I've never done that before. Don't worry about it. You can you can direct me because I've been what was which being on anyway.
Could you just start by saying your name and. Okay. And your title?
So my name's on a Garland tested event as professor of biodiversity in the Zoology Department.
Who else? That's lovely. And can you just give me a brief account of your career up to the point that you got to where you are now?
Yes. I've always been interested in country, countryside and nature because I was brought up in in rural Sussex.
But also being interested in science. And so and then aged about 13, I decided I, I really wanted to save the world.
And those two things kind of came together in an interesting conservation.
So I've been working conservation, you know, my entire career.
I did my undergraduate degree in pure and Applied Biology here, Oxford,
and that was a really nice course that fitted my interest because it had the pure side of behaviour and evolution and things like that,
but also the applied side of kind of agriculture, forestry and development, economics, that kind of thing.
That would allow me to think about how to apply biology in the real world.
Then I did my PhD on on the wildlife trade elephants,
rhinos and saiga antelopes using population models to think through sustainability of wildlife trade.
And, and that was really great because from my Ph.D. when I first arrived for my Ph.D. in the first term,
the ivory trade was being talked about as could it be banned in international conventions.
And my supervisor was given a consultancy which allowed me,
as a 21 year old to go and present my models to CITES the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.
And ever since then, I've had this kind of interface and job in which I've done pure science,
but also been involved in international and national policy and working with NGOs to try to implement the solutions that we've been thinking about.
And that's been just a great privilege.
So and you arrived in Oxford in 2015 in your current post, having been at Second Imperial from Imperial before that.
Yes. Yeah. So let let's just go to an example of the kind of work that your group does.
You mentioned that you've been working in Cambodia quite a lot.
So what what have been the issues that you've been interested in that?
So Cambodia's been this wonderful long term project with a with a conservation NGO, big one called the Wildlife Conservation Society.
And they had a very enlightened policy towards research because, you know, not all and JS necessarily want to engage with researchers,
but they had implemented a programme to protect critically endangered bird species in the northern plains of Cambodia.
But what was the threat to these species? Hunting, cutting down trees and habitat loss.
And they designed this a payments for ecosystem services scheme for local people to pay
them to to guard these birds and to do aquaculture that was more environmentally friendly.
And also they were helping the government to put protected areas in place.
And so our research was trying to find the ecological and social impacts of those programmes and help the NGO to design them.
So they started in 2008. We came in in 2012, the guy who actually designed the programme came and did a Ph.D. with me to evaluate them.
And ever since then we've been working closely with them to evaluate the and the
progress and and that has then fed into the design and improvement of those programmes,
which has been really good to see.
So we get very independent advice, but we're working very closely with them so that so that it really changes things on the ground.
And I've had numerous Ph.D. students and Master's students working with us and in other parts of Cambodia as well now.
But it's all been around how do we do conservation better?
And that's what I really like to do.
I've had a long term projects as well in Central Africa, working with wild meat and how to improve sustainability for wild meat consumption.
What kind of animals are we talking about here? What is hugely varied.
So it goes all the way from kind of frogs and snails and through crocs.
Most of the world meat is actually mammals, so forest antelopes and then going up to kind of pigs and things like that.
Much of the wild meat is actually sustainably harvested.
So local people are catching, for example, cane rats in their crops who are eating their crops so that the crop pests and.
And then eating them or selling them. Some of it isn't sustainable.
So some of it is things like this, some primate harvests, which are pretty unsustainable.
So we took chimps. Monkeys? Well, yeah, more monkeys and chimps.
So colobus monkeys, for example, and civets.
And the great apes aren't particularly harvested for me, to be honest.
But, you know, elephants, you know, there's various things that get hunted for various reasons,
some of it for food, some of it for trophies, for export.
Things like pangolins were traditionally harvested in Central Africa for meat at relatively low levels,
but are now obviously subject to a rather large international wildlife trade, which is very much unsustainable.
And and then I've also had a big research programme in in Asia, China, Vietnam and Singapore, places like that,
working to understand the motivations of consumers and how to intervene to reduce illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade into Asia.
Can you give me an example of that? Yeah, sure. So for example, we and we did a programme in Singapore recently,
so I've had a long term other interest in Saiga Antelope, which lives in Central Asia, in Glass,
in Central Asia, and the horns have for thousands of years been used in Chinese traditional medicine,
and they're used for something called heat illness. So it's like a fever and liver disease as well.
And actually kind of similar to rhino horn in some ways.
So that species now critically endangered is still legal to use like a horn in Singapore because they have a domestic stockpile.
And we did a study to find out what proportion of people were using it.
And we found out that 20% of Chinese Singaporeans had used the cyclone as their preferred treatment for illness in the last year.
So that's huge, you know. And so we then thought about like, what is it that motivates them?
And so we did a lot of focus groups and detailed research with,
like with people in Singapore and understood that, you know, the main reason is because it it works for them.
It works to reduce heat illness. And because they're being recommended by friends and family and delving further,
it was clear that middle aged women were particularly important in that because they were given their children and grandchildren.
