about them in a picture book, we do not automatically rush to their defense. Only when we can somehow form a personal relationship with wildlife, where we come to love them, only then will we feel the urge to save them. It is disheartening but true In today’s world, it really boils down to whose voice is loudest and whose voice sticks with us the longest. Steve Irwin’s behavior was unconventional – and passionate – and loud – and, by cricky, it sticks with us long after the television has been turned off and the lights dimmed. Which is the point! Irwin clearly engaged us in a dialogue about wildlife with his expressive eyes, his undaunting curiosity, his tirades, and with his astonishingly unconventional approach in the field. He ate, slept, and lived conservation and we all knew it. We loved it. We ate it up and I, for one, never once dozed off while Steve Irwin was on the air. That said, I wish Steve had talked with me before that now-famous incident where he fed a crocodile with his month-old infant son in his arms. That was stupid, yes, but only because he did not anticipate the public reaction to his implied irresponsible parental behavior. From another perspective, however, it was very normal behavior from a man who grew up with crocs and who wanted his children to be equally fearless of them; which is something that comes from constant and close behavior of the kind that normal parents in suburbia cannot even fathom, let alone understand. But humans are a judgmental lot, and they are quick to judge even in the face of little or no evidence. Camera angles made that episode with Steve’s infant son seem as though he was right on top of the croc when he was not. He talked in detail about that after-the-fact. The camera lied…and we believed it…and that is what every photographer everywhere must understand. Our lenses express our vision but not necessarily reality, and certainly not someone else’s reality. We can actually bias reality quite convincingly when we chose to do so just by changing our lens and/or our composition to include or exclude certain things. Steve and his team of videographers wanted to infuse drama into the father/infant son scene and they did just that. Jumping out of our skin Isn’t that what it is all about? Isn’t it about making you and me jump out of skin? We remember jumping out of our skin. We do NOT remember boring discourses of landscapes and places that we have never personally visited. We remember what touches us emotionally and Steve Irwin touched us, by cricky. I wish the world were not so blaze about wildlife. I wish that giant corporations were not trashing wildlife habitats for business profits, and I wish that people would stop buying up the last remaining vestiges of shoreline property on our fragile coasts just so that they can live their dream. At whose expense, we have to ask. I also wish that schools the world over would posture conservation as a core program of study. Nobody is listening, and nobody is paying the slightest bit of attention to the average conservation message. The fact is, they haven’t been paying attention for years. We are digging ever deeper for oil, we are building ever bigger cars, we building ever-taller skyscrapers – there is no end in sight. To get the message out there we have to yell louder and dance harder, like Steve Irwin did. Whether you like it or not, someone has got to do it before we humans take the whole planet down with us. Instead of arguing about who does it better, I say just get out there and do your thing – speak your peace, yell if you have to! – but most of all, get your conservation message out there with all the passion that your old bones can muster, and then some. Time is of the essence.
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