Podcast 6 - transcript

TRANSCRIPT

This is Made at UCL: The Podcast. Bringing you closer to the UCL research answering life’s big questions. From engineering to art, health care to space exploration, ancient artefacts to the technology of the future.

Episode six: Perspectives

Hello! I’m Suzie, welcome to another episode of Made at UCL. 

[Curious string music]

What happens when we explore perspective outside of our own and apply their lessons to our present experiences? That’s the question I’m exploring throughout this episode. We’ll be hearing about UCL research that tries to understand the lives of very different groups of people and work alongside them to gain new insights on how we can keep striving to do better. From avoiding mistakes of the past, to rebuilding spaces for the future. I’ll be talking to UCL experts in anthropology, architecture, medicine, history and law.

Philippe Sands  

A country will send you an email, get on the phone, send you a text message or WhatsApp and say "We need help on something. Are you available?" I cannot predict what the next case will be. What I can predict is that if there's some major dispute that takes place between two states somewhere in the world, chances are one of them, or sometimes both, might get in touch.

Suzie McCarthy  

This is:

[Slow jazz music]

Philippe Sands  

Philippe Sands. I'm professor of international law at University College London, where I've taught for 20 years

Suzie McCarthy  

Alongside teaching, he appears in court on international cases, from oil spills

Philippe Sands  

to a dispute between states over a boundary

Suzie McCarthy  

From UN reforms 

Philippe Sands  

to mass killing. I'm involved right now in the case for the Gambia against Myanmar on the protection of the Rohingya community from acts of genocide. And any manner of other things. It's actually an immense variety and that is, I think, part of the joy of my work and my life.

Suzie McCarthy  

And when he gets a spare moment away from teaching or court,

Philippe Sands  

I write books.

Suzie McCarthy  

I caught up with Philippe to discuss his latest book: The Ratline. It's a true story following Philippe's research into what happened to a Nazi war criminal that escaped justice.

[Sirens sound and clock tower bell rings] 

The story starts in Lemberg, or Lviv as it is now known, which is a city in Ukraine. It’s the birthplace of the legal concepts of geonicde and crimes against humanity.

In WWII, Ukraine had one of the highest Jewish populations in Europe, and it’s where Nazi forces first started rounding up and killing people based on ethnicity.

This was overseen by 

Philippe Sands

the governor of Lemberg, a man called Otto Wetcher. He disappeared off the face of the earth in May 1945. He been indicted for mass murder.

Suzie McCarthy

But, like many Nazi war criminals, he was never caught.

Following a visit to Lviv to give a lecture in 2010, Philippe was introduced to Otto Wetcher’s son, Horst.

Philippe Sands  

And when I met Horst I encountered a man that I liked. He was genial. He was… He wore a Pink t-shirt and Birkenstocks. And he was warm and friendly and open. He basically said, "Look, I hardly knew my father, I was very close to my mother, I loved my mother very much, my mother loved my father, and hence I do what I can to find the good in my father." And that's what he does.

Suzie McCarthy  

Philippe and Horst embarked on a number of projects together, despite having very different perspectives on Horst’s parents, Otto and Charlotte. Over time, Horst shared information with Philippe and they’ve worked on a number of articles, events and a film together.

But Horst wasn’t prepared to share the full story with Philippe until they’d built up trust over several years.

[Uncertain music]

Philippe Sands  

And into my letterbox one day popped a single USB stick. 24 gigabytes, 10,000 pages of documents. The entire lifetime of family papers, letters, diaries, photographs and other things between Otto and Charlotte Wetcher.

Suzie McCarthy  

This was an enormously valuable and expansive archive, which Philippe took to historian Lisa Jardin, who sadly passed away in 2012. She was  Professor of Renaissance Studies and the director of UCL’s Centre for Editing Lives and Letters and she had a particular interest in using personal archives for historical research.  

Philippe Sands  

And she said, “That is fabulous material. Why don't we start a research project jointly and look into the material to identify what became of him?” And since we had his archive, we believed we had a basis for working out what a senior Nazi on the run did, who he met and how he tried to escape to Argentina.

Suzie McCarthy  

These archives could open the door to understanding how many Nazi criminals were able to escape justice, fleeing Europe to Argentina in a route that would come to be called the Ratline. For Philippe, his interest wasn’t just historical, but personal.

Philippe Sands  

Otto Wetcher was, in the summer of 1942, the man who oversaw or contributed to the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of people, including my grandfather’s entire family.

