Wild Voices: The Godfather of Biodiversity, Professor Thomas Lovejoy

Wild Voices Project

Welcome to another episode of the Wild Voices Project podcast with me, Matt Williams. It has been quite some time since I’ve published an episode - a new house, a new girlfriend, a new dog and a new baby mean that life has been somewhat busy in the past year. So I put the podcast on pause for a while. But we’re back - and to begin with it’s with some episodes recorded around a year ago. So in listening to this episode and some of the upcoming ones please bear in mind that they are around 12 months old and were recorded prior to the coronavirus epidemic. But I believe there’s still huge, timeless value in these conversations. I hope you and your loved ones are well during this strange and concerning time. Many of us are very privileged by having access to nature and the outdoors right now. And I recognise that both I, and many of my guests, fall into that category. I hope that hearing about wildlife and nature might also provide some solace during this time. This episode is a cracker - it’s with the so-called ‘godfather of biodiversity’ Professor Thomas Lovejoy. Thomas Lovejoy is a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation, an expert on climate and biological dynamics in the Amazon, he was previously the biodiversity advisor to the World Bank, and is known for being the first person to coin the word ‘biodiversity’. In this episode, we discuss using high mist nets to catch spine-tailed swifts in the Amazon rainforest, the tipping points caused by fragmentation that could lead to irreversible dieback, and how he keeps his energy levels up for office work and advising decision-makers and achieves an emotional or professional reset at the start of each day. The Wild Voices Project podcast tells the stories of people saving nature. You can find us online at www.wildvoicesproject.org and @WildVoicesProj on twitter. And you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.