Udawattekele: A Sanctuary Destroyed From Within

Sri Lankan legislation has frozen vital biodiversity research (Reproduced from Current Science 2007)

Thilo Hoffmann – The last interview

by Rajith D. PhD

Thilo Hoffmann 1922-2014; Photo from interview

Pioneering naturalist and conservationist Thilo Hoffmann was still alive in his native Switzerland when I met him for what turned out to be his last interview.  Not just Sri Lankans but the world owes him a debt of gratitude for setting in motion the protection of the prime wet zone wildernesses in Sri Lanka, Sinharaja forest and the Peak Wilderness under the government of Sri Lanka, outstanding global biodiversity hotspots.  Despite this, much of his contribution is unknown in the West including his native Switzerland.  This is a summary of my interview with him at his home near Zurich on 28 December 2012.  It may provide both history and inspiration for those few audacious enough to endeavour to follow in his footsteps and enhance what remains of Sri Lanka’s currently dwindling biodiversity.  Hoffmann’s dreams will contribute to conservation in the future – an integrated vision of man and biodiversity from marine reserves and coastal wilderness to montane forests that provide the aquatic lifeblood of the nation.

Douglas Ranasinghe has published Hoffmann’s biography, The Faithful Foreigner (2015), a wonderful tribute to the man, his work and a history of wildlife conservation on the island.  In a review of this, Rohan Pethiyagoda that it was amazing that Hoffmann was not kicked out of the country for his political agitations – Hoffmann had to renew his SL visa annually.  As Pethiyagoda recently stated about Sri Lankan conservation in De Silva Wijeyratne’s Wild Sri Lanka, taking a cue from European history “The renaissance has started though may be not the enlightenment”. 

My interview was a conversation and has to be seen in that light.  Not all will agree with Mr Hoffmann, but this is precisely the point of shedding some light on a giant of wildlife conservation in Sri Lanka who is in danger of being forgotten in recent wildlife literature.  As much of the original conversational style has been preserved – punctuation has been added.  The forceful expressions of Mr Hoffmann may be quoted as genuine, verbal statements.  I placed several questions.  Rather than detailing the entire conversation, it has been edited and major themes highlighted in bold text representing topics introduced by me.  Bold italic text highlights the questions for clarity, or points, posed by the author.  Quotation marks are regarded as largely redundant except in indicating general, context driven elements in the talk, where expressed.  Finally, Hoffmann managed to correct my transcript.  Any errors are my responsibility.

Early life and getting established in Sri Lanka

I think I published about four hundred articles ….  I was there last March (2012), I always go into book shops [in Sri Lanka] to see if there is anything new …

My date of birth is, 13 March 1922.  My father was a doctor, and he was a keen botanist and mountaineer.  He took me out as a small boy and showed me the plants, the animals and the trees.  I learned these things.  And my paternal grandfather had a small farm with animals, bees and fruit trees and my maternal grandfather lived in the canton of Shaffhausen, in a lovely rural area where I spent many happy holidays.  So I had an affinity to agriculture, to nature, to beauty, to knowing plants, knowing animals and so on.  This is something that grew with me.  Whereas I could be classed as a naturalist, I was cut out to be a conservationist.

I came to Sri Lanka in October 1946.  I had obtained a Diploma Agricultural Engineer (Dipl. Ing.-Agr. ETH) qualification from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.  I was also awarded an agronomist qualification as Master of agricultural science.  Baurs in Ceylon was looking for what they call a Scientific Advisor or if you like just an Agricultural Advisor, and when they wrote to the Institute of Technology, they recommended me and I was selected.

It was my wish to go somewhere to the tropics.  I don’t know why.  During my studies I had read books and heard a lot about the island, naturally including about agriculture.  So, I had an image of beauty, warmth and romance and richness also, and all these put together.  It was during the war here, so we were really confined to this small country.  We were unable to move so much as one foot beyond.  And, there was hardship in Switzerland.  There were all sorts of things, restrictions during the war, in the middle of it, having to defend ourselves, against all sorts of pressures.  In short one just had to get out.  So Sri Lanka was an opportunity to get out.

Baurs has always been, since its inception in the 19th century a Sri Lankan Rupee company.  It dealt with agricultural fertilisers and later pesticides and other goods.  It has not been taken over by foreign hands yet and still operates.

I was struck by Ceylon firstly as I am an explorer.  As soon as I got there I liked the country.  I had to travel a lot as an advisor to the customers of Baurs.  I visited untold estates, farms and places and so I almost began to try to get to every place in Sri Lanka, not always following the same route.  When I followed one route I tried to find another one.  And like that I began to explore the country, to see it, to notice it.  So this was really the beginning, my interest in the country was mostly geographic then. 

Ayyo!  There is no comparison between the island in 1946 and now.  Natural landscape was then really plentiful and there were less people - a population of just six million then.  In my view one of the most basic problems in the world is explosive population growth.  All the ills of the environment are in part a consequence of the growth of population.  Our first aim should be to keep that down.

From my explorations I got interested in the jungle and the animals of course.  I went on shooting trips at the beginning with Sinhalese friends.  I was not interested in shooting.  In fact I never liked the killing of any animal.  But that was the way it was.  In 1947 friends invited me, we went via Panama to Okanda in what is now called Kumana national park.  We camped out there for two weeks; at night we went water hole shooting in the jungle.  It was a terrible drought that year I remember.  Anyway I had a yearning for that kind of outdoor life.  My friends were chiefly trophy hunting, the main quarry was leopard, but they also shot pig, deer, hare and jungle-fowl for the pot.

As for the British – I never went hunting with the British.  It was with local fellows.  Dougie de Zilva, Ben De Harmer, Anton Soerz and Hans Siga another Swiss chap who was with me at Baurs.  The five of us together went to Okanda twice in 1948.  Mind you it was already an adventure to get there in the first place.  We had to go up to Haputale, down to Wellawaya, then Monaragala, Potuvil, down Panama and the coast, and this was an adventure.  Much of the way was through jungle.  We went on foot, at night or evening.  We had local guides and a cook.  We travelled not by car, but by foot.  I shot crocodiles – that’s all.  One of us shot a leopard at night at a waterhole.  In the morning I was totally covered in ticks after patting the poor animal’s head.  A bear was shot in order to collect its baculum or penis bone.  Wounded bears give off terrible cries in pain.

Once I attended an annual general meeting of the Wildlife Society (Wildlife and Nature Protection Society – WNPS) at the Galle face hotel and I met the President, a planter called Ted Norris.  I said I wanted to join.  He promised to send an application form but it never came.  So it took me several years to become a member.  Rodney Jonklaas, who you may have heard of was the secretary then, but he hardly attended meetings although he sent their notification.  So I was asked to take down the minutes, and I became secretary and so my involvement grew.  That’s how I shifted towards conservation.  I would say I’m mainly conservationist rather than a naturalist or activist.  Nature and its ways were always part of me.  I would never consider myself a green extremist.

Noted natural historians and authors encountered

I knew Dr Richard Spittel the anthropologist very well.  I only once went with him to a Veddha place off Maha Oya, probably around 1952.  I also knew Christine Spittel Wilson.  Dr Spittel was a medical doctor with a nursing home on Bullers road.  She was first married to a burger chap Jonklaas before marrying an engineer called Wilson and wrote Bitter Berry.  Originally, Christine and Jonklaas lived at Nagarak Estate that Dr Spittel had purchased for them – they had one child Anne, but no children issued from the second marriage to Jock Wilson, a Scotsman.

I knew Mrs Lushington the ornithologist.  She and her sister were members of the Ceylon Bird Club, they were both at Wanaraja tea estate.

I knew W. W. A. Phillips the noted mammalogist when he was still planting in Sri Lanka.  He was mostly a tea planter though he may have done rubber.  Although he became noted for dealing with mammals he was largely an ornithologist, one of the founder members of the Ceylon Bird Club.  He never wrote a book about birds like with mammals.  Most of his work was in the nineteen thirties.  He was a scientifically qualified prisoner of war.  I knew him and his wife at Pingarawa Estate, Namunukula during this formative stage.  Subsequently we corresponded when he lived in the UK.