Singapore for a ward, just like you would give someone Calpol in this country.
And so, you know, that's a very difficult thing to think through how to change if a treatment works.
And, you know, I guess from a Western perspective,
I would say that I couldn't quite understand why other than the placebo effect, because saiga horn is keratin.
But has anybody done a controlled trial? Knows there have been trials in a kind of traditional medicine context that showed
some effect of both the buffalo and cyclone and rhino horn in reducing fever.
So, you know, maybe we haven't got to the bottom of why it works,
that there are alternatives available which are less preferred, but there's different kinds of herbal tea.
There's also Western medicine like paracetamol.
And so then we talked to our demographic who we wanted to change the behaviour of the middle aged women and asked them,
you know, what kind of messaging would, would make you think twice about cyclone.
And they said the conservation message that this is a critically endangered species because we're not aware of that and we're not aware
a lot of people weren't aware that these hormones were coming from the wild and that the animals were being killed to get the horns.
They were thinking it was found sustainable. So that conservation message was something that we then put out in a controlled way as the researchers,
through the media, that these people engage with and trust.
And then we could monitor the engagement with that message and then see how it change behaviour.
So that's one example. We've also done work in in Vietnam with pangolins as well to try to understand who's using pangolin products.
And the answer there was, you know, there's a number of different pangolin products that are used,
meat scales, kind of other products in tonics and being used for different reasons.
So for example, the meat is eaten a lot in restaurants by people out socialising business partners to impress them.
The scales are used in a tonic as a to try to improve wellbeing for example, and that's different people.
And so all the messages we've got from these long term programmes, you know,
both working with local people who are eating meat in Africa and working with people who are eating wildlife,
imported wildlife in, in, in Southeast Asia is you have to understand legislation to people.
Those motivations are complicated and there is no way that you're going to succeed in changing,
unsustainable wildlife use without the consent and understanding and engagement of people.
Maybe one final example, which is in what we've been doing in Cameroon,
which is with villagers who live around the reserve and the how do you spell that?
D. J Yeah, and it's a real jewel of Africa's crown.
It's got amazing wildlife and elephants, chimps, gorillas bear some things and these local people are hunting.
So long term work by by my researcher Stephanie Britton. I kind of led into this.
And the the the name of our last project that's just finished was called White Wild Meat,
which was trying to understand motivations of different people.
Because a lot of people come in with alternative water products.
They the NGOs will perceive a problem and say, all right, unsustainable wildlife consumption.
We'll come in with some alternatives, like fish farming or, you know,
chickens or basket weaving, and then we'll give that to the locals and they'll stop eating meat.
And those alternative projects routinely fail.
And so. Arthur was. Nobody ever asked people why they were eating the meat in the first place.
So without asking that, how could you alternative possibly succeed?
And so that was a long process of engagement with people to try to think through, you know,
what are the preferences that people have, but what did they actually eat and how do the preferences relate to actual eating?
And then why of alternatives fails, you know, and sometimes, for example,
it's that the market conditions aren't right or that the eco gods are asking for a bribe, for the work, for the for the alternative.
Therefore, it becomes impossible for them to sell it at the market and they can't eat and the chicken or whatever because it won't grow.
You know, you can't actually raise those in those conditions, enjoyable job conditions, all sorts of reasons.
But until you understand those reasons and until you're working with local people to devise things
that they want and that that will work with them and to take away the barriers to success,
conservation won't work.
And so that's just another example of, of the main message we've had, which is that unless you need to engage with people as well as wildlife,
you need to think about the system as a whole and not just the local people,
but the systems within which they're sitting that might be causing those issues.
So clearly your main focus has been on conservation, but before COVID came along,
had you thought also about the the dangers of disease transmission when people come into close contact with wildlife,
I would say that that's had been relatively peripheral to what we do.
So obviously it comes up because, for example, Ebola,
there's been quite a lot of work about trying to understand why people continue to eat wild meat in
Ebola areas when they know that Ebola would come from Wyoming and which was done by my colleagues.
And that's that's a kind of interesting one because and Ebola that the evidence shows that once Ebola is in the human population,
it doesn't come from well, it comes in as occasional species jumps, but they're very rare.
And that's been true with kind of disease that's come from wildlife in general.
You know, you get a species jump, but then it transmits within the human population.
So if you say to people, stop eating wildlife because otherwise you'll get Ebola, that's patently not true in the vast majority of cases.
And so, you know, there were some very interesting studies that were done in Guinea where they'd been public health,
health messaging that went out saying stop eating wildlife.
And local people then lost their trust in the public health authorities who were trying to control this Ebola outbreak, because they said,
well, you know, actually, we eat more meat and we've been eating it for ever and we don't get Ebola from it, generally speaking.
And you're messaging that saying stop eating wild meat is just conservationists
trying to jump on the situation and stop us hunting in the particular area.
And by which was actually a fairly accurate portrayal of the situation on the part of local people.
But the unfortunate side effect of that was it led to less trust in the authorities,
public health authorities, who were trying to control the outbreaks.