[Slow, reflective music]

But I think there was a third element also and this links the two, the historical and the personal. And that was the legal element. I wanted to know what happens to a man who has been indicted.

Suzie McCarthy  

That is when a prosecution brings enough evidence to show that somebody may be guilty of a crime, in this case a war crime, and demands that they are trialled on the basis of that charge.

Philippe Sands  

And the reason that I was interested in that was that at a certain moment in my relationship with Horst Wetcher, the son, he said to me, “You know what, Felipe, my father died an innocent man. He may have been indicted, but he was never caught. He was never convicted.”

Suzie McCarthy  

Meaning he died without being found guilty. And that's something which Horst holds on to.

Philippe Sands  

He is not a holocaust denier. And he accepts that his father was deeply implicated in these terrible acts, which were crimes, but he's not willing to accept that his father should be called a criminal. 

That interested me as an international lawyer who deals with matters of international crime, that space between criminality and innocence. It's the sort of grey area in international law.

Suzie McCarthy  

Philippe began digging through the Wetcher's huge family archive, which wasn't an easy task.

[Upbeat plucked strings]

Philippe Sands  

You need help with language. I mean I'm dealing with documents in Ukrainian, in German, in Polish. I don't have all those languages. And so one of the wonderful things that a university like UCL has is this incredible group of students.

Suzie McCarthy  

Many of those students come from all over the world and could offer Philippe a great deal of support in transcribing, translating and cataloging all the documents from the archive.  Two students in particular played an essential role:James Everest, a PhD student of history and a Master of Laws graduate Lea Main-Klingst.

Philippe Sands  

I would not be able to do this kind of work without the incredible student community that I work with.

Suzie McCarthy  

Collectively they pieced together what happened to Otto after his indictment: where he went; the fake name he took; and who helped him avoid capture. But there was one important question remaining.

Philippe Sands  

I needed help to work out what it was that had killed him, was it, as Horst Wetcher suggested or said, that he had been poisoned by people who were hunting him? By the Russians, by Jews, by Americans, by Poles? 

[Slow, investigative music]

Suzie McCarthy 

Or was it just an illness that had killed him?

To answer this question, Philippe turned to UCL's Medical Faculty. Dr. Massimo Pinzani is a professor of medicine at UCL's Royal Free hospital, specializing in immunology. Figuring out how Otto died, using only letters or reports describing his symptoms...

Philippe Sands  

...Like sort of viral detectives...

Suzie McCarthy  

Was a new venture for Massimo! It meant going through the letters Otto wrote in his final days to assess his symptoms.

Philippe Sands  

Wetcher described he had a fever and, uh, Massimo Pinzani from that was able to work out the infection had been caused by a virus. And through a process of elimination, we were able to work out with a high degree of certitude what had killed him.

Suzie McCarthy  

I'm afraid I can't give it away here exactly what happened but do go and get your hands on a copy of the Ratline to find out! 

The archives could answer many of these historical questions as to what happened when and give a sense of Otto and Charlotte Wetchers' characters. But understanding the impact of that legal grey space between indictment and conviction, innocence and guilt, that Philippe talked about earlier, depended on his personal relationship with Horst.

Philippe Sands  

Horst and I have taken a journey across 10 years, and um, I don't think either of us have budged very much. He's tried to persuade me of the decency of his father, I've tried to persuade him of the criminality of his father, and neither has persuaded the other. It's a sort of waltz that we have both taken one pulling the other constantly in a different direction.

Suzie McCarthy  

Maintaining this relationship with a man who doesn't believe his father - who was responsible for killing Philippe's relatives - was a criminal can't have been an easy task. Philippe told me that he probably made use of the sort of emotional distance that lawyers have to have when working on cases to follow Horst lines of thought and to give his parents a fair hearing.

Philippe Sands  

And I'm very careful in writing about Otto and Charlotte Wechter, whose views I abhor, or whose actions in some cases I abhor, not to describe them as monsters. They were actually people who did monstrous things. Otto Wechter in particular. 

[String drones]

But he wasn't just a monster. He was also a dad, and a husband, and a lover, and a friend, and a poet, and a writer of letters, and a man who could express enormous tenderness. And I think it is the normality of the kind of person who can get engaged in mass killing, that is so chilling and so troubling. 

I've begun to understand how it is that regular, decent, ordinary people, cross a line, find themselves in another place and then cross another line. Until they are willing to get involved in acts which are absolutely, you know, unforgivable. 

