 Thank you, Chaplain Elvie. Good morning, everyone. Dr. Thomas Lovejoy comes to this conference as a tropical and conservation biologist and is a major figure in influencing and developing national environmental policy. He is author and co-author of dozens of scientific articles in journals such as Biosphere, The Environmentalists, The Atlantic Naturalists, and also in journals with more interesting names, at least to a chemist, such as Acta, Amazonica, and Dodo. He has played an important role in popularizing tropical rainforest and biodiversity issues with articles in The American Scientist, contributions to the spectacular IMAX film on rainforests, and the widely acclaimed PBS series Nature. He still maintains a research group in the Amazon region running up from Washington where he says all the money is. His interests in fieldwork are still very strong. He said on the yesterday on a walk through the Gustavus Arboretum that he wishes that he had more time to actually do fieldwork. However, based on some of the stories he told me about Amazon, basin, fauna, I find it hard to imagine. I won't relate all these stories to you, but suffice it to say if you have the opportunity to swim in the Amazon River, we're a tight swimsuit. Dr. Lovejoy has also been quite influential in developing environmental policies in this country and abroad. He was US program director, vice president for science, and executive vice president of the World Wildlife Fund over a period of 14 years. Since 1987, he served as assistant secretary for external affairs of the Smithsonian Institution. From 1989 to 92, he served on President Bush's Council of Advisors in Science and Technology. During those years, he was instrumental in creating and promoting the Debt for Forest SWAP program, which many of you are familiar. Most recently, he has served as science consultant of the Department of the Interior, where he has worked on developing a national biological survey. Today, Dr. Lovejoy will speak to us on this most recent work of his, the National Biological Survey. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Thomas Lovejoy to the podium. Yesterday, we were given a series of perspectives and views on the environmental challenge facing human society. George Woodwell, amongst other things, dwelt on the biological links to the problem of climate change, the problem which in fact could come back and be devastating to biological diversity. Robert May gave us a description of the diversity of living things with which we share this planet and the awesome prospect that half of species might be lost by some time in the next century. And indeed, that's a very believable projection. You start to realize that biological diversity essentially integrates all environmental problems and a lot of others as well. It's not surprising that as the most sensitive indicators of environmental change, they are about, if we let things run as they are, they are about to indicate massive environmental change. Dan Botkin illuminated some of the conceptual hurdles that lie between successful management of natural systems and last evening, at least in the firing line that I was lined up on, we dealt mostly with sort of the enormous cosmic social questions, the dual impossibilities of on the one hand of all people on earth living an existence such as we do in the United States and on the other hand of the impossibility of all the people on earth returning to a hunter-gatherer existence. Obviously, the solution lies somewhere in between those two extremes with the reasonable amount of equity. But having had yesterday to really sort of contemplate these matters on a global scale, I thought that rather than just talk about the National Biological Survey with which I have been engaged in the process of design, it would be more useful if I would draw on my recent experience as science advisor to the Secretary of the Interior to tell you a little bit about the insights that I've gained about what it's like to try and do something about these problems. And inevitably, one bites off a smaller piece than the whole global challenge but tries to deal with it in a way that such pieces would add up to a global solution. So, what I will do this morning is talk a little bit about some insights I've gained during my brief period inside government. It was even a radio program in Washington about temps, which I'm told said even Tom Lovejoy is a temp. But in any case, we'll talk a little bit about the insights I've gained about working within government on these kinds of problems. We'll talk some about the scale of the problems in the United States. And then finally, using the example of designing a new agency, the National Biological Survey, indicate a bit about how one needs to address these problems. So, first of all, you should know I went into government even at the relatively high level of being the Interior Secretary's essentially private science advisor with a fair amount of trepidation. I mean, I really felt it was going to be like stepping into the La Brea tarpits and that nothing would ever happen. Well, I'm here to tell you the good news that there are moments when government works and the Department of the Interior is one of those right now. I mean, it is extraordinary. It is so that the dark clouds have rolled away and it's not a breath of fresh air that Bruce Babbitt has brought there. It's like a whole weather front. And the Department is returning with renewed vigor to its responsibilities as the major steward of the nation's natural resources. Every Tuesday morning, the senior figures, the Assistant Secretaries, meet with the Secretary and the science advisor is present. And we talk about some of the major policy questions in front of the Department. What I have discovered is that having a scientist present is even more important than I thought it was in advance because many times the course of the conversation has changed because of something that I was able to contribute merely because I was a scientist. The best-willed people in the world are not necessarily going to come to the right conclusion unless they have the right information. So it's rather horrifying to realize that in the 144 years of the Department of the Interior there has been a