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Eleanor Milner-Gulland It runs deep, this connection to nature, and it's not always seen. We see it in our children, but then we sort of lose touch a little bit. And bringing that back out is really, I think, vital to solving some of the many issues that we have in this world. (...)
Sanam That's Dame E.J. Milner-Gulland, my guest this week on If You Were In Charge, with me, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. Welcome, everyone. The show is brought to you by the Robert Bosch Academy and my organization, ICANN, where for 20 years we've been working with women peacebuilders on stopping wars and violence around the world. Each week, I talk with other doers and imaginers about the tough issues they tackle, from extreme capitalism to police violence to war and peace in the Middle East. And I ask them, what would you do if you were in charge? On this episode, we're talking about the scale and impact of biodiversity loss, including all of the species that are endangered in our world. A quick background. In 2022, the World Wildlife Fund reported that between the years 1970 and 2018, that's in my lifetime, the population of wildlife species, from mammals to fish, reptiles, amphibians, plants and insects, dropped by 69%. 30% of mammals around us are at risk of extinction. More than 40% of sharks and rays in our ocean are at risk. And if that's not enough, in 2023, the UN Environmental Programme reported that humans have introduced 37,000 invasive species, many of them harmful, threatening indigenous plants and animals. (.) And then finally, of course, climate change is another cause of biodiversity loss. But since it's human behavior that is at the heart of this, my conversation today is focused on what could or should we be doing differently. It can all be very overwhelming, but luckily, I have the preeminent person in the world to help us understand the issues and offer her solutions. Dame E.J. Milner-Gulland is the Tasso Leventis Professor of Biodiversity at Oxford University and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Conservation Science. E.J., as she prefers to be called, is also the founder of the SEGA Conservation Alliance and the Conservation Optimism Movement. I love that. (.) So, in a moment, I'll be talking to E.J. about current developments and the future of biodiversity and humanity on our planet. But first, like I do every week, a reality check with my daughter, Sole, at Cambridge University. But with a bonus for me. Lydia, her identical twin sister, who studied with E.J., is also joining us. (.....)
Soleh Hey, Sos, how are you doing? Good. (.) I did not go into lab, so... So no new bacteria. //S00: No bacteria. (.)//
Sanam Well, thank you for that very exciting news. (.) Listen, we have a very interesting guest today with us, in addition to our real guest that's coming. And she's sitting right here with me. Do you know her, Sos? I think I recognize her, maybe.
Lydia Yeah. Can you tell us who you are? Seems familiar. (.) I'm Lydia. I'm the other twin, the other sibling. And how come you're gracing us with your presence? I'm joining this episode because E.J., who's going to be the guest, was my supervisor for my master's project. I was really drawn to her work, and I really thought that it matched with what you do. And then with the theme of the podcast. So I introduced you guys. And she founded an organization called Conservation Optimism, raising awareness of good stories of conservation and sort of combating the doom and gloom around conservation stories. And then she also runs the Interdisciplinary Center for Conservation Science, which is her research group and the group that I was part of as part of my master's thesis that focuses on people-focused conservation. So designing conservation policy that really works with the communities that it's affecting to make sure that it's actually impactful and that people don't just sort of skirt around it because they're not given any other option, that sort of thing.
Sanam That's very cool. And you call her E.J., but she is Professor Dame... Professor Dame E.J. Milner-Gulland, yes. And you... But when you were her student, everybody called her E.J. as well?
Lydia Well, yeah, because I joined the research group. I wasn't just her student. So she was very familiar with people that she was working with. And she treated us like we were part of the group.
Sanam You went in kind of interested in marine biology, and she really inspired you to think in this holistic, multidisciplinary way.
Lydia Yeah. So I think the, like, course at Oxford is very broad in terms of the biology it covers. So I ended up being more drawn towards conservation. But yeah, E.J. was open-minded to, like, how biology was pulling in more other things to actually make policy effective. That's cool.
Sanam So when you think about environmental issues, climate issues, biodiversity, conservation, I mean, on the one hand, they're all obviously interrelated, and then there's complexities and intricacies. So you're at one end of it dealing with sort of the micro, micro, very...