And I think it's a warning sign. I mean, it's a warning sign that's very pertinent right now. We're speaking at a time when the United States is in a state of eruption. And I, watching what is going on can see very easily how one thing can lead to another. And why a president for example, who puts out a tweet saying when the looting begins, the shooting begins, is in danger of entering a space, of crossing a line in which the logical next step could lead to a point of mass killing or mass violence.

Suzie McCarthy  

The Ratline opens with a quote from Spanish writer Javier Cercas which says ‘it is more important to understand the butcher than the victim’. Researching the lives of senior Nazis has given Phillipe a new perspective on that. And that's something which he's taken with him into his legal work now.

Philippe Sands  

I had an interesting experience last December. I was in court, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, acting for the Gambia, opposite Myanmar. And opposite me was an iconic figure, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Suzie McCarthy  

Aung San Suu Kyi is the first State Councilor of Myanmar, a position akin to being their prime minister, and played a key role in transitioning the state from military junta to democracy, for which she won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Philippe Sands  

And I remember sitting there, as she made what I consider to be unpersuasive arguments about the actions of the Myanmar military against innocent civilians, members of the Rohingya community and I asked myself the question: "How on earth did you get to cross on that line and you're standing here before the International Court of Justice defending the indefensible?" And of course, it raises the question: "Could I do that? Would there be a moment where I would be able to cross a line?" And of course, putting my hand on the heart, I am bound to say I can't exclude it entirely. 

[Slow, reflective music returns]

I think we are all, in principle capable of doing terrible things. And I think the question is, what are the trigger, triggering acts? And what makes those things happen?

Suzie McCarthy  

There are perhaps no clear cut answers on all of this. But these are questions that it's important to keep asking. Philippe recalled an event he attended where he was speaking alongside Horst, but also with Nicholas Frank, whose own father was hanged at Nuremberg for the death of millions of people. 

At the event, an audience member asked Nicolas just this question: how is it that people come to do such terrible things?

Philippe Sands  

And he paused and then he said, you know what it is? It's a lack of civil courage. It is a lack of independence of spirit, you reach a crossroads and you do the wrong thing.

[Pause. Then gentle electric guitar and piano]

Suzie McCarthy  

Social research often comes down to trying to understand the many different lives and experiences humans live. Often, as with the Ratline, having a personal connection to the subject of study allows for different perspectives to come into view. An outsider with no close connection to Horst, or with no legal understanding of  war crimes, may have written a very different story to the one that Philippe has put to paper.

This personal connection to the subject of study is also really important to our next story, which brings to the fore the perspectives of people who are often not heard. 

M

I’m not sure how to start this, but…

[Jaunty bass and guitar music]

H+R 

Hi Suzie! We’ve just had a semi date night. So I promised you we’d try to do a recording talking about Queer spaces.

T

Ok! I’m going to talk briefly about two spaces that I really like that are queer.

H  

Queer spaces have always been a really important thing for our community. 

M

I am an asexual, which means, for those that don’t know I don't experience sexual attraction. Which puts me in the Queer spectrum of folks.

H+R 

I’m pretty sure we’re the only gay parents in the village [R laughs]. I know the only gay parents in the next village.

[music stops]

Suzie McCarthy

Queer or LGBTQ+ folks know well the value of their spaces. Whether that’s parents groups, poetry groups or late night venues. 

[music restarts]

M

Queer spaces have been really important for me to help me find a way to feel at home with other people who feel a bit different or a bit, you know, like they don't know what's going on. 

[Sounds from Queer performance: “We good, are we good? I’m literally risking life and limb for you right now, I hope you appreciate that.”]

T

Yeah! And I think it’s a place where you can kindof just, you know, do what you want to do and nobody really judges you. Which is really great!

[Sounds from Queer performance, cheers, “Thanks guys. This is what I expect from you. The rest of you take note, blind support or nothing, why are you here?” Laughs.]

H+R 

We think a lot more carefully about what company our children are meeting especially while they're super young, and making sure they have allies and that they are not the only ones.

K 

Well, I mean, yeah it's safety isn't it? Going somewhere, which, in theory, at least still going to be accepted for who you are. 

T

And all these places. There's just like a really big, like expression element. Everyone's really creative. And you always bump into just like really funny, interesting people.

[Sounds from drag show: “My drag aesthetic is whatever’s on sale at ASOS!” Hammed-up laughter. Cheers.]

