#15 Grunting with the gorilla gardeners with Ian Redmond OBE. 1 of 2

Jul 23, 24

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Episode 15 Grunting with the gorilla gardeners. Ian Redmond OBE in conversation

[00:00:00] Charlotte: Hello!, welcome to the East Africa Travel Podcast. Today we’re talking about the interconnectedness of life and how gorillas, chimps and elephants of the Congo Basin are connected with a loaf of bread in England.

[00:00:30] Charlotte: I’m your host, Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Muzungu. Thanks for listening.

[00:00:35] Charlotte: Regular listeners will know that one of the reasons I created this podcast is so I can introduce you to some of the incredible people that I’ve met working in conservation and tourism over the last 15 years in East Africa.

Today’s guest is one of my conservation heroes.

He confesses that he’s been in love with East Africa since 1976.

[00:00:56] Charlotte: Known locally as Mandevu, “the bearded one,” Briton Ian Redmond, OBE, is a tropical field biologist and conservationist, best known for his work with great apes and elephants. His story about how he first got to East Africa is as interesting as everything else he’s done since.

One of the things I really admire about Ian Redmond is the way that he seized, or dare I say, created the opportunity to travel to East Africa, even travelling by freight ship and cargo plane!

[00:01:27] Charlotte: In 1978, he introduced Sir David Attenborough to the Gorillas for the BBC’s Life on Earth series. And, when we think about gorillas, I know for a British person, that’s perhaps the most vivid encounter we’ve ever seen: Sir David, in the mountains with the gorillas. Since then, Ian’s advised on the making of more than a hundred documentaries for BBC, National Geographic, and the Discovery Channel, amongst others.

[00:01:51] Charlotte: In 2006, Ian was appointed an Order of the British Empire, OBE, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Ian is involved numerous organisations, and I’m going to put information about all of those in the show notes.

I first met Ian in Kampala when he was there with The Gorilla Organization.

[00:02:11] Charlotte: I was introduced to him through Jillian Miller. I’ve also met Ian at Kwita Izina, the gorilla naming ceremony in Rwanda, which celebrates its 20th edition this year.

I had so much that I wanted to talk to Ian about and so this interview is a two-part series.

[00:02:28] Charlotte: In today’s episode, we talk about: his role in the Mountain Gorilla story, his unusual approach to securing a job with Dian Fossey, what she might think of gorilla conservation now, and the turning points in his life: the killing of Digit, the young silverback gorilla, and the killing of Charles, the elephant. Ian also talks about the role of gorillas, chimps and elephants in managing our forests and how that’s linked with the bread that we eat in a small town in England!

[00:02:58] Charlotte: I hope you enjoy this week’s episode.

[00:03:04] Charlotte: Ian Redmond, OBE, very much for agreeing to be part of the East Africa Travel Podcast. I know that you’ve got so much that my audience would like to hear about, and I know that by connecting with you that they can hear about some really amazing conservation initiatives across East Africa, across the world.

[00:03:19] Ian Redmond OBE: Thank you for inviting me.

Here we are in Stroud, in Gloucestershire, talking about East Africa!

I’ve been in love with East Africa since 1976 when I first arrived there. I go back at every opportunity, which is sometimes to take tourists, or my last trip was actually taking parties of tour operators on what I now know is called a fam trip, a familiarisation trip where they could visit all the different hotels, just stay in one of them, but visit lots of them and experience the gorillas and the golden monkeys, so that when their clients want to know what it’s like, they have first-hand experience.

[00:03:58] Ian Redmond OBE: A company in Kigali called Travulous organized two back to back trips of tour operators, mostly from North America, and we had a ball. It was great because obviously they knew the travel business, so I got to look around lots of hotels that I would never normally stay in, including some of the very high end ones which have now moved in; and some of them are doing really good stuff because they’re buying land around their hotel, which is contiguous with the park.

[00:04:27] Ian Redmond OBE: So effectively, they’re expanding the park by converting former agriculture into natural habitat again. And from some of them, elephants, buffalo, and even on one occasion, a couple of occasions, gorillas have been to investigate the land around the hotel.

