The Hitchhiker’s guide to sustainability

Sustainability takes many forms and our Transition Edinburgh South group is keen to promote many of them but where does a book by Douglas Adam, better known for his sci-fi books and radio and TV programmes, fit into our work?

Douglas Adams might not have been a fierce Green activist or eco warrior but he gave money to Greenpeace and took up the cause of endangered species after a proposal from the Observer magazine to team up with a zoologist to look for the aye-aye.

“Aye-aye what?” asked Douglas, “The aye-aye. A rare, very shy nocturnal lemur. It’s got beautiful eyes”. This proposal came from the World Wildlife Fund and the Observer who had got together to send writers and experts out into the world to find endangered species. The rationale was that the writers would have the freshness of perception that comes from complete ignorance of the subject and the experts would furnish the background and specialist knowledge.

Douglas was paired up with Mark Carwardine, a zoologist and plunged with characteristic enthusiasm in the study which prompted a radio 4 programme about endangered species and Douglas' favourite book ‘last chance to see' which he co-authored with Mark Carwardine, The book is a compelling mix of wittily observed travelogue and natural history documentary. It is a really good read.

See also the youtube follow up with Stephen Fry on http://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/

Douglas had become fascinated by the endangered species the project was investigating, the komodo dragons, the Northern While Rhino, the gorillas of Zaire, the river dolphins of the Yangtze and many more. He was strongly interested in Darwinian evolution but there is also a real anger in 'Last chance' that as a species we could be so careless.

"The rhino, for instance, is a bad-tempered, nimble, two-ton, armour plated animal with a great nose, crappy eyesight and a complex, muti-chamber biochemical processing plant to digest the otherwise indigestible vegetation and turn it into more rhino or heroic quantities of excrement (none of which is wasted). There are now only thirty White Rhino left in the world; that this amazing creature should be shot, not even for its meat, but because of two excrescences of ossified hair on its nose is beyond belief. The wickedness of the slaughter takes on another dimension of stupidity when you realise that the reason is a trade in ceremonial dagger handles as props for Yemeni men to look chunky or to help credulous Orientals reduce fever or get erections (for which the rhino has no value whatever). It's basically hair, guys for God's sake" (Webb, 2003).

Douglas Adam combined his scientific interest in endangered species with a desire to understand the animals he was studying. What he wanted to imagine was the world as these animals might perceive it. This was the reason why he was, for instance, so stricken by the fate of the Yangtze dolphin which assembles its model of the environment through sound. The doomed specie was maddened and, as it were, blinded by mankind’s marine engines before extinction.

Douglas would have been interested and concerned by the new challenges we are facing in 2009 as species are becoming extinct at an increasing rate, with a study in Nature suggesting that a million of the world’s species could be extinct before 2050 and they reckon that is an optimist estimate!