S6. E14: Damien Mander: How to be a Superhero
“So, we had 87 women come in for what we call pre-selection, the interviews... And I can say that after all the shit that I've been through in my life, that was some of the hardest two days of my life, listening to those stories. And, it was hard in a way because they were genuinely tough stories, but it was also hard in a way to know that even though I hadn't done anything directly to these women, I was part of a culture that had kept women just like this oppressed, the boys club, the macho club, all that sort of thing. And just part of, I suppose, this macho culture.”
- Damien Mander
Damien was on the show in December. He was in the bush in Zimbabwe and I was in New York but we had a bad connection and terrible sound. So, we redid the interview last week, in person, in NYC - and it is so much better. Even if you heard the first one, listen again. Damien does not cease to astonish.
Damien Mander is the founder and CEO of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF).
He is a former Australian Royal Navy clearance diver and a special operations military sniper who became an anti-poaching crusader and an environmental and animal welfare activist.
In 2009, while traveling through Africa, he was inspired by the work of rangers and the plight of wildlife. He liquidated his life savings and established the International Anti-Poaching Foundation.
Over the past decade, the IAPF has scaled to train and support rangers which now help protect over 20 million acres of African wilderness.
In 2017 Damien founded ‘Akashinga - Nature Protected by Women,’ an IAPF program that has already grown to over 240 employees with 7 nature reserves in the portfolio. They are the only group of nature reserves in the world to be protected by women. And, these women are changing the game in terms of what it means to fight poaching.
Damien was featured in the James Cameron documentary The Game Changers and has now released another documentary with James Cameron and National Geographic about his work with the women of Akashinga – “The Brave One’s.”
He is a resident of the National Geographic Speakers Bureau, has spoken at the United Nations, is featured in June 2019’s National Geographic Magazine, and has been featured three times on 60 Minutes. And, if you haven’t seen it, watch his TEDx Talk at the Sidney Oprah House, it’s just awesome.
It was an honor to spend time with Damien. He is a warrior, a hero, and a man who understands what it means to never stop evolving.
Learn more about the International Anti-Poaching Foundation
Learn more about LEAD Ranger
Follow the International Anti-Poaching Foundation on Instagram
Follow Damien on Instagram
Films: Akashinga the Film, The Game Changers
Watch Damien’s TEDx Talk
Transcript:
Damien: [00:00:16] So, we had 87 women come in for what we call pre-selection, so the interviews. We sat down and listened to their stories and I can say, after all the shit that I've been through in my life, they were the hardest two days in my life, like listening to those stories. It was hard in a way because they were genuinely tough stories. But it was also hard in a way to know that even though I hadn't done anything directly to these women, I was part of a culture that kept women just like this oppressed, the boys club, the macho club, all that sort of thing. Just part of, I suppose, this macho culture.
Elizabeth: [00:00:58] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite for the months of May, June and July, Species Unite is celebrating plant based eating with vegan nights. All that really means, as we would love for you to cook dinner for your friends or your family or your neighbor and make it vegan. On our website, we have downloadable ghost packs with recipes, tips, information to make your vegan night all the more fun and better. So go to our website Speciesunite.com and download a host pack and you'll be entered to win one of six, two hundred and seventy five dollar vegan gift baskets that are filled with all sorts of incredible plant based products. We would love for you to join us in changing the way the world treats animals, and you can do so by becoming a Species Unite member. For a monthly donation of any size, you'll get all sorts of exclusive benefits, including access to exclusive content, outtakes, bonus episodes, updates and news. Priority access to Species Unite events. A copy of our annual newsletter and a welcome pack from yours truly. Go to our website Speciesunite.com and click Become a member to join. This conversation is with Damien Mander. Damien was on the show in December, but he was in the bush in Zimbabwe. I was in New York and the sound was terrible. So we had the opportunity to do it again. This time, both of us in New York in person with much better sound. Damien is the founder and the CEO of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation. He's a former Australian Royal Navy clearance diver, who is Australia's Navy SEALs and a special operations military sniper. He spent nine years in the military, three in Iraq. He did 13 tours and then used his life savings and his military skills to train people to fight poachers in Zimbabwe. He started out training men, but soon realized that women were much better suited for the job. This group of women is called Akashinga. Which means the brave ones. It's an all female ranger unit that is changing the game for conservation and what it means to fight poaching.