science advisor at the level of the Secretary for probably, if you add up, a few sporadic moments on no more than 12 or 15 years. The second thing I got really valuable perspective on was the importance of non-governmental organizations and citizen initiatives. And I'm here to tell you that in fact they make working sometimes a real pain. They fill up your inbox. The insistent phone call comes just at the moment. You're trying to actually get something done. And then when a problem has been wrestled down to a solution such as one involving the sugar interests in Florida and the Everglades those groups can sometimes be in the view of those who've been wrestling with the problem remarkably unappreciative. But the truth is that the process works much, much better because of those initiatives. And yes, I would prefer that if often they would be better organized and it would be clearer to read the message. But it is absolutely indispensable. And what that means in fact is that each and every one of you in this room has a critical role to play in how government works. But also make the observation that when you're in one of these roles such as I was in it's a little terrifying because it's as close to sort of playing God with nature and the future of the creation as one can possibly get. And when you say I don't think that works scientifically or why does endangered species X really need six and a half million acres of critical habitat or can it really only make it if there's no grazing you are playing in fact with the future of creation. So it is important to always be bearing that in mind. The last thing I have to tell you in a general way and then in detail that I learned in this post is that after having spent basically 20 years focused on problems at the global level and in tropical countries when I really got to look at most United States environmental problems at least those dealt with by the Department of Interior more often than not they turned out to be bigger problems than I had realized. And what I will do now is just with the aid of a few images give you a little taste of the scale of some of these problems. The first of course is the very familiar story of the forests of the Northwest which to most of America is thought of in terms of spotted out. But of course the story is really the story of the biological diversity of the old growth forests of the Northwest and in one sense it's just the luck of the draw that a particular species is the first one to end up on the endangered west and indicating that the entire ecosystem is in trouble. The old growth forests were really being mined for timber and for many who had worked on the problem it was clear 15 years before that the old growth forests and their wealth of species were headed for serious problems and that is the time at which the problem should have been dealt with and the timbering industry brought into a solution in which ultimately more old growth forests could have been protected than as possible today. But in any case scenes like this one which probably is not too easy to see in the back but the next one which highlights it with snowfall are very common in the Northwest personally reviewing biological analyses of the options laid before the President so that I could advise the Secretary of the Interior which would protect the biological diversity of those forests and which wouldn't I've got to tell you there really was very little room it was so close to the point where there was nothing that one could do to prevent a whole host of species literally dozens of other species from reaching the point where they might be listed as endangered and the option that was chosen cut it as close to the bone as possible and will require a great deal of close watch and analysis to make it work. Further south on the West Coast we have the situation of another bird species another indicator of an ecosystem under stress deeply constrained and diminished by development. This is the little California napcatcher which occurs in a habitat called the California Coastal Sage Scrub a habitat that does not have the immediate appeal of the old growth forests of the Northwest but which is under tremendous pressure from development in the five southern counties of California San Diego, Orange County, San Bernardino County, Riverside County, I guess Los Angeles County here we at least have caught the problem a little more in advance than in the Northwest and there is an active planning exercise going on between the Fish and Wildlife Service between the State Natural Resources Agency and the county governments and the development interests and the environmentalist interests and it should be possible to design something that will protect at least a representative sample of the California Coastal Sage Scrub and its diversity. When however one starts to look at the freshwater systems in this country the situation is even more grim. I don't need to tell anybody in this room about the extent of the floods in the Mississippi drainage this past summer but there clearly floods that were considerably worse because of the way the Mississippi river ecosystem has been managed the draining, the levees, etc. As one goes farther south and looked at the implications of this beyond just the river valley itself in terms of coastal erosion you come across this rather startling image that I just saw one day when I was over at the United States Geological Survey Arrayed across the south of the Mississippi Delta is a series of islands known appropriately as Le Dernier Heal They are major protection for the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta The constraints put on the flow of the Mississippi River has basically eroded away those islands until in 1988 the fragments you see at the top of this image were all that remained unless a great deal is done they're likely to be gone in 10 to 20 years and the protection they afford to those wetlands in the Delta will be gone So the whole exercise of trying to restore the management of the Mississippi River ecosystem is an absolutely staggering one that we need to face If you look more from the point of view of what lives in the river you get this series of staggering numbers nationwide rivers inventory in 1982 less than 