Meet Dr. Paula Kahumbu

When Dr. Paula Kahumbu was a little girl, she had a run in with famed conservationist Dr. Richard Leakey, catapulting a lifelong curiosity about, and interest in, Kenya’s wildlife. Since then, Paula has gone on to become an award-winning Kenyan conservationist herself, and is the current CEO of WildlifeDirect. In this episode of the podcast, she celebrates Kenya’s rich bio-diversity and talks about the need for civic education on conservation. Loss of bio-diversity, she also argues, is our biggest threat yet. “We have the most to lose, because we have the most on our doorstep.”

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hi everyone. And welcome to the Nairobi ideas podcast, a podcast that gives a public platform to the Africans, changing the world with a big ideas. There will be ideas. Podcast is brought to you by the Moser Institute, and it will be based research organization focused on female thought leadership and public engagement with research. I'm your host, Dr. Rose Matisa CEO of the MOAs or Institute. Thanks for tuning in for this episode of the Nairobi ideas podcast. As we continue our series on climate and conservation, in case you missed the last couple of episodes, we've been sitting down with experts and activists who are helping us better understand how the continent is responding to climate and conservation challenges. Our guest today is Dr. Paula humble, who is the chief executive officer of wildlife direct and an award-winning Kenyan conservationist, Paula unhap PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton university, where she currently teaches undergraduate ecology, how Korea and wildlife and conservation spans over 24 years working across government NGOs and private industry. She's also passionate about public engagement with wildlife and conservation issues here in Kenya, all over the world. She's produced the award-winning NTB wild and wildlife warriors TV series, and also writes extensively on a number of platforms on wildlife issues. She's also the author of two children's books, including the award-winning Owen, M Z. Hi Paula. Hi Rose. Thank you so much for joining us. We're so thrilled to have you on our podcast today as part of this climate and conservation series. Thank you for having me. Okay. So jumping right in, you have a long and impressive career in conservation, which from early on, has focused on Kenyan, wildlife and specifically elephants. So to give the listener a little bit of context for the backstory of the Parson before the Pola that we know now, what made you first fall in love with our life? Where did this come from?

Speaker 2: 1:42

Well, that's a really interesting question. I think we are so blessed in Africa that we have this incredible wildlife heritage that every other continent on planet earth has lost. We still have our megafauna, our elephants rhinos to drafts Buffalo's Elan's these gigantic animals. And they are still in quite large numbers. Kenya is where I was born and raised. And as a child, I lived just outside of the city of Nairobi in an area that was quite forested. At the time we had monkeys and mice and birds and lizards snakes, and my large family. I have four brothers and four sisters. We were always outside. My mother used to lock us out, actually, because we were always muddy and we were outdoors running around climbing trees, wading through swamps catching frogs. You know, it was just a very blessed and unique upbringing for us at that time. And I fell in love with nature from a very, very early age. At the age of four, I was out with my brothers walking around and a vehicle drove up to us as we looked up into this tree at this amazing animal. So we're standing there gawking at this furry creature on this car stops, the window comes down and this man who appeared slow somewhat grumpy after what are you kids doing? And we said, Oh, you look up there. And the tree, there was this amazing animal, you know, big ferry thing. And he looks up in the tree and he says, that's a tree hierarchy. And he goes on to tell us about tree hierarchy, which is just amazing mind boggling. We had no idea. We'd never seen this creature before. And he then asked us, are you going to kill it? And I think it was the fact that my brother had a catapult in his hand. He always walked around with the catapult that it gave the impression that we were out there destroying animals and nature. When in fact we were just out there enjoying it, that man was Richard Leakey. He happened to be our neighbor and he invited us to his home whenever we wanted to learn more about wild animals. So we caught everything you can possibly imagine. And we took them to his house and he would tell us these incredible stories about the natural history of these animals that were right here in our backyard. That's when I fell in love with DJ,

Speaker 1: 3:51

Both a very idealic and possibly dangerous childhood. So strangers cut to snakes, mice swamps. There's a lot going on there, but, you know, I just, I love this idea of a natural introduction to nature. Not very many children probably have this kind of an early exposure to the natural world in this way. So really inspiring. And I love that Richard Leakey was the grumpy man that introduced you to nature at such an early.

Speaker 2: 4:14

I just want to go on to say that we are so lucky. Those of us who live in Nairobi Nairobi is the capital city of one of the fastest growing economies in the world. And yet we are also the world's capital for bird species, more than 490 species of birds can be found within our capital city. And that's because we still have this vast national park full of different habitats from forest rivers, wetlands, short grasslands, tall grasslands, all kinds of different habitats that, uh, are home to the migrating birds from Europe during the winter. We also have our forests. We have our wetlands, we have grasslands still in the city of Nairobi. And so there's no reason why any child in this city shouldn't have an upbringing that includes going out and spending time in nature. Look at Cora, look at city park. We have so many public spaces and full of indigenous trees, insects, birds, reptiles, frogs, you know, it's a natural classroom and we have failed our children if they're not learning outdoors and spending time exploring and discovering for themselves,

Speaker 1: 5:20

Expecting this interview to be a very gloom and doom interview. And, you know, it's really kicked off in a very surprising thread of kind of this abundance of nature and beauty, even in a place like there would be where I think that everyday Nairobi is just beseeched by dust and fumes and apartment blocks and buildings and construction. And what is the reason for this in congruency in terms of what you're describing. And I want every day

Speaker 2: 5:40

Experience. I have several ideas about that, but in an aerobic is growing very fast. It's a city that is on the rise and with development, of course there is pressures and there are threats to these open spaces and to the biodiversity of our city, don't forget Kenya is considered a mega diverse country. Only a few countries in the world have that status. It basically means we have more biodiversity, much more biodiversity than many other countries in the world. And Nairobi could be the showcase example to the rest of the world. Just last week, London was declared the first national park city in the world. London, if you've been to London, you'd know what it's like. It's, uh, it's always wet and gray or usually wet in great. It has pigeons and a few foxes rats, you know, there isn't really the kind of abundance that you've just mentioned for Nairobi. The failure in Kenya is that we haven't educated through civic education, our children, we don't have conservation in our curriculum. We don't have conservation as a ministry. We have forestry, which is all about production. We have wildlife and tourism, which is all about foreigners coming to our country to enjoy our wildlife. We haven't declared that. What we want is a neaten and cities that are rich and thriving and biodiversity. And we need this biodiversity. It's not just for our pleasure. This is vital for the future economy of our country. The insects which make up the bulk of our biodiversity are critically essential for agricultural production out of every four bites of food that you eat, three were pollinated by insects. So the overuse of pesticides is destroying our natural pollinators. In some countries it's gotten so bad, like in China, they have eliminated so many insects that now they have to pollinate their plants by hand. Can you imagine with a paint brush going around flower to flower, trying to pollinate manually crops so that they actually produce fruit. We can't afford to go there. We should not even dream of going there. We should be a country that takes advantage of all the knowledge and the mistakes made elsewhere and develop our future, our economy and all these sectors in a way that enables us to have development, to have growth and poverty. And at the same time secure this abundant biodiversity that we have, we spend a lot of time talking about climate change, trying to save our forest, trying to replant our forest that makes succeed. It will probably succeed because there's vast amounts of money and attention being put into climate change mitigation, but there is no India as much attention put onto biodiversity. And as a result, we are losing biodiversity at a rate that is catastrophic 35 species go extinct around the world. Every single day, 1 million species are on the brink of extinction. And we have the most to lose because we have the most on our doorstep right now.

Speaker 1: 8:31

Who can we petition to get Nairobi on the list of a park city? We have an elephant national park. This is terrible. That London scooped us, but let's, let's just hold that thought for a second. But I definitely feel very offended about this. This is incredible everything you're describing. You know, there's such a soup of crises. So the pollinators, the biodiversity climate change people often use, as you said, climate conservation, biodiversity, uh, forestry, there's this soup of terminology in which people discuss all things related to the planet. And a lot of crises are happening in parallel in these different dimensions and some are overlapping. So for example, we've had conversations with some of our previous guests that kind of think of climate change as an umbrella that encompasses everything. And what you're saying now is no climate is related separate. That biodiversity is a real crisis. And so for an everyday listener, and even for our decision makers, this is a lot to navigate. Like where should we even start?

