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]