 Hello, first of all, thanks to Simon for inviting me and also thanks to the other presenters here. I mean, I was during the break, someone was saying that a common theme here is sadness. There's a lot of sadness in these presentations, but there's also beauty in how the artists are approaching the sadness, so thanks to the other presenters. So I am a biologist. I work for a group called the Wildlife Conservation Society. Half of what we do is New York City zoos. The other half is international conservation, and that's the part that I work for. We work in more than 60 countries in the world, and what we try to do is conduct scientific research to best inform the protection and management of wildlife. So I am a wildlife biologist, and I work in remote areas. I've captured tigers. This is a little messy. I've surveyed for salmon. I've weighed bears, and my favorite, I've studied the world's largest owl. And people tend to get into my field to get away from people. People tend to be socially phobic and don't want to engage with people. And so as I'm in these remote wild places, there's people there. There's loggers. There's hunters. There's fishermen. There's reindeer herders. And so it took me a while to understand that the people who interact with the environment every day. People who share space with wildlife, these are the people that we most need to reach when we're trying to do conservation work. People like me can sit in a place like New York and come up with the best possible ideas for how to protect wildlife, but if the people who live there don't feel safe with having things like tigers or bears sharing forest with them, they're going to do what they can to get rid of them. They're going to poison them. They're going to shoot them. They're just going to get rid of the threat. And so I'm going to give a small example today about this using tigers. I would say a quarter of my pictures are not showing up here, so do bear with me. So some background, the red is where there are tigers now. The orange is where they used to be. So 120 years ago, there were probably 100,000 tigers in the world. Now there's 3,500 in Russia where I work way up there. There are 500 to 550 tigers. So this contraction of range and of tigers is because of us. It's loss of habitat and it's things like poaching. So about 20 years ago, some Russian conservationists decided to, I guess, bring conservation to the people and they started this thing called Tiger Day and it's become in the capital of Primoria, Vladivostok, it's become a pretty popular event and you have, my presentation also has parades. There's up to 20,000 people take part in Tiger Day activities in Vladivostok, which is pretty amazing. There's a huge parade, there are school classes get involved, kids paint their faces, they join these parades, they put on these skits. What impresses me about the Vladivostok Tiger Day event is that it's multi-generational, it's not just the kids getting engaged, it's older folks too. This couple here is reading a graphic about tiger conservation. And so the parade ends in the city square where there are informational booths. So nature reserves and environmental organizations have information about tigers and what they're doing to protect them. And they have games associated with it. So here there's several generations working together to see if they can pull as much as a tiger can, for example. So if you remember just a few minutes ago, I said that we really need to engage local people in conservation activities. Now getting people on board for tiger conservation in Vladivostok is, it's great, but it's not incredibly impactful. That's like if everyone in New York City got on board with cougar conservation or wolf conservation. The odds of someone tomorrow running into a wolf is pretty low. And just like people in Vladivostok, it's more, tigers are more of an abstract concept. So these are the folks we need to reach, right? The people who are walking the same rivers as tigers, sharing the same space with them. It's the fishermen, it's the hunters, it's the people who spend time in the woods and share resources with tigers. So look, my organization has a field office in a county in this province. And there are 10 settlements in this county, about 10,000 people total. And it's about 10% of tiger habitat in Russia. So what's more important to get 20,000 people to a day event in Vladivostok or focus on this to these 10,000 right here? So the last few years, we've been trying to replicate the tiger day model and bring it to these smaller villages where, I mean, tigers are not abstract. Tigers walk through town, bears walk through town. People encounter tigers, berry picking, hunting, fishing. So the presence of tigers is very real for these people. So what we do is recruit children from some of the larger villages in the county, help them put together performances, put together plays, skits, come up with some games. And then we take them to some of these villages. And so this place here at Ust-Sovolivka, some places are quite remote. To get here from the main road, it's about 20 kilometers of a side road that takes almost three hours to drive. I mean, that's how poor the road is. You can almost walk that fast. So when we come to a village like this, there is tremendous appreciation from the locals that we're spending our time to come and speak to them. So the kids we work with, they put on these plays. They show the interconnectedness between humans and tigers and other wildlife. And we also ask that the kids themselves from these villages put on performances. And some of them are pretty cute. Now speaking about impact, so this picture here shows every single child in that village. So when we're in Vladivostok and we get, let's say, 10,000, 15,000 kids at the 20,000 come to Tiger Day, that's a relatively small proportion of the overall number of children in Vladivostok. But here we have everybody. So it's much, much, much more impactful. And we pepper in educational information. We give them information about tigers. And so they're learning at the same time. And it is impactful. I mean, look at that little boy's face up there. I guarantee you that kid's going to grow up to be a hunter. He's going to grow up to be a fisherman. There's, in a place like Ust-Sobolivka, there's no other option. People basically don't leave. They stay and they live their lives. And that's who we want to reach. A speaker this morning talked about targeting the climate change issue to children. We're trying to do the same thing. The adult hunters and fishermen, it's harder to change behavior of adults. But you can change the behavior of children. And this is the way to do it. So in 15 years, 15, 20 years, when this boy is out hunting and fishing, he looks outside his hunting cabin and he sees a tiger. Or he's walking on a trail and he sees a tiger. He has two options. He can raise his gun, take the shot, maybe make some money off the skin. Or if he feels that tigers are a threat to him because they're eating the same deer that he's trying to feed his family with. He shoots them. Or he stands back, looks at this beautiful creature and lets it pass. So that's what we're trying to do is instill a conservation ethic in the youth of tiger habitat. And I think that this style of performance, performance art is a means to do that. That's it. Thank you.