Damien: [00:03:47] So honored to be on your show twice in one year.
Elizabeth: [00:03:49] The sound was so bad and plus what an opportunity to see you in person.
Damien: [00:03:53] Yeah, not so quick. For those that don't know the story, we did an interview earlier this year and the sound didn't work, but hard to tell from the middle of Zimbabwe.
Elizabeth: [00:04:02] So some of it will be repeated, but somewhat.
Damien: [00:04:05] I've been working on some new material.
Elizabeth: [00:04:07] So, yeah, so let's start at the very beginning, kind of go back and set us up.
Damien: [00:04:12] Yeah. So I grew up on the east coast of Australia. Born in Melbourne, raised in Sydney, spent more time in water than out of it. Growing up as a kid, just snorkeling, free diving, spear fishing, I don't spear fish any more people. Then I got involved. Here I'd go snorkeling off the pier in my hometown, Mornington. So it's about an hour south of Melbourne. I go snorkeling there after school and collect all the fishing lures that had been lost by the calamari or the squid fishermen overnight, and we'd sell them back and sell them back for about five bucks. So these things would generally go for more than $20 in the shops, and we're selling it for a quarter of the price. You're doing a good little, little business there.
Elizabeth: [00:04:54] How old were you?
Damien: [00:04:55] 13, 14 years old. Then you realize that if you go diving before school in the morning, you get there before anyone else and you start making more money. Then you realize that if you go and throw a heap of shopping carts in there and wrap them up with stolen ropes off the fishing boats that people catch their lures a whole lot more and you make a whole lot more money. So I took that money and used it to buy scuba diving equipment and put myself through courses, and so I grew up diving, just literally submerged in water. Then as a kid, any kid that's spent their life diving, the dream dive job is to be a diver in the Navy, and that's what I did at19. So I actually, by the time I signed up to join the Navy, things had started going pretty off the rails for me.
Elizabeth: [00:05:37] How so?
Damien: [00:05:39] Oh, just not that I fell in with a bad crowd. The people I'd grown up with, I sort of fell into the wrong step, and I sort of dipped myself in and out of that lifestyle. There's a lot of drugs where I was growing up actually. Just before I went into the Navy, I pulled up to it. It was about a week before I left. I pulled up to my mate's house in Mornington and four of those mates, my closest mates, were handcuffed, face down on the front lawn and I sort of just froze there. I had this big black muscle car, the fat back wheels and the engine sitting there humming. This sort of tough guy persona and I were frozen like just solid on the spot, like a scared little kid. This big big guy in a dark suit came over and just leant in the window and he looked at me, straight in the eye. He goes, Mr Mander, would you like to join your friends or would you like to piss off to the Navy next week? I said, Sir, I'll take the Navy, please. He's goes to me then get the fuck out of here. I left, of those four friends, one just got out of prison last year, two died and one actually managed to get their life together. I think sometimes that's all you need is just a stranger to believe in you and give you just a splinter of an opportunity. That was it. Hey, I was off.
Elizabeth: [00:06:54] You show up for the Navy.
Damien: [00:06:56] Yeah, show up for the Navy. That was it, I got whisked away. Mum was standing there with tears running down her face, that was it.
Elizabeth: [00:07:05] How long before that you started diving?
Damien: [00:07:08] Immediately after I finished recruit school, I started putting in a request to transfer to a category to become a clearance diver. It was denied, denied, denied. Every day, I started writing a handwritten letter to the commanding officer. A new one every day and hand deliver it to his secretary. Eventually, I said, Alright, you're going to dive school to do the selection. I found out some years later I spoke to my old divisional officer who said the only reason we sent you there is because we knew you'd fail and you'd be back here to finish your original training. I never went back to original training. I went to dive school and we started what's called a seat at the clearance diver acceptance test. That's our version of hell week of buds. There's nothing I've been through before that will sort of strip you bare to your soul and expose you as to who you are as an individual and how much character you have. In the end, there was nothing special about me other than when everyone else said it was too hard. It couldn't be done. I was like, No, let's let's do this. There's a very high attrition rate in that course, and at the end of the day, they're left with only a few people and they do that over and over again until they've got enough to make a dive course. Then they start the course.