[00:04:46] Ian Redmond OBE: So, it’s a very positive conservation message that conservation finance doesn’t just pay the rangers and help the local communities with the community benefit sharing, but it’s actually increasing the amount of area available to wildlife.

[00:05:02] Ian Redmond OBE: And that provides ecosystem services, which has been the part of conservation that has been least talked about.

[00:05:10] Charlotte: So you were in Uganda and Rwanda, were you, on this last trip?

[00:05:13] Ian Redmond OBE: Last year, yes, because we also had a couple of lovely donors to The Gorilla Organization, which I’m proud to be the chairman of the trustees of, who came to see our projects and visit the gorillas, of course.

[00:05:24] Ian Redmond OBE: So that was the Uganda bit. And it was my first time back in that area (which has been my second home since the mid ‘70s), since the pandemic, so I’ve had this long period of three years without being back home, having been able to travel to “Gorilla Land.”

[00:05:42] Charlotte: And, so your first exposure to the gorillas, if I’m right, was with Dian Fossey in Rwanda?

[00:05:50] Ian Redmond OBE: Yes. When I was at university, I organized speakers for the biology society. I invited someone who was recommended by this chap who had just come back from Rwanda studying gorillas for two years with Dian Fossey (who was not a known name at the time).

This was in ’76 and he stayed in my flat overnight. (He’s known as Sandy Harcourt, and he’s part of the whole Mountain Gorilla story).

[00:06:14] Ian Redmond OBE: And Sandy gave me Dian’s number, and gave me two bits of advice. He said, “when you live in a tin hut in the mountains, if something breaks, it stays broken unless somebody can fix it, so if you can fix it, mention that.” And the other bit of advice was “don’t mention my name” because he and Dian had fallen out big time.

[00:06:32] Ian Redmond OBE: So, I wrote to Dian and pointed out to her that my academic supervisors didn’t rate me very highly but I was very keen and would love to come and “help mend the roof or make the tea” was the phrase I remember using. And months later, Dian wrote back and said, “if that’s the case, you’re welcome to come here.”

[00:06:53] Ian Redmond OBE: Essentially, she was saying, “if you can get here, we’ll try you.” And she said, if I spent more than three months doing what she considered to be useful work (that was obviously her decision) she would cover my Nairobi to Kigali fare. I got a one-way ticket from Nairobi when I got to Nairobi, and then on the way back, I got a lift on a freight plane.

[00:07:14] Charlotte: Wow, interesting!

[00:07:15] Ian Redmond OBE: And then worked my passage from Mombasa back to the UK on a cargo ship.

[00:07:20] Charlotte: Superb! Oh, that’s the way to travel.

[00:07:21] Ian Redmond OBE: It’s certainly the way if you haven’t got any money! And I didn’t have any money so…

[00:07:27] Charlotte: But how long did you end up staying or working for Dian?

[00:07:30] Ian Redmond OBE: Well on that first trip it was about 18 months. I was back home for a little bit and then poachers killed Uncle Bert and Macho so I got out there as quickly as I could on another freight plane from the UK with the same company.

[00:07:41] Ian Redmond OBE: It turns out the freight planes usually have what they call a technician seat and usually they’re empty, if there isn’t any technical expertise needed. There’s no good standing at the end of the runway with your thumb out! You have to chat to someone in the company and yes, they had heard that there had been poaching and that I had to get back out there, and they kindly flew me from Gatwick to Kigali – for nowt!

[00:08:03] Charlotte: Why do you work in conservation?

[00:08:05] Ian Redmond OBE: I describe myself as a naturalist by birth. (I think people who are just fascinated with natural history are born that way – you can’t train someone to be fascinated; a biologist, by training, because that’s what I studied at university; and a conservationist by necessity, because twice, when I was studying wonderful animals, they were killed by poachers who had a very different agenda. And now, with the distance of time, I can see that their agenda was entirely logical.