I never met ornithologist G. M. Henry though I wrote to him.  I knew his son Bruce.  I also knew Lyn de Alwis, the former director of the Sri Lanka Zoological gardens quite well.

I knew Arthur C. Clarke.  He was very rich.  He came to Sri Lanka because he was rich.  He seemed to like Sri Lanka and knowing N. M. Perera, convinced him to set up a resident guest scheme.  He came to Sri Lanka as the first resident guest tax-free!  Attracting people like him to settle down was good for Sri Lanka’s image.

The maximum number of members at the Ceylon Bird Club was according to how many bird record books that could be produced using a typewriter.  It was a maximum of eight members to begin with in the forties when I knew W. W. A. Phillips.

Encounters with politicians and weakening of environmental enforcement

I knew Dudley Senanayake quite well and also J. R. and Premadasa.  Premadasa was one of the best during the time I was there.  Barely two years in power and he was killed.  I knew him long before when he was an MP.  Educated, clever, a doer and a hard worker.  His time was the only time when employees of the state were told to dress properly and serve the public efficiently and politely.  He was good though his wife was of a different calibre. 

The best leader in terms of the environment was J. R. Jayawardene.  Dudley was also a nature or jungle lover but when it came to doing things - that was JR.  JR gave the definite order stopping logging at Sinharaja.  I spoke to him personally.  He was always good to me and received me nicely.  He listened and seemed to be sympathetic, understanding and he did things.  At an earlier time, when he was minister of state under Dudley, he was the one who stopped Upali Senanayake’s idea of putting hotels up along the Yala coast.  Upali was a member of the Ceylon tourist board.  There was a big conference.  I was the secretary of the society.  At the conference, when we went out Upali was mad like a coot.  J. R. seemed to have a genuine understanding of the needs.  He was not perfect, his brother Harry was responsible for the constitutional issue.  I always found him to be nice, friendly and decent.

Was it bad when SWRD Bandaranaike caused most of the Europeans to leave?  Well, it was not so much that but the wrong people came into positions of power at all levels and these people had no understanding or interest in the environment.  You can see even now.

The 5000 feet law was there then giving some protection to all lands, mostly forest above that altitude and stream reservations.  Stream reservations, forests along streams were also respected.  There were three tea estates in Uva that Baurs owned, they all had several stream reservations along the streams running down the slopes.  Never infringed.  When SWRD came all these stream reservations were compromised.  Encroachment began.  To date they are all gone.  No one even knows the word “stream reservation” any more.

Patna habitat

Are patnas man made or indigenous habitats? Patna pieces between forests are still there exactly as they were and have not been heavily influenced by succession.  They represent original vegetation.  My main reason to say this is because there are endemic plants and animals in the patna.  Often strictly endemic to the patna nothing else.  These could not have evolved as endemics had patnas not been original vegetation.  There should be national parks to protect some patnas.  I have always argued for it, I continue to argue for it.  The heartland of the patna is in Uva.  Uva and the Nilgala area with its talawas (savannahs) and those foothills around that area.  Uva itself, the Uva pleateau was very special with its talawas.

Conservation issues

The IUCN in Sri Lanka is now linked with WWF.  I was associated with these organisations for many years but fell out with the WWF eventually.  In a way IUCN do good things but now in Sri Lanka, they are not that effective.  Both these organisations were founded well after the WNPS and the local IUCN ignored my work including a pioneering booklet on the endangered birds of Sri Lanka.  Earlier organisations like the Ceylon Bird Club and WNPS were built up by voluntary contributions.

Before the CITES regulations were implemented in the 1990s was there more research by foreigners?  I don’t know about research.  There was not much actually [in the 70s].  Actually during that time (70-80s) there was not much interest shown.  They were not aware of the problems or facts of Sri Lanka.  When that did happen, then CITES was already in existence.  Before CITES I got down that couple Bertram, for Dugong research for the wildlife society at that time.  During those days there was no problem at all for research, they could move about freely, no interference from customs.  Now there is a special section in the Customs and the department of agriculture.

Botanical concerns

Issues about invasive plants may be hyped.  Some cases are exaggerated, others misunderstood.  There are many foreign plants that are now branded as aggressive.  Some are, but many are not.  The gorse has been around Nuwara-Eliya for 200 bloody years.  Only recently thanks to the mass migration to Horton plains has it spread there.

We must be sensible.  Lantana was introduced apparently by a British Governor’s wife as a garden plant and naturally it has spread from there and now covers the entire island.  And is regarded again as an invasive plant.  But it first of all it only grows where humans have devastated the original vegetation.  Nowhere where the original vegetation is intact do you see a lantana.  It’s impossible, it cannot grow.  Its seeds are spread by birds, by seeds and so on.  And now what happens.  You have an area which has been devastated by Chena or a similar sort of activity, or clearing of an enormous areas for a scheme like Uda-Walawe, and then they leave the land fallow for years, for decades, not used, only partly used for paddy fields.  Uda-Walawe national park is a prime example.  The lantana established itself there because there is nothing else.  All the rest had been done away with.  Now they try to clear it for millions of rupees.  In vain it will come back.  If you look closely at the lantana spread and you go into it, under the protection of the lantana, local native trees begin to grow.  You see palu inside the lantana.  So if you leave the lantana for 100 or 200 years, you will get back something similar to the original vegetation.  And the lantana will be gone.

Isn’t tea the worst invasive species unlike coffee?  Even coffee required full clearing.  Actually tea also needs shade.  Grevillea the silky oak, another imported tree is a fine shade for tea. 

Best cash crop – cocoa? Coco is a forest plant.  Coco under rubber maybe.  Well rubber itself with Pueraria is not really a bad cover.  Of course it is a monoculture – so it’s bad.  Even tea if it is optimally done along contours – if it is well cultivated plus the shade, in areas like Uva.  Can tea be grown sustainably – yes.  Now of course in Uva tea was grown in patna.  When I first came to Sri Lanka Uva was one large undulating land of patna.  200,000 Acres.  It went right down to Nilgala with its talawas - the steppe, groups of trees plus grass.

Tea was grown there where it was almost an enhancement, if the tea covers the land well, if it is well planted with shade. 

Are forests needed for springs complementing patnas?   Of course those are the sholas - patches of montane forest in grassland.  The water eats itself into land and you can have streams along patna bordered in recesses like this, by small trees.  Such depressed gullies are protected against strong seasonal winds and eventually develop into dense jungles of trees, shrubs and lianas.  These forest patches are the sholas – these were very rich systems, with many animals who used them for migration, such as barking deer, that moved from the low country to the hills along these streams.  Nobody in Sri Lanka took interest in this or noticed and today, few are left.

Amateur versus professional naturalists and NGOs – the impact of amateur naturalists being replaced by professionals and NGOs

Amateur naturalists historically used “their” own money.  I agree naturalists have to have their own resources.  What actually happened during my time is that the amateur naturalist or conservationist, has been gradually and sometimes ruthlessly displaced by the professional.

Now, All these bodies, which you have today, Birdlife international and World Wide Fund and what have you, all are professional bodies.  Now they cannot tolerate amateurs next to them or even on par with them.  They have to suppress them and that’s what happened throughout parts of my life.  I was the exponent of the amateur and I suffered from that.  I can tell you, I had terrible fights with the World Wildlife Fund.  Eventually they pushed me out as president of the society –

As president of what society?  Wildife [WNPS] society.  As I said ruthless.  And what do you get instead of devoted organisations which you find in all countries? – in every country you had a band of amateurs.  It cost nearly nothing; they all did good productive work, they studied, they sent reports.  The movement was living on its own and in my humble opinion did better work for conservation than these super organisations do now.  What they do they produce?  Beautiful books, with pictures and all the rest and so on.  Spend enormous amounts of money on conservation and this and that; actual effect in a country like Sri Lanka – practically zero. 

