Stephen Fry
He tells Natalie Hoare why it's important to protect these species, and how geography might benefit from a rebrand.
My late friend, the great Douglas Adams, writer of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wrote a book with zoologist Mark Carwardine back in the early to mid-1980s. Funnily enough, I was actually house-sitting for Douglas at that time. His idea was to go and look for rare species around the world – species on the brink of extinction – and that’s why it was called Last Chance to See. A quarter of a century later, we decided to go back and retrace their steps.
Mark and Douglas, almost at random, chose eight species, and we looked at six of the original eight, as two – the Yangtze River dolphin and the northern white rhino – are now extinct (a couple of white rhinos are alive, but they’re beyond breeding age). As a snapshot of endangered species – a quarter [having died out] in 20-odd years – it’s probably fair to say it’s quite representative.
We have a huge advantage as a species of being unbelievably flexible and versatile – we can live in the desert, in Antarctica and in the Arctic, in Europe and we can even live in Yorkshire. There is nowhere, because of our tool making and our adaptability, that we can’t live. But that isn’t true for an enormous number of species. The demands of man and the demands of certain species are incompatible.
Why should we protect these natural oddities? Well, one argument is emotional and aesthetic – and I don’t discount that at all as perhaps being the most important one – because in and of themselves, these animals are beautiful achievements in time, variation and the simple laws of evolution working out into their full complexity. I don’t know that we have a duty to protect them, but I certainly know that we don’t have a right to be the ones to destroy them.
Extinction is irreversible: once you allow a species to die, it can’t come back unless you go along with Michael Crichton and DNA in a jam jar. But DNA is pointless without habitat and habitat is what we’re killing. No-one will actually go out and kill the last 100 kakapos [flightless parrots], but they’ll go out and destroy the environment that allows them to live.
We could be setting fire to a library before we’ve read all of the books. There is a chance that all these species that are becoming extinct hold great secrets. If you were to list the important medical breakthroughs in terms of drugs in the past 100 years, they’ve all come from natural phenomena: whether its digitalin from foxglove, aspirin or acetylsalicylic acid from a willow tree or a fungal mould for penicillin.
Talking of discoveries, every time I go to the RGS, I get a little thrill when I think of [John Hanning] Speke and [David] Livingstone and [Richard Francis] Burton and all the great explorers who came to that very lecture theatre to tell the world about what they’ve found. It’s very atmospheric.
I can’t pretend I was a fan of geography at school, but I won’t, like most people, cheaply blame my geography teachers. It was actually the syllabus to be honest – cash crops of Costa Rica and rift valleys really didn’t inspire me at all then. Now, of course, I love it all. I’m absolutely passionate about it and I can’t learn enough.
I imagine that most people have a slight suspicion that geography isn’t really a science, but it’s not really one of the humanities either, so people think that it’s for people who aren’t quite good at either, which is terribly unfair. Anybody who is a serious geographer these days has to have mathematical tools at their disposal, and economics, geology, and a wide range of historical, social and ethnological subjects have to be within their grasp.
Unfortunately, it’s all about that ghastly late 20th-, early 21st-century issue of brand image – geography just happens to have a bad image. I wonder what would happen if the RGS decided to find a new word for it… Worldology? Worldology is an absolutely ridiculous hybrid, whereas world studies sounds creepy. How about the world? That would beat geography wouldn’t it? ‘I’m studying the world.’ So that’s my hint: to rebrand geography and get people to realise that it’s about the world – all the world in every corner sing.
Curriculum Vitae
1957 Born in Hampstead, London
1981 Graduated from Queens' College Cambridge with a degree in English Literature 1980s and '90s Appeared in various stage productions, films and television series including Jeeves and Wooster, A bit of Fry and Laurie and Wilde
1991 First book, The Liar, published
1995 Presented with an honorary doctorate by the University of Dundee
2005 Presented with an honorary degree by Anglia Ruskin University and made an honorary fellow of Queens' College Cambrige
2009 Documentary Stephen Fry in America aired on BBC One
For more information, visit www.stephenfry.com
October 2009
My late friend, the great Douglas Adams, writer of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wrote a book with zoologist Mark Carwardine back in the early to mid-1980s. Funnily enough, I was actually house-sitting for Douglas at that time. His idea was to go and look for rare species around the world – species on the brink of extinction – and that’s why it was called Last Chance to See. A quarter of a century later, we decided to go back and retrace their steps.