2% of the 5.2 million kilometers of streams in the contiguous 48 states remain in a high quality condition It will not surprise you that organisms which live in those aquatic ecosystems are in serious trouble Just to give you a sense of the magnitude of the species involved if you look at the freshwater vertebrate species there are 179 amphibians 47 reptiles, essentially all turtles and slightly over a thousand fish species The next slide, which will not be readable to you is the numbers of invertebrate species clearly the number is much larger This slide documents the extent to which different kinds of factors have contributed to the extinction of 40 freshwater taxa And the first is physical modification The second one on the left is physical modification of the water course hydroelectric projects channelization The second is the introduction of exotic species usually deliberately And then it drops off considerably to the middle bar there which is essentially water pollution which is there at sort of the same level as hybridization And then there's a problem of exotic species hybridizing with native ones and then the last one is the problem of over harvest To give you a sense of the importance of exotic species and their effect on native ones This graph shows from 1967 to 1991 the growing percent of listed as endangered listed fish species which were listed because of at least one factor being exotic non-indigenous fish species And this is a story one could go on about at great length Here we're looking at the map of the spread of the zebra muscle You can look at the difference between January 1989 on the left and 1993 on the right and of course the floods of the summer considerably aided that species further But this is not just a problem of fresh waters It's a serious problem on the land The prairie that some of us visited this morning has I think something like 30 exotic species competing with the native ones California has hundreds and hundreds of exotic species in it This slide takes a more comprehensive look at the state of endangered species in the United States looking at mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, crayfishes and freshwater mussels And as you go down that list, the percent which are rare or extinct increases from 13% of the mammals and 11% of birds to 65% for crayfishes 73% for freshwater mussels And the column on the right is the percent of those species listed as endangered or threatened under the formal provisions of the Endangered Species Act The number is considerably smaller than the actual number of rare or extinct species and usually because the listing process is long and cumbersome and there is an extraordinary waiting list Species go extinct while they're on the waiting list to be listed I really want you to remember this problem of going at protection of biological diversity species by species because the more pressure we put on our natural environments and the more endangered species are generated eventually we're going to get to a point where if this is the only way we approach the protection of biological diversity the system will break down What I'd like to do now is give you a view of the Everglades look at a problem at the level of the ecosystem and I have to tell you the situation of the Everglades is something that haunts me and particularly I'm haunted by the satellite images of the southern half of Florida and I think by the time I get through the description of what has happened to the Everglades you will be equally haunted I mean basically the Everglades is this enormous ecosystem which is dominated by sheet flow of water the so-called river of grass the sawgrass of the Everglades but it's part of a system that also includes mangrove shorelines islands and shallow bays and indeed the Florida Keys and beyond the Florida Keys the coral reefs and this has been so modified by 40 years decisions and projects each of which seem perfectly sensible at least to most people in the context of their time that the aggregate is leading has led to an enormous dying or at least changing ecosystem there are more than 2,000 kilometers of canals which have been built and literally not a single drop of water flows naturally in the Everglades today and more often than not it requires some human decision to turn a pump on or turn it off there are roads and dykes which impede the natural flow they are there for flood control but they alter sort of the natural flow patterns of water and water tables and indeed water tables are estimated in some places to have been lowered by 2 meters and that's a very serious number in a very low lying flat place like the Everglades in addition to this there is agricultural runoff principally but not exclusively from an area south of Lake Okeechobee which has been set up as a competing sugar supply to that of Castro's Cuba and human waste as well are pumped into shallow coastal aquifers and affect coastal ecosystems natural mangrove shoreline has been replaced by sea walls and rip-wrap islands and their aquifers have been divided by canals for navigation and the drawing of the wetlands has led to enormous declines in water bird populations very little successful reproduction of water birds and yes once again the exotic species come back into the situation with the Melaleuca trees and others up to the edge of the Everglades park itself and marine grass beds particularly in Florida Bay to the south of the peninsula have been declining presumably because of changes in salinity and nutrients in the coastal water literally only a quarter to a half of the normal fresh water flow emerges from the end the southern end of the Florida peninsula into Florida Bay so the seagrasses are dying it's a correlation nobody's really proven the cause and effect but suddenly the seagrasses are dying their ugly algal blooms the shrimp fishery has collapsed and hyper saline water pours between the Florida Keys onto the already stressed coral reefs and that is one of the places where disturbingly suggestive phenomenon of coral bleaching has taken place probably because of increased water temperature amongst other things and if you look at that satellite image you can see almost the entire story the enormous urban population down the side of