Elizabeth: [00:08:12] Wow. Yeah, at that time, were you like, I've made it? This is where I want to be in the world and this is it?
Damien: [00:08:18] This is like a rock star category with the military? Yeah. After I finished my initial selection, I went out and got this tattoo across my chest, seek and destroy anyway. So long story short, it took me about a decade to grow into that tattoo on my chest, and by the time I grew into it, it was time to leave. That's a good thing about tattoos. If anyone's thinking of getting one, once it's there, it's stuck. So my new rule is to now decide what you like and really like it. Then you have to wait three years and if you still like it, then you can get it. You don't end up with stupid shit drawn all over you.
Elizabeth: [00:08:48] How long are you a diver?
Damien: [00:08:49] I was with the Navy for four years and then after September 11, the Australian government formed what they termed the first and last resort to a terrorist attack on home soil and that it was a unit called Tactical Assault Group at East. So it was made up of the two different special operations branches we have in the Australian military. The commandos and the Special Air Service Regiment and then navy clearance divers. So we went through all the training together, the selection together, and then I made it on the team. It was actually the first time in the history of our Defence Force that direct entry into special forces was open to the entire Australian nation and to our Defence Forces. So basically anyone that fitted the category could try out for it. So there were thousands and thousands of civilians that tried out for it. And then there were also lots of people from within the military that tried out. At the end of all the selections, it was just under 60 people, 60 guys there that formed the Tactical Assault Group. It's made up of three platoons: land, water and sniper. So I came across to a water platoon, being a diver, being there for two days and told I was going on to do a sniper's course. So you can't you can't ask to be a sniper. You're told you're doing it. I went through sniper training.
Elizabeth: [00:09:59] Were you just really good at it?
Damien: [00:10:00] They don’t tell you why you were selected. It's one of those things you lots of guys in long white jackets standing there with clipboards that
Elizabeth: [00:10:07] They saw your tattoo.
Damien: [00:10:09] No, I don't know.
Elizabeth: [00:10:11] Were you bummed? I mean, was that? Were you happy about that? Or because you were leaving diving then right?
Damien: [00:10:16] No. So they needed dive capabilities when it's not returned, so I still got to still get to stay in the water. I had some extra tools to carry around now, but it was amazing. That was the hardest course I'd ever done, I suppose, in terms of standards that we had to meet. But it wasn't like the other courses. It's once you get to snipers, it's like they tell you very calmly how to do things. They show you how to do it and then you either do it or you don't. It's not like, it's not like in the movies. You've got people standing around screaming at you and yelling and you haven't got much to prove by the time you've gotten to that section of the unit, it's like we're trying to teach you a new skill. Maybe you'll fit in. Maybe you won't. But we're not going to stand here trying to scream and push it down your throat.
Elizabeth: [00:10:57] So now you're a clearance diver and you're a sniper and you're kind of like becoming a superhero. It sounds right? Is that how you end up in Iraq?
Damien: [00:11:05] So I finish my time with special operations. Then I went to the private sector basically selling myself out, for big bucks and was in Iraq. So I started in Iraq beginning in 2005. A tour would last anywhere from two weeks to six months, just depending on what we're doing and what the mission was, who we're working for, where we're deployed. So I went over there to make money essentially.
Elizabeth: [00:11:28] Did it get harder or easier with each tour?
Damien: [00:11:31] Yeah, it sort of became complacent. Like in the end, we were running four or five, sometimes six missions a day.
Elizabeth: [00:11:42] What does that mean?
