“I’ll say this to anybody who thinks they can’t as a single voice make a difference: Some guy who ate a bat that had been in a cage with a pangolin in China sure made a difference.” It was a shockingly stark thing to hear in the middle of an interview with two wildlife filmmakers talking about Born Wild: The Next Generation, their beautiful new documentary series about baby animals.
But I shouldn’t have been surprised, really. The filmmakers behind the series, Dereck and Beverly Joubert, have been passionate environmentalists and conservationists throughout their careers. They created Great Plains Conservation, an ecotourism-funded organization that manages extensive wildlife reserves in Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe; they also founded two African animal-protection organizations, the Big Cats Initiative and Rhinos Without Borders. The Jouberts specialize in looking at our planet through a micro and macro lens at the same time.
The release of Born Wild was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, and that anniversary inevitably framed much of the Jouberts’ comments. But the tidiness of the calendar has been completely overwhelmed by the chaos resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of the virus has brutally exposed many hidden vulnerabilities and interconnections: between people, between species, and between humans and the world they inhabit. An edited version of my conversation with Dereck and Beverly Joubert follows.
The COVID-19 pandemic is obviously a health crisis and an economic crisis, but you also regard it as a conservation crisis. How so?
Dereck: What we’ve been seeing over the past 50 years, in many ways, is a breakdown of harmony and balance between humans and the wild. Climate change coming out of excessive use of resources around the world, damage to the atmosphere — it has been snapping back and hurting us. It would be wrong to ascribe a human characteristic to nature, as if it’s coming for us. It is our excesses that have snapped back, whether we’re dealing with the global environment or killing and eating wildlife.