So, you know, I was aware of all this and I have worked on disease in the past, wildlife disease.
And so I'm not completely unaware of those kinds of issues.
So I was working in this area and then I saw the messaging that was coming out around the very early discussion of COVID,
which was around the role of the who and what market and wildlife in there in COVID and the role of pangolins in COVID.
And I and my colleagues were immediately uncomfortable with the messaging that was coming out.
Why was that so? Firstly, wet markets.
What is a wet? Yes. So firstly, wet markets are widely distributed around the world and really know your local farmers market is a wet market.
Really. So so the term wet market was coined by British colonial settlers who saw in places like Singapore
that people with rain water on on the fresh produce that they were selling in order to keep it cool.
And so these markets in in Asia, just like markets in Africa and markets in Europe until very, very recently,
which is that they would have a mixture of dry and wet produce, fresh produce, domestic produce and wildlife.
Some live, some dead.
And so we had is no exception to that said, there was an area in Wuhan market where they were selling live and dead wildlife and domestic animals.
And different markets have different kind of speciality.
So some of them were wildlife than others. I was concerned that the word wet market was becoming a really kind of pejorative term for,
you know, you know, these backward people are just selling wildlife and that's the problem.
So I was keen to kind of disabuse people of that.
And that's not to say that there wasn't a problem with wet markets in Asia or around the world.
You know, there are problems because you do get protective wildlife there, you get endangered wildlife there.
You do get live wildlife that's crammed up against each other in very unsanitary and conditions that are also really bad for animal welfare.
And as someone who loves animals, very unhappy to see that kind of thing.
But it is also a public health risk when you do that,
because if you bring different species together from around the world, they all have their own viruses.
And when they're stressed in unsanitary conditions, that is, and they're kind of shedding bodily fluids,
whatever that is, then that is a recipe for viruses to jump the species barrier.
And when fast is species bad, they can continue to just be spread potentially into us.
And there have been cases in the past of that happen, say civets, for example,
it's pretty clear that cells came from civets in a in a market situation, maybe not in market.
They came from civets through the wildlife trade and into humans.
And so that is of concern.
But that doesn't mean that the Wuhan wet market was where COVID was transmitted, and there's actually no evidence that that is the case.
The evidence suggests actually that it was circulating in the human population well before
that and that the wet market was probably just a transmission event between people working.
And do you think it was wildlife origin? Yes.
So it's pretty clear that that kind.
It's like to come from a bat and other coronaviruses have come from bats into humans.
Other viruses have come from bats into humans and from bats into other species into humans.
So, uh, Nipah virus is, you know, there's, there's a number of previous incidences where it's clear that you've got that transmission rate.
So I'm pretty certain that it came from a bat. And there have been COVID like viruses found in research that was done in Yunnan province in China.
So that's the likely place where it would have started.
But these detective stories are incredibly hard to piece together post hoc, and so we may never know where COVID came from.
It certainly didn't come from pangolin and even as an intermediate.
So. So how did the government of China react when it initially thought that it was the origin?
It closed in what? It closed the wet markets and all of them across the whole community.
Yeah. And it puts in place stronger, it now has stronger measures around wildlife trade and as a result of this and and international pressure.
What was your view or what would you come to about that kind of blanket response?
So. I mean, the first thing is so kind of maybe I'll just go back to the story of what got me really concerned.
So not just the wet market thing and the blaming pangolins,
but also that conservation NGOs were kind of jumping on the bandwagon and seeing an opportunity to do something they've been wanting to do for ages,
which was to put a ban on all wildlife trade in place.
And these were welfare, animal welfare organisations and conservation organisations.
It's worth making the distinction because conservationists think about biodiversity in general and species and populations and diversity.
Welfare organisations think about the welfare of the individual animal. And there's a bit of a grey area where there are welfare organisations who
talk about conservation and conservation organisations and the welfare aspect.
But the two are actually quite conceptually different.
So welfare organisations and some conservation organisations were talking about this is our chance really to ban the wildlife trade,
which they see frankly as a threat to sustainability.
But as I hope I've explained, it's a bit more complicated than that, that, you know,
people in Africa trap Kmarts around their fields as crop pests in order to save their crops, but also to feed themselves and to sell.
And that's there's nothing unsustainable or there's nothing illegal about that.
So I and my colleagues were incredibly concerned that something as blanket as that was going to cause irreparable harm to people across
the world that estimate perhaps a billion people who rely on wild meat for protein and and wildlife trade for their livelihood.
So, for example, in Central Africa, it's women who most of the trade is the market traders, and they're supporting their families of this trade.
So you can't just ban wildlife trade like that.
And so it seemed like governments were taking notice of that as a as a as a message.
And we got very concerned and quite angry that people were being opportunistic about it.
And just like the example I gave about Ebola in Guinea, the same kind of thing.
So I guess we started to mount an information campaign to try to help people to understand the nuance and the complexity of what they were saying.
The other thing was that they were talking about wildlife ban, wildlife trade for consumption, food.