[00:08:33] Ian Redmond OBE: They had no money. Some foreigner was prepared to give them some money if they did this. So whether or not it was part of their own culture, their need for income prompted them to break the law and go and kill an animal because a muzungu wanted to buy – in the case of the gorilla – the heads and the hands, or the babies.

[00:08:53] Ian Redmond OBE: And in the case of the elephant: the front teeth, sometimes the tail hairs or the skin or the meat, you know, less valuable products. And those two events, first with Digit, and then other members of the study groups that we were studying with Dian Fossey. Ten years later, when I was studying underground elephants (on Mount Elgon in Kenya); elephants would go deep into caves to mine the mineral-rich walls of the cave.

[00:09:18] Ian Redmond OBE: One of my study animals there was killed, and I found his body with his face sliced off in a single plane, which suggested it had been a chainsaw. Those poachers are in a hurry. If they’re in a protected area, the shooting will attract rangers, Now they’re usually shooting with small caliber guns, not designed for elephant killing, designed for people killing – guns of war.

[00:09:38] Ian Redmond OBE: So if you’ve got an AK 47, you have to spray a lot of bullets into an elephant unless you’re a very good shot and know where to shoot if you want to kill it. And so the herd flees in panic, individuals, depending on the number of bullets in them will stumble and fall and die slowly, or be caught up with more bullets pumped in.

[00:09:56] Ian Redmond OBE: And then the dismembering, with elephants that’s just usually at the front of the face. It takes time to get a tusk. The total length of an elephant’s tusk (about a third of it) is the root and, like a human tooth, it’s got connective tissue. It’s really hard to get it out unless it’s been lying there in the heat for a few days and then it’s rotting and you can slide it out and there isn’t time to carefully cut it out.

[00:10:21] Ian Redmond OBE: So a chainsaw speeds that process. But yes, standing beside Digit’s body in January 1978 was a turning point in my life. And when I started studying the elephants on Mount Elgon in Kenya that go into the caves, it was wonderful because it wasn’t a conservation project. It was just a fascinating, you know, ‘satisfying my curiosity’ project and then the poachers hit and mid-80s. And in 1987, ten years after the death of Digit in December 1977, I’m standing beside the body of another animal who had begun to trust me – not to the extent that Digit was. Digit was a friend, he would choose to come and hang out with me. And I lost a friend there. With Charles, this elephant, you know, he tolerated me.

[00:11:10] Ian Redmond OBE: Hadn’t gotten to the point where we actually had a positive relationship, but he had got used to the idea of a tame human who would rumble at him to try and reassure him in the same way that Dian learned to make the gorilla reassuring sounds. And I took photographs of him in the cave, in the dark, mining. And if you see pictures of elephants actually mining in colour, those are my shots of Charles. And after three, four shots, he turned around and stuck his ears out, which is a sort of instinctive response.

[00:11:41] Ian Redmond OBE: Totally dark in the cave (so a visual display is not the best idea!) But I took a picture of that and the ears stuck out. I thought, “I’ve got to call him Charles (with all due respect to our current king!” And then, a year later, standing beside Charles’s body (no, actually it was a few years later).

[00:12:05] Ian Redmond OBE: I can’t be certain it was Charles, but it was the right size, right place. And it doesn’t matter if it was the individual I knew or another one. He was a young male, not yet reproductive. That’s the end of his genetic line.

And from an ecological point of view, if he was killed at 15, and he might live to 65, that’s 50 years! Of work in the forest: 52 weeks a year, that’s 52 tons of manure that that elephant would have been adding to the forest, enriching the soils. So every time you see a dead elephant, it’s a tragedy for the family of that elephant. It’s a lost opportunity for that individual. It’s a loss of the genetic material and whatever cultural information he might carry.

[00:12:51] Ian Redmond OBE: If it’s an old individual, you know, that’s a store of knowledge for that population of elephants. But it’s a loss of the habitat. And it impoverishes the ecosystem to lose such an important individual animal to the point that if you put a value on the difference an elephant makes to a habitat, it works out at about USD $2 million per elephant over the course of 60 odd years.

