Executive Producer's Message
Four years and 54 films ago you answered the call of the wild and we started our journey together, from water to dust. We first circumambulated East Africa's great lakes: Ziwa Victoria and Turkana while showing the resilience of Lake Naivasha. Their names alone evoke an epic history, from humanities first footsteps to tracing the source of the Nile. The mission entrusted to you, during the current Anthropocene era, was to chronicle an equally important saga: documenting the world's fastest decline of biodiversity. In just five decades, human folly and habitat destruction has wiped out 84 per cent of the planet's freshwater species. But saltwater survivors are also clinging onto life, nurtured by East Africa's underwater treasures- its threatened mangroves and corals. In Africa's biggest rainforests and sweeping savannas, the bigger the megafauna, the bigger the target, for both poacher's and those on a crusade to stop them. Your films have demonstrated that ivory belongs to elephants, stripes should be saved for zebras, spots shouldn't be disappearing from cheetahs, scales are meant for pangolins and crocodile skins shouldn't be sown into fashion accessories. In no man's forest should chimps become amputees? Instead, rhinos should always have a future and pollinators should continue echoing their sustaining buzz.
By Giving Nature a Voice you have done much more than compile a litany of sobering scientific statistics. You have also told the heart-wrenching stories of millions of people living on the edge of nature. From the end of the river to its glacial source where Mt. Kenya melts, from the last forest, burning into charcoal and going up in smoke, to the once pristine coastlines now soiled by murky tides, you have given a voice to the children of climate change whose very future depends on a healthy environment.
You have shown that even in the toughest struggle, local communities can harness their power when they are armed with the knowledge they need to save their homes from the deluge. When they do, plastics won't last forever, food won't be wasted, sandstorms won't desiccate water wells, the Mara River won't be on its deathbed, Zanzibar will save its seas, giraffes will still strut like towering beauties, vultures won't vanish and Uganda's emblematic cranes won't fly into extinction. Informed by your films, local communities will be saving gorillas and sitatungas, Man won't be pitted against elephants and instead will be living with bats and saving snakes. Environmentalists will focus on turtle rescues and start greening the bare ground.
I will always be grateful for the opportunity I've had to launch this project and mentor some of Africa's most talented filmmakers. You should all be proud of Giving Nature a Voice. May your vital mission continue.
Andrew Tkach
Executive Producer
