Real Audio Recording   

I'm delighted that so many of you could join us, both yesterday and today. I am sure that this will be a provocative, lively session, from which we will all learn, and ultimately be able to bring the data, the urgency and the excitement of this issue to the public at large. So, without further ado, it's my very great pleasure to introduce Francesca Grifo, who heads our Center for Biodiversity and Conservation as its director -- and also, along with her staff, has been responsible for all of the arrangements around this conference. So I am pleased to present her, and also to thank her. And I wish all of you a great day. Thank you

Francesca Grifo:

The Center is very pleased to be able to catalyze events like this one. This symposium, in many ways, is a metaphor for the goals and missions of the Center. I think what we've done here is to examine an issue of relevancy and importance to biodiversity conservation, bringing the best scientific minds to it, and then bringing it to a broad audience. And this is the essence, really, of the Center's educational, research, training, and outreach activities.

Yesterday we looked back at the role of humans in past extinctions, and there was lively debate -- as there always should be when scientists gather to compare related research. But while it may seem that there was a lot that they disagreed on, I believe that I am not misrepresenting them by saying that there are some things that they all did agree on. I think that they agree that past and current extinctions are very real; I think that they agree that humans have played a significant, if not the most significant, role, in fact, in our current extinction crisis. And I think this is what we'll hear this morning in our first two presentations, from Tim Flannery and Ross MacPhee, who will try to capture yesterday and move on from that for us this morning.

But here, you know, I'd just like to pause and take advantage of the setting, because I think that the question that we need to ask ourselves, as we look around this room, is that although the dioramas that we're surrounded by are beautiful and exquisite and amazing in their detail, I think that we agree that it isn't the only place that we want our children and our grandchildren to really experience nature. I mean, we want them to be able to get out in the woods, to get to the jungle, to get to the mountains, and experience these things firsthand. And I think the question that we have before us today is: How do we enable them to do that? How do we make a world where that's going to continue to be a possibility?

Futter bio
Grifo bio