To Be Or Not To Be - Darryl Jones Knows The Answer Is Always To Be Wilder

As a kid I was obsessed with two things - the Balmain Tigers rugby league team and animals. When I was about seven or eight years old I was gifted a big hardcover book with a tiger on the front cover. The book was hundreds of pages in length, covering every continent and what must have been thousands of species. Nearly 35 years later I vividly remember the look and feel and weight of this book, and I’ve got no doubt that it played a significant role in everything that’s come for me since in trying to commit my working life to ecosystem and species conservation. At university I did my best to never finish my undergrad degree, but that meant I got to enjoy moving my way through degrees - first science then education then environmental management then climate science and finally environmental economics. I got to properly study landscapes and species and what feels now like the early days of climate science. Action was needed, time was still somewhat on our side.

All these years later and through this endeavour speaking to renowned scientists and environmentalists like Lesley Hughes and Macro Lambertini, I can see now that my education and everything that I’ve learnt is because of the giants who’ve come before me, before all of us. Today’s guest is one of these giants, Darryl Jones. Darryl is a behavioural ecologist - that is, someone who studies the behaviours of non human species and since the late 1970s Darryl has travelled across this continent and right around the globe to capture and record the habits and sociologies and experiences of hundreds of species. Everything that he’s seen, I can’t comprehend it. From the high Arctic to the still untouched jungles of Borneo to completing a PhD on the maligned Australian brush turkey. Darryl’s life is truly extraordinary, but very much one of the esteemed scientist - always working, always testing, always refining, almost always out of the limelight.

Beyond his scientific work, Darryl is also an author and he’s on the show today to talk about his latest - Be(Wilder); Journeys In Nature. Every chapter of this book follows a different adventure and experience he’s had over the years - from avoiding charging elephants in Asia to warring birdwatchers in the US to the efforts of conservationist farmers in Australia. It’s a beautiful book, part travelogue, part behavioural ecology journal, part personal manifesto, part a-life-well lived guide. In this chat we get into different aspects of the book and its stories, his own life changing experience of spending time surveying wildlife in Sudan in the late 1970s, how he’s seen the natural world and humanity’s relationship to it ebb and flow over time, and how, after all these years, he is still powering forward carrying a message of strength with answers to our environmental crises - but more importantly, how we relate to the rest of the world as a species - must and can be shifted.

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