So home grown conservation is best?  Yes.  Mainly as a hobby.  Certainly not as an income. 

Thilo Hoffman’s role in the Mahaweli Project

By that time I was retired from Baurs but still living in Sri Lanka (in the late eighties); at that time there was Dr Atapattu who was the Director of Wildlife.  He was a veterinarian who had been at the zoo under Lyn de Alwis by the way.  He knew me and invited me into this Mahaweli Environment Project under the Ministry of State at that time.  So I became for about two and half years, the manager of that, in a purely honorary capacity.  That was based on the TAMS report by an American organisation paid for by USAID.  The US paid for it, the whole program: setting up of national parks.  They paid for the environment program as part of the Mahaweli program that was set up from the very beginning.  It was creating the Maduru Oya National Park, the Wasgamuwa National Park, Somawathie National Park and The Flood Plains National park.  These four national parks were in this program and the connection between them.  There was a planned connections between Maduru Oya and Flood Plains and Wasgamuwa on the other side of the river.  The whole thing was interconnected right down to Thamankaduwa – that was really to my heart (since compromised).

Some of these national parks existed already, Thamankaduwa was a sanctuary, Somawathie was a sanctuary, Maduru Oya did not exist, that was entirely new; Wasgamuwa was a strict national reserve.  So there were reserves, but to tie them up and defend them against the avalanche of machinery – have you seen how land is cleared today?  They moved these enormous machines down corridors in-between with chains, they rip the whole bloody thing out.  But still these parks are the reserves where wildlife can survive.

Mahaweli development was a necessary project as extensive dry zone areas could not for ever remain under mostly unproductive forest, but unfortunately it was implemented by ruthless destruction, sometimes leaving flat areas with not a single tree.  It may have been better to restore thousands of crucial tanks and their cascades as had been suggested.

Then came this bloody war and the tigers encroached on these national parks.  Yes the war did help to protect wildlife – temporarily.  Subsequent developments have the opposite effect.

I retired from Baurs in 1982.  I was still chairman of Baurs at that time (of the Mahaweli development).  I was still to some extent involved but not full time.  I left Sri Lanka in 1998 or so, my wife was very ill and she had to come here, that’s why I left.

Sinharaja

This is, if you talk of accomplishments, probably the only really important one that has really saved something.  I did hardly know it, but what happened was that I was the president of the Wildlife Society, and the idea of doing something in Sinharaja which has a mystical connotation in the minds of the Sinhalese did not go down well.  That was the time of Mrs Bandaranaike.  The idea of destroying the forest was strongly opposed by some people.  One of them was Vere de Mel; Who was a leftist politician at some time.  He was the founder of these taxis Quickshaws, he was also a member of my committee and he used to harp on this and said “you must do something”.  You! Not he!  I.  That was always the thing.  They came up with ideas and I was supposed to do it.  So anyway, what happened, after several interventions by these people, I went there.

I spend three days there, with my friend Sam Elapata who lived at Nivitigala and every morning at five-o-clock I pushed off and went into Sinharaja.  I did the whole damn thing in and out; I walked right through the forest to the other side at Watugala and I just looked; in fact I published a small thing after that, as a basis for the campaign we started, I said, I went there.  I was not at all extremist to say “we must not do anything here!” but I wanted to see what it was.  What it represented.  Then, this decided me that we should not touch it at all, because this seemed to me from the creation of the world, an evolution, which had not been interfered with by the people. The local people were very few, tiny little hamlets, and they took a little jaggery and a little timber and a little this and a little that from the forest; so, to my mind this area especially around Sinhagala was entirely untouched; and then, I walked through all that; Ayyo, what I can tell you, I mean, after half an hour you were wet and you stayed wet until you went to bed or took a shower - soaking wet because of the high humidity.

Except for smaller areas of higher elevations like Suriyakanda, basically in the rainforest it is always very humid, the rainy season almost impossible, and there are leeches also, of course, leeches you get only where animals move, buffalo in this case.  Anyway, I think I could give you a copy of that.  The Wildife Society produced thousands of copies of a booklet by me called “Sinharaja 1972” both in English and Sinhala; 1972 – that’s when the campaign started.

What happened actually after some time, the government appointed a committee with George Rajapakse was minister of fisheries as head; and why they wanted to log Sinharaja was to feed that Kosgama plywood factory; all that is described in my booklet and in the upcoming biography by Douglas Ranasinghe.  So, they were of course set on this.  Autarchy was their main thing.  They didn’t want to import anything if they could, that was also the reason … Autarchy means self-sufficiency in something, in this case timber.  They had to import enormous quantities, plywood for tea-chests.  They wanted to do that themselves.  The timber was to come from Sinharaja by a means called selective felling, that means only ripe trees.  Four or five or even only one or two per acre, but the destruction to get them and out, altered the whole system, totally.  And I Knew Sinharaja was a unique thing, which once logged selectively would be lost forever.  And it would never be regenerated quite like that.  I mean think of all the species, which Rohan has found, fishes and things … slugs and snails and insects and god knows.  All that would have really, or much of it would have [been lost], so I was very convinced that for the people, for Sri Lanka it would be better not to touch it and in fact conserve it.  But, ayyo, uphill struggle – all in the book about me by Douglas Ranasinghe.

It was JR who gave the order.  He came to power with a landslide.  It was actually around 1977, he was Prime minister, he became president a year later.  I went to see him, and talk to him about this because by then [1978] this had been going on for six years, and it had still not been resolved.  They just wanted to give 4000 acres which had most of it already been logged so not much use for anybody.  I said no.  Somehow or other he was convinced.  Possibly also because he was Sinhalese, he knew the history, the story that the forest was something special to the Sinhalese.  Anyway he gave the order [to stop logging] – out finished. 

Then there was a struggle between me, as representative of Wildlife [WNPS] and the Forest department.  There were two forest reserves.  One was the Sinharaja and one the proposed Sinharaja forest reserve, adjoining.  But the two of them were what we wanted.  And then I said it should be handed over to the Wildlife Department because at that time the forest department did not have any legislation, which gave real proper safety to an area like a national park.  Then they introduced a new law, which was called the National heritage act, basically the same as the Flora and Fauna Protection Ordinance.  They wanted to keep the forest.  And in a way, well I didn’t like that - because it was really the forest department who had started this whole thing and who were behind the logging, not anybody else.  So how could you make them the guardians?  Anyway in the end that was probably OK.  Thus it became this national heritage area, then it became a biosphere reserve and eventually it became a world heritage site, which it’s now.  All this happened after the logging was totally stopped.

There are national parks and forests.  Only 2% are wet zone forests. Aren’t these more significant and are wildlife corridors important? Dry zone forests have also lost a lot and they will lose more [in comparison to wet zone forests].  If we can.  One time long long ago when I was secretary of the WNPS, I wrote an article where I wanted to tie up the Ruhuna area with Gal Oya.  That’s a very very long time ago.  Dr Spittel called it at that time one of the best things written on this subject.  These things have been in my mind all along, you know, to connect them [national parks] up, sensibly.

What about using mountain ridges as forest corridors? The top mountains are entirely cut off from the lower lands.  You still have, above 5000 feet a few areas of forest, and if rigorously protected most certainly that would be most valuable.  Not only to wildlife, catchment and erosion protection but also for the climate.  These are very often the cloud forests, and the cloud forests have been dying during the last thirty years, probably due to pollution.  I was about the only person who took an interest in why and came up with the conclusion that it was pollution.  Not only our own pollution but from south India and surrounding regions.

What’s the main motivation for preserving wildlife, to preserve species richness, the water catchments, tourism?  The lot.  Not tourism.  For me what is now called eco-tourism is an evil, because it destroys the last remaining intact sites.