Damien: [00:11:43] I worked for four, three different companies over there. The last one, we were contracted out to the US military, the US Army Corps of Engineers. So we were basically going out looking at major infrastructure that had been destroyed schools, hospitals, power plants. So we'd go in and secure the area and then work with traditional leadership in local communities to try and understand or do a feasibility study from a security standpoint on what it would take to rebuild this area. While the Corps of Engineers would be looking at the bricks and mortar side of things. We had the command sergeant major as he would be in our convoy with us, and he was a high value target. So he wanted to move everywhere by road. It didn't like helicopters, which wasn't great for us. But yeah, so we went all over the country doing that. Sometimes you're doing short missions around Baghdad, two, four or five of them a day, six a day, just depending on what it was where we wanted to go. What do you want to see who he had to talk to? So we'd be going into some pretty hairy areas. I suppose you just do that over and over again. You become complacent, and that's essentially where it got to. For me, I built up a really good property portfolio. I didn't need to be there from a financial standpoint, nothing left to prove from a military standpoint. I was just becoming complacent. It was time to get out of there.
Elizabeth: [00:12:53] So you just said to yourself, this is the last hurrah, I'm out!
Damien: [00:12:56] Yeah, yeah. I remember I got out. It was just before Christmas in 2007, yeah, I remember thinking I can't get fucking blown up on Christmas because my mum would be really pissed forever. So actually, my parents didn't know I was in Iraq for the first two and a half years I was there.
Elizabeth: [00:13:15] What do they think you were?
Damien: [00:13:16] I told them I was working as a consultant in Dubai, in the UAE. I was just really close to my family and didn't want them to go through that stress, I suppose. Now someone who's got kids, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to put a parent through that. But yeah, it was. A few mates got killed, actually. Then, they found out and said Okay, tell us what's going on. Yeah, that's when the truth came to the surface. But yes, as children, little shits. Yeah, yeah. Sorry mom, sorry.
Elizabeth: [00:13:50] That's crazy.
Damien: [00:13:51] Going to be grounded again.
Elizabeth: [00:13:55] I'm one of seven and we're all still scared of my mom.
Damien: [00:13:56] The look?
Elizabeth: [00:13:57] She still has a lot of power. Like an amazing amount of power. And did you know so after you decided this is it, did you have a plan? Did you like it? Before we even go there, clearly since then and throughout all of your life, you've just been evolving on every level.
Damien: [00:14:19] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:14:20] But when you were there, were you thinking in the same way? The way you are now in terms of compassion and depth. Giving so much thought to just your surroundings and who you are in the world?
Damien: [00:14:31] No, none absolutely. Absolutely not. I would consider myself to have been a fairly selfish person up until probably, probably a couple of years after that. The military was about adventure. Iraq was about money and then South America was about reward. So I went to South America for a year after Iraq, and that was just about rewarding myself for having done what I'd done in the military and surviving Iraq and all that. So.
Elizabeth: [00:14:57] So, just like partying like crazy?
Damien: [00:14:59] Well, it started off, you know, I just go for a go for a bit of a look and then, yeah, it's just sort of turned into a pretty downward, rapid downward spiral. Having come from being surrounded by my mates and having purpose. A lot of people are struggling in life trying to find purpose and with the military, we had it. Even if we didn't believe in it to begin with, it was drummed into us so much that you feel as though you've got a purpose. And then once you stop believing in the mission, I suppose that's, that becomes tough. But I didn't really have time for reflection until I'd left Iraq. That's when a lot of stories started coming up in the media. All these, the search for WMDs and you start to realize you're fighting the arguments of old men and not actually over there trying to effect good. You've been part of a system and a process that has destroyed a nation, obliterated a culture and destabilized the region. Yeah, realizing that you're part of that and that maybe everything you'd believe you signed up for and spent the last decade doing didn't really amount to what it is you believed in as a kid. It can be quite confronting.
Elizabeth: [00:16:10] Is this all coming to you when you're in South America? This kind of realization?
Damien: [00:16:14] It did and there's easy access to a lot of drugs and a lot of alcohol. The purpose is gone. The mates are gone. You're by yourself on a foreign continent. Yeah, it's very, very easy to slip down the slope. There's a lot of my mates, I mean, I hit rock bottom and I bounced. There's a lot of mates that didn't bounce. I say this talking to you now in a country where 22 veterans a day commit suicide, it's an issue. It's a real issue. You're going to send kids off to fight these, these old men's arguments. You've got to pick up the pieces when they come home.