That's what they were talking about.
And actually that is absolutely full of loopholes and would actually either solve disease transmission or unsustainable trade.
Because as I think as I've explained, trade is not just for food.
Trade is for medicine, trade is for pets, trade is for, you know, ornaments.
And all of those things are bad for wildlife, potentially bad for animal welfare, potentially,
but also potentially sustainable and also potentially the source of livelihoods.
And, you know, people value wildlife and wild places for many, many reasons.
And part of that is including if they're able to make a livelihood from it. So just walking in with your big boots and saying, oh,
I would just ban wildlife trade for food because of COVID is really jumping on the bandwagon without understanding what the consequences might be,
good and bad. So we I the first thing I guess that my group did was that we put out a position statements and wrote some open
letters explaining some of those complexities and calling for a risk based approach to the wildlife markets,
saying that, you know,
there are public health risks of wildlife markets, conservation risk, welfare risk and livelihood risks which are positive and negative,
and that we should we should assess each species and each kind of trade on its risks and its benefits and try to do something a bit more nuanced.
And also that and. These blanket calls could have terrible impacts on local people.
Interestingly, the NGOs never accepted what we said,
but we did see a shift in messaging after we started kicking up a fuss and to say that local communities
and indigenous groups could use wildlife sustainably and that was okay for food in their local areas,
which was nice. Again, you know, it's all very top down.
That doesn't address the fact that it doesn't address that trade is actually part of the livelihoods and that local,
you know, the cane rat example, they all traded in local markets. So do you Barnat or do you allow that?
When does trade start becoming something that's a problem? When it isn't. But at least they shifted to say, Yeah, okay, local people can go and eat.
You want me to be sustainable? And we talked to the UK government.
I gave kind of evidence to All-Party Parliamentary Groups to try to explain to them what the
wildlife trade is and what wet markets are and and what the consequences of bans would be.
Try to explain to them the risk of disease and where the risk is and isn't.
And then also it's in several research papers, some of which were kind of perspective pieces,
trying to explain the wildlife trade, some of which we're talking about, and some of the knock on effects.
So we did some work trying to think through and what impacts both COVID itself,
but also all the mitigation measures for COVID were going to have on African economies in particular and on local people who are hunting.
So what is the kind of long term sustainability outcome of all the COVID by-products basically.
So for example, in a place like Gabon, which is huge, reliant on commodity trading and oil,
the big drop in oil in oil use and big drop in tourism and therefore big drop in incomes both in urban and rural areas,
leading to people moving back home from the cities into the into their country areas and then hunting more.
But then at the same time, there's much less demand for wildlife, partly because of the perception of risk,
but also partly because people can't afford wildlife in the urban areas anymore,
because it's luxury said drop in urban demand, increase in rural demand.
You know, it was quite complicated trying to think through in a given country.
We did that with our with our African colleagues. So that was really nice to have a collaboration with our African colleagues to try to think through.
And and then that's led to some further work.
We also did some detailed work in our place in the GI Reserve in Cameroon to try to understand again what on the ground has happened to what meat,
trade and consumption as a result of COVID.
And again, the answer seems to be mostly it's to do with trade is not coming anymore because of fuel, because of dropping out of demand,
people not being able to send their kids to school, people not being able to do their livelihoods,
falling back on wild meat as a kind of fallback food security.
And so that's been good as well because then we can start to think about how do you support those local communities pre-COVID?
And so, yeah, I guess those two different things and.
Trying to put some experience on the wildlife side into the debate so that it gets a bit more nuanced.
And it's difficult because people don't want nuance, they don't want grey areas, they want black and white.
So what do you think? This is a very big question. Is it possible to give some kind of overall sense of what you want to talk about?
I think I think it is taking itself, you know, a you.
Is it possible to say whether COVID has on balance, been good or bad for the world life?
That's a terrible, terrible. Oh, is it?
I mean, you've been talking about New Orleans. Obviously, it's going to be different in different places, in different contexts.
I think it's too early to say so. So the the measures that governments are putting into place in Asia, it's not just China,
it's Vietnam and other places to kind of clamp down on the wildlife trade.
Um, they, I think they are so, so people have done some polls, the public about what they think about what they see wildlife now.
And people are much more negative about eating wildlife in China now, which is a good thing for wildlife.
The actual legislation.
Well, firstly, I think in many countries it won't be followed because most of the wildlife that is actually of disease risk is already illegal.
So, you know, people have been carrying on eating pangolins in these places in the situation where it's not been legal.
And so only if they do more enforcement will there be a difference.
But I guess if perceptions change, if the sections of governments about the enforcement changes,
then they will, um, they will enforce more and people leave this endangered illegal wildlife.
And that might be good. Um, there's massive loopholes in the Chinese legislation because it is a lot of different wildlife,
including wildlife that's not being used for food is not, is not included.
I think it's potentially a bit sad that the little bit worrying that it includes captive bred wildlife because
captive bred wildlife includes things like frogs and includes things that are not a disease risk and that were,
um, lives for many people. And I don't think, you know, personally I'm a vegetarian,
but I don't think that keeping domestic livestock as long as you keep it appropriately, is wrong.