Soleh Well, I think I'm on more of, like, a research in terms of, like, producing new technologies. We're definitely on the, like, earlier end, maybe not, like, basic, basic research, but kind of one step up on this ladder. And then E.J. and conservation, like, implementation. We have the science, and we have even the technology, but the research is more around, like, how do we get people to actually implement it?
Lydia I think E.J.'s stuff is also much more sort of human behavior focused rather than attacking it from any other angle. So there's sort of sides to conservation that are reducing carbon emissions or reducing plastic pollution, like Soleh is working on. And then E.J.'s side is looking more at biodiversity specifically and sort of habitats and endangered species and how human behavior is directly impacting them rather than sort of saying that, you know, plastic pollution is clogging up rivers, which is meaning that beavers are going extinct, which is just a made-up scenario. I don't know if that's true.
Sanam You know, when we've had these conversations before, you raised, I think, a question around, you know, when we think about whatever obscure African bug there is or, you know, even animals that aren't as cute as pandas and elephants, is that a question around why we should care? I would say it's a moral question or I would say that, you know.
Soleh I don't think there's a question in terms of, like, me personally or people that I know, but I'm just, it's an interesting question for her. Like, how does she get people to care about it outside of just, like, maybe it is just a moral argument. I don't know.
Lydia I think also the moral question is, like, more complicated than just, oh, we have, like, a moral obligation to save these species from going extinct. And it's, do we have a moral obligation to treat all species the same? How do we choose which species we're going to protect? Should we protect, should we be protecting habitats, not species, so that it's, like, more equally applied to things? Should we be, you know, should we be protecting species that humans consider valuable, like things with tusks that we hunt for ivory or, for some reason, pandas that have been chosen as, sort of, the world's cute organ, that cute thing that we save?
Soleh We're going to come out of this looking like panda haters or something.
Lydia I mean, there's a ton of money historically in pandas, and it's, like, unclear why. So it's, it's not a question of, like, is it, it's not, I don't think that anybody would say that it's, like, directly ethically wrong to save the pandas, but it's a question of what are you overlooking in order to put so much money into pandas?
Sanam And I, I think that the, the environment aspect of it is, you're, you're absolutely right, because, you know, dolphins and whales get a lot of attention, but all sorts of other sea creatures don't, right? But the other, the other thing that I read about her work is the fact that nature itself has, has so many of the solutions. Like, this idea that we don't even think about nature as, you know, as, as a resource, but, but, or if we do, we just think about it in terms of a resource that we just exploit, as opposed to a resource that we respect and, and, you know, need for.
Lydia So there's this, like, idea that essentially, and let me, tell me if this is not what you read, that, like, nature has a lot of pharmaceutical solutions, like chemical solutions, enzymes, like what, what Soleh is working on, you know, could be an enzyme that already, or is an enzyme that already exists, and you're trying to use it in a certain way. So it's actually much easier to go find these things than it is to create them. And so by destroying certain species, you might be losing opportunities to find those things. It's like those weird ads, this might not hit with UK audiences at all, but you know, those weird ads in the US that are like, this anti-aging medication uses an enzyme found in jellyfish.
Soleh That's what I always think of. Or like, you know, trees or something, right?
Lydia Yeah, and it's, it's always the most random thing where I'm like, do I, does it actually make me think that it's going to anti-age me more, the fact that it comes from jellyfish?
Soleh Yeah, it's like, am I supposed to think that that's good, that, like, I'll get rid of my brain fog if it comes from jellyfish?
Lydia But it's sort of, it's, it's the example I always think of when it's like, I guess we found some compound in jellyfish. I mean, it might, it's, it might be totally false advertising. Botox is like a prime example, right? Botox is like something that existed that we decide, like botulinum toxin that we, like decided we were going to use for humans and is like now obviously a massive //S00: industry.// You know, they use them also for camels, for camel racing, to make the, they have like,
Sanam they have like camel beauty contests and every once in a while they find that, that there's been some cheating because the camels have been Botoxed in Saudi Arabia. //S00: But to make them less wrinkly?//
Lydia So weird. Yeah.
