Lecture by Douglas Adams

The complete 87 mins Parrots, the Universe and Everything talk at UC Santa Barbara given a month before his death. It’s a speech about the environment and his book Last Chance to See.

“All my other books are lined up in the science fiction section - which I kind of wish they weren’t. I think they could be in general fiction, but I don’t think there’s a science fiction writer who doesn’t think that,” Adams said. “Last Chance to See is completely orphaned from my other books, either off in the travel section or in the natural history section or whatever.”

To write Last Chance to See, Adams traveled the world with zoologist Mark Carwardine, looking for endangered species. The two met when the World Wildlife Fund sent Adams to Madagascar to write about an endangered lemur, the aye-aye.

“Lemurs were the dominant life form on the planet and when the continents split up, Madagascar kind of sailed off then into what suddenly became the Indian Ocean and took with it a representative sample of the livestock of the area, which included a lot of lemurs,” he said. “They sat there for millions and millions of years in glorious isolation, while in the rest of the world a new creature emerged that was much more intelligent than the lemurs, according to it, much more competitive, much more aggressive and incredibly interested in all the things you could do with twigs.

“Twigs were absolutely wonderful. There’s so much you can do with twigs. You can dig around in the ground, you can burrow into the barks of trees for grubs, and you can hit each other with twigs. If there would have been Twig User magazine around in those days, these creatures would have been lining up for it. As you may have guessed, these animals were called the monkeys.

“Because they were more competitive than lemurs, they successfully supplanted lemurs everywhere in the world except Madagascar. Madagascar was right out in the middle of the Indian Ocean and they couldn’t get there until about 1,500 years ago when, due to startling advances in twig technology, they were able to get there in boats and planes. Suddenly, the lemurs, who had had this place to themselves for millions and millions of years were suddenly facing their old enemy, the monkey.”

Adams came face to face with a lemur - for about 10 seconds.

“This creature came out along the branch, looked down at me and I looked at it, and as it looked at me, it obviously didn’t at all like the look of what it saw and it went away,” he said. “What this encounter had been was I was a monkey looking at a lemur. Our roots in this planet go back an awfully, awfully long way and we don’t tend to think about that very much.”

The interactions between man and beast have often ended up with the beast getting the short end of the twig, Adams said. Humans think the world was created for them and prance around like they own the place, he said, which is often not in the best interests of anything.

“We think we can screw about with the world any way we like. But maybe we can’t,” he said. “We don’t have to save the world. The world is fine. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us after we’re through with it.” –source: Daily Nexus

A gloriously Adamsian talk!

Watch it now: Streaming Video
Also for a limited time you can download it Here. (zipped - 37.7mb)
File removed 25 april 2005.

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From the Another Chance To See blog:

I found pages for most of the of “Last Chance To See” animals, and, joy of joys, many of them have GREAT video clips. Seeing a Kakapo wandering through the forest is WONDERFUL! Go there NOW!

Kakapo Parrot
Aye-Aye Lemur
Amazonian Manatee
Komodo Dragon
Rodrigues Fruitbat
Baiji Dolphin
Mountain Gorilla
Pink Pigeon
Mauritius Kestrel

 Other Media: Download

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