But good examples as in Hong Kong exist?  You could do that.  The trouble is people always go beyond limits.  Everybody thinks we must offer our clients something new, something special, something original.  So instead of sticking to what there is, well, certainly you could develop, jungle trails, say in the Knuckles.  You could.  It would be a good thing.  If the rest is then strictly left alone.  That is not going to happen.  Some other fellow, he thinks, ah I want to go beyond and so on. “Proliferation”.  That’s the problem.  I have very much seen that through my eyes, somewhere I have written.  For me the best thing is to confine tourists to strictly designated areas and not allow them to roam all over the bloody place.  Of course where there are roads …

So there needs to be a hierarchy of natural reserves from strict to nature trails? That’s right. 

On Marine conservation

Marine conservation is very important.  Extremely.  I have been fighting for that also, because I had a house on the east coast which was ransacked during the war [1980s] and I was very concerned about coral depredation for lime burning.

And what about fisheries?  Sure sure.  With regards to dugongs, to my mind it’s too late now.  I don’t think you will find any more dugongs in Sri Lankan waters, because that waterway between Puttalam, Kalpitiya and Mannar is now heavily disturbed daily.

Yes marine reserves should be created.  Of course.  All the major coral reefs should be protected fully, entirely, and only entry allowed against permits for specific, well controlled purposes because they are very sensitive.  And corals are enormously important to keep our coastlines intact.  Of course the coral reefs have an important, protective, role to play and so have the mangroves.

Anything special about Sri Lanka?  Its similar to South India, Laccadives, Maldives or something if you like.  Sri Lanka is special by its geography.  Being an island, being where it is at the tip of India in that climatic zone and all the variety it has from sea level to seven thousand feet and so on.  It is a biologically unique, especially these elevational differences.  That is why I always wanted that the peak wilderness to be made a national park. 

That’s one of your accomplishments?  No it is still not properly protected.  Still only a sanctuary, bits and pieces.  I wanted to add to it, the Kelani Valley, the forest reserve which goes right down to Kitulgala.  So you would have a national park from under a hundred feet up to seven thousand feet.

Do you think the British did a good job in preserving forest despite all the destruction?  Yes.  They did a good job as far as the forest itself was concerned.  Of course they gave land out for clearing and plantation, that’s a different matter.

The problem of crown land – the government owning all the land as an effect of colonialism, is not that a problem?  I think so.  Earlier, these were not really property rights, they were usage rights under the kings.  And the population was very thin at that time.  Hardly had an impact on the forest.  They used the forest for this and that, just like Sinharaja when I first saw it.  So what the British really did, they declared all the land to which there were no clear titles, as crown, meaning government property.  This is today the land which the government is giving away for this and that and the other, and which of course was then, given to tea estates and so on.  That you have to judge in a different way.  But once that had been done, towards the end of their period, with the forest department and the land department.  These people did a good job.

Was there more damage done post independence compared to colonial times?  Very definitely, because discipline disappeared, and of course the growth of the population.  Pressures came and politicians had no other idea when they wanted to develop this country than to open land and give it for settlement and cultivation.

Only Premadasa, again was the first to introduce industries like the garment factories, all over the country, he was really the first to get us away from this basic, preposterously simple ways of developing the country.  I was here two years before independence.  Through independence, after independence, I can tell, the main damage to the natural environment has been done since 1960. 

Isn’t it difficult to get things done then? Pessimism?  It is.  Of course you can find people who have the same idea as you and I.  You are an example, but that’s not enough.  You have to get to the centre of power, where decisions are taken.  If you have a person there who is a convinced conservationist, then you know that he or someone like that will think before doing things.  People must have foresight, think about the possible results, in order to do that they must be influenced by …

You have to be optimistic.  You get knocked down, but you stand up and start again, otherwise, if you are not.  You see I am really, quite a sensitive person, people don’t perceive me as that, so it hits me, it worries me, it hurts me when things go wrong, terribly wrong, and when the wrong motives are imputed to me for doing those things.  It’s been a bad time, generally speaking, up and down.  Sure I did love the wildlife.  Animals have no votes at all.

Elephant killing by trains

You see another thing which still happens today [elephant decline].  Throughout my life the railway has killed elephants, throughout though perhaps a little less during my first years in Ceylon.  And I know for a fact that some engine drivers are drunk, at night, when they drive the train, and they deliberately run their bloody trains into a herd of elephants.  Now that train goes so slowly, it runs so slowly.  I once read a small article, this is a fact, in the paper, it says: A terrible accident was prevented the other day on the rail track between Polonnaruwa and Vallaichenai.  The last wagon caught fire.  There was a Catholic priest in that train, he jumped down and he ran and ran and ran up to the engine driver and told him to stop.  And if that priest had not done that, all those people would have died.  That was written in the paper and it actually happened.  So you can see how fast these trains normally run.  And these fellows could have stopped their trains, but they hit an elephant deliberately!  No no ordinary Sinhalese farmer would simply kill an elephant.  But if it damages his paddy field, that’s another matter.

Films: Bridge on the River Kwai and Elephant Walk

Bridge on the River Kwai: It’s one of my favourite films as well.  I saw it here recently for the 10^th time.  Superb film.  I was chosen as a stand-in for Alec Guiness, but did not dare ask my employer for so much leave.

Elephant Walk: Blocking Elephant roads mostly fiction.  At Hantana they did much of the filming for that movie.  Elizabeth Taylor came in much later, because the original actress chosen, Vivien Leigh fell out, after they had taken all the shots in Sri Lanka.  She became ill, infatuated with another actor, had to be taken out.  Elizabeth Taylor was never in Sri Lanka.  That’s why the film was pretty lousy.  All original shots were replaced with studio scenes.

Are there messages for young people in this Hoffman biography by Douglas Ranasinghe?

I hope so.  I mean, the only reason I have put in a lot myself, was I was hoping that it might, even after my death, have a certain impact, meaning it shows people what they could do.  What they should not do.  Mistakes that may have been made in the past and which they make over and over again, if somebody will take note of it, but I must say I have not much optimism.

The organisations in Sri Lanka should unite and put their heads together.  In my time there was only one.  The wildlife and Nature Protection Society.  There was nothing else.  Today there are dozens.  as you can see.  And they all do their own little thing which is often, nothing.  Which has no impact what so ever.

The Young Zoological Society (YZS) is good.  That was created by Lyn De Alwis.  Of the others, The Wildlife Society is now, almost defunct, regretfully I have to say. Just existing, that is not good enough reason.  People are not prepared, to really give much of their existence to an idea.  They feel strongly and all that … Now the Young Zoologists are basically good.  I have occasionally met some members, I see how keen they are, mostly how they study, they learn, that’s a good thing, that was Lyn De Alwis.  But again originally, the YZS was a rival to the Wildlife Society, just like FOGSL was and is a rival to the Ceylon Bird Club.

There is no reason why there should not be different people looking after different small little different interests, as long as in important matters they get together. 

Personal life revisted

What allowed you to live and work in Sri Lanka and retire in Switzerland? I was working for Baurs for 40 years.  I think I could have managed to live on the amount I saved during this period of time.  My family, fortunately, is well to do and I had no problems there.

I have no children.  Married for over 56 years.  I met my future wife just before I left for Sri Lanka.  At that time we were not allowed to marry during the first contract.  The contract was for 4 years.  I must have been very persuasive.  My boss didn’t like the idea.  I got married after 1 year.  My wife was with me in Sri Lanka throughout; we could not have any children.  My wife was very happy to be in Sri Lanka, she shared all the hardships, she walked with me, we did everything together.  No complaints.  She came with me on the second hunting trip down to Panama.  She endured all the hardships without complaint.  She died twelve years ago.

Another photo from the interview

Thilo's last flat in Switzerland

The Lunacy of Environmentalism

by Rohan Pethiyagoda

At the Meterological Department Auditorium, Colombo 7, Thursday December 19^th 2013 at 6 pm, organised by the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society of Sri Lanka (WNPS).  Some of the issues covered such as golden rice have had recent developments.  The substance of the lecture with regards to Sri Lanka remain relevant.