K

Bar Whatever is one of the best things I've been to and it really showcases Queer performers and performaners of colour and really honors the history behind different performances 

[Sounds from protest, person with megaphone: “In the name of the drag queens, and with the drag queens we give thanks and we protest!”]

H

They've also been an important space for the political side of our community. They've always been a place for people to come together and come up with new ideas.

[Person with megaphone: “And we’re going nowhere!” Crowd shouts, “Nowhere! Nowhere!” Claps and woops.]

Suzie: But as valuable as these spaces are  to the community…

[slow guitar music]

Ben Campkin  

In around 2015 there were a spate of closures of LGBT venues in London.

Lo Marshall  

Closures had disproportionately affected lesbian and women's, spaces spaces for trans people and spaces for queer, trans and intersex people of color.

Suzie McCarthy  

We’re hearing from UCL’s Ben Campkin and Lo Marshall Ben is a professor of architecture and urban spaces and Lo is a researcher in UCL’s geography department.

As members of the LGBTQ+ community, Ben and Lo had been aware of the closures for some time, but there was very little formal research going into the phenomenon.

Ben Campkin  

So there was a lot of anecdote and kind of fear about what was happening, I think, but not much data. 

Suzie McCarthy

This seemed an important research gap to fill if there was any chance of halting or even reversing the trend of closures. Academic research is often the way that knowledge held within communities can be formalised, and that formalisation is what allows people like planners and policy makers to make interventions to help those communities. 

[Busy marimba and piano]

So Ben and Lo embarked on a project to do just that, building a database of all LGBTQ+ venues from 1986 to 2016, which resulted in some clear and somewhat alarming statistics.

Ben Campkin  

The dramatic figure of 58% decline was what was picked up by all of the journalists. About 50 different news stories covered that. One of the arguments that came up in the media discussions around spaces closing was, well, are these spaces really needed anymore? Aren't all spaces inclusive to LGBT people now? 

Suzie McCarthy  

To understand and illustrate the value of these spaces, they conducted a survey in collaboration with The Raze Collective and the Queer Spaces Network, to help them reach as much of this diverse community as possible.

Lo Marshall  

We came back with this beautiful array of different kinds of responses that reflected who we've worked with.

Ben Campkin  

People told us what they valued about particular spaces and why and what they were worried about in terms of spaces closing, if they were worried about that.

Suzie McCarthy

As we’ve heard, these are spaces where people can freely express themselves, celebrate innovative performances and feel safe. Which is especially important in the context of rising cases of hate crimes, particularly against trans and gender non-conforming people. 

But Lo and Ben also wanted to understand how even Queer venues can still be exlusionary; how they can be more or less safe for people of different backgrounds, relationship status  and orientations

[Uneasy synth sounds]

K  

It can be still quite white, a lot of the spaces or there's a lot of segregation, I guess from white spaces to, you know, queer spaces for people of color.

[Synths turn to techno beat]

H  

There's lots of people that don't go out to nightclubs for various reasons, whether that be physical access, or the fact that they don't drink or the fact that they're survivors. 

A  

Being bisexual, Muslim and East Asian means that sometimes it's a bit of an extra challenge trying to find a safe space.

H+R

And when we went to a pride, normally I find them really uplifting events. And with long term relationships and children in your head it's not designed as a children's, it's not... there's nothing for them to do here. Yeah, it seemed like gay spaces were specifically not children's spaces. And that's a weird message as a parent.

A

Also, the Islamophobia that's freely expressed in certain queer circles means that it's not a safe space for me. The biphobia that is also expressed in queer spaces means that I can't bring my partner of a different gender and be myself at that particular space. 

Suzie McCarthy

One of the key findings from Ben and Lo's research was that the best and most loved venues were ones where people felt safe from these societal oppressions. And that making venues inclusive, means diversifying who runs them.

Lo Marshall

Usually nights or spaces are better when they're coming from members of those communities when they're run by and for those communities. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're exclusive. But it can mean that people are centered.

Suzie McCarthy

Once they had a good understanding of what makes a great space, it was time to figure out how to protect those spaces. So they needed to figure out why venues were closing.

Ben Campkin  

That's not necessarily an easy thing to do, because it's not always in the public domain. But we've done our best through routing through archives, through routing through planning documents, through interviewing people, and so on.