Speaker 2: 9:21

It's very true. It is a very complicated and complex issue because if you think about it, nature is complex. We have different things interacting in different ways. So for example, evolution occurs and a very, very slow pace over millions of years, but deforestation happens overnight. We could lose species overnight. We have things like watershed destruction and it affects rivers and streams over timeframes that might be years or decades. And yet we have other things happening like human practices, farming expansion happening in the course of just months. So we have things happening in different timeframes, which we have to navigate. And in addition, nature itself is all interlinked and interconnected. The quality of our air is related to our forest. The quality of our water is related to how we manage our watersheds and what we do with our waste. So we can't avoid it. We have to get in there and get dirty and start looking at what could we do? What are the tipping points that we need to go for? That is going to enable us to have a thriving economy because people are thriving. We destroy our rivers with pollution. We end up with sick people and then our economy is being catastrophic. They're affected by the medical costs associated with things like cancer, which we are already seeing in Kenya today. If you look at coal, we fought the coal power plant, not just because of climate change, because frankly Kenya's climate impact is so minuscule. It's hardly, even on the map, we literally are emitting emissions at a rate that is almost undetectable on the world map. And yet Kenya has a very strong climate change policy. We were one of the first countries to sign the Paris agreement. We're not thinking about what does it mean in the bigger scale of things? The attention has gone on to climate change. And I believe we should actually divert our attention to what's happening with biodiversity. With our own course of a train crash. Many of us species have declined by over 80% in just the last 40 years. Even the wildebeest migration has declined significantly. We have too many livestock in certain, very fragile landscapes causing degradation and desertification. Now our really rare zebra species, the grubby zebra has been reduced to just over 2000 individuals, zebra and their Cubs. The folds are not surviving because there's not enough grass to eat because it's been eaten by all these livestock. So now we actually growing grass in one part of Kenya to feed zebra in another part of the country. That is an ecological crisis. This is something that the government of Kenya has to recognize. We are actually in an ecological crisis today. And I, and when you asked me, so what solutions I am hopeful because just last night, the minister of transport declared that the, uh, proposed road across Hulu park has been canceled in the way it was initially planned because of public outcry. So the public clearly can drive political change, can drive decision-makers to alter their plans and inspire people to care for nature. You'll get much less of this problem of people destroying nature. So as wildlife direct, we're doing two big things in this area. One is we've got a, a new television series called wildlife warriors. It's a series that we're broadcasting on citizen TV, which is the largest broadcast of 30% of the Kenyan audience. Watch this channel. This series is about Kenyan conservation heroes at the frontline. So until now, Kenyans have either had no access to wildlife documentaries, or the only access they have. It shines a light on these foreigners who are saving our animals. The image is so disconcerting because as a child in Samburu, how do you watch a film about somebody saving elephants? And that person doesn't look like you, and there's no way you can aspire to be that person because they're from another country, they're from another economic frame. They don't speak your language. It's very hard to see role models for Africa in Africa. So we made this series to precisely address that problem. We shine a light on a Kenyan accountant, could change his life and became a rescue of turtles. And he saved over 2000 turtles in what tumble. I mean, these are really phenomenal stories of people. Who've made huge personal sacrifices, gone to school to learn about the animal that they want to see what at the frontline, but in a, in a world where they're not seen by Kenyans. So we're shining a light on them, taking them out of the shadows, bringing them right up into the forefront and exposing them to Kenyans and to the world. And the impact has been amazing. I think the most amazing thing about this is we tested our series in South Africa in a township called Pietermaritzburg, which is near Durbin. So we showed one episode about snakes to a community of poor people. And they watched this episode in complete silence. I watched the video of them watching. And then at the end, they got very excited. They spent two hours discussing the half hour program because they wanted to know how come in Kenya people have snakes in their environment, and they're not scared of them. How come Kenyans are handling snakes and how come Kenya looks just like South Africa. It was quite interesting. So they saw themselves in the show and they demanded to have snakes brought to their community so that they can actually touch them the way that they saw people touching them in the series. They wanted to be educated. They wanted posters about their own snakes in their local environment. So I can say for sure that the show has potential to make a big difference across the continent. And from November of this year, we will be broadcasting across 29 African countries and the Caribbean.

Speaker 1: 14:44

It was really exciting, Paula, um, maybe slightly disturbed by the fascination with snakes, which terrified me. But other than that, all of this is so inspiring. And[inaudible] our mission is around public engagement, science and research and storytelling and creative media. And what you're doing with wildlife direct with these TV shows that now have pan African reach very much embody that. And I really do agree with this idea of getting people engaged, giving them ownership, helping them see themselves in these wildlife and conservation narratives. So that's all well and good, but then how do you then put this all in the structural context, the entire existence of the parks in the first place is predicated on this kind of complex structural environment in which people decision-makers everyday, people are having to trade off land for food land for animals, you know, water for animals. But, you know, there are all of these structural things that seem to supersede merely having people appreciate and enjoy wildlife, that our appreciation is almost overwhelmed by these kinds of practical challenges that Steris in the face every day, that people don't have land for food