Sanam Yeah. And also to pump up their cheeks and stuff. Anyway, that's a random part. (.) That's me waiting. To pump up their cheeks. I don't know if that'll make the car. (.)
Soleh Poor camel.
Sanam All right. So, so I'm going to start the conversation. with, with EJ soon and any particular things that you would want me to ask her.
Soleh If you had to rank Lydia in the, what percentile of the master's students that she's had, where would you put her?
Lydia Top 1%, you know, maybe average. (..) 10th percentile. (..)
Soleh Can we, should we guess? I'd say like 30th percentile.
Lydia 30th? Oh, I guess that. No, that's 30th is bottom third. Okay.
Soleh 66th percentile.
Lydia I'll take top third of her, all of her Oxford master's students, to be honest. I don't think that's like a bad group to compare to. I don't know. I think the question of like, because she works on this sort of conservation optimism. Do you actually find that people give more money? Do you actually find that like things get done more when you can show success stories? (.) Can you say that something is fully a success story? Are we done working on it? Or is it just that the interventions have worked and therefore we need to continue? Because if it's sort of, it's working, but it's like in perpetuity we need to continue. Is that a success story?
Soleh I think in some ways people are like almost skeptical of the good stories because it's like, oh, well, I bet it's just greenwashing.
Lydia Yeah.
Soleh It's not true.
Lydia And a lot of the times things seem like they're good stories and then end up maybe being bad. Like different interventions that we've tried to do, especially with like invasive species, end up having knock-on effects that are possible to calculate. So it's like, oh, maybe it's great that the wolf population is back up, but maybe the ecosystem rebalanced in the meantime. And actually the wolf population is going to screw things up all over again. So there's lots of things. But I think overall people do want to know the good stories so long as they're true.
Sanam So long as they're true. Okay. So on that note, I'm going to move on and thank you guys. I, yeah, maybe see you in the future season. (........) EJ, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure. Before we get into the meat of the conversation, I wanted to thank you very much because you were my daughter Lydia's supervisor at Oxford. She came there interested in marine biology and she left with a much broader perspective of looking at the issues from not only the issue of biology and nature and biodiversity, but also policy and the human connections and so forth. And I guess you were the person who inspired her to do that. So thank you very much for that. And I hope that she was a worthy student.
Eleanor Milner-Gulland She was a wonderful student. And it's really great to see her finding her path.
Sanam We hear a lot about climate change issues, obviously, which are breaching sort of critical levels of urgency. (.) We hear less about sort of conservation and biodiversity, which is also having its own challenges. Is it fair to say that in some ways biodiversity or nature seems to be the poor cousin of the climate change debate? Is that something that you also feel in your universe?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland It really is. It's very hard to get people to think about biodiversity on the same level as climate, which is a mistake because biodiversity is the fabric of our planet. It's the thing that helps us to survive, whether that's clean water, clean air and, you know, actually helping us to survive the climate crisis. I mean, the good news is that governments and companies are now starting to think about biodiversity, but it's got a long way to go until it's got as much salience as climate.
Sanam When we hear about the urgency of the problems or in the sixth extension, is that exaggeration or is it as overwhelming as it seems? (..)
Eleanor Milner-Gulland It really is, yes. And one of the scariest things that I've found is that actually you can see it around us, even in somewhere like the UK, which is really relatively buffered, you can see declines in species, whether that be insects or birds or whatever. One of the scariest statistics is that in my lifetime, we've lost about 70% of the world's wildlife, that's the living planet index, and just to think that that's in my lifetime so fast.
Sanam I was talking to my daughter Sole, Lydia's twin sister, earlier on about this, and I asked her what questions she would have, and she was putting on her sort of, if you want, her cynical, skeptical hat, and one of the things that she was saying was, why should we care, right? Is it just because it's bad for humanity, or is it just that we think that cuddly animals are sweet and we should care about them? But how would you explain that, that when you're talking to these companies or governments around the urgency of the issues, why should we really care? (.) Why does it matter?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland So I will give you the kind of utilitarian argument, but I'm going to start by saying that we should care because we are nature, and there is a moral and ethical obligation not to trash our planet. And it's not just to nature, actually, but it's to us as humanity, you know, I can envision potentially a future in which we all live in glass boxes, and we eat manufactured food, and there's no need for any nature. But that is no planet on which I don't think any humanity would want to live, so that's, that's, that's the one argument, but the kind of, the argument that's often given, and it's, it's, it's a correct one as well, is that it does underpin the functioning of the environment that we live in, and we don't really necessarily realize that it's not nature gives us a lot of things for free. So it does clean our water, it does clean our air, it provides the matrix in which our crops grow, you know, soil is a living community of many millions, trillions of organisms that nurtures our crops, without that our crops would be really hard to grow. So, nature really is in the background of all the things that actually make our planet function.