Suzie McCarthy

And they’ve found that residential and transport development are the main reasons for closure. This is the case for many London venues, though it particularly affects Queer venues since they tend to cluster together in one place, so redevelopment often leads to multiple closures.

Taking on the advice of their research, the London Mayor’s Office has come up with a way to protect venues as sites are redeveloped, with something called...

Ben Campkin  

An LGBT venues charter.

Suzie McCarthy  

Which is a legal document laying out what an LGBTQ+ venue must include.

Ben Campkin

So for example, displaying a visible rainbow flag as a signifier of LGBT inclusion

Suzie McCarthy  

It helps bridge the gap between the people and the planners. One place where this was particularly successful, was at the Joiners Arms in East London.

Ben Campkin  

Tower Hamlets who were the planning authority in that context have insisted that the developer re-provide a late night LGBT venue within the same development. 

Lo Marshall

That’s a first for the British planning system as well, which is exciting.

Suzie McCarthy

The research will continue to inform policies and planners, but we also need to recognise that, due to the coronavirus pandemic, many venues across London are likely to close.

As with many of our interviews from this season of our podcast, this conversation was recorded prior to widespread lockdown, but it somehow seems even more relevant now, given the need to rethink how we come together. In fact, lockdown may be creating a virtual roadmap for phsyical queer spaces of the future. A roadmap that may even start to address those issues of imbalances and oppressions that we heard about earlier, to make spaces more accessible for all.

[Jaunty music returns]

K  

One thing that I've seen that has worked online has mainly aimed at ethnic minority lesbians and bisexual woman. Events have been promoted that have been run by the community for the community. You know, that's dance classes or meditative spaces.  

H

Putting stuff online means that people could feel part of the community even though they aren't physically in that space. 

T  

Since the lockdown happened, I've been really enjoying going with my flatmates to a queer house party on zoom. 

H  

We're just a group of friends living in a house share in southeast London and we came together to make a bit of money and have some fun. At the beginning of lockdown. It's now grown into something a lot bigger than that. 

K

Perhaps that's something we can try and have more grassroots involvement in venues.

H  

We have people that are in isolation in separate places that sort of full screen the other house full of their friends and they all dance together like in the same room. We've had couples that are isolated in separate places attending together. It's pretty mad!

T  

It’s really brilliant for anyone who might have, like, certain disabilities. It also has a British Sign Language interpreter. I think stuff like that is really cool and something that physical venues can definitely learn from.

H  

And we're actually going to move forward when we do physical parties. We're going to keep on making them accessible! It's really important to us now. Yeah, everyone's really supportive and it's really beautiful. And I'm really looking forward to the day where we can all actually come together and see everyone.

Suzie McCarthy

Thanks so much to the many lovely folks from the Queer community who got in touch with me for this episode. 

[Gentle marimba music]

Our final story is also about people protecting and rebuilding their spaces. But, rather than touring London’s busy streets, we’ll be venturing into the rainforests of South America. 

We heard from Anthropologist Jerome Lewis back in Episode 4. This time, he’s talking to me about work he’s done with the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, which seeks to understand how people around the world relate to their environments, aiming to better policies and practices to protect our planet. 

This means breaking away from Anthropology’s history, which was very much tied up with colonialism and the West imposing its own values and frameworks onto people around the world. Those frameworks include a flawed understanding of humans’ relationship to nature.

Jerome Lewis  

There's a very common misperception that people are not part of nature. And this is actually the heart of the crisis that we face now, is that we have separated ourselves so far from our appreciation of nature, that we've forgotten how dependent, how much part of it we are. 

Suzie McCarthy

If we’re going to have a chance of protecting the world’s ecosystems: seas, tundras, plains and forests, we need to get away from this idea of humans and nature as separate entities.

Jerome Lewis 

In the context of forests, people need to understand that we are a keystone species. So keystone species in an ecosystem have a disproportional impact on that ecosystem.

Suzie McCarthy  

Being a keystone species means that humans can have a positive effect on their environments.

[Upbeat plucked strings] 

Jerome Lewis  

The groups I work with in Congo, for instance, when they collect wild yams, they always put the stalks back. And that actually enhances the abundance of wild yams in their forest. And literally for thousands of years doing this, they have made that forest a super abundant place for wild yams, which means gorillas love it, chimpanzees love it, elephants love it, because they find their favorite food stuff. And this is true in every single environment that human beings are key in how that environment comes into being, how its flourishes.