So if you're keeping frogs or your hunting pheasants in this country or hunting deer in this country,
um, I don't think that most people would say that necessarily is unethical.
I think they see what people do. People in this country see what people do in Southeast Asia is different and
they might dislike the fact that people would be keeping frogs or something.
But if they're kept in appropriate conditions and it's sanitary and it's the welfare is okay,
then I don't think it's incompatible with us eating chicken.
So the fact that that's all been shut down with potentially the loss of I think there was an estimate of,
you know, $14 billion a year or something for this kind of wildlife farming, millions of people involved.
What are they going to do and what are the consumers going to do? They going to go out and get more wild, folks.
Is that good for wild folks? I don't think so. Is that good for wildlife in general?
No. So, you know, I think there could be some really quite intense unintended consequences.
Yeah. And also for people who are trading wildlife in in in Africa, in other parts of the world.
Mm hmm.
So just coming back to the sort of mechanics of doing research, did you have to raise funding to pivot your work towards the these kind of questions?
So we already had projects that were working on, well, meat.
And so the research is on those projects, like the White Whale Meat Project that I mentioned before, we just kind of pivoted.
But then we got a couple of rapid response grants to several. The UK government and other people put out rapid response calls and we got a
couple of those too that would allow our research to spend a bit of time on this.
So no, I think part of it was that we could just be nimble and we worked really, really hard.
So I think that you now had a department that's not quite true.
But I thought at the time that the amount of work I was doing in April, May,
June was the hardest I'd ever worked because we were really just trying to to
get our science and our understanding into this debate before it was too late,
before, you know, horrible unintended consequences had happened.
So we did a lot of work on engagement and budgeting.
And you talked about working with with a number of NGOs of different, different kinds.
And did you also collaborate with people in other institutions?
I mean, I think I think I've got a general question as to whether you found your work on COVID,
was more involved, more collaboration than work had previously.
So we didn't actually collaborate a lot. So our work is actually very internationally collaborative.
We already had people who we were working with in all of these countries, in both in Asian countries and in African countries particularly.
But I'm I made a real point of bringing collaborators from the countries concerned
into my work because part of the problem with what was going on with this,
it was people who didn't really understand the issues from northern countries, rich countries, trying to get these kinds of bans in place.
You know, and the last thing I wanted was to have just a north north debate, you know,
a debate of us Europeans with other Europeans about what should be done in Africa.
You know, it's not right.
And so we leveraged our current collaborations to to bring in researchers working on wild meat and disease in the countries concerned,
to be part of the perspective pieces and particularly early career researchers.
So yeah, I think we had a really good set of people in that has built new collaborations with the early career researchers in particular,
and has helped them to to kind of boost their career.
And I just think it's so important that when you have a dialogue about something that's going to affect people in one country,
that those people, people in that country should actually be involved.
And that we were talking earlier about grass roots.
So you've presumably collaborations with people who are already in academic institutions in those countries,
but you work very closely with people who are living in rural areas or urban areas.
To what extent have you been able to engage them in the kinds of ideas you're working on?
Yes. So I guess our fieldwork in Cameroon on the Rapid Response Grant was an example of that,
where we were already working with local communities to understand how best to implement
alternative livelihoods and protein projects for them with them that they would actually like.
And so we went back to them and as part of our project to ask them how could we to change things for them?
And I hope that that will then be a kind of those understandings from what they were saying to us,
will be integrated into the alternative projects that are now being devised.
Into the long term going forward. The best example any. Um, so I've got a question again.
It's another terribly broad question. Is the, is there currently, do you think, an effective mechanism for effecting change worldwide?
Changing what sent in in the direction of improving conservation and protecting livelihoods and disease outbreak health.
Yeah. Yeah. And so.
No, but there's definitely work towards that.
So the World Health Organisation has been think has been thinking now about wildlife much more.
Um, there's some thinking in the kind of international convention space,
the UN space about how do you make sure that all these different strands of concern are actually talked about by the same people in the same forum.
So I think the World Health Organisation, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, which does kind of domestic health, I still have no.
Oh. I.e. another kind of domestic livestock health organisation.
And the conservationists are now thinking about how do we set up dialogues into
the future internationally so that we engage all these different stakeholders.
Um, but. In itself, that's not going to work because what you need is this on the ground work.
So how are we actually going to make sure that wildlife market X in Country Y is adhering to the hygiene,
public health, welfare conservation standards that it needs to adhere to?
So you can have all the international commitments and dialogue, if you like.
If you don't have those markets being properly patrolled, enforced and sensible rules in place, then it's just going to happen again.
Yeah. And it will happen again. So the other thing I'm thinking about is when we're thinking about how do we do pandemic preparedness and uh,
how do we make sure that our preparedness doesn't start with the point at which the first person is infected with the disease?
We need that preparedness to go way back into the kind of the environmental drivers of disease transmission.
