For me it started with gospel music.
A group of African-American women were singing
for their children who had asthma
and for neighbours who had cancer.
It was a strange picture: these women
standing in front of these huge smokestacks
that were emitting a poisonous gas.
It was deceiving, because the thin line of white smoke looked very innocent
but at night, in the cover of dark,
they'd really let it go and it was black and thick.
These women did something interesting,
interesting to me as a conservationist:
they launched this conservation campaing through their church.
They went to traditions that they knew: gospel music, God and passion,
and they went up against this refinery in Southern Lousiana
that did not have monitors on their stacks, and they won.
The stack emissions were finally regulated.
This idea of putting religion in conservation
had never really occured to me before.
I'd been working in conservation for a number of years
and this was a new idea.
Six years after this occurred
I was going down to Southern Louisiana again
and priests were handing out at that time food vouchers
and they were overseeing some suicide watchers
of these fishing families that had been wiped out
during the Deepwater Horizon explosion.
It really impacted their industry and these families were desperate.
What they did in a time of crisis,
was that they returned to their traditions, to their faith,
and to their religious leaders.
Now --
conservation cannot be done by radiocolouring and by tagging alone,
it cannot be done through surveys and data sets.
If conservation is going to be successful,
there has to be a community
that's living in and around the issue, wildlife, habitat
that cares about the wildlife as a sacred value.
So, it occurred to me that I needed to go to the religious leaders
and begin to talk to them,
it was when I met the many Gods of planet Earth.
I went to Mongolia in 2002 as part of a team going over to work
on a fisheries conservation project.
This was an area on the Siberian border
and it was inhabited by nomadic people
who lived on the banks of the Üür river.
The Üür river was also home to the taimen,
which is a fish that gets up to 180 pounds and six foot in length
making it a huge draw for anglers
who come over to catch and release fly fish.
There were a number of pressures being put on this fish at the time
and we were really tempted to launch into a full-on
sort of community-outreach effort,
we had fisheries biologists over there,
who were tagging the fish and tracking their movements.
But the first thing I wanted to do with this team,
is go and visit families and listen to their stories:
what was it about this culture that -- What did they respect?
What did they value?
I learned a few things.
Number one: Mongolians come from a long ago coupling of a wolf and a roe deer.
Number two: in this valley, a long time ago,
a wicked shaman had really terrorised the people,
but later, converted to Buddhism as did the inhabitants of this valley.
And number three: the death of one taimen
equals the souls of 999 people suffering.
So that's what we'd build the campaign around.
It was a circuitous route actually:
we re-built a Buddhist monastery,
that became a site for Buddhism and conservation dialogue,
we started a summer camp for kids -- a free one --
where they would learn about conservation issues,
they'd learn about conservation policy, nature,
and they also were learning about water quality and fisheries.
We went and we were able to, excuse me --
we were able to create these festivals
that incorporated local traditions and what not.
And I want to say that, right now,
the taimen population is stable in this area --
that was -- we started the project in 2004,
and that's one of the only places in the world that can make that claim.
When I began to look at religions, and look at cultures
I discovered that every faith, every culture has a message about ecology
and nature and its importance.
For example in the Bhagavad Gita, which is a sacred text in Hinduism,
they have a quote that says,
"He is dear who practices non-violence against all living beings."
And then, on a more rather -- condemning note,
in Revelation, in the Christian Bible it says,
"God destroyeth, he who destroyeth the world."
So, I thought these were so interesting
and it was really adding another dimension to the work,
and it was also this wonderful new experience for me
to be working with religious leaders.
So I started the organization "The Tributary Fund"
and together we go and unearth traditions,
or rather discover traditions,
encourage the traditions that put value in wildlife
and really try to bring these traditions either back,
or to make them a part of community practice and replicating or whatnot.
And I want to give an example of one of the things that we do, which is the next step:
we find these traditions, Buddhism is a good example
of people who believe that all sentient beings need to be protected.
So we brought a group of Buddhist monks over to the United States
and this is, we've done it now for four years,
and they went and saw a researcher who was working on Pallas's cats.
Pallas's cats are cats indigenous to Mongolia.
In the work that they were doing: they were [tranquilizing] the cat,
colouring the cat and they were harvesting eggs.
After the monks saw this, there was a lot of discussion and --
obviously it had touched a nerve and they turned around and said,
"You know, we do understand that there is harm being made towards these beings,
we understand that this cannot be comfortable,
the harvesting of eggs in particular."
But the scientists said that these eggs are our insurance policy, essentially.
"If this animal faces extinction we have this genetic material," and they said,
"We think this research is OK
because there is nothing more profane than the idea of extinction."
This is something that really drives us,
these beliefs, these -- traditions,
we're really finding them more and more in Bhutan, Mongolia,
we're working in the United States with a variety of different religions.
Science is important for understanding conservation boundaries,
but beliefs and story-telling is important for local communities involvement.
Both are essential in protecting the Earth.
Luckily, we have many Gods on our side.
Thank you.
(Applause)