Sanam I, I'm an anthropologist by background, and one of the things that I've always found is that when you go to sort of, you know, the pre monotheistic religions, or you go, you know, in Colombia and places where they've had a whole history and culture of seeing nature and humanity as one of the same, you know, right now you're a human being, you might be reborn as a, as a rock, frankly, or as a fish. And somehow that sense of, we're all equal, and, and we should be mutually respectful, um, it, it, it seems to exist in some of our sort of, you know, ancient cultures as well around the world.
Eleanor Milner-Gulland We've lost that sight, I think, here, at least in the Western cultures, although, obviously, not everybody has, and, um, I was very struck, for example, um, in the UK, we had this iconic tree. It was just very beautifully situated, called the Sycamore Gap Tree, and it was felled by a vandal one night, and the whole nation was devastated. Yes. (..) And it runs deep, this connection to nature, and it's not always seen. We see it in our children, but then we sort of lose touch a little bit, and bringing that back out is really, I think, vital to solving some of the many issues that we have in this world.
Sanam Here's this big problem. What do you do? What, you know, what has been your work, or what piece of it do you deal with and focus in on, and are you trying to address?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland So, my research area is pretty broad and interdisciplinary, and it's just around the kind of relationships that people have with nature, broadly speaking. But I guess a lot of what I do day to day, and more and more, is to try to build the next generation of conservationists who have the capacity, the networks, the ability to go out and actually make a difference. And, you know, I guess when you're younger, you feel like you're the one who has to do everything, and actually, as you get older, perhaps you find, no, I can actually have a lot more impact if I'm capacitating others to do it as well. So, I do a lot of that, and trying to bring people who perhaps have had a less advantaged background to give them the leg up, the opportunities to be able to get where they want to be in conservation. And the platform of Oxford really helps there. The other thing I do is a lot of work with policy, with governments, and with companies trying to bring nature into their discourse to help them to see the importance and the risks, but also the values attached to nature. Actually trying to understand how to make conservation work and be more effective.
Sanam What was your aha moment in terms of, in this universe, and then this, you know, this holistic approach that you're taking, but what were the sort of key moments that led you to where you are?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Yeah, I mean, I think I've almost always been on this journey. So, you know, I had a childhood in the countryside with parents who really cared about nature and knew a lot about nature, and that was really important for me. I've just always been someone who wants to make things change. So, for example, when I was at school, I went to my first careers fair, age 13, and marched up to the desk and said, I want to be prime minister. And how do I do that? And he didn't laugh at me, but he did say I'd have to join the political party. So I didn't like that so much. But it was because in those days, we were incredibly worried about nuclear war. And I felt if I was prime minister, I would be able to stop nuclear war, which was, of course, the arrogance of youth. (.) You know, ever since then, really, I've wanted, I've moved more into conservation. The key thing that I care about is nature, but I still just really want to find the way to make the biggest change that I personally am able to make through whatever route I can.