So what we see in the literature is a really large increase in emerging infectious diseases in the world in general over the last ten, 20 years.
And that's including in wildlife, in livestock and in humans.
Why do you think that this is because of um, but there's a number of things.
So, so there have always been these transmissions at the kind of wildlife, livestock, human interface.
Now we've got, uh, environmental destruction,
habitat destruction that brings livestock and wildlife into very close proximity and people often in quite unsanitary sanitary conditions.
So at that frontier, uh, you know, you might have small holders who are not able to get proper drinking water, for example.
So who are drinking from contaminated water you're getting, and perhaps which are particular transmitters of viruses in general.
So best lovely creatures. You know, I love bats.
That's very good for pollination. Don't hate bats, but, you know, they do have viruses.
And if you if you take them away from their habitat, they're roosting near livestock.
The droppings are going to the livestock. And you're potentially also eating bats as well.
And there's this kind of just big nexus happening.
So if we have to have a more respectful relationship with nature, we have to not have this environmental destruction.
We have to make sure that those nature, human livestock interfaces are properly managed on the ground.
And then we also have to say, right, okay, so stuff is traded into markets,
let's make sure that those markets are hygienic and we're not mixing species in the way that we're doing at the moment.
So and and also we have to look beyond viruses.
So most of the emerging infectious diseases and actually most of the mortality in humans
is things like diarrhoeal diseases and in the under fives in tropical countries,
which might be coming from these environmental sources as well.
You know, we've got huge issues coming along for livestock with things like avian flu, for example.
Um, and all of this is, is bound up in our general relationship with our planet.
Once you get into the kind of first step into humans, then you have things like globalisation, global transport,
all that kind of stuff that causes the mass rapid pandemics in humans that but we do need to think back towards this one health thing about how,
how do we make sure that we have a healthy relationship with with our fellow creatures?
And, you know, antimicrobial resistance is another thing.
You know, how do you make sure that domestic animals are not incubating, um, microbes that can no longer be controlled by our drugs?
It's all part of the same package, which is where conservation becomes so important.
Yes, yes, yes. And not something, you know, when you watch David, for instance, that's not that tends not to be the message that's coming over.
It's looking it's it's very much, you know, he has a lovely animal and it's habitat is being destroyed.
But the the connexion to humans is a kind of aesthetic one almost.
It's not it's not actually. We are all in this together.
We want this together. And, you know, we rely on we rely on nature for our food and our water, our clean water and habitats and our air.
But also, you know, there is this public health risk. And what I'm concerned about is it's great that public health, you know, so say conservation.
We have these waves of concern and funding opportunities.
So, you know, a decade ago it was with development.
So we suddenly realised that people and wildlife were kind of interconnected.
And so we were trying to get money from development and and kind of looking at the conservation development interface,
which is an incredibly important one.
But you know, it needs to be done in a way that means that conservation is working with people in it, using the best developed methods.
Now we've got this big realisation that there's a public health element to conservation,
and what we don't want to do is have that drown out and reverse some of the improvements
we've made in trying to understand the dependence that local people have on wildlife.
So, um, just trying to not push the pendulum to the extent that public health drowns out everything else and.
That we see with clear eyes. I mean, the other thing that gets me so to go on about this is that is that we don't we blame the local people,
whether they're eating wildlife or buying wildlife in a wildlife market or whether they're kind of killing animals in the forest.
We blame them. We don't blame the system. So think through what's the reason why there might be unsustainable wildlife use?
And some of those reasons include, you know, habitat being destroyed for logging, for our timber habitat being destroyed for our soy and our palm oil.
That means that wildlife and people are in close proximity.
Meaning that people don't have livelihoods in that wildlife to have places to go.
And so we have the conservation issue. We have the poverty and food security issue, we have the public health issue.
And we have a systemic driver, which might be the fact that we are using palm oil from unsustainable palm oil.
How are we in this country actually recognising the responsibility of the system and our need to change the system?
And those kind of very indirect linkages that take us back to COVID or other diseases are not
recognised and they're uncomfortable for us because it's our consumption that's causing it.
So of course, that would be the strongest message to take back. Yes.
Yes. So just going back sort of personally, again, to to what extent did you feel personally threatened by the virus?
Me, myself, the possibility of that feedback to have you caught it?
I mean, I haven't had COVID some obviously a hermit. I didn't feel personally threatened.
I felt familiarly threatened because I've got elderly relatives.
I felt very concerned for then. Yeah.
Mm hmm. And I still do, of course. Yes. Yes. And how have they been affected?
No. Very fortunate. And I guess you didn't talk about ours.
But did you? Did you work longer than normal hours as a result of the extra work they were doing?
Yeah, we felt very urgent to do something.
I also went a bit mad personally at the beginning because I just wanted to help,
so I signed up for NHS responders and then in the end I deleted it because there
were so many other people in my local area who were also jumping on every call.
I never got a call. And I also started a community newsletter for my village.
And I did stuff the community, WhatsApp for my village because I felt very concerned for my community and wanted to do something.