Elizabeth: [00:16:47] It's still not happening.
Damien: [00:16:48] No, not at all. You want to send someone off and you train someone to shoot someone in the head from a mile away and bring them home and tell them to drive an Uber or flip burgers and figure out why they can't talk to their wife and kids about what they've been doing. It's a real thing. We haven't been getting it right recently. We haven't been getting it right for the last century. No, it's an unnatural situation that we put people into. While the muscles and tattoos and guns are all cool and when it's on the TV screen in real life, it's not like that.
Elizabeth: [00:17:18] What brought you out of it?
Damien: [00:17:20] I knew I was in a bad place, so I knew I was in a bad place and that place was only getting worse. I was just spending a hell of a lot of money on drugs and alcohol and just parties, really. I suppose I'm blessed with a sort of mindset to be able to make rapid changes in a short space of time. I knew I had to get out of South America, and I knew I had to get myself into something else. I left South America, went home, dropped my stuff off, saw the family and then I got a one way ticket to Africa. Didn't even take it. I didn't even have a checking bag.
Elizabeth: [00:17:56] Yeah. So no plan, no plan.
Damien: [00:17:58] No, I heard about anti-poaching and just went to get involved with that. I didn't have a start point.
Elizabeth: [00:18:03] Was there something though, that spurred that?
Damien: [00:18:07] Barroom chat years before somewhere in Sydney and just sounded like a romantic adventure? Read a bunch of Wilbur Smith growing up, and Africa was sort of this, the Dark Continent, as they say, just went over there again, for adventure. It was about me and it was about doing something that was cool for Damien and going to get some cool pictures for social media. I suppose once you've done our version of being a navy seal, you've been a special operations sniper. You spent a bunch of years in Iraq and the last year in South America partying. This is pretty hard to try and find things to do that look cool.
Elizabeth: [00:18:41] You had to keep up in it.
Damien: [00:18:43]Yeah, yeah, literally.
Elizabeth: [00:18:44] So you just show up with no bag clothes on your back.
Damien: [00:18:46] I had a little sort of daypack. Yeah, that was it. I just started going.
Elizabeth: [00:18:49] Did you know anyone? Did you have any contacts?
Damien: [00:18:52] No, nothing. I started working my way around South Africa, chatting to people looking for leads up into Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and then Zimbabwe. As I started to get further up north around Botswana, Zambia, and they just started making some contacts there and they said, Yeah, go and speak to these people in Zimbabwe. So hop over there and then got to Zimbabwe and met this guy there called Roger. Then started working with an anti-poaching unit that he had and just didn't have the time to do any training with them. So for me, it was like going back to basics, just coming back and working with these rangers who had minimal equipment and very basic skills. That was sort of refreshing to just come full circle and back to where I'd begun and just have that opportunity to work with a very small group of people and just to be able to impart some knowledge and then just working with these guys. There's a whole bunch of things happening in my life at the time, in terms of personal evolution, I suppose. Iraq had broken down a lot of barriers, I think not only just Iraq, but the months and a year afterwards. I had built this barrier around myself, like this armor of ego and masochism. And then Iraq has a way of sort of chipping that away from you. I was developing a different lens through which to look at the world at the same time I was getting older, a little bit more mature, a bit more worldly. That, combined with going around southern Africa and meeting the people that had been dedicating their lives to nature, conservation and animals. You start this idea of there's more to life than Damien Mander. There's more to life than fulfilling my own satisfactions, that was becoming more front and center in my thought process. Then working with these rangers, having come from working in Iraq with not only work in Iraq, reflecting on it where we had access to billions of dollars as part of this massive war machine to create havoc and we're fighting for oil in the ground and dotted lines on a map.
Elizabeth: [00:20:57] You've got to be so like, just fighting for the planet and the animals and literally like the sustenance of the entire world.
Damien: [00:21:08] Yeah, yeah,
Elizabeth: [00:21:09] The money in comparison is so tiny.
