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In an interview, Pierre Fidenci, discusses how, in an era of runaway destruction of tropical forests, ocean depletion, rampant plastic pollution affecting all life forms, biodiversity decline, and rapid species extinction, ESI’s work and solutions are making a difference. He also responds to the most common inquiries that ESI has received over the years.
Q: What prompted your interest in saving wildlife and natural ecosystems?
Pierre Fidenci: It is more than an interest; it is a passion and a way of life that started at 16 years old. When I was a child, nature opened up my curiosity. Each time I was outside in nature I was fallen in love with it. Watching birds and insects, observing plants and trees, listening to sound of nature and surveying for amphibians and reptiles made me a conservationist.
Q: why ESI? Instead, you could have joined another conservation group?
Pierre: Well, it is always easier to join an existing conservation group. As a matter of fact, I joined several non-profit nature organizations when I was young. I volunteered my time on the ground to save threatened animals several months at each time and even interrupted my study at the university for quite some time. However, at 20 years old, I created a small nonprofit group in France and embarked in a three-year project in Costa Rica to help Las Baulas National Park, which was a newly created protected area. This project involved volunteers, removing illegal dump site in the mangrove, creating awareness and educational boards, providing technical support like patrol equipment against illegal parching, and much more. It was just a natural call. Further, I witnessed and got very disappointed by the waste of resources of large NGOs like World Wildlife Fund, just to cite one, and therefore, I wanted to create and run a NGOs, where resources are not wasted, where decisions are not made from a distance office, and when indigenous people make decisions. Do you think that the salary of a CEO of a large nature charitable organization should get around half millions of dollars per year? Personally, I don’t think that so, with half of this salary, we can have many field staff in Africa doing a crucial work against illegal poaching and deforestation and support their families. It is called common sense to me and it is honoring our financial supporters. The problem with many NGOs is that there are influenced by the corporate world and behave like them, and have lost their essences.
Q: What are ESI’s current priorities?
Pierre: Our current priorities sit on four areas: rainforest conservation, ocean conservation with emphasis on coral reefs and sea grass, endangered species, and plastic pollution. At the inception of ESI, we did not have field activities on plastic pollution as it was not as serious and obvious as it is nowadays. Plastic pollution started since the production and use of all kind of plastics in the late 1960s; however, we are at unprecedented level that surpassed any horror movies! Plastics are everywhere, affecting everything. About 11 million metric tons of plastic are dumped each year in the ocean.
Q: what is ESI’s work to protect rainforest?
Pierre: Nowadays more people are aware of the importance of Amazonian conservation at the same time that many more threats are pressing in from all sides. Governments are more aware on the urgency to protect rainforests; however, it does not translate into actions. Therefore, our work to save and restore rainforest is crucial. We create protected areas for rainforests, we plant native and monitor trees to restore rainforest, and we support indigenous tribes in the protection and management of their forested lands.
Q: You mentioned about the fight of ESI against plastic pollution, can you explain a bit more?
Pierre: Plastics must be classified as hazardous. The rich countries have the moral obligation to do that. More than 50 per cent of plastics contain chemicals that are toxic and are released into the environment. Moreover, plastic debris is not biodegradable, it is photo-degradable, making all the plastic debris fragment into smaller and smaller pieces that can easily be confused by organisms in seawater or freshwater as food. It is contaminating all organisms including humans and seriously impacting and polluting ecosystems like mangroves, rivers and oceans. Plastic pollution has a huge impact on nature. ESI has various projects in Southeast Asia which remove plastics from the ocean, educate local coastal communities about the danger of plastic pollution and push for the implementation of current laws banning single-use plastics.
Q: What about the tribal people and ESI?
Pierre: Indigenous and tribal people are at the core of all our conservation work since the inception of ESI. I personally spent time in the field to understand and listen to tribal people where we have projects in their home lands. I started to be emerged in the tribal life at 19 years old during my first conservation work as a volunteer in the Amazon. It is the backbone of all our field projects. We work hand in hand with them and they make most decisions. Forty five percent of the intact forests in the Amazon are in Indigenous territories, and millions of hectares of tropical forests are occupied by tribal people in southeast Asia and Africa. They are our best friends and we must support them to protect their lives and home land. By doing so, we can restore and protect vast land of rainforest.
Q: Is illegal wildlife poaching a big threat to wildlife?
Pierre: The trade in wildlife is at least as old as recorded history. Early Egyptian and Greek civilizations documented commercial transactions involving wildlife, a practice that has continued uninterrupted ever since. Large-scale unsustainable commercial wildlife use was documented during the Roman Empire, and contemporary concern about unsustainable and illegal use of wildlife dates back to at least the 1960s. So, it is not something new, but its scale and speed is the biggest ever. Behind the numbers, there are the paint and atrocity inflicted to all individual life. The illegal wildlife trade is a global conservation issue that threatens thousands of species, including fish, fungi, medicinal plants, and charismatic mammals. It occurs almost everywhere from the Himalayan region of China to the lowlands of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. We have made some significant victories over the last decades. ESI has also made some important achievements whether it is at the local or regional scale to stop or curb illicit wildlife trade. Measures to stop it vary widely, targeting the supply, transactional, or demand points of supply chains. ESI targets mostly the supply at the local level where we directly stop the killing of animals in the field. We stopped the poaching of gorillas, forest elephants, mandrills, chimpanzees, tarsiers and many more species at the local level in various parts of the globe.
Q: And so when some folks claim that trophy hunting is an indispensable way to fund conservation, what is your opinion on that argument?
Pierre: Simply, trophy hunting is not acceptable and should not be allowed. It inflicts pain on living creature solely for pleasure. Killing just for pleasure is just ethically and morally wrong, we don’t engage violence for fun and earning money. Money for conservation exists, however, the funds are not use for protection of nature but rather to build bombs or unnecessary gadgets derived from oil industry. It is society’s choice.
Q: What would you say has changed and accelerated the most since you started your career?
Pierre: I started my career at 16 years old. There are many areas where accelerated changes are obvious around the earth and often we don’t need to gather scientific data to observe decline of biodiversity. It is difficult to pin point one area that has accelerated. Rainforest destruction, ocean pollution and destruction, risk of species extinction, animal and plant population enormous decline, all have accelerated since I started my career.
Q: Are there conservation issues that you feel are overlooked right now?
Pierre: Well, population growth and family planning are important for nature conservation. The size of the population and the way human live is absolutely crucial for conservation, healthy planet, and our future as a species.
Q: What would you say to the young generation who is distressed about the current trajectory of the planet?
Pierre: I understand that feeling and I am solastalgic when I directly observe the rapid decline of coral reefs or rainforests. Last week, I was monitoring corals in the Philippines and that made me very nervous and sad to see their rapid decline. However, the young generation holds the future and can make many good changes for nature and a better humanity. It is clearly possible. It is important for the young to spend as much time as possible in nature, the special connection to nature is vital to change the tide. ESI achievements along with thousands of other groups is telling us that we can change the trajectory. Let’s carry on!
You can also listen to a podcast featuring an interview with Pierre Fidenci.
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