Sanam It resonates a lot with me personally, because I went through the Iranian Revolution, and I kept thinking, first of all, I don't want other people going through this, but how do we stop countries falling apart and having their own crises? And, you know, thinking about journalism and law and, you know, journalism, you observe the problem, but you don't deal with it. And it's forging your own path, right, of creating something that doesn't exist. Were there places or people that you met that made you sort of rethink the way traditional conservation was being done?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Yeah, I was so lucky in my PhD to have two really formative experiences. So when I turned up to do my PhD at Imperial College with no idea, really, as to what I wanted to do, other than I wanted to do something that was going to make a difference, my supervisor had just been given a consultancy by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to do some population modelling to find out whether the decline in elephant numbers was actually being caused by the ivory trade. And that led towards that piece of work, which he gave to me, led towards the ivory trade being banned. And that was just really formative in terms of international conservation policy, because I was 21 years old. I was thrust into this hugely contentious debate. And I realised that science isn't value free. And even if you do what you think is the best, most neutral objective science, it will be taken by sides in both directions and taken apart. And I felt like, wow, okay, I'm not sure I can deal with that. And then I went to the Soviet Union for the second half of my PhD and worked with something called the saig antelope, which is a very obscure species at the time anyway. And that was because my father was a professor of Russian art history. And he instilled in me just, it was a place of my imagination. I wanted to go and visit. I went there and I just found it so inspiring and so interesting to be there on the ground, talking to scientists and local people who were working for saiga conservation, really unnoticed by the West. And then after a few years, people came in from big international NGOs. And I was horrified by the way in which people just discarded all those decades of research. And they didn't really think that anything that had been done by the people I'd been working with was worth anything. And I found that very upsetting. And so I got this feeling that, you know, there's this big disconnect with between what happens at the international policy level and what's really going on on the ground, what that expertise on the ground is. And that really helped me to think, okay, how can I bridge that gap? How can I make sure that the people who actually know what's going on locally can have a voice to make sure that they actually have their expertise and their knowledge heard?
Sanam Fascinating, because right now we're having all these debates about decolonization of scholarship. And, you know, this idea that I was in Uganda a few years ago and we went to the head of the Nile. And, of course, the locals knew where it was, but it was only discovered because some English guy showed up there and discovered it. You know, this idea that people don't, until it's known and turned into somebody else's PhDs in a Western university, it's almost like that knowledge doesn't count. Elevating those voices, I think, is such an important, or that expertise, I should say, is so important in your work, in my work. How is that going? Is that, have you created, have you been able to sort of bridge those divides? Is it easier now with, you know, whether it's through technology or through the sort of policy awareness?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Well, yes and no. So I do constantly ask myself and ask my team, you know, what is the role of a wealthy, privileged university and wealthy, privileged professor in the Global North? What is my role and my team's role in conservation? Because the time is past when you just train up British PhD students to go and do their PhD on Species X in the romantic country Y and then come home again, you know, that is not the way we do things now. So I feel like I have this hugely privileged platform, which I have to use to the best advantage. So I do that by, firstly, making sure that everyone in my team understands their privilege and questions their privilege and tries to use it to the best. But also, I have a lot of programs where I try to bring people from less wealthy, less privileged backgrounds to Oxford to work as part of the team. And then we build networks around the world to try to break down those barriers.
Sanam There's sort of two things that came to mind for me. One is that this idea of sharing your privilege, sharing the space. We have an expression in Farsi, which is you can't ride a camel, bendy, bendy. It means that if you've got the camel and you're riding, you can't pretend that you don't have that position, right? So it's kind of very visual, if you want. But, you know, are there instances of inadvertent harm that's been done by conservationists that have come in, you know, bestowing their goodness on, you know, whatever community in Africa or Asia or wherever it may be? Have you come across that as well? I mean, those cases of, you know, you wanted to do good and you ended up doing bad?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Oh, they're everywhere. (.) I can't tell you how many of them there are. Generally, just failing. So wasting money, coming in, wasting people's time, actually. People who have a lot of other things to do with their time. So, for example, there's just a long, long, long tradition of alternative livelihoods projects for people who are reliant on wild meat for their food and for their income. People come in and say, oh, you can do basket weaving or beekeeping or aquaculture or whatever. And they come in thinking they have the solution from their desk. And they never think to ask people, what are the barriers? Why? Because, you know, people who live in these areas actually have the expertise. They're the ones who know their systems. You'd think they would have thought of option X if it was an option. (..) So, the first thing to say is, all right, so what would work for you? What are the constraints? What are the barriers? What are the things that actually, do you even see this as a problem? You know, is another question that isn't often asked. So, it's coming in and asking those questions in a spirit of humility is something that we just don't do and we should. It's because conservationists feel that they, you know, they have the moral high ground. You know, they come in thinking we have the moral high ground because we're trying to save nature.