[00:13:16] Ian Redmond OBE: And if that was translated into funding for local communities to protect their elephants, think how those communities would flourish. So that’s what drove me into conservation. And in recent years, in meeting Ralph Chami, the economist at the IMF, and Walid Al Saqqaf, who’s a blockchain specialist, who thinks that the blockchain might deliver that money to the communities without possibility of corruption, and Rob Gardner, who’s the fourth co-founder of Rebalance Earth, who is a finance specialist.

[00:13:48] Ian Redmond OBE: He’s spent a career in the pensions industry handling billions! And knows how these things work. So between the four of us, we’ve got the conservation skills, the economic skills, the, the blockchain skills, and the, the financial management and regulation skills. Our goal is to change the global economy. And that’s from a bloke who just likes to hang out with gorillas and elephants. Who’d have thought it?

And increasingly, I hope, corporations and people who benefit from the services that ecosystems provide – the rain, the air, the carbon sequestration and storage – will pay for those services. And that’s our goal with Rebalance Earth, to internalize the cost of conservation and investment in nature so that nature pays dividends, which it will, of course, because when nature is allowed to flourish, you have natural abundance.

[00:14:45] Ian Redmond OBE: With care and attention, those numbers can recover. But if you’ve still only got 5% of what there once was; elephants, we know that we’ve lost something like 95%. Other species, the average is like two thirds; we’ve lost two thirds of the individual animals over the past 50 years. That’s my working life.

[00:15:09] Ian Redmond OBE: So as a conservationist, I’ve failed abysmally. I and all the other conservationists who have spent the last few decades trying to prevent this, I suspect if we hadn’t been trying, we’d have lost them a lot faster. The UN designated this as the decade of ecosystem restoration. More and more people are talking about rewilding and restoring ecosystems.

[00:15:28] Charlotte: And the value of an elephant beyond the tourism value, for example.

[00:15:32] Ian Redmond OBE: Yes. And as we’re all aware in recent years, tourism has halted because of genocide, civil war. A terrorist attack in Africa will deter some people from going to the continent. Even though Africa is, whatever it is, 50/53 or 54 countries, thousands of miles apart.

[00:15:51] Ian Redmond OBE: And the fact that a bomb goes off in Nairobi shouldn’t deter you from going to some other part of – or if it’s in West Africa – but people just see Africa and think everywhere is dangerous “I don’t want to go there.” So any conservation work, from paying government rangers to patrol national parks, to engaging local communities to not destroy the habitat the biodiversity that the species concerned; if that’s dependent on tourism income, it is in jeopardy if tourists stop to come.

[00:16:22] Ian Redmond OBE: So the pandemic stopped tourism, civil wars stopped tourism, and yet the animals are still going about their business in the forest, eating and pooing, nutrient recycling, which encourages the big trees to sequester and store carbon and put water vapor into the atmosphere. and regulate the runoff when it rains in the forest, so it doesn’t rush down and flood the villages downstream.

[00:16:44] Ian Redmond OBE: It soaks into the forest and then when it stops raining for a while, the forest continues to let the water out like a giant sponge, so the communities living around it have year round water. All that is at risk if you lose that habitat, so the fact that some bits of habitat are being restored, it means you’ve got a bigger sponge.

[00:17:02] Ian Redmond OBE: The projections for what the world would be like if average global temperatures continue to rise is that sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon and the Southeast Asian rainforested islands will become arid, so no rainforest, no rain, no rainforest animals, and that whole ecosystem; that isn’t just a tragedy for them.

[00:17:22] Ian Redmond OBE: Those ecosystems send water vapour rivers in the sky around the world that water the crops here in the Strand. So if we destroy those forests, either through ignorance or through just desperation, people cutting down trees because they haven’t got an option, then that’s going to impact on everyone on the planet.

[00:17:43] Ian Redmond OBE: So if everyone on the planet, when they bought something, a little bit of the purchase price was to pay for the ecosystem services that resulted in that product, you know, you buy a computer or a loaf of bread and you know that the company that made that product has calculated the price to cover the employees, that the plumber who fixes the loo’s when they go wrong, the accountant that does the books, all those things are in that price.