Suzie McCarthy  

Many indigenous groups around the world have not forgotten how much humans are entwined with the natural environment. One group that Jerome and his colleagues have been working with is in Brazil. 

Jerome Lewis  

Not everybody realizes Brazil actually has two major forested regions. One is the Atlantic Forest and the other is the Amazon. The Atlantic Forest is less well known because 92% of it has been cut down. But that’s where the cities of Rio, Sao Paulo and so on all are based. It's the east side of Brazil. And the Guarani are the traditional indigenous inhabitants of this region, the first people, the owners of the land in indigenous terms.

Suzie McCarthy

And the Guarani people have a great deal to teach us about how we relate to nature.

Jerome Lewis

They have a belief in paradise being present on Earth.

[Forest ambiance]

It's not something that you seek after life, it's something you seek during your life. And their idea of Paradise is based on your ability to find a beautiful part of the forest, where you can plant certain key crops where you can eat certain key honey and other wild animals that are very very  important. They're considered to be the foods of the gods. And as time passes and you dwell in this paradise, your body changes and you effectively become a different sort of being, a being who is closer to the gods.

Suzie McCarthy  

This is a completely different way of relating to the food we eat and the environment we inhabit, and a very different spiritual idea to those predominantly held here in the UK.

Jerome Lewis  

We forget because we buy things in plastic packaging in supermarkets, where they come from. But if you are a farmer and a hunter and a gatherer, when you are so in touch with where your food comes from, and you see the process by which it transforms into your children's bodies and growth and health and vitality, you start to really perceive yourself as forest.

[Shimmering synth sounds]

And it's very difficult for us to understand that but it's rather like me suggesting that you might sell your big toe or sell your fingers. It's just not even there… You wouldn't even… It's just no! It can't happen, this is part of me. And that's how these people feel about their space.

Suzie McCarthy  

Sadly, just as humans can be key in building these paradises, we are also all too often key in destroying them. 

The Guarani people have been pushed out of their lands and into narrow corridors between large farms based on monocultures of soya and other crops that are being consumed in increasingly high numbers in Northern and Western countries.

Jerome Lewis  

They have cut down so much forest that it's very difficult for Guarani people to continue their traditional ways of life

Suzie McCarthy  

UCL's aim was to find ways to support the Guarani in rebuilding and protecting their forest. But throughout history, and even in the present day, research bodies, NGOs and charities on all sorts of levels have often failed to account for the needs, culture and beliefs of the people they are trying to help, offering advice that may work well in places like the UK or US, but can be inappropriate or even harmful when forced into other contexts. 

[Gentle guitar music]

For this reason, it was really important to Jerome that the research was designed alongside that Guarani right from the outset.

Jerome Lewis  

The advantage of including the people you're working with in these kinds of developmental research questions, is that all sorts of questions you wouldn't have thought of asking as an outsider, as a researcher from the west, are suddenly offered. And this takes things in directions which you never intend to. So we wouldn't have thought that we need to start protecting divine foods or even that there were foods that were divine. But because that's how Guarani understand things, that's how the project was driven and mobilised. 

And in fact, of course, the Guarani were much more keen to be participants because they had that control because they were determining what we would do. And because it was based on their values and on the way they understood their relationship to that environment.

Suzie McCarthy  

UCL then worked in a facilitative role, working with the Guarani and a number of NGOs to develop a strategy to help them rebuild their home. To do this, they drew on the knowledge of another indigenous group.

Jerome Lewis  

The Asháninka who live in the Amazon and have done the most remarkable job in regenerating their traditional territory. From a space which was devastated by cattle ranchers had become so impoverished in parts, that it wasn't even good for pasture for cattle anymore. And the Asháninka went through a very hard and long process of firstly, getting rid of the ranchers from their territory, then getting rights, legal rights to their territory and then building nurseries up of indigenous tree species so that they could replant that territory with the trees that they recognised as being part of their forest. 

[Upbeat plucked strings]

So the Ashaninka have these incredible skills. The Guarani are really devastated by the damage being done to their forest and really want to regenerate it and show that they are caring for it. What we facilitated them doing was meeting so that the Asháninka could teach the Guarani how to create these nurseries and provide them with some stock for those trees that are shared between the Amazon the Atlantic Forest, but also with the know-how so that they could start to cultivate the other species which are endemic to the Atlantic Forest. 

Suzie McCarthy

Many of the seeds for some of the most important, most divine species have been lost as these monocultures have taken over. It was important to bring them back to the area so that the Brazilian Guarani could cultivate them once more.

