Agrandir le plan

This small town, rather run down, sits by the Mekong at its widest spot. It is famous for its freshwater dolphins, which number less than 75 in that spot today from hundreds before. The Irrawaddy dolphins are recognizable by their bulging forehead and squashed nose, and rather whale-like appearance. They’re the pugs of the dolphin family, less conventionally handsome than their bottle-nosed cousins. Though the dolphins are no longer poached, at least not in this part of the Mekong, because locals found out they could make better money from ecotourism, the animals still suffer from accidental deaths in fishermen’s nets and from the ecological damage wrought by dams and industrial pollution further upstream. (Hello, China.)

Catching the dolphins on film comes down to luck since it is impossible to anticipate where they will break the water. By the time you hear the distinctive sound of one of them pushing water out of its blowhole and you turn around, all you catch in circles in the water. And in any case, these dolphins tend not to jump out of the water for fun and play with tourists’ boat as you might have seen bottle-nosed dolphins do. These trips to the surface are utilitarian. They come up, they breathe, they go under. The spectacle is rather in the majesty of the Mekong at sunset and in sitting quietly in a boat, slowly realizing that you are surrounded by discrete, beautiful animals. Anyways, this is what I saw.

Please bear in mind I’m standing at the front of a moving boat with only a digital zoom, hence the shaking. The buzzing is the camera’s microphone picking up the sound of the tape rolling: I really need better equipment.

… minus the Schubert soundtrack of course. (The audio track from the original recording was unusable.)

These gibbons are endangered. As is much wildlife in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Here’s the reason why:

These photos of deforestation (most likely clearing the way for one of the Vietnamese-owned industrial coffee plantations that have been sprouting up in the area) were taken the same day, March 8 2009, maybe 20 kms away from the gibbons. Since the animals were singing, I’m assuming they were a male and a female, but sexually mature females of this species are all blonde, so maybe juveniles. In any case, they were most likely at least partly domesticated because this tree is right outside a guesthouse on the outskirts of the village of Paksong. The gibbons weren’t scared by humans watching or the sounds of the road nearby, nor did they seem unfazed by the lack of trees in this relatively ‘urbanized’ part of the plateau.

My environmental conscience has grown tremendously over the past year or so. Maybe it had to do with being diagnosed with asthma and feeling the direct effect of hydrocarbon pollution on my ability to breathe without having to put effort into it. Maybe it was moving to Cambodia: there might be less pollution in poor countries but it’s more in your face, with mounds of trash everywhere you look and deforestation fires everywhere (I took the photo above in Laos this past March). Maybe it was the massive upsurge of media attention to global warming that had an impact. Whatever it was, it worked and apart from a few changes in personal habits (giving up my A/C unit in Cambodia not the least of them), I’m mulling over a switch to environmental journalism, if I could just find the job.

Much is being written now about causes and consequences of global warming, but I fear we’ve gotten to the point where everyone whose mind could be changed has been. For an even larger change to occur, we need to find living solutions that are more green without forcing people in developed countries to give up their comforts… because they won’t, you won’t, I won’t, at least not in a major way, let’s face it. And more importantly, we need to find solutions that allow people in poorer countries to improve their lot without worsening the planet’s. I’ve been educating myself about such solutions and found hope in the brand new field of biomimicry, which consists of getting inspiration from nature’s own design to engineer the future tools of human life: buildings that work like trees, trains like birds, textiles like butterflies, etc… It’s something engineers have certainly done before, but now there’s a systematic attempt to look to nature first. The website asknature.org has a catalogue of nature’s solutions to many problems under the sun, open to any inventor seeking inspiration. Our disconnect with nature is our downfall, and there’s a way to go back to it without moving back into caves and giving up centuries of progress.

So for this Blog Action Day, I ask you to set aside 17 minutes and 39 seconds to watch this inspiring talk by Janine Benyus, who’s doing much to raise the media profile of biomimicry these days. (Note: I’ve been trying to focus my work as a TED volunteer translator onto environmental topics, so I’ve translated this talk into French but it still needs a reviewer before TED publishes the subtitles. Anyone knowing French out there wanna help?)