And then I was also giving evidence to all parties,
paramilitary groups and trying to influence conservation NGOs and and write a ton of papers and get money.
And so I just felt partly I mean,
this the emergency nature of things and the fact I guess I was cooped up at home and that I felt this was a moment when I
had to contribute and I had to contribute to the best of my ability professionally and also personally in my community.
So it did get a bit mad at that.
But because I mean, quite a lot of people have said that, you know, I think I think lockdown and everything got a lot of people very down,
but people who've actually been able to do research on COVID,
a number of them have said to me that the fact that they had that sense of purpose was beneficial for their own well-being.
Did you recognise that? I needed a sense of purpose?
Yeah, but I did feel very worried about how things were going, you know.
So although I had the sense of purpose, I guess with people who are developing vaccines and nature, seeing that you can do good.
And what I was seeing was to some extent 20 years or 30 years of an understanding of the role of local
people in the solution to conservation was being unravelled in a matter of weeks in front of my eyes.
And I was incredibly worried and sad and concerned that the main reasons for this was going to be the people who we were finally,
finally in conservation, starting to bring into our thinking.
So it wasn't a happy time in the sense of purpose of I'm going to do something good.
It was a reality of time, of am I going to be able to make the difference that needs to be made and before it's too late?
You know, it's the old thing of, you know, crisis policy is bad policy.
Yes. Yes. And you said that you talked about being cooped up, I mean, previously your your work,
although I think you told me earlier that most of the on the ground stuff is done by your team nowadays.
But you used to travel a lot. I travelled a lot.
I mean, so I was travelling every month or so, I mean, much less than most conservation professionals.
But I it was a bit ironic because I had my last travel, my last.
Top of work even to this day, was at the end of November, early December 2019.
And I was really tired because I've been travelling a lot and to meetings around the world and I said, okay,
I'm going to have a few months breaks that kind of Christmas and then early 2020 and again in February,
and then I'll start travelling again March, April. Well, that worked out well.
Didn't travel since not even to London for work so.
Yeah. And is that is that hard that not that you've not been able to actually get on the ground in the places that you're interested in.
It's incredibly difficult to maintain your relationships and keep your work going.
And actually, we had a lot of trouble with our field work because a lot of it was cancelled.
I had two people who were out in the field and at that stop people had to rush home.
And I work in Cameroon with local people for a while was was stopped because of COVID restrictions.
So we couldn't even go to the local and see how it was affecting them because we couldn't get there.
And one benefit certainly in our team and maybe in other teams as well was I've heard this with other people,
was that like this comes back to the kind of decolonisation thing local team leaders or
researchers who were perhaps would have been working under the direction of people from my group,
had to take up the baton and do it themselves, you know,
and we were training them remotely and they got much more responsibility than they would have got in the project and stepped up.
Amazingly so, particularly Cameroon. You know, our research field was such a went out, my research couldn't go.
He went out on his own and did the work and blossomed.
And you saw the leadership qualities and research qualities that would otherwise have taken.
I think they would have come out because, you know,
I hope that we were enlightened team that would have promoted him, but he was promoted very quickly by necessity.
And that was great. And that's a lesson.
This is a lesson that you should be able to give people more responsibility and you don't have to be there leading field teams all the time.
You can train people remotely. And, you know, I've spoken to various people who've done that and then they teach remotely as well.
And that's. That's great. Mm hmm. And so in terms of keeping in touch with the team, it was like everybody else at the teams was in meetings.
And that's incredibly hard to some parts of the world.
Yes. You know, because not everyone has an Internet connexion. And also, actually, if you have language difficulties,
if you're sitting in the room and you know you're not so great in each other's languages, you can always just pigeon translate.
You can watch each other's lips much better.
On teams on Zoom, it's much harder for people who are less confident in the language which whether it's me and French or whatever,
it's much harder, strangely, to talk, and especially the connexions that you know.
So when did you become head of department? Oh, God. mid-September.
So. So that means on September 20, 21?
Yeah. Oh, right. Recently. So all the stuff about teaching students remotely and all that had that had happened before that.
Yeah. Yeah. And my position anyway, means I don't have very much teaching.
Yes. Yes. And. So I think I think we've just about got to the end.
How has the work that you've done in relation to COVID raised new questions that you're interested in exploring in the future?
Yeah, definitely. So the work I mentioned about trying to understand the system change has raised some interesting
questions about how do you address systemic change when you've got shocks in a shock to the system,
whether it be COVID or an oil price shock or anything else?
I guess some of the other things we've been doing is another bit of my madness was to set up a website called Pledge for Our Future of Earth,
which is the Pledge for our future dot, dot, earth. Yes.
So it's an open letter that anyone in the world can sign to say, you know, we want to change the way we live.
We want to change the system. We want to sign up.
And, you know, allows because a lot of people said to me, I know there's a problem with climate change,
biodiversity loss and COVID, and I don't know what to do as an individual.
So we set this website up to give people tips and ideas and to allow them to become part of the community by pledging to change their behaviour.