Jerome Lewis

So then we arranged visits for them to go to Argentina to meet some Guarani in Argentina who still had large intact forest and still had these traditional seeds. And we arranged a number of seed exchanges in which these groups could come and collect their seeds and start replanting back in Brazil in their traditional areas. 

So it was a very nice project because it was really the different groups teaching each other facilitated from time to time by people with expertise that they lacked, but very much in control of what was being done in the project, how it was being done and very much empowered to take the steps themselves.

Suzie McCarthy  

The project was recognised for its excellence with the prestigious Newton prize in 2018, a £200,000 grant that allowed the centre to further their work. One of the PhD students from the Extreme Citizen Science Research Group, Carolina Commanduli, is continuing this work.

Jerome Lewis  

And she's trying to develop ways to support them in their struggles for rights in exposing the sometimes very violence and outrageous abuses that communities are suffering at the hands of farmers who want to expand their fields; the pollution that being exposed to; rivers you can't fish or drink from anymore. Some very, very serious issues.

Suzie McCarthy  

This is particularly urgent given that the current Brazilian government is continuing to be extremely negligent to its indigenous population, supporting aggressive takeovers of the forest by farmers. You no doubt saw pictures last year on the news of the Amazon burning, and this continues across the region. 

Throughout Jerome's work, he's been exposed to the atrocities that humans commit towards each other. But it’s equally given him the possibility of another way of being. One that is hopeful and caring and connects up humans from around the world, not just with each other, but with the natural world too. There’s no doubt a great deal we can learn from taking on these different perspectives. Jerome told me particularly about the Asháninka's approach to the huge challenges they faced.

[Upbeat strings and marimba]

Jerome Lewis  

Their path is quite different to our path. So as technicians, as scientists, as researchers, we think "Ah, right, there's a problem here. Let's go and study it, study it, study it, work out all the different elements that contribute to make this a problem. And then we'll try and resolve each of those individual elements". But what they actually say is "No, that's not the way to do it. The way to do it, is to sit together and try and imagine what the perfect future would be. And to get a vision of that future." Then you think about what steps need to be taken in order for that vision to be realized. And you take those steps. And then the vision realizes itself! 

And the problem that you were faced with that all seemed so insurmountable, and believe me, the Asháninka faced what seemed like insurmountable problems, but they escaped their history. I think that that’s the big challenge that faces us in the West, in the context of this climate catastrophe, climate emergency, we really need to escape from our history. And the rapid way of escaping from your history is not to sit there dwelling on it and thinking about, "Oh we've got to sort this out, got to sort that out". But to work out what your vision is for the future, and then make that the focus of your actions.

[Indigenous music]

Suzie McCarthy  

A packed auditorium of about 350 people came to listen to the perspectives of the Asháninka, the Guarani and many other indigenous people from across the globe in September 2019. 

[Sounds from event, Jerome introducers speaker]

As part of a series of events organized by UCL called Flourishing Diversity.

[Speaker greets the audience in her language.]

Jerome Lewis  

It was a very beautiful series of events. It made people not just inspired but it also made them weep. It made them laugh. It really took them through the whole set of human emotions in a very powerful way. And that's part of what indigenous people still have, which I think science and academia has lost, is the passion. It's the heart. And I think that actually this is the time when we have to start returning to heart. Thinking about things like love. And how we can really love other beings. And not just other people, but other beings of all these species we depend on. This should be paradise. How can we make it paradise? That really is the challenge for humanity, make this planet paradise.

[Upbeat, gentle strings]

This has been quite a special episode to put together, and I’ll be reflecting on the many perspectives we’ve heard for some time. In the context of the pandemic, and, importantly, the Black Lives Matter movement, I think now more than ever we need to be putting ourselves into other people’s shoes, reflecting on our many histories, and learning different ways of being so that we can rebuild our future.

Thanks for joining me.

[Theme music]

Made at UCL: The Podcast is made by me, Suzie McCarthy. The Assistant Producers on this episode were Rosalind Chaston and Cassidy Martin. The Executive Producer is Nina Garthwaite. Mixing Support by Mike Woolley. We’d like to thank all our researchers for welcoming us into their labs and offices. #MadeAtUCL is a campaign that brings to life disruptive thinking at UCL. This episode it brought to you by UCL Minds: events, lectures and podcasts, open to everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai Edited by Suzie McCarthy