Florida the pink area south of Lake Okeechobee which is the major sugar cane if you really were close to the image you could see the channelized rivers the dikes you could see that water no longer flows naturally that's the kind of challenge we have in front of us the department of the interior how do you deal with problems of that scale one of the parts of dealing with the problem on that scale is better organized scientific information more scientific information although that will not do it by itself and that plus the problem of an ever lengthening line of candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act has led us to do a couple of things one is to take a look at what the Endangered Species Act actually says the Endangered Species Act in fact is more powerful in the protection of the nation's biological diversity than the way in which it has been administered more often than not the action of government has waited until there was a problem and then inevitably it was some species which the public had never heard of with some quaint name like Mrs. Furbish's Lousworth which was easy to make fun of and was easy for the press to throw into a false dichotomy of economic interests and jobs versus some species which little was known about and certainly was hard to make practical arguments about in the specific in fact I've lived in terror for 20 years that one of the freshwater mussels in the southeast United States would turn up as a major endangered species problem blocking development and can you imagine trying to defend the species with the English name of the orange-footed pimpleback and I'm all for it I mean here's for the pimpleback but the real point is if you look at the Endangered Species Act there is plenty of power in there to start anticipating problems and working on land use problems and plans with local and state authorities so that you avoid that ultimate conflict so easily parroted and I'm not about to say there aren't situations in the United States and you essentially have seen some of them where it's pretty last minute already and nothing has been done of that sort but the whole notion of the National Biological Survey is to couple it with the powers of the Endangered Species Act and try to get ahead of the problems Biological Survey has an idea is really old and while it may not have been called that it certainly was going on in 18th century America when among other things William Bartram the Great botanist from Philadelphia discovered what I think may in fact be the first known endangered species in the United States a small tree or shrub called Franklinia with beautiful magnolia-like flowers which I think was last seen in the wild in the last decade of the 18th century or the first decade of the 19th although somebody told me recently another wild population has been found and I haven't had time to check that out but that's what Lewis and Clark were doing and since the Smithsonian didn't exist at that time their specimens in fact reside in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and you can see actual specimen labels made out in their handwriting very thrilling thing to see and that's what the second secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Spencer Baird was doing in the 1850s when he essentially authored a series of huge volumes on surveys along the possible routes for the transcontinental railroad mammals, birds, etc so the tradition is a grand tradition in the United States and in fact there even was an agency called the Biological Survey the U.S. Biological Survey once before and it was created by a gentleman named Sehart Miriam who was encouraged by Spencer Baird and it was established in 1895 in the Department of Agriculture grew over time Teddy Roosevelt was a great enthusiast for the survey so inevitably there is the recorded Teddy Roosevelt quote a bully for the Biological Survey and in 1940 it was transferred from the Department of Agriculture brought to the Interior Department merged with sports fisheries and became the Fish and Wildlife Service and what has happened in the 50 or so years since then is that the Fish and Wildlife Service has been increasingly driven by short term management problems that they're called upon to help solve one person in Interior put it sort of problem the trees are dying in my park why and what should I do about it problems that cannot be denied and in the course of that pressure to deal with these short term problems that today we would think of in the realm of conservation biology the survey function dwindled away although there still is a tiny little office of the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum which is as you look at it in an evolutionary way the lineal descendant of the U.S. Biological Survey now what we're trying to do in 1993 in creating the National Biological Survey somehow the idea of a U.S. Biological Survey was quickly tossed as a name when somebody realized the initials would be U.S. B.S. what we're trying to do in creating it is an extraordinarily complicated task it's very different from trying to create the Biological Survey in 1895 it's very different from trying to create the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879 at that time basically all you had to do was use federal money easier to get in those days and persuade the two or three major egos in geology in geological survey to pool their efforts in a new agency in interior what we face today is a vastly more complicated challenge first of all there are all these existing responsibilities to manage parks and wildlife refugees just there in the department of the interior and the notion of creating a field biology agency has to be done very carefully so that the service provided to the other managerial parts of the interior department does not have the rug hold that from under it and that has been a major complicating factor which I think we have dealt with well we also have to realize that in 1993 there are hundreds of agencies and organizations each of which are doing a piece of biological survey in the sense of finding out what there is and where it lives they are already doing pieces of that you cannot make this exercise work unless somehow all of them are involved it cannot be just