Primarily in conservation I’ve been very interested and in fact started the wildlife conservation society’s program in Patagonia, the Patagonian Coastal Zone Management Plan. And the concept was to take an entire ecosystem, it’s vast, almost 3000 mile long coastline of Southern Argentina with its extraordinary colonies of sea lions,… Read More
30 Years ago, the AZA’s forerunner, the AAZPA had virtually no scientific staff. Let’s see, I guess it just about had a species survival plan. We just started it 30 years ago and not long before that we started the accreditation program, but all of these efforts to professionalize the… Read More
How does that American Zoo Association compare with the American Zoo Association or the AAZPA of 30 years ago?… Read More
What do you see as the difference from that organization?… Read More
They have to have some place to live, something to eat, some way to raise their children. The human population growth, which has almost tripled since I was born, is the fundamental problem. We can talk about conservation at length, but we’ll only be able to preserve small groups of… Read More
China and India are building four coal power plants a week. Nothing we do in the west will matter as long as this continues. And it affects wildlife. It affects life. It affects you and me. If we can’t control our numbers, we can’t protect the numbers of wildlife. And… Read More
AZA member Steve Burns, who incidentally is from Boise is leading the field conservation committee of the AZA, which I founded in 1999. And he’s doing a wonderful job. The concept that he has developed is to get every AZA zoo, to contribute a percentage of its income to conservation… Read More
Consider the Serengeti threatened by a road right across. There is the great Tambopata Park in Peru is being chewed up, cut up, bulldozed by timber interests and gold mining. This is a national park. Everything that is happening is against the law. They Peruvian officials claim they do not… Read More
Ivory is not coming into the United States and Europe mow, it’s going to China. We have no control over that market. In fact, we owe them money. Not a happy situation. There is no clear way other than actually trying to stop, the poachers and to see that those… Read More
What issues would you like the American Zoo Association to be addressing right now?… Read More
Actually, they are doing some wonderful things right now. I should start that again. AZA, the American Zoo Association is doing some wonderful things right now. They have become, I think, fully dedicated to conservation. They’re dealing with the problem that their sources of income in many cases, if not… Read More
The wildlife conservation society was struggling, I was, I was trying to run an elephant conservation program and I had a talk with Liz Claiborne, you know who Liz Claiborne is, everybody knows who Liz Claiborne, the great stylist is, and one of the greatest American businesswomen. Liz Claiborne had… Read More
This is something where they could make an enormous difference, but we can’t ask them to do everything. There are many other people out there who might be able to do something about the elephants that we haven’t thought of, who have business connections, who have insights about the market… Read More
Is it more than that?… Read More
The elephant poaching problem is a particularly tough and disgusting problem. The vast majority of the poaching that is occurring today is fueled by the Chinese economic success and the fact that they are purchasing illegal ivory. Now, let’s look back a little, in the late ’70s and the ’80s,… Read More
Elephants, that so many are poached, what’s the answer to stopping that immediate problem?… Read More
Is it just a lot of boots on the ground?… Read More
I think it can. I think it’s time because there are now so many problems, so many challenges in attempting to preserve wildlife for zoos to have exhibits and theaters addressing these problems, explaining the science, setting forth the alternatives, the options that we have as human beings who run… Read More
I don’t think anybody is. That’s another challenge, a wonderful challenge. Read More
Zoos in general, plays a great deal of emphasis upon the education of children, which is fine and necessary and very important. There is one group that they have not place sufficient emphasis upon. These are decision-makers. No zoo that I ever heard of built exhibits or interpretive displays that… Read More