Sanam And I think we need to get off that. It's across the whole spectrum of anything to do with international development that, you know, we, from out here, we sort of, people study and then they go and they think that they can tell the locals what to do about whatever issue it might be. It's, you know, whether it's female genital mutilation to war to conservation. I'm just so stunned by how similar the approach is. And the flip side of, yeah, the locals know and how one brings. And it's more complicated, obviously, and the answers are more complicated. The other question of privilege that, uh, when you mentioned privilege that, that struck me is this, you know, pessimism is a privilege of the privileged, right? So, so in a way we can be sitting here and saying, oh dear, you know, whatever the, the white rhino is about to go and stink, how terrible, how terrible, and, and, and feel pessimistic about it, but doesn't necessarily affect us. Number one, number two, how, how do you see pessimism actually causing inertia and, and lack lack of action, if you want, lack of change, um, is, is that something you come across as well? That people say there's nothing we can do, so let's not do anything?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Yes. And, and, you know, I founded conservation optimism a few years ago, uh, because for me, hopelessness, pessimism isn't an option. You know, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. How are we supposed to get young people coming into conservation and really trying to make a difference difference if they feel there's no point? How are we going to get government or companies to engage? Nobody wants to back a loser. You know, people want to back a loser. Yes, that's, yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, I think part of conservation optimism is to, is to try to combat that burnout, make people realise that there are others out there that, you know, they're not alone. You know, I've sent out hundreds and hundreds of people into the world and I feel that they're often sent out into very difficult situations where they can feel very alone and they can stop recognising their success for what it is. So the fact, for example, that a forest is even there at all is a massive success in some contexts. So trying to bring these people together and, and say, yes, we may not be winning the war yet, but we're winning battles. Let's see how we're, how we're winning those battles. Let's see about, you know, are there things we can scale up? Are there things we can learn from each other? And can we just kind of support each other through the bad days? You know, it is going to get worse, but there are also many, many examples, often at the kind of very local level of things going super, which we don't hear about. (.)
Sanam Can you give me an example of something that's going really well? (.)
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Well, coming back to my saigo antelopes, you know, that was a species that lost 95% of its population in the 10 years following the breakup of the Soviet Union and was on the point of extinction and now has bounced right back and has gone off the threatened species list this last year.
Sanam And that's because the country started working, working together and, and you had the sort of the scientists, the conservationists, the policy coming together around them, basically.
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Yeah, it's, it was something that the governments felt was serious. It actually gave me some confidence in the UN system because I, I didn't really think that having it, an MOU about it under the conventional migratory species would make any difference, but it really did because the countries took it seriously. And also it was dedicated people working together as a community, as you say, NGOs, scientists, people from in the countries concerned, people on the ground and the governments all working together. So it really can be done.
Sanam AJ, so a couple of sort of big questions that we always ask in the podcast. So you've talked about the kind of the nature of the work you do and the students that you've put out into the world and the networks you've created. But if you were in charge, what would you focus on? What would you try and do to make that, that change that if you had been prime minister? (..)
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Okay, well, I'll give you two and you can choose one.
Sanam Sure.
Eleanor Milner-Gulland So the first thing I would do is trying to just kind of reorientate the juggernaut of overconsumption and which overconsumption and the associated issues of kind of inequity and poverty. And in particular, I really think that we need to pay the true social and ecological cost of consumption of our goods and services. Everything comes for free or too cheap. a cotton once used dress for five pounds, that's not sustainable. It's not sustainable in human rights terms and it's not sustainable in ecological terms. You know, we have to get those externalities internalized, speaking in jargon. But, you know, we have to pay the true costs of our goods, both in terms of fair wage, but also in terms of the cost of the planet. That would, that would shift overconsumption. No perverse subsidies, you know, proper accounting of companies for the damage that they do. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing, maybe if I had loads of money, would be some kind of trust fund that could support nature stewardship. So the problem at the moment with all the interest in biodiversity that's coming from companies and governments is all about, okay, well, we've got to either kind of mitigate the risks that we face or we have to mitigate the damage that we're doing. So if you're doing damage and you're not changing your behavior, then the only thing you can do is to try and find a way to add biodiversity to the system, you know, restore nature or stop local people cutting down forests or something like that, which is all very well. But a better solution would be to reduce the damage firstly, but also then people who are actually currently stewards in nature, which is a lot of indigenous peoples, there's no reward for that at the moment because the nature is there as things stand. There's just this kind of moral hazard, really. So I would have some kind of trust fund that would unconditionally fund the indigenous groups, the local people who are actually currently keeping our nature going. (.)