to start with a department of the interior exercise it's got to involve the other branches of the federal government agriculture primarily because of the forest service the national marine fisheries EPA national science foundation all of those have to be drawn into a collaborative exercise but it goes far beyond that because there are 50 state heritage programs started by the major conservancy each a major source of information on threatened endangered species in their particular states and there are a dozen or so state biological surveys and a variety of other agencies in states which are collecting information which is properly part of what one would think of as a national biological survey and then there is the environmental community the academic community the natural history museums the botanical gardens the important repositories and collectors of relevant information and one has to go beyond that of course because if we only collect biological data we are going to miss important pattern so there has to be some way to tie this to physical data soils, climate, geology all of this has to be done at a time when I don't have to tell you there isn't much money in Washington to give you a sense of the scale of the money the interior department which is really one of the smallest of the federal departments has had in 1993 an annual budget of eight and a half billion dollars and that sounds like a lot but please remember that interior is responsible for 22% of the nation's land serious responsibilities there in fact it is underfunded which is not to say there aren't parts of it which could work better more efficiently the total new money that we expect to get in the 1994 budget is going to be for the whole department like $30 million and the prospects of the years out aren't particularly rosy either which is one of those great love joy understatements so even though all the new money in interior will go to adding new functions to this agency called the National Biological Survey it's obvious that we will fall well short of the mark unless we really form a collaborative exercise in which other federal departments and other agencies public and private participate in collecting information one of the important ways we want to use this information is in managing ecosystems such as you just saw for the Everglades basically the survey is going to break down into three pieces the largest initially will be assembled from the various agencies within interior field biology research and that will be immediate management needs and conservation biology then there's going to be a piece which is ecosystem management oriented and may include a bit of the former and then the third is going to be the organizing information and the collecting of information about the plants and animals of this country and where they occur so three pieces and obviously the intention is as much as possible ecosystem management and survey in the true sense of that word parts of it will be where major growth lies in the future but one also faces the problem suppose we have a reasonable set of information for making initial decisions about how to restore the Everglades in particular it's plumbing how do you make that happen and there you face a welter of different jurisdictions I mean it's really quite something EPA has a piece of this because of water quality the national park service has a piece of it because there is an Everglades national park but essentially by law the park service is not allowed to do anything outside of the park so it just sits there while it dries up there is efficient wildlife service is managing the refuge there Indian lands which means the Bureau of Indian Affairs is involved there is a state water district south Florida water district and then of course there are the interested local governments and the local and national environmental agencies and the development interests and all of that has to be pieced together into something which will bring the Everglades back to something like their initial glory well I think the good news is in this case that the Everglades looms so large in the psyche of most of the citizens the tourist industry is so concerned about what's happening in Florida Bay the shrimp fishermen are so up in arms about what's happened to their shrimp fishery that in fact it begins to force all these disparate interests to work together I in fact attended a two day meeting of all the federal agencies involved oh yes the Army Corps of Engineers and I really see the log jam of splintered jurisdictions beginning to break the collaboration beginning to happen perhaps really the most exciting thing to tell you is that planning for the 1995 federal budget already includes initial steps towards budgeting for ecosystem management of a handful of ecosystems one of which will be the Everglades so a drawing together which is necessary if all of this is to work there are two reasons why I think will be successful initially together these interests one involves the survey essentially a project which lives under the sort of tentative misnomer the National Biodiversity Center which will be an electronic network of all existing databases in the nation on biodiversity models I anticipate rather after what the Australians have done with their errand system and basically nobody has to give up their data but they have access to everybody else's data you have to set some minimum standards so you have some comparable qualities to the data but it doesn't prevent any entity from collecting additional data that's not in the minimum standards so there's still a lot of freedom and there's a big plus for all to participate I think that is going to move in direction of greater collaboration of the various interests and agencies and the second I think which will drive in the direction is just the emerging realization particularly in obvious places like the Everglades that there is no way that all of this can work in terms of managing large ecosystems unless there is a reasonable amount of collaboration one of the interesting things that falls out of that is when you look at relatively large units of landscape there is more flexibility in terms of the kinds of decisions to be made about development and environmental