So I did that in April, May 2020 as well as another thing I did.
I also have a and I have a longstanding thing called conservation optimism.
And another thing I did was I got some money from the university.
I was from my own ego about conservation.
Oh, yeah. So I thought so. So I just remembered all these other things I did.
So it wasn't just the community and it was just the research.
It was also these things that pledge your future is one thing just to help people to to sign up and say,
I feel I can do something to change the system. Conservation optimism I set up in 2017.
Just the symposium has been running ever since. It's a kind of independent entity within the department with my group.
So what we do is we say there are big problems with biodiversity, climate change and so on,
but if we just present things negatively and in a kind of doom and gloom way, people shut off.
People can't cope. People get depressed, people get despondent and just kind of disempowered.
So although we recognise all the issues the conservation have,
what we do in conservation optimism is we share positive stories or stories of solution and ways to cope.
So conservationists burn out the general public burn out, you know,
how do we actually engage people so that they think there is hope, there are things we can do.
There's evidence the conservation works. And that way, you know, you get buy in.
Actually, governments buy and businesses buy in as well. Everybody can buy in and think, yeah, okay, I can move forward.
So that has really blossomed since 2017.
And it's, you know, it's a tiny thing in terms of personalities.
Just one person in my group, but it's, it's, it's a big movement.
So coming back to April or March, April, May, 2020,
I've got a son who is at the time university and obviously I've got teenagers in my family and finding it incredibly hard but really difficult.
And there was a tragedy and one one of my teenage nephews, one of his best friends died and right at the beginning of lockdown.
And and I wanted to do something that helped teenagers with their anxieties, basically.
And so we got some money from Oxford, actually,
for conservation optimism to run a series of teenage focussed things about how to think about wildlife trade.
So I had to think about disease and wildlife trade, but also about how to cope with eco eco anxiety, really.
And so we had a clinical psychologist who works for that.
That's also too who works with clinically for an eco grief.
She did a podcast with us talking to people about about the issues and how to, how to, how to own your grief and before from your grief.
We did some Instagram takeovers with with young people from Nigeria and the UK so
that they were talking together about their feelings and how to move forward.
And that has sparked a whole new set of resources and ways of thinking and engagement with people like Extinction Rebellion,
things like that, through my conservation optimism thing. So I guess that that is something new that we're still taking food from conservation.
And how do you spend much time on social media before that?
Me Yeah, yeah.
So that wasn't new. The conservation optimism wasn't new. It was just the focus on teenagers for this personal video of the tragedy with my family.
And I really felt there's nothing I could do for my nephew.
But what I could do for teenagers was to try. To help them in the time of COVID and in the time of concern about wildlife trade,
and that that nexus between wildlife trade and conservation was coming to the fore a lot.
Okay, well, maybe I can help them to think better about these things. Mm hmm.
I didn't. Sorry. I did as much brief briefing of myself as I could before I started, but I didn't find any of that on your departmental website.
No. Oh, you have to do is look at my and look at my signature in my research email because I've got eight websites there.
Oh. Which these are some. You go back. Yeah.
So finally, that has the experience of Coby changed your your attitude or approach to your work?
And is there anything you'd like to see change in the future?
Well, I think I think new ways of working, obviously, and try I mean, I find it really difficult to keep my group together.
And I think every researcher will say that to you because, you know,
we have a very strong group ethic to try to find ways to keep that group ethic when people are scattered to the winds.
And some people have never even met each other in person, because I'm trying also to coax people that maybe they could come and see each other.
So rather than having everyone in the lab forever, we do have to have ways in which we all get together.
That's one thing. And as head of department now,
how do I think about keeping a departmental ethos and a social ethos where people feel like part of a team when there's scattered?
It's really difficult to trying to find ways to do that has been important.
I always worked remotely a lot because I've had international collaboration, so although it was Skype in those days and not teams.
But I do think that you do need to meet in person occasionally to get those social bonds.
The other thing I guess has been trying to think about reshaping Oxford as a as a global
university is something that is consuming my thinking less at the moment when we you know,
for climate change reasons we can't. I but also because of COVID, we don't need to.
How do you and how do you have equitable partnerships with people in the Global South?
I think there's a lot of thinking that needs to be done.
And my friend Lisa White, who I hope you're going to talk to and has done a lot of this around COVID,
actually put in putting work on on supporting people through COVID.
And the other thing I guess is. I don't know what else there is really.
It's about.
I just I just think we need a complete rethink of the way that we engage with the public and the way that we engage with the natural world.
And now's the time. COVID What's sad is that COVID should have been could have been that recent moment,
particularly with the climate change conference and the biodiversity conference. And I do worry that it hasn't been.
That said, just like the global financial crisis in 2008 was the moment at which the financial markets,
the financial system of this planet could have been reshaped.
There was just that moment, you know, when everything was in meltdown, when it could have been V-shaped, and it really wasn't.
And I think it has been that meltdown moment when it could have been reshaped.
And it really isn't being. And so that's a bit of a shame.
So that's my next place finish.