Recorded and transcribed by Pothila – This is as word perfect as I can get it bearing in mind there was a slide show with key slides represented in square brackets only when relevant.  The subdivisions into paragraphs are my own choices to break up the prose.  There were subsequent questions and concerns expressed by the floor, which unfortunately was not packed this evening prior to Christmas, opposite the BMICH building.

Chairman’s introduction to Rohan Pethiyagoda

I am delighted to introduce Dr Rohan Pethiyagoda.  He has the unique honour of having a fish species named after him - Rasboroides rohani I got it wrong, but never mind.  A biomedical engineer by profession, Pethiyagoda established the Wildlife Heritage Trust, which has been responsible for the discovery and description of almost a hundred new species of vertebrates to the world of natural science from Sri Lanka, mainly amphibians but also fishes and lizards as well.  This work also led to the finding that some twenty species of Sri Lankan amphibians have become extinct, in the past one hundred and thirty years, the highest number of national extinction of amphibians recorded in the world.  Amongst other world records, this is another record we have.  Pethiyagoda served as advisor on environment and natural resources to the government of Sri Lanka from 2002 to 2004 and also in 2005, elected the deputy chair of IUCN species survival concept.  In 2008, Pethiyagoda was elected to the board of trustees of the international trust [code] for zoological nomenclature.  He’s a research associate of the Australian Museum and serves as editor for the Asian Freshwater Fishes of the Journal Zootaxa.  With a reputation for being unafraid to express his views on issues, we’re all due for an exciting lecture which promises to be a fascinating talk on the wild places and creatures of Sri Lanka and of their conservation.  Ladies and gentlemen Rohan Pethiyagoda: (applause)

I want to stir the pot a little today to address a few issues that, I think we need to think about more often.  The theme of this discussion is the increasing divide that’s happening between the world, the magisterium if you like, of science and reason, logic and rationalism on the one side and elements of the environmental movement that have drifted away from those values on the other.  It’s a controversial topic but if we don’t address it, we stand to lose because, when environmentalists stop being taken seriously by governments and their policy makers, it’s the environment, it’s the national interest that suffers.

I want to start this story, where I think it begins with the foundation of the Royal Society in London in 1660.  That was a turbulent time in Europe but it was a time of huge scientific advancement.  When in 1660 the Royal Society was founded, people like Newton, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren were walking the streets of London.  These men when they got together and persuaded king Charles the 2^nd to give them a Royal Charter to institute the world’s first academic, scientific society, which is still probably the most prestigious, they chose as their motto the Latin inscription Nullius in verba, basically meaning take nobody’s word for it, in other words treat everything, all knowledge with scepticism.  At the time, remember this is just ten years after Galileo’s death at the hands of the papacy for having said that the Earth goes around the sun, it was a courageous statement to make, you were contesting the authority of the king, the authority of the church.  But it is this statement that science has held true to, to our time.  Our practice of science is still the testing of established knowledge and the testing of new hypotheses.  It is always questioning what is known.  It’s a question of subversion.  As a result of this, in science we treat this questioning nature as a positive thing, but there has to be a limit because if we question everything we tend to get into trouble.  If you think about it, when you were a small child, your parents said if you put your hand in the fire, you will get burnt.  If you didn’t take their word for it, and you decided to question that statement and put your hand in the fire, you would get burnt.  So we take certain things on faith, but we must always be ready to question those things because if someone discovers that fire doesn’t burn you, then we can slowly start experimenting on that basis and make some interesting discoveries.

My argument is that by denying science, many people in the environment movement have let the whole movement down and I want to go through that partly in the global context but mainly in the Sri Lankan one. 

America is the world’s most advanced scientific country.  They spend more on science than any other country in history or in our contemporary world.  Only 15% of Americans believe that evolution by natural selection is true.  Almost half of Americans, a greater proportion than you, a lay audience here, in a developing country, believe that God created man like that.  The reason for this is not because they don’t understand science.  They understand science but they see science through the prejudice of their religious conviction.  It’s not just religion that prejudices us, it’s also politics.  Take the principle that we know is well founded in science and in fact, that global warming is happening.  Science that we know to be true, Americans also know to be true.  Still, when they look at it through the prism of their political prejudice, 84% of Americans think that global warming is true if they are Democrats, if they’re Republicans it’s only half as many.  How can the same facts be seen by the same population, and have them come to two very disparate conclusions?  That is the prejudice of politics.  So just as, this most scientifically advanced country on the planet can be so profoundly wrong, we must concede it possible that we too, as environmentalist can be profoundly wrong if we choose to view science through the prism of our own prejudices.  They could be ethnic prejudices, they could be the prejudice that we see ourselves as a country oppressed by colonialism, that we are suspicious of Western values; these are all prejudices that can be brought to bear to give us a wrong take on life.  Just as much as those people are wrong.

So I want to start this evening with the concept, the idea that many environmentalists all over the world, not just in Sri Lanka have talked about which is that genetically modified foods and crops are bad for you, either in terms of health, and for you in terms of the environment.  Since 1996 genetically modified crops have been steadily taking over agriculture.  Today in the United States, about 90% of all these crops which are staple crops, are derived from GM plants.  In tropical and southern America, the trend is almost as high and growing.  China and India have taken over.  In 2001 Sri Lanka became the first country in the world to prohibit genetically modified food from being imported.  I don’t have a grievance with that decision so much as the grievance that it wasn’t found on science.  It was founded on some person saying “these foods are dangerous, therefore we will prohibit them”.  It didn’t affect Sri Lanka very much but it made global news and it made us a laughing stock of much of the world.  But that’s not a bad thing.  What was a bad thing was that the following year in 2002, there was a massive drought driven famine in Africa.  Zambia and Zimbabwe both had thousands of people dying of hunger because there was a huge shortage of food.  They couldn’t get food from anywhere and when the Americans offered them free corn, mind you all the corn in America is GM, the governments of Zambia and Zimbabwe said “no”.  “The Sri Lankans say it’s dangerous, we don’t want to touch it”.  They’d rather let their people starve, which they did than import so called poisonous genetically modified corn from America free of charge to feed their starving people.  That was an example where a stupid action of one or two people in the Health Ministry in Sri Lanka, none of who understands in my view what a gene is, made a profound mistake with international repercussions, which were tragic.  I’m going to mention a few more examples like that as we go along.

Quickly to recap to those of you who might be not be up to speed with what genetic modification is, a gene is a piece of information, it’s nothing more, it’s not a substance, it’s not a substance that you can touch or feel or eat.  It is like a piece of computer program, and genes tell cells how to behave, that’s all there is to it.  So the fact that a gene has been taken from one organism and put into another one, by itself, doesn’t mean anything.  It’s like you’re getting a laptop with Windows whereas somebody else may have a laptop with Microsoft OS.  It doesn’t make a difference.  GM crops have now, as I mentioned earlier become widely distributed almost everywhere in the world.  Several countries in the EU don’t allow GM food for human consumption because environmental NGOs in Europe such as Greenpeace are very powerful politically active and make it difficult for governments to approve it.  No one up to now has found any health risk from genetically modified food.  But in Sri Lanka I’ve seen over the past ten years repeated newspaper articles saying that this food is poison.  The fact is many of us already would have consumed GM food, without even knowing it and if you find yourselves glowing in the dark, you’ll know why!  GM food can also be very beneficial.  The countries marked in red on this map, are countries where there is a clinical undersupply of vitamin A.  Vitamin A deficiency in the population that is of clinical proportions, Sri Lanka is amongst them.  What’s the impact of this?  Half a million children worldwide every year, under the age of five die of vitamin A deficiency.  This is basically a lack of things like cod-liver-oil, that we get in our normal diets but poor people don’t.  680,000 Children in these countries become blind permanently for life as a result of vitamin A deficiency.  What was the scientific response?  A group of genetic engineers got together, and about ten years ago they developed what they called golden rice.  Rice with a gene in it, that creates beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A in the rice itself.  They tested it on rats, they tested it on people, they tested it on all kinds of things and nothing was found to be the matter with it.  But still, globally, the environmental lobby says “no”, “we will not allow this to be grown”.  Two weeks ago they tried a field trial in the Philippines, environmentalists went and destroyed the trial.  Greenpeace, if you look on its website says they can’t find anything wrong with this rice but on principal, they are opposed to it because they are in principal, opposed to genetically modified crops.  So people have tried for a good long time since the early 1990s to find if genetically modified foods cause problems.  The fact is, up to now, they haven’t.  But last year, for the first time there was a study, by this guy Gilles-Eric Séralini, in which he showed that mice fed genetically modified corn developed cancer.  There was a storm of publicity, as a result of this, in the world’s media scaring people again from touching genetically modified food.  Nine months later, those authors themselves retracted their paper, because other scientists stepped in and showed that their methodology was fundamentally flawed, that their results were meaningless; the nature of science is such that we can test these things.  But that was an easy paper to discredit because the authors were really good, they did an honest piece of work, it’s just that they made some mistakes.