protection and if you are dealing with very small units of landscape and in fact there's a movement away from a notion which was lurking in some of what Daniel Botkin talked about yesterday that nature is something over there that you can put a fence around that's where the biodiversity is and people and what they do is over here and they really don't have anything to do with one another what we're really moving toward here is a notion of people living and working within ecosystems which will still have their portions dedicated to preservation one who wants to use the ultimate sort of extreme term for it which will have the dedicated areas for forest protection or whatever it may be but instead the people will be living within the larger unit and be more aware if this works right of how their individual decisions affect the larger whole because that in fact is another way to look at the whole environmental dilemma one that Brian Norton and I talked about years ago of the increment versus the aggregate and I would assert that one of our problems is that more often than not we have just simply lost track of the aggregation of human effects on particular ecosystems well this is a pretty ambitious program we've laid out National Biological Survey will begin at least the original pieces assembled into a survey will begin as soon as Congress passes a budget people who have been stationed in National Park doing biological research will still be in the National Park but they'll be working for the Biological Survey so the survey will start in that sense a three to six month period of strategic planning for how the other parts of the survey the ecosystem management research and the actual survey information work will proceed that will start almost immediately back over at the Smithsonian I will be cheering with the help of money from EPA a working group on the design of the National Biological Diversity Center or Network and of course we have this budgeting process on specific ecosystems starting for the 1995 federal budget so there is progress despite the scale of what has to be obtained but in the end as I think about the Biological Survey it's never going to be possible for the survey to work solely with government servants or solely with money from government simply too large and I think should be an important opportunity here for voluntary participation if you stop to think about it in fact that already happens in the terms of bird collected by tens of thousands of volunteer bird banders across this nation and it's generally high quality data using volunteer help doesn't mean necessarily sacrifice quality and I'm very excited about the prospects of building a voluntary effort and I hope that I won't give too many protests from Robert May if I push for importation and immigration of a whole series of English clerics there's a second reason I'm very excited about the voluntary possibility and that is what a wonderful way to improve public education about the biology of our country and the importance of it all you know as I listen to some of the problems painted in their scale and urgency yesterday and wondered how do you get to the solutions yeah the gas tax makes all the sense in the world yet we have a country which has a population that's largely resistant to that simple lack of understanding it's not just a lack of leadership it's a lack of public understanding which probably doesn't apply to people who come to hear a talk like this so how do you get beyond talking to the choir and I think that the nation's natural areas and the parks provide a great opportunity but so does the prospect of a major voluntary national biological survey force of people we had a lot of discussion yesterday in fact in the evening about other moments about how urgent is this problem do certain things have to be decided upon when does society have to change in certain ways if we are to avoid some of these terrible prospects such as the loss of half of the biological diversity on the earth and I'm one of those who thinks despite the fact that happens to be a millennium that the 1990s is an extremely critical and the reason I think that is because of the scale of the numbers of that additional hundred million people that additional four billion tons of carbon going into the atmosphere every year of the rate of tropical forest destruction the kinds of problems I've seen looming in the 48 states and I was reminded pretty easily of a thought that was expressed at a memorial service for two very remarkable naturalists who died in a plane crash in Ecuador in August the rapid assessment program of conservation international remarkable young people Al Gentry one of the great field botanists of the tropics of all time was driven new species endangered species in time for some form of protection to be accorded to them and then Ted Parker with this extraordinary ear and memory such that he literally had stored in his memory the songs not just one song but the entire repertoire of half the species of birds on earth tremendous loss to the conservation effort but what really put me into a profound depression for quite some time was an observation made at this memorial service that there probably was a very envelope in time when Ted Parker's and Al Gentry's would be possible which has been set by technological achievement kinds of tape recorders that Ted could use in the field for example but perhaps even more important the ease of travel to almost any remote spot on earth and it is remarkably easy to do 20 years ago other end of this envelope being set by the disappearance of tropical forests and other wonderful aggregations of life on earth that these two young people were working so hard to save it's a pretty gloomy thought and you just sort of know in your heart that there's a lot of truth to that thought but in the end it comes down to the realization that to accept it to accept that there will be to that envelope in time is to literally let it the other possibility is to press forward each and every one of us each in our own particular way with our particular talents to prevent that terminal force to that envelope in time I think the choice is up to each and every one of us and you know which one I would like you to make thank you