Letter from Gerald Durrell to Humankind, 1987
A plea to the planet’s future custodians ~ A last testament

Many of us, though not all, recognize the following things:

• All political and religious differences that at present slow down, entangle and strangle progress in the world will have to be solved in a civilized manner.
• All other life forms have as much right to exist as we have, and that indeed without the bulk of them we would perish.
• Human overpopulation is a menace that must be addressed by all countries; if allowed to continue it is a mindless syndrome that will cause nothing but doom.
• Ecosystems are intricate and vulnerable; once misused, disfigured or greedily exploited they will vanish to our detriment. Used wisely they provide boundless treasure. Used unwisely they create misery, starvation and death to the human race and to a myriad other life forms.
• It is stupid to destroy things such as rainforests, especially because in these great webs of life may be embedded secrets of incalculable value to the human race.
• The world is to us what the Garden of Eden was supposed to be to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were banished, but we are banishing ourselves from Eden. The difference is that Adam and Eve had somewhere else to go. We have nowhere else to go.

“Many people think that conservation is just about saving fluffy animals—what they don’t realize is that we’re trying to prevent the human race from committing suicide . . . Humans have declared war on the biological world, the world that supports us . . . At the moment the human race is in the position of a man sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on.” -- Gerald Durrell

I hope that by the time you read this you will have at least partially curtailed our reckless greed and stupidity. If humans have not, at least some of us have tried . . . .
I hope that you will be grateful for having been born into such a magical world.

Gerald Durrell (1925 -1995) was an internationally acclaimed naturalist, writer and conservationist. His literary legacy includes 37 best-selling books, including My Family and Other Animals. He was the founder of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, a vastly successful zoo created to save and breed endangered species. Durrell dreamed that someday the wild homelands of his captive creatures would become safe for them to return.