The Ecoflix Podcasts

Rhett Butler founded Mongabay.com in 1999 with the mission of raising interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife. For the first ten years of the project, he operated Mongabay on his own, publishing thousands of stories and tens of thousands of photos.

Today Rhett Butler serves as editor-in-chief of the web site as well as president of Mongabay.org, Mongabay's non-profit arm. Rhett Butler is also Mongabay's senior writer and photographer, continuing to create much of the site's content.

When Azzedine Downes became President and CEO of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in 2012, one thing was clear to him: "Talking to people who already agreed with us just isn’t enough to get real results."

As IFAW’s Executive Vice President since 1997, Azzedine had worked closely with experts from across the sciences and decision makers from around the world. But when he became President, IFAW started bringing together what Azzedine likes to call “the unusual suspects.” Seamstresses in Malawi. Auction houses in China. Working together, IFAW’s eclectic network is now helping animals and people thrive together in more than 40 countries.

Azzedine has led IFAW through a groundbreaking period of geographic expansion and strategic consolidation. He’s helped open offices on four continents, including IFAW’s first office in the Middle East.

Azzedine has also influenced international policies to create positive change on the ground. In Azzedine’s first year as President, IFAW signed a historic lease agreement with a Maasai community near Amboseli National Park in Kenya, securing 16,000 acres of precious habitat for elephants. Months later, Azzedine helped establish a first-of-its-kind cooperative framework between IFAW and INTERPOL’s Environmental Crime Program. For years, Azzedine has served as the Head of the Delegation to the CITES Conference of the Parties. And recently, he directed IFAW’s successful campaign for membership to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Before joining IFAW, Azzedine served as the Chief of Party for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jerusalem and Morocco, as well as the Acting Regional Director for the United States Peace Corps in Eurasia and the Middle East.

In 2015, Fast Company named Azzedine one of the “The Most 100 Creative People in Business,” and he has been listed among The NonProfit Times’s “Power and Influence Top 50.” He is a member of the Global Tiger Forum Advisory Council, and he currently sits on the U.S. Trade and Environmental Policy Advisory Committee.

Named to the prestigious Council for Hope of the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation in 2023, Azzedine joins a group of prominent global thought and business leaders committed to using their influence to improve the world around us.

A graduate of Providence College and Harvard University, Azzedine is fluent in Arabic, English, and French.
His personal memoir, The Couscous Chronicles: Stories of Food, Love, And Donkeys from a Life Between Cultures, was published in June 2023.

Ian Redmond talks to special guest Ugandan veterinarian and founder of Conservation Through Public Health Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka an organisation dedicated to the coexistence of endangered mountain gorillas, other wildlife, humans, and livestock in Africa in his Primate Podcast. A Whitley Gold Award for her conservation work, in December 2021 Dr Gladys was proclaimed a United Nations Environment Programme's Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation for her work with the One Health initiative.

Ian Redmond talks to Primate Podcast guest Dr Elodie Freymann who researches how wild chimpanzees use plants as medicine.
Elodie spent 9 months observing chimpanzees in Uganda to gather behavioral and pharmacological information on these medicinal plants, specifically on their ingestion of tree barks which are also taken as medicine by local human communities. This has implications for the discovery of novel human medicines in an age of growing antibiotic resistance and for the conservation of rapidly disappearing chimp forest habitats.
Find out more about Elodie's work at https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-elodie-freymann

As a prominent nutrition scientist and leader of research on the positive benefits that a plant-based diet entails, Dr. Christopher Gardner has created the Stanford-led Plant-Based Diet Initiative (PBDI). This initiative, directed by Dr. Gardner, encompasses a series of seed grant research led by prominent Stanford scientists.
Ultimately, the Plant-Based Diet Initiative would focus on science and policy to identify the optimal plants to displace animal products and demonstrate how plant-based diets can maximize the intersection of human health and the health of the environment, paving the way for a better and healthier future for people and the earth alike.
Shifting to a more plant-based diet involves a continuum of choices. At the extreme is a vegan diet that includes no animal products. While many nutrition scientists believe a healthy vegan diet can support optimal health, many intermediate approaches that involve less meat can also provide optimal nutrition, and are likely to be more realistic in terms of broad population-based change.
Given the popularity of Beyond Meat and other plant-based alternatives to animal meat and dairy products in the current food market, this is a prime opportunity to identify the role that these products can play in shifting public perceptions (and perhaps behavior) around adopting more plant-based diets long-term.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/nutrition/cgi-bin/pbdi/wordpress/about/

Laurie Hood is the visionary behind Alaqua Animal Refuge. In 2007 Laurie discovered that countless animals were being euthanized due to the lack of a no-kill shelter in Walton County, she couldn’t reconcile this with her natural passion for animals, so she started Alaqua Animal Refuge. The refuge has expanded despite setbacks from hurricanes and COVID and Laurie has also spearheaded legislative change across Florida.

In the first Ecoflix Primate Podcast, Ian Redmond chats to Professor Gilly Forrester about how she came to be studying apes.
Gilly is a Professor of Evolutionary & Developmental Psychology at the University of Sussex. Her academic story began with a BSc in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego (where she witnessed some of the invasive research methods used to study brain function) and continued with a PhD in Experimental Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. She designed complex puzzles for captive apes that mimic syntax in language to explore the link between hand-use and language, then gave the same puzzles to human children to see how they compare. Her new project is to see if studying how humans develop skills can help us prepare captive gorillas and chimps for successful release into their natural habitat in Africa. Gilly says she is "on a quest to better understand how we became the upright walking, talking, tool-using great apes that we are today – both through the evolution of our species and though the development of infants." She also likes to share that knowledge and engage the public at science festivals and on radio and television - which is why she is our inaugural Primate Podcaster on Ecoflix.

With over 30 years of experience in conservation, wildlife protection, environmental/wildlife crime investigations, management of nonprofit organisations, Andrea Crosta also has a broad cross-functional expertise in researching and investigating Environmental Crime Convergence including money laundering, human smuggling, narco-trafficking, corruption, transnational trafficking of wildlife and natural resources, transnational trafficking networks linked to organised crime, conservation, environmental/wildlife protection, and intelligence. He is the founder of Earth League International, the first intelligence agency for Earth.

Carl Safina - Ecologist and author focused on human relationships with the natural world "we are a series of dilemmas inside a bunch of problems". Listen to this fascinating podcast which discusses Carl's early inspiration, his love of birds, his Covid era book on an owl named Alfie and so much more.

Captain Peter James Bethune is a New Zealand ship's captain with 500 ton master licence, published author, producer, and public speaker. Pete Bethune takes conservation to the extreme.

As the founder of Earthrace Conservation, Pete is a world record holder, circling the globe four times on his powerboat Earthrace. From serving months in a maximum security prison for fighting Japanese whalers, to saving endangered red monkeys from poachers in the Amazon.

His missions have seen him shot at, run over by a Japanese security vessel, incarcerated in Libya and Japan, and held under armed guard in a Guatemalan Military camp. Pete Bethune’s story will thrill, move, and inspire you.