Speaker 2: 15:44

Rose. I think that the solution is actually fairly simple. It's purely about money. The parks don't have enough money. And that's why when government wants to put roads, railways pipelines, power lines, sewage lines, international parks, you'll find that the department might agree to it if they get some payments, some compensation. And that's how we ended up with a Southern bypass and the standard gauge railway across Nairobi national park and the standard gauge rail, they across the sovereign national park. So to me, the problem is how do we finance conservation? And the value of conservation is it's an area of science that people are trying to position as a way of encouraging the government leaders. And decision-makers in order to protect those places. I personally think it's very risky because Nairobi park will you always be worth more if it has housing development industries and skyscrapers will make much more money than from what we're getting from tourism. So valuing the wildlife purely on a tourism basis is I think a huge potential mistake or a Pandora's box, which could threaten all of our protected areas when it comes to things like Jesus and other items of heritage that are human made, we wouldn't dream of destroying them and we need to treat wildlife and our parks the same way they need to be sacred. And we need our leaders to speak out and agree and enforce the law that these places are sacred in Kenya. We have seen a phenomenal rise in public interest in protection and conservation. We have 160 new conservation areas that are privately owned or community owned, mostly community owned, which is interesting because we are not a rich country. These communities are not going to get rich, but they've decided that these open landscapes and postures and Hills and valleys and lakes and swamps are valuable for them from their own cultural heritage perspective. And if we, as Kenyans support that development, we can secure up to 20% of our national landscape. And that might actually be enough. There's plenty of spaces to put roads and railways. What we're saying is they shouldn't be put into the very few and small protected areas that exist in the country today. I don't see it as a, either development or conservation. I don't think these two things should be caching. The future of Kenya's economy will depend on tourism. Tourism is one of the fastest growing and most reliable industries in the world. And Kenya should aspire to be the world's superpower for wildlife tourism. And if we destroy those parks today, we won't have that option in the future.

Speaker 1: 18:22

We've covered so much ground, both very bleak and hopeful and everything in between, but I really love this wrapping our conversation up around this idea of it need not be zero sum, which is often what we hear, if there's other narratives of either or, and tension and conflict and humans versus planet, and there spaces in which you see both coexisting. And I think that's a hopeful note for us to kind of wrap up this really multifaceted and complex conversation. And thank you so much for walking through it. So, sorry, before I go, could I just say one more thing?

Speaker 2: 18:51

Probably the biggest threat to our wilderness and wildlife heritage is corruption. So Kenyans know that corruption threatens everything in this country. We've seen it through these big projects, like Goldenberg, where there's just outright grant theft or grant corruption. We forget that it actually is affecting our natural areas as well. And so my, my dream is that our leadership will wake up the people who are good in the leadership. I know that there are lots of not so good people out there. If we can infect every school, going child with a love of nature, get them into the parks, give them these experiences that will be unforgettable with not talking about just science or nature or environment, but talking about values of values have to underpin the aspirations of Kenya. We cannot have middle income industrial nation. If we don't have values, shared values. And I think nature is one of the best places to learn values. We learn about compassion. We learn empathy. We learn about caring and protecting, defending, even learned about sacrifice. You know, we learn about curiosity, innovation and discovery. It is such a rich learning environment that has a place in the education system of Kenya, not just today, but into the future. But if we destroy these parks and areas, we lose more than just some animals and some species, some bio diversity, it's really urgent that we implore and succeed in reaching the current leadership to secure these protected areas. Secure the biodiversity. These protected areas are like an arc. If we can secure this up, then Kenya's future will be incredibly economically viable. If you think about it, there's not just that it's a country with natural resources and brilliant people, but it's a country that is amazing to live in and a country that will attract some of the best brains and businesses in the world.

Speaker 1: 20:45

Thank you so much, Paul. I couldn't agree. And I love this idea of nature as our anchor and I should just yesterday, we had a discussion with different stakeholders in the creative economy, and I'm quite struck by how much this conversation and what you were just saying. Now, Mira is what they were saying about that social infrastructure that our governments and our people cannot appreciate and what the intangibles that anchor us. And it just is a really, really compelling stuff. And I'm so thankful that we have Kenyans like you at the forefront of securing this cultural heritage of securing the sense of place and groundedness in our nature and in our environment. So thank you so much, Paula, and wish you all the best of luck as you continue to fight this good fight. Thank you so much, Rosa. I look forward to hearing,

Speaker 3: 21:29

To find out more,

Speaker 1: 21:30

Dr. Paula humble find links to information shared in this episode, or to listen again, you can find us permanently on the neuro BDS podcastPage@wwwdotmywazoinstitute.org backslash podcast. You can also subscribe to the Nairobi ideas podcast on YouTube, iTunes, arthropods, Google play, or wherever you get your podcasts to our listeners. Thank you for tuning in to our climate and conservation series, where we sit down with scientists, activists, thinkers, innovators, and decision-makers who are helping engineer's sustainable African futures. You episodes from this series drop twice a month. So look out on our social media to keep abreast on the latest tell then from all of us here at the or Institute by and keep it nerdy.