When an author or a scientist deliberately seeks to mislead, it can be very difficult to refute his work.  Take a simple and trivial example given first by Bertrand Russell about the problem of disproving a negative.  If someone were to tell you today to make an assertion that there is a Victorian silver teapot in the orbit of Mars, you can’t disprove that.  It’s going to cost you millions of dollars to send space probes to Mars to find out whether there is actually a silver teapot orbiting Mars.  That statement is not easily disproved.  We just know that it’s a stupid statement.  So we have to be a little rational.  The fact is, though the environmental lobby has been so violently opposed to GM food there’s not been one whisper about genetically modified medicine.  Today a huge number of medicines are made from recombinant DNA.  Essentially they are genetically modified.  Pretty much all the insulin you get in the market worldwide today is GM.  So is the TPA, that’s the drug they give you when you get a heart attack or a stroke and they wheel you into the emergency care at Durdan’s, they stab you with a quick injection to dissolve any clots, that’s genetically modified.  Are you really to go into hospital and say “I don’t want insulin, I don’t want TPA, because I don’t believe in GM”?  Interferon to treat cancers, a bunch of other medicines are all genetically modified; there’s no other kind you can get, 99% of Sri Lankan children have been vaccinated against hepatitis now, all of that vaccine was GM.  And none of those kids has had a problem.  So this scare campaign really hasn’t amounted to anything, anywhere.  And when, people in a scare campaign get in the newspaper we see that and we get frightened.  When nanotechnology came into vogue ten years ago, environmentalists were not far behind saying “you need to put a warning on that”, they even designed a warning saying against what?  It’s just, there might be something bad about it so let’s stick a warning saying people need to be informed that there’s nanotechnology involved.  And some of these scares can be expensive, painful and costly.  In 1998, a paper appeared in Lancet, one of the most influential British, medical periodicals, claiming that children who had received MMR – measles, mumps and rubella vaccination, developed autism.  It made headlines worldwide.  Who carried the news to the people?  We environmentalists.  Immediately across the world, parents stopped immunising their children.  If you look at the statistics for deaths from measles in Europe, there’s a huge spike because a whole generation had grown up with measles being unknown.  When I was a kid, it was common to have measles.  My children’s generation have not known what measles is, they have no idea unless they look it up on Wikipedia.  As a result of this one article parents stopped immunizing their children, and everybody in the scientific and medical world knew that this was rubbish but like that silver teapot orbiting Mars, to prove that it is rubbish is expensive; you’ve got to do clinical trials, you’ve got to replicate these people’s studies, you got to spend millions of dollars to show that they are fraudulent.  It took ten years to show that they were fraudulent.  Eventually it was only in 2011, two years ago, that the Lancet was able to publish a full retraction of that paper.  Not only that, they found that the man who published those results was an absolute fraud, he was doing it for money, he was a doctor, and he was struck off the medical register in England.

But thousands of children everywhere in the world died as a result of this misinformation.  Misinformation can be a very expensive thing for people who are not up-to-date with looking at the latest scientific results, going to the latest seminars and keeping themselves abreast of science.  Most of us are in that category.  So there is a responsibility for environmentalists to report the truth, always. 

So let’s take an easy example and one in which I was personally involved.  We all know that electricity demand in Sri Lanka is sky-rocketing.  The orange bars in this graph represent thermal production of electricity.  The blue bars represent hydropower.  If you look at the situation in Sri Lanka from about 1980 onwards, from about 1980 to 1995, the onset of the Mahaweli projects was able to increase the amount of hydropower we had so that we needed very little thermal power.  From 1995 to now, hydropower has remained almost constant while thermal power has skyrocketed.  This has horrible effects.  It’s Sri Lanka’s biggest focus of expenditure.  It’s the biggest hole in our balance of payments.  The need to import fossil fuels to burn, to make electricity, when we’ve got still quite substantial resources of renewable energy like wind and hydro in the country.  But who have the enemies of renewable energy been in Sri Lanka?  The environmentalists!  I just don’t understand it.  Every time a wind turbine goes up there’s protests saying “that’s bad”.  When a hydropower project is mooted there’s protests saying “that’s bad”.  How can you have development because the basic point, worldwide is that if you have poverty, you will have environmental problems.  The only way of solving environmental problems is to lift people out of poverty.  Every continent that has got around the poverty gap has found that it’s much easier to deal with the environment after that.  And we can’t lift people out of poverty so long as we keep exporting all our money to import oil, just to burn to give electricity.  When the upper Kotmale project was mooted in the early 1990s it came under huge opposition!  The Catholic church was against it, the environmentalists were against it.  One environmental foundation even went to court and got an order to stop it.  There were protests in the streets saying this project is going to cause enormous environmental harm.  The Ceylon Worker’s Congress Mr Thondaman was adamantly against it, he was leading street protests and burning tyres, to stop the project from happening.  It had ground to a halt when in 1994 as a result of all this environmental opposition, I was given a bunch of reports and told to report to the government as to whether there was really any environmental harm coming out of this project so it could go or not go ahead.  So I took all these reports and I looked at what’s wrong with this project.  I had a public hearing, there were people who came from Ruk Rakaganno, from EFL from the green movement who made representations.  There concerns were there will be landslides, species will become extinct, there will be earthquakes, as a result of this piddling little project.  Do you know the size of the dam in upper Kotmale?  Two hundred and fifty hectares.  Most coconut estates will be bigger.  250 Hectares.  It’s an environmental pindrop!  As for species going extinct, that becomes laughable because this is built in an area where 100 years previously the British had cut down all the forest and grown tea.  The tea was so unproductive that in most of it the tea had been abandoned.  It was just growing back into grass, into patna.

So the main objection that we were left with, was the involuntary re-settlement of the people in Talawakele whose houses were going to go under water.  This was the main grievance that Mr Thondaman had and he said that they were adamantly opposed to the project.  So I went and met them.  I asked for a meeting, we, got the people together, here’s a picture of the kind of housing those people had: no inside bathrooms, no piped water to the house, no road access for them to go to school, ten or more people sleeping in one tiny room without a ceiling and a leaky roof, no paved flooring, in abject poverty.  So we got these people, five-hundred families togethe and I asked them “so what is your objection to this project?” and they looked really bewildered and they said “hang on, we have no objection to this project – we want this project to happen because they promised  us new houses”.  So the people who were claiming that these people had a grievance because they were going to be involuntarily resettled had basically been lying.  I asked the community to raise hands to show if they had any objections whatsoever.  Not a single hand went up.  And today, now that the project has been finished, they’ve got these beautiful houses with internal kitchens, with road access to a new school, I haven’t been there to find out if they are happy with this but I bet they are.   And for fifteen years it was environmentalists who held them back, who held the country back, who held development back.  Because if we don’t develop, environmental problems are going to get much worse.  It’s much better to build confidence in governments, in policy makers for being responsible environmentalists so we can get them on our side rather than be antagonistically irrational and alienate them which leads to the predicament we have today, when nobody listens to environmentalists.  There is no voice, I’ve been overseas and come back and found out - newspapers are basically mute, they attack each other.  No one takes on the government.