[00:18:09] Ian Redmond OBE: Those services are considered to be part of the economy. But nature, economists used to tell you, is an ‘externality’, not part of our clever economic system. And so we don’t pay for nature, but we need to because nature is being depleted almost everywhere on the planet. And that’s our life support system.

[00:18:30] Ian Redmond OBE: So it’s really important that people understand that. It’s not just that gorillas are nice and share some DNA with us, and that elephants have got funny noses and our children like them. All those are true. But the reason they’re important is that they are keystone species in those globally important ecosystems that help to keep the whole planet healthy.

[00:18:51] Ian Redmond OBE: And that’s the message we’re trying to get across. And then if tourists come and give you more money to come and see those animals, that’s a bonus. That’s the cherry on the icing on the cake. But what about the cake? So I want to value the cake, and then the tourism is just an extra on top. And it turns out that if you were to pay for the amount of carbon to be sequestered by a machine, which is what people are now designing, as if we haven’t got beautifully evolved natural machinery in the form of forests and animals!

[00:19:21] Ian Redmond OBE: If you were to pay for that, the amount that can be attributed to an individual forest elephant was calculated by Ralph Chami. who at the time was the assistant director of the International Monetary Fund, so someone people listen to. Each elephant’s work, not the elephant himself or herself, but the work that they do in the forest by eating and pruning and pooing, was equivalent to about USD$1.75 million.

[00:19:48] Charlotte: Over its lifetime.

[00:19:49] Ian Redmond OBE: Over its lifetime, so about USD$ 30,000 a year, USD$80 dollars a day, if we were paying for that service. Right. Now, I think people who complain about elephants eating their crops or even, you know, killing people would be much more tolerant of that and have the money to put up a fence if they were paid to keep that elephant alive and doing the job in the forest.

[00:20:10] Ian Redmond OBE: And that’s the premise of Rebounds Earth. It’s all kind of joined up. And whilst we don’t want too much rain in a single time, we do want rain to fall on our crops. And what most people don’t realize is that the loaf of bread that was made from wheat that’s grown in Gloucestershire (in the UK) is watered by weather systems that you can track back to the Congo Basin.

[00:20:30] Charlotte: That’s incredible.

[00:20:31] Ian Redmond OBE: And that, if you look at the role of gorillas and chimpanzees and elephants in those forests, which is to eat fruit and poo seeds in a package of fertilizer, 365 days a year; they’re fertilizing the land and spreading the seeds of the next generation of trees that will put water vapor into the atmosphere to travel around and water the crops in Gloucestershire.

[00:20:52] Ian Redmond OBE: And not only that, thinking of migratory species, because I’ve just been at the UN Convention on Migratory Species 14th Conference of the Parties. COP14 was hosted by Uzbekistan in Central Asia, the first time a big UN meeting has been held in that part of the world. That’s important because whilst we mark our seasons by the arrival of the cuckoo, you know, people write to The Times about “the first cuckoo” it’s getting earlier every year and we watch swallows and swifts and if we’re in the right place in Scotland corncrakes ‘craking’ in the fields – all those species spend their winter months in Africa and for them to fly back here (especially getting across the Sahara) they feed up on insects, whose life cycles are in the forests that the gorillas and the elephants and the chimpanzees keep healthy.

[00:21:40] Ian Redmond OBE: So, you know, natural history here, people like to watch the birds as they arrive and then see them go in the winter. Well, they’re going off to rub shoulders with birds. The species that we think of as ‘far away and exotic’, and yet the same individual bird, year after year, is coming backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards: elephants and gorillas, farms in Gloucestershire; elephants and gorillas, farms in Gloucestershire. And that joined-up thinking of conservation is what the CMS, Convention on Migratory Species, is all about, because species that move across a border, if they’re protected in one country, and not in the other, it isn’t going to work. You need a collaboration.

[00:22:16] Charlotte: Fascinating. When are you writing your biography or autobiography?

