All about beauty

Brink of extinction than anyone else in his field, in Midrand in October. By

‘Long-term commitment’

“There’s a very powerful lesson there. Yes, we can restore the populations of critically endangered species, but we also need to continue to look after the populations.

“We need 100-year visions for our programmes. Then we will achieve great things. This is something the conservation community has yet to embrace.”

Saving the world took its toll, in those early days. “The operation was looking desperate. The funders weren’t happy with my approach. I was very hands-on, and in the 1970s and 1980s a lot of the conservation organisations were protectionist and didn’t believe in active management.

“They believed that the best way to save species was to put up a national park, protect them and go round schools and educate people. I just knew that wouldn’t work. There was destruction, and degradation of the forest, [human] populations were growing, and I knew we would have to be proactive.

“There was this huge philosophical debate, conflict, tension, between the protectionist ideology, which still exists in the Western world, and the practical get-out-there-anddo-it ideology like you have in South Africa, and which I admire.

“Funding was withdrawn … I was very lucky that Gerry [the conservationist Gerald Durrell] came in and saved my bacon and gave me a job.” The rest is history, a country Jones doesn’t like to inhabit, except for what it can teach about the future. “The world is going to change dramatically,” he says, “but the one thing we mustn’t get obsessed with is trying to turn the clock back. Thinking like that can be very destructive.

“We’ve got to look to the past, but so we can guide development in the future…

“And now with climate change, people have woken up and they’re saying, ‘Bloody hell, we can’t turn the clock back even if we wanted to.’ We’ve got to think in a very creative way about what may be in the future.”

The lesson of the dodo, the “iconic lost species”, he says, is that “it was the first species that became extinct, in 1662, where we realised that we’d caused its extinction.

“People then looked back, years later, and said ‘Where’s the dodo gone?’ and they realised that the world was exhaustible, that we could deplete species, that they weren’t just there for us to take and take and take.”

He insists that all species can be saved, and bridles at the suggestion that choices need to be made about which ones to save, and that there isn’t enough money to do so anyway.

“When you start saying there’s a limited pot, you become less creative in your thinking. I always say all species are saveable... But the moment you start saying species aren’t saveable, you start giving up.

“And I don’t think we should ever do that. How much are people spending on skyscrapers? How much has been poured into Ukraine? I’m not saying we shouldn’t have. Of course we should. But how much money goes into armaments compared to conservation, to looking after this planet? I think we need to restructure the way we look at the world.” And not just as a matter of survival. “Keeping the planet healthy keeps us healthy, not just in terms of physical health but mental health. We need diversity. We need complexity. The human soul feeds off complex, interesting worlds.”

At home, on his three-hectare patch of Wales, it’s the simple pleasures of his own birds and other animals that occupy Jones.

“I have a number of birds. Birds of prey. Parrots. Some owls. I’ve got birds that I fly, that I let go and they come back. I’ve got a tortoise. I’ve got some fish.

“You know, if you build a rapport with birds, especially the intelligent ones, they become very intuitive about you... It wouldn’t surprise me if many animals had telepathic ways of communicating.

“I’m not saying this in some airy-fairy, New Age sort of way, but there are modes of communication between animals which we don’t fully understand. I don’t want you to think I’m a hippie. But I like to think I’m open to other possibilities in the world.”

A world that is more complex, more bounteous, and more beautiful thanks to Jones’s efforts.

Yves Vanderhaeghen writes for Jive Media Africa, science communication partner for Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation.