You may remember that I wrote about “Earth Day at 40″ a couple of weeks ago. Since then, my brother-in-law has put a video of my sister Amy Vedder‘s presentation online. It’s worth a look — with great photos and description of some of the innovative approaches Amy has developed over the last 30 years to successfully preserve animal species and their habitats.

Amy, who is now senior vice president of the Wilderness Society, offered three examples of her successful projects during this talk. The most dramatic was setting up the Mountain Gorilla Project in Rwanda in the late 1970s. What she and her husband Bill Weber discovered was that the Rwandan people had no connection with the gorillas in their land, to the point that they asked why these two Americans weren’t studying American gorillas. The Mountain Gorilla Project, described in Amy and Bill’s book In the Kingdom of Gorillas, established a win-win situation for the people and the animals in Rwanda, giving jobs to Rwandans who lived near the Virungas National Park, bringing hard currency into this 3rd poorest country in the world, and giving the people pride in the gorillas that lived only in their country and nearby. It was perhaps the first ecotourism project in the world.

CONSERVATION, CONNECTIONS By Dr. Amy Vedder from luciano M on Vimeo.