Saving the world's wetlands
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Iran hosted a meeting to save the world's wetlands in 1971. The Ramsar Convention - named after the village on the Caspian Sea where it was originally signed - is seen as the first of the modem global intergovernmental treaties on the sustainable use of natural resources. Claire Bowes has been speaking to the Belgian representative, Eckhart Kuijken, about the battle by conservationists to interest people and governments in the value of wetlands. He describes how his home country had no planning laws protecting natural landscapes until 1962 - so that many were lost to industry and agriculture.
Photo: Hawizeh Marsh in Iran. Credit: courtesy of the Convention on Wetlands
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:29.2 | Hello and thanks for downloading witness history on the BBC World Service with me Claire Bose. |
| 0:41.2 | Today we're going back to Iran in 1971 and what's seen as one of the first modern international agreements to protect the environment. |
| 0:53.0 | Before save the whale and save the rainforest came an effort to save the world's wetlands. |
| 0:59.0 | The frogs and birds of the vast wetlands of Iran. |
| 1:07.0 | I was so astonished by this culture in Iran, very nice people, very nice way of life. |
| 1:15.0 | At 28, it was the first trip outside of Europe for Echard Kurken. |
| 1:21.0 | And Kuken means a little chick. Kurkin. And Kurkin men's a little chick. |
| 1:24.0 | Kurkin, the little chick, was, appropriately, the youngest at the meeting which would help determine |
| 1:30.6 | the future of conservation. He was a biologist from Belgium and he joined |
| 1:36.3 | experts and government representatives for an historic agreement in the small |
| 1:41.4 | coastal village of Ramsar. |
| 1:43.4 | So the invitation to have the meeting in Ramsar brought together all these guys |
| 1:49.8 | with the same feeling as I had, admiring the way in which the people of Iran was living with |
| 1:56.8 | their wetlands and living with respect for nature much more than we were used here. In his native Belgium, the flower power generation of the late 1960s |
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