Sanam That's, yeah, that's the second question that I was going to ask that if you were a billionaire, billionaire, if you were a billionaire, what would you do?
Eleanor Milner-Gulland I mean, I guess the other thing that I would do if I was a billionaire would be I've, I've got a few networks that I've set up, which I think are the type of things that really make a difference. And it's, it's always, it's always a little bit indirect, I think. So conservation optimism is a network around the world to support people who are engaged in conservation to help them to feel better and do better and be more effective. I've also got something called nature positive universities, which is helping universities to become more sustainable themselves, to teach more sustainably, helping students to learn about and initiate sustainability on campus, that kind of thing. And then I've also got another one called cascade, which is for academics in universities currently in the UK, but hopefully around the world to be able to be listened to by their governments and be able to provide evidence to their governments to support international and national policy. So I think those, I really like tacitating networks that allow people to have the influence, the voice, the power that they deserve, and they would be able to, to make a lot of use of. I'm right with you there.
Sanam It's, it's the, I call it scaling across, you know, it's, it's not about scaling one thing. It's, it's really about having the super local, wherever they are, being able to be connected globally. On that note, what gives you hope? (..)
Eleanor Milner-Gulland You started by saying, you know, biodiversity is the poor cousin and it is. But I think people are more and more realizing that we need to support nature and we need to conserve and restore nature and biodiversity for its own sake, but for our own sakes as well. And so I do see a shift in perspective around biodiversity. People are taking notice and it's too little getting close to being too late. But the one thing about nature actually is that it does recover. If you take your foot off the pedal, it can recover very quickly. It's, it is resilience. And so, you know, that gives me hope. The other thing that gives me hope is, and I'm sure everybody would say this, who's interacted with young people, is that they are our future and they are stepping up. (.)
Sanam They are. Yeah, absolutely. It's actually, when you said about taking our foot off the pedal, I, I just remember when, you know, when COVID, when we were all stuck at home during COVID and how quickly certain rivers got, the fish were back and things like that. And I sometimes wonder where the nature is just waiting for us to make ourselves extinct so that they can, you know, the species can come back themselves and say the hell with this, with this, with this human lot. //S03: Yeah.//
Eleanor Milner-Gulland There is room on our planet. You know, there are ways forward. I think the problem is that we see there's so many dire paths to the future, but there's good paths to the future as well. Yeah. And we just need to find that good path. There'll be many, or actually what we need to find is the braid of good paths. You know, there is no one path we're not, you know, we're not going to have a totalitarian world that works, but, but there are many paths that could join together into something that's quite powerful. So what we say in conservation optimism, we don't make light of the difficulties, the issues, the challenges, but what we do say is that at the end, there's always a call to action. There's always a way forward. That's the most important thing.
Sanam That's perfect note to, to end on. There's always a way forward. Professor Dame E.J. Milner-Gullen, thank you so much for sharing your time, your expertise, your passion. Thank you so much.
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Well, thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and yeah, really nice to meet Lydia's mom. Yes. Thank you.
Sanam Thanks a lot. Okay. I think we're done. (.)
Eleanor Milner-Gulland Brilliant. (.......)
Sanam This is an Africa digital audio production. My executive producer is Pierce Lynch and it contains original music by Little Monster Media. Remember, you can catch a new episode of If You Were In Charge every Tuesday. A huge thanks from me to the Bosch Academy for making these conversations possible and to my own organization, ICANN, for allowing me the time to explore these big issues with my guests and spend some time with my daughters. If you want to get in touch, you can find all our social media links on our website and the link is in the description of the episode. So that's it for If You Were In Charge. I'm Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. See you next time. Bye.