Damien: [00:21:10] Yeah, I mean, the humility of these guys that I was working with and what they did not have. I mean, some of them didn't even have boots, they were in bare feet or sand shoes, type thing. Like you said, these people are protecting, they're actually protecting the planet. They're protecting our future as a civilization. I mean, our future is dependent on a willingness to preserve biodiversity. These guys were doing it. I didn't understand the full scope of how important what they were doing was at the time. I just knew that I was raw and it was real, and I wanted to be a part of it. So I started working with this team more and more. The more you work with them, the more struggles you see and you come face to face with the animals that they're protecting and the fight that those animals are in. I mean, these are people that are spending up to 11 months a year away from their families and the animals they protect become their family. That's how much they value these animals. I mean, one of them is killed. It's a grieving process not only of failure with their unit, but you know, we've lost something that we've been tasked to protect. Rangers have to be right 100 percent of the time. Poachers have to be right once and just seeing that in the whole process and then a few personal experiences with animals that were being poached. That really started to bring things to a head for me. So at this stage, I had the enrolment forms filled out for Silver Culinary College in Cape Town to be a chef. So Anthony Bourdain on one of my final trips to Iraq and just like, fuck, this looks awesome. Chefs just fly around the world and drink up and cook traditional recipes with little old ladies in small towns.
Elizabeth: [00:22:48] Thought, Oh, I'm so glad you didn't become a chef. That would have been a huge loss.
Damien: [00:22:52] I'm going to be a chef, but. Yeah, so I'll put that aside and set up the International Anti-Poaching Foundation that was in October 2009.
Elizabeth: [00:23:04] When you decided to set it up. What were you thinking? I want to do this a different way?
Damien: [00:23:09] I wanted to do something different to what I was seeing being done on the ground. It's not necessarily that it wasn't being done right in a bunch of other areas. It's just the area that I was in and that I was stationed at.
Elizabeth: [00:23:23] Ok.
Damien: [00:23:24] There was a lot of opportunity for change. It didn't seem from my perspective that it would be a far stretch to make that change, at least on a small, a small or regional scale. Where I was a little bit naive was that I sold up everything I had and used all my own money to get this thing going. As opposed to what most people do when they get an investment going, they do what they call a funding round and
Elizabeth: [00:23:47] Yes they raise some money
Damien: [00:23:48] Then raise some money.
Elizabeth: [00:23:49] Did you sell all your properties?
Damien: [00:23:50] I sold everything, yeah. So what I just spent the last decade in Iraq and in the military and every last penny I had putting into that portfolio, I liquidated it in a short space of time and put it into setting this organization up.
Elizabeth: [00:24:04] So when you started out. Do you have guys already? How does that work?
Damien: [00:24:08] So, it's just going out and doing training with Rangers. Honestly, that's what I thought would be the way for the next five or 10 years or even longer. I thought I would spend my life in the bush just working and training with rangers. Then we slowly started scaling up as an organization, and I entered the industry at a time when it was becoming increasingly militarized because of, I mean, the rhino wars had just started. So there's an increasing amount of pressure against rhinoceros and elephants. Even today, up to 35000 elephants a year are being killed for their ivory. You see an increasing amount of military tools and tactics that are being employed into the industry. So I sort of fell into step with that really well. It suited me. We came into growth as an organization that would beat that drum louder and louder, up until 2017. Our job was essentially to be the last line of defense between animals that were being targeted by paramilitary units, these poaching units.
Elizabeth: [00:25:04] Give an example of what they're doing because it's gone crazy now.
Damien: [00:25:07] You can have anything up to a dozen people crossing international borders. We'll have big poaching crews that can even be bigger with more people. They'll have heavy caliber rifles, automatic weapons. They'll have the carriers to carry all the ivory out that they've been poaching, and they'll be coming in to try and kill as many elephants as possible and then get out, usually across back into another country and then sell that into the black market. So for me that's cool. We've got an enemy or a threat. We've got a need. We just need to apply the right tactics and equipment to training these units to be able to defend against that threat. That was a very straightforward, I would say, narrow approach to looking at conservation. But it was the bit that at that time I understood the best and of course, over time, but I think you get a much broader perspective. But so we started off as I said, just myself and then sort of scaled up over time over the coming years as a service provider, so we would go out and help other organizations fulfill niche capabilities within their units. Then we