Another hobbyhorse of environmentalists in Sri Lanka has been this issue of biopiracy.  There’s hardly a month that passes by when you don’t see this word used in the newspapers.  People talk of people going into forests and pirating our valuable biological and genetic resources.  I looked up on the internet from the main English newspapers and found that the word biopiracy has not been used by an English newspaper in Sri Lanka since 2000 in the correct context.  Because none of the journalists who write this rubbish or the so called environmentalists who feed them the rubbish to write have ever looked up the definition of what is biopiracy.  It’s a very careful definition and in my opinion – I don’t want to read this out, in my opinion there’s been no demonstrable incidence of biopiracy in Sri Lanka in history.  But we see this word repeatedly been used and allegations made against people on the basis of biopiracy.  This is not unique to our country, I’m not trying to single us out for ridicule.  All over the world, there is a problem of radical environmentalism – here’s a cover story from Nature, quite respected journal in the sciences, discussing the green scare, where all over the world environmental movements go away from science, they start adopting their own prejudiced agendas and then try and convert people to them.

Biopiracy is in effect the theft of green gold, valuable resources of forests.  I don’t deny it for a moment that there is value in biodiversity.  We know that the British when they first came here in the early 19^th century, one of the first crops they planted, few people know this, before tea or rubber was cinchona, cinchona is a south American plant that’s used in the treatment of malaria.  It is still very effective, no doubt an important biodiversity constituent.  More recently the Chinese plant Artemisia makes Artemisin, also used widely to treat malaria.  A very charismatic example, the Rosy periwinkle, a Madagascan plant now found all over the world as a result of horticulture – people discovered it was good for treating Hodgkin’s disease, a form of leukemia.  The cone shell has yielded a painkiller that is much more effective than morphine.  There are undoubtedly a handful of such examples, but there aren’t’ hundreds of them.  They are lovely examples when we can find them.

Now I don’t deny that there is value in biodiversity.  But unfortunately, more and more environmentalists have found it necessary to lie in order to make this true, the fact is there aren’t a million examples.  There are very few, like the ones I showed you.  Take this statement “a chemical that constitutes bullet proof vests which have a multi billion dollar global market originally extracted from the web of the wood spider Nephila.  The spider thrives in Sri Lankan forests but the technology to manufacture the vests is not available in this country”.  It sounds credible, an article written by a global 500 laureate who said so himself and who identified himself as a former president of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society, so anyone reading this in the newspaper in the Sunday Times to boot, would think this is a truthful statement.  [“Bulls**t” picture] That’s what it is.  Kevlar, which is what bullet-proof vests are made of, is a polymer that was discovered serendipitously in a laboratory of the Dupont corporation made entirely from synthetic materials, there was nothing to do with spiders or spider webs or Sri Lanka or any other country.  That was the fantasy in the mind of one environmentalist who chose to make his point by telling a lie for no good reason.  There’s enough truthful things to tell.  Another example from the same gentleman, again, president of this society, global 500 laureate.  “The globally used statin drugs which control blood cholesterol originate from a tropical plant but this million dollar trade predominantly benefits only the manufacturing countries that have acquired the patent rights”.  What’s the impression you get from that statement?  That our forests have got plants from which some multinational came and took the genes and made these wonderful drugs from which they’re making billions of dollars.  Again [“bullshit” picture].  Statins are made from very common fungi that are found pretty much everywhere, not in beautiful tropical forests like that.  Aspergillus which is the common one from which Crestor and all these popular statins are made actually is found in garbage.  If you put some paw-paw skins in a plastic bag and leave it in damp dark place, you find that lovely green mould on it – that is what Aspergillus is of which the statins are made.  If you leave your walking boots with sweat in a dark place, Penicillium will grow on them.  And that’s from which other statins are made.  These are not things that come from tropical forests.  The gentleman didn’t need to have to tell a lie in order to make his point.  Because when you lie with such credentials, people tend to believe you.

There is another often quoted fact.  This one is true.  Eleven of the top twenty-five best selling pharmaceuticals in the world are derived from natural products.  Worldwide sales of these eleven, reached about $18 billion.  That’s a lot of money.  It’s bigger than the national economy.  And that statement is true.  What I did was, I think for the first time probably.  I looked at this list of some 20 drugs, I found the 11 that were made from natural products, and I went into their formulas to find out what those natural products were.  Here’s the list of drugs.  You can see how many billions those companies are making.  Four of the eleven are statins, which as we’ve just found are made from common, soil fungi.  Three of them are antibiotics, again made from very common fungi like Penicillium.  Two of them are proteins that are used in blood transfusions made from cells extracted from the udders of cows.  One is Neupogen which is made from E. coli which is a bacterium that lives in your anus.  The eleventh one is Ciclosporin which is made from a ubiquitous soil fungus.  All eleven of these multi-billion dollar drugs come from fungi and organisms that are found pretty much everywhere on Earth.  There was no biopiracy necessary for any of this.  My beef with the biopiracy argument is not that biopiracy cannot happen, it is entirely conceivable that someone will look in a rainforest somewhere and find a gene of huge commercial value, that is conceivable.  But in order to prevent that guy from finding that gene, we have shut down all of biological research in Sri Lanka.  To get a permit from the Wildlife Department, and nobody in the Wildlife Department believe me, knows what a gene is – you have to get a permit to do any kind of biological research in this country.  And there is a huge problem because they believe that people are out to pirate biological resources as a result of that, to get a permit is near impossible and I’m going to return to this subject.  The biopiracy hysteria set up by the environmental lobby has caused huge harm to research we need for biodiversity conservation research.

Today, if you think about it, biodiversity is rather like this patient [picture] in an intensive care unit.  We have species becoming extinct.  We have species in grave distress, that are at the verge of extinction.  We have habitats and landscapes that are disappearing or being profoundly altered.  We have land use that is changing much more rapidly than you’d like.  To address this situation and to try and reverse it we need science.  Take the example of this man in the intensive care unit.  He’s at death’s door.  Who is treating this man?  Hopefully the best doctors, the best nurses, the best technologists are treating him.  Who is treating biodiversity in this country?  The Wildlife Department doesn’t have a single Conservation Biologist in its 2000 strong staff.  It doesn’t have any PhDs, at least in biology.  It has no capacity to manage the patient that is at death’s door.  How would it be if this patient were going to be treated by the security guard in Apollo hospital?  What confidence would you have?  Yet that is precisely the situation you have with biodiversity in Sri Lanka.  You have two types of people who pontificate on how this should be done.  Scientists are not one of them.  One is the Department of Wildlife, and the other is people who make a few trips to Yala and then become experts on wildlife conservation.  But we have huge national capacity in terms of specialists.  I don’t want to mention names but I could mention a dozen names of Sri Lankans who can’t work in Sri Lanka and who’ve emigrated who are world famous conservation biologists who work outside of this country because there is no place to work here.  Other countries have addressed the same problem.

In Costa Rica, a country about the size of Sri Lanka in central America, they established, not the government, the people, through a NGO established the Institute of Biodiversity, INBIO.  That was about twenty-five years ago.  INBIO is today, one of the most successful biodiversity conservation science institutions in the world.  When I visited, there were more than 60 PhDs in conservation biology on the staff.  In Sri Lanka we don’t have one.  You don’t need to go as far as America.  Look at India.  Again, the Ashoka Trust in Bangalore, an NGO funded by overseas donors, hugely successful - in the last 15 years they’ve grown enormously getting funds from everywhere in the world for biodiversity conservation related research, doing wonderful work.  A couple of years ago they became a PhD awarding institution, an NGO mind you. 