Mark and Douglas, almost at random, chose eight species, and we looked at six of the original eight, as two – the Yangtze River dolphin and the northern white rhino – are now extinct (a couple of white rhinos are alive, but they’re beyond breeding age). As a snapshot of endangered species – a quarter [having died out] in 20-odd years – it’s probably fair to say it’s quite representative.
We have a huge advantage as a species of being unbelievably flexible and versatile – we can live in the desert, in Antarctica and in the Arctic, in Europe and we can even live in Yorkshire. There is nowhere, because of our tool making and our adaptability, that we can’t live. But that isn’t true for an enormous number of species. The demands of man and the demands of certain species are incompatible.
Why should we protect these natural oddities? Well, one argument is emotional and aesthetic – and I don’t discount that at all as perhaps being the most important one – because in and of themselves, these animals are beautiful achievements in time, variation and the simple laws of evolution working out into their full complexity. I don’t know that we have a duty to protect them, but I certainly know that we don’t have a right to be the ones to destroy them.
Extinction is irreversible: once you allow a species to die, it can’t come back unless you go along with Michael Crichton and DNA in a jam jar. But DNA is pointless without habitat and habitat is what we’re killing. No-one will actually go out and kill the last 100 kakapos [flightless parrots], but they’ll go out and destroy the environment that allows them to live.
We could be setting fire to a library before we’ve read all of the books. There is a chance that all these species that are becoming extinct hold great secrets. If you were to list the important medical breakthroughs in terms of drugs in the past 100 years, they’ve all come from natural phenomena: whether its digitalin from foxglove, aspirin or acetylsalicylic acid from a willow tree or a fungal mould for penicillin.
Talking of discoveries, every time I go to the RGS, I get a little thrill when I think of [John Hanning] Speke and [David] Livingstone and [Richard Francis] Burton and all the great explorers who came to that very lecture theatre to tell the world about what they’ve found. It’s very atmospheric.
I can’t pretend I was a fan of geography at school, but I won’t, like most people, cheaply blame my geography teachers. It was actually the syllabus to be honest – cash crops of Costa Rica and rift valleys really didn’t inspire me at all then. Now, of course, I love it all. I’m absolutely passionate about it and I can’t learn enough.
I imagine that most people have a slight suspicion that geography isn’t really a science, but it’s not really one of the humanities either, so people think that it’s for people who aren’t quite good at either, which is terribly unfair. Anybody who is a serious geographer these days has to have mathematical tools at their disposal, and economics, geology, and a wide range of historical, social and ethnological subjects have to be within their grasp.
Unfortunately, it’s all about that ghastly late 20th-, early 21st-century issue of brand image – geography just happens to have a bad image. I wonder what would happen if the RGS decided to find a new word for it… Worldology? Worldology is an absolutely ridiculous hybrid, whereas world studies sounds creepy. How about the world? That would beat geography wouldn’t it? ‘I’m studying the world.’ So that’s my hint: to rebrand geography and get people to realise that it’s about the world – all the world in every corner sing.
Curriculum Vitae
1957 Born in Hampstead, London
1981 Graduated from Queens' College Cambridge with a degree in English Literature 1980s and '90s Appeared in various stage productions, films and television series including Jeeves and Wooster, A bit of Fry and Laurie and Wilde
1991 First book, The Liar, published
1995 Presented with an honorary doctorate by the University of Dundee
2005 Presented with an honorary degree by Anglia Ruskin University and made an honorary fellow of Queens' College Cambrige
2009 Documentary Stephen Fry in America aired on BBC One
For more information, visit www.stephenfry.com
October 2009
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