[00:22:19] Ian Redmond OBE: Well, I’ve got to finish the biography I started decades ago of Digit the gorilla whose death was a milestone in gorilla conservation and in human gorilla relations. And it’s a three part book, and I’ve written part one and part two, but the part three, which is the consequences of Digit’s death, are still happening.

[00:22:41] Ian Redmond OBE: But I should have finished it 20 years ago. Indeed, I should have finished it before that! But every time there’s a new development, but the book hasn’t an end.

[00:22:51] Ian Redmond OBE: No, and I need someone to hobble my feet – to stop me going somewhere – to finish it! Those who have been waiting for a long time for the biography of Digit, I do apologise. It will come. I’m determined to get it out.

[00:23:04] Charlotte: I’d love to read it.

[00:23:05] Charlotte: What would Dian Fossey think of gorilla conservation, how gorilla tracking is a tourism activity, and how Rwanda, for example, has developed on the back of it?

[00:23:17] Ian Redmond OBE: Well, given that Dian feared that mountain gorillas would be extinct within the same century that they were discovered, so described by science in 1902, the people who lived there knew that they were there all the time, but the foreigners coming in and collecting a specimen and describing it in a journal, that’s what’s considered a discovery.

[00:23:39] Ian Redmond OBE: And that happened in 1902. Dian feared that by 2002, they’d be gone, but largely down to her work and the example she set, sometimes inspiring people to want to emulate her, sometimes inspiring people to say, “no, she’s doing it all wrong. We want to do it this way. And this is better.” And a combination of all those measures have led to where we are today.

[00:24:04] Ian Redmond OBE: So I think basically she’d be thrilled that there are more gorillas every year than there were the year before in the Virungas and in Bwindi. It’s not the case across the whole ten countries that have gorillas. We now consider there to be two species, and the western gorillas are still declining. The cross river gorillas on the borders of Nigeria and Cameroon are down to maybe 280, are really critically endangered.

[00:24:28] Ian Redmond OBE: Eastern lowland gorillas are still declining, only found in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But the mountain gorilla populations have had such a lot of attention, and with revenues from tourism and philanthropy, charities like The Gorilla Organization, the Dian Fossey Gorilla  Fund, the Gorilla  Doctors have all played a part. in securing their recovery. It’s a fragile partial recovery. Mountain gorillas are into four figures.

I mean in the 1980s, they were down to probably at the lowest point, something like 350 (individuals). You always hear the 250-figure, which is the Virunga population but at that time we hadn’t counted Bwindi (Impenetrable Forest), and there were probably at least 100 to 150 there.

[00:25:09] Ian Redmond OBE: So if there were 250 in the Virungas, and let’s say for sake of argument, 150 in Bwindi, let’s say there were 400.

[00:25:18] Ian Redmond OBE: But now there’s over 1100, about 1100. And going up every year. So they’re recovering areas which were depleted in gorillas before. And that’s really important because that’s putting the gorilla back into the ecosystem.

[00:25:32] Ian Redmond OBE: It’s not just, there’s a forest and gorillas might or might not be there. Gorillas are part of that forest. And when they build a nest in a tree, or a chimpanzee builds a nest in a tree, it’s like folding an umbrella. So there’s a tight ball of vegetation and all around it there’s a light gap. What do apes do when they wake up in the morning? They poo, and the seeds in the poo drop into that space. And when the sun shines, that bit of canopy has been folded into a nest.

[00:26:00] Ian Redmond OBE: So it’s ideal, you’ve got seeds in a packet of fertilizer under a light gap. And that’s how the forest works. And that provides the ecosystem services for the surrounding agriculture and the communities that depend on the water from the forest.

[00:26:16] Ian Redmond OBE: Obviously the fresh air, because photosynthesis takes in CO2, releases the oxygen, stores the carbon. And that stabilizes the climate. So we’re getting lots of services that we’re not paying for. And people think that gorillas are valuable because you can go and see them on holiday!

[00:26:32] Charlotte: We’re missing the point really.

[00:26:33] Ian Redmond OBE: We’re kind of missing the point.