So some years ago I took into my head to try and persuade the Sri Lankan government to start an institute of biodiversity in Sri Lanka, where we could lure back all these Sri Lankan experts who had left this country for lack of opportunity.  Many of them had been hounded out by environmentalists.  To bring them back.  To have a national brain tank to set up here.  The government agreed.  The cabinet passed a decision.  A legal draughtsman was asked to draft a bill to incorporate a National Institute of Biodiversity, an NGO but incorporated by an act of parliament just like the WNPS itself is incorporated by an act of parliament.  Conservation International, one of the largest international conservation NGOs took leadership in the project to try and raise money from other donors.  They were able to put together a set of pledges for 22 million dollars.  That’s about two and a half billion rupees, quite a lot of money to set up quite a nice institute.  What happened?  Environmentalists went to town.  What were the allegations?  We were selling Sinharaja to the Americans.  We were going to make this an avenue for biopiracy in Sri Lanka.  And these allegations were not just made lightly in an odd newspaper column, rather, a sustained campaign against the project.  The former president of the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society went on television, interviewed by Frederica Jansz and claimed that the president of Conservation International Dr Russ Mittermeier had been arrested in Brazil for biopiracy, an absolute, unfounded lie.  That man is in America, you can say what you like, that’s the way we behave.  Unfortunately a few days after that someone leaked this information to Dr Russell Mittermeier and he called me up and he said “I’m out”.  And when he withdrew, the whole project, collapsed like a pack of cards.  There were no voices apart from a handful of people from the environmental community saying – come on, there is something wrong here.  Even when the $34 million so called ADB Wildlife Project was being mooted in the late 1990s, who opposed it?  Environmentalists!  The WNPS was against it, EFL was against it, everybody was against it and tried to stop it.  Eventually, the global environmental fund, which was again giving $10.2 million for Sri Lankan projects in the wildlife sector said they’re going to withdraw and on that occasion a few of us decided to stand up and fight.  One of them is here, Dr S. Fernando.  Quite a few of us, Nimal Gunatilleke from Peradeniya, Professor Kotagama from Colombo University, Ajita De Costa from his NGO, Jayantha Jayawardene from his NGO and I.  The six of us signed an appeal.  I sent it personally to the head of The Global Environment Fund.  I called him up and lobbied personally on the telephone and eventually, they took us seriously and they reversed the decision and they gave the project.  But that was a disaster for other reasons and I don’t have time to go into them now.  That’s another day.  But again destroyed by environmentalists.  So this project, $22 million in grant aid and those $14 million that were coming from the so called TFCA mechanism was money that the Sri Lankan government already owed the American government, and the Americans said, no you don’t need to pay that back to us, you can pay it to this institute of biodiversity.  The government was very happy to do that.  The environmentalists did not want it.

And there were loons, crazy people, not just in the environmental community – the President of the National Academy of Sciences, Sri Lanka’s answer if you like, equivalent to the Royal Society of England.  The president wrote a newspaper article attacking the idea, saying that this was a recipe for biopiracy.  I wrote back to him and said give me an opportunity to come and make a presentation to the council of the National Academy of Sciences to show why this argument of yours is wrong.  Here’s his reply: … the unanimous decision of the Council was that no purpose would be served in my making a presentation to it.  And unlike the Royal Society, our National Academy doesn’t even have a letterhead by the looks of it.  Can you believe the level of folly that the country’s highest academic institution’s determination to block an initiative, that I just can’t understand anyone wanting to block?  You have to be uniquely stupid to behave in that way and unpatriotic.

It’s not a secret that we have huge problems in biodiversity.  Every week you read of tragedies like this [elephant conflict image].  Elephants are dying.  What has the response of the Department of Wildlife been?  Translocate elephants that are problematic.  Put up an electric fence here and an electric fence there.  Yet, there are people here in Sri Lanka who are doing valuable, much needed research who have put their finger on the problem and who have cogent solutions to offer.  Again in this room, I don’t want to mention names – who have done marvellous work.  But they have no voice in the Wildlife Department.  If we only had an Institute of Biodiversity in Sri Lanka where they could have worked and they had a voice – where they had a right to do research which nobody in this country has any more, we might have made a big difference in the human-elephant conflict.  For thirty years now, we’ve been talking about canopy dieback in the mountains.  Whether it’s in the central mountains or Horton Plains or in Hakgala or in Knuckles.  No research has been allowed to be done to find out how to address this problem.  Recently there was a lovely blooming of nillu (Strobilanthus) and people sent me lovely photographs [picture of flowers], this was sent to me by I think Prithiviraj Fernando, and when I saw this photograph I was a little surprised because if you read all the books, nillu is meant to be an understory plant.  Strobilanthus grows under the shade of the forest canopy.  I wondered, where’s the forest canopy here?  At the time these plants germinated, maybe fifteen years ago, there was a forest canopy, there isn’t any longer.  When it comes to the time for the seeds of these plants to germinate, if there isn’t a canopy there is a good chance that they will not germinate at all.  But you will have alien invasive species like this Austroeupatorium, which is growing all over Horton plains now.  But no research is permitted to be done to find out how to stop it.  That’s why we need a national institute of biodiversity.  We’ve got about five hundred threatened species in Sri Lanka ranging from fish, to cuddly animals to plants.  There isn’t a conservation plan, a recovery plan for any of those, what’s the point of cutting down trees in Indonesia to print these big red lists and reports, when you don’t have a conservation plan for a single species of those five hundred?  A hundred and thirty species of plant in Sri Lanka have not been seen since the time of Trimen, that was the 1890s.  A hundred and thirty endemic plants and we have only about nine hundred in this country.  There is no research permitted to find out, are these plants still here, is there something we can do to conserve them?  That’s why we need an institute of biodiversity.  But that’s not permitted. Why?  Because a few crazy environmentalists thought their prejudices were more important than the national interest.

Then they have this ridiculous system, where the Wildlife Department itself is lead by something like the Spanish Inquisition.  There is a so called Research Committee established in secret.  Nobody even knows who the names of the people who sit on this Research Committee are.  One would have thought, sitting where you are, that these people’s job was to encourage and foster research on biodiversity conservation in Sri Lanka.  Quite the contrary!  They have systematically blocked almost all research initiatives, or put impossible conditions on them, and made life a misery for everybody trying to do honest research on biodiversity in Sri Lanka.  I found out the names of a few of these people and I looked up their histories on the internet.  Some of them don’t have a single scientific publication to their name.  Not some, but quite a few.  Some of them are not even scientists, they are lawyers.  What do they know about biodiversity research?  They have a vested interest in blocking people who are trying to do some honest work, and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing!  And yet, do we hear one word from the environment lobby saying there is something wrong?  No!  The WNPS itself has representation on the only committee that is legally established for the Wildlife Department, the Technical Advisory Committee.  The WNPS is a part of that committee.  That committee never sits.  Instead of that they have this secret committee, the so called Research Committee made up of two bit scientists who have never been heard of.  Who have no published record, lording it over the few people who are trying to do honest work in this country.  It is a tragedy and I think for the first time I’m airing this today, because it needs to be said and these charms (?) need to be called out.

So the challenge before us as environmentalists is simple.  Are we going to be environmental activists in the genuine meaning of that word or are we just going to be vocalists?  Most environmentalists in Sri Lanka just talk; it’s a talk shop.  That’s what I’m doing here today but I think to be fair I do some work too.  But most of us just articulate opinions not based on science, not based on fact and it has done us a huge disservice.  And that I think, is the core problem that we need to address to get environmentalism in Sri Lanka back on track doing good work, fostering and protecting the environment, recovering species that are threatened with extinction, restoring landscapes that have been degraded; putting our country back on a decent track.  You may now throw your vegetables at me!

[Applause and questions]