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A talk by Corneille Ewango

By melvin

Although this talk was given a year ago, the good folks at TED just now got around to making it public.

Ewango is a botanist, former poacher, and winner of the 2005 Goldman Prize for his heroic efforts to protect the DRC's Okapi Faunal Reserve in the chaos of civil war.

For three months he risked being shot on the spot while preserving the herbarium, hiding equipment in the forest canopy (and burying a land rover engine underground), furtively emailing information on troop movements and atrocities to the outside world, and confronting strongmen face to face. He is a living hero to match the martyrs of Leningrad who starved to death guarding the seed repository.

While he recounts all that in the talk, note the mention by this man, who obviously would rather talk only of the work, of coltan and the Congolese that have died for our cell phones, and his minor-key plea for an end to "the language of guns."

As Ewango said in another talk:

I thought I could die anyway and someone needed to save the work.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on July 12, 2008 (boomark / email).