I often like to use single malt whiskies as an example, you know, so many distilleries in Scotland, so little time to get round them all and taste each one! But when you go there, it’s often seen as a tourist attraction. But the tourist attraction is kind of the cherry on the icing on the cake.

[00:26:52] Ian Redmond OBE: What is the cake? They’re distilling whiskey in beautiful big copper vats and, and that’s fascinating and people find that interesting. But when you go and see the gorillas, you’re not thinking, “Oh, they’re the workers in this wonderful factory.” You’re thinking, “oh, they are just like us. Look at their hands. Look at their eyes. I want to commune with this non-human being.” And of course I understand that because I’ve had the extraordinary privilege to be accepted into families of gorillas without tourism, without the current rules and interact with them in a way which we now try to discourage. That might sound hypocritical.

[00:27:25] Ian Redmond OBE: I’ve enjoyed that and I just want to stop everyone else. But coming from all over the world, you’re potentially carrying diseases. In the COVID pandemic, people started to understand about social distances. Social distancing. If you have a virus, and if it’s a virus that is spread by a droplet infection, wearing a mask can help.

[00:27:46] Ian Redmond OBE: If it’s aerosol infection, the mask doesn’t do very much, but it does stop you coughing and spluttering. The rule used to be, okay, you have to keep seven meters away, because in a laboratory, a sneeze has been found to carry, for nearly that amount. So if someone sneezes, you don’t want them sneezing on a gorilla because it depends on the wind direction.

[00:28:04] Ian Redmond OBE: All sorts of things. But everyone now has kind of accepted. Okay. We want to keep the gorillas safe, we’ll wear a surgical mask and…

[00:28:12] Charlotte: You have to do that now, don’t you? All great apes.

[00:28:16] Ian Redmond OBE: You have to wear a mask at all great ape sites now. Yes. Before, some people did, some didn’t, and I don’t think there was any obvious difference in the incidence of diseases between those sites. But because of COVID, everyone understands now, keep your distance, wear a mask, reduce the risk, and hopefully keep the gorillas safe. Because no-one wants to be the tourist that wanted a selfie and introduced a disease to the gorillas. And some of them ended up dying. That would be a terrible thing to have on your conscience.

[00:28:44] Charlotte: Okay, well thank you for that, Ian. I love hearing you talk, Ian. You’ve taught me so much over the years. Rebalance Earth, I think, is really exciting, but I’ve got lots of other things I want to talk to you about.

[00:28:56] Charlotte: One of the things I really enjoy about these conversations with these interesting people is that as I’m editing the content, I get to listen again and again. And I get a deeper and deeper understanding of what drives people and what inspires people. It’s such an honour to be doing this series of podcasts.

[00:29:13] Charlotte: Hope you’ve enjoyed my first conversation with Ian Redmond. Listen in next week, episode 16, when we will resume our conversation.

[00:29:22] Charlotte: A few of the things we’ll be talking about next week are:

travel advisories and the safety of traveling to East Africa

is there any other conservation model around the world that is as effective as gorilla tracking?

Western lowland gorillas and bonobos. What’s the difference?

There’s a phenomenon called primatologist’s neck. What is it that Ian is referring to there?

Which great ape is your favourite?

[00:29:48] Charlotte: You’ve been listening to the East Africa Travel Podcast, hosted by me, Charlotte Beauvoisin, author of Diary of a Mzungu. Thanks for listening.

[00:30:00] Charlotte: Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. It’s such an honour to get a chance to speak to Ian. He has so much to share and he’s such a superb communicator. I feel quite empowered listening to him, feeling motivated and encouraged to try and fix nature and to inspire that passion in others.

[00:30:20] Charlotte: I’ve had a huge amount of fun talking to Ian, reading more about his work, researching a lot of the organisations that he works with so, please check out the show notes on Diary of a Muzungu; there’s a long list of links all about Ian and his work.

[00:30:37] Charlotte: If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please share it with your friends or give us a review on Apple or Spotify or write a comment on Diary of a Muzungu.

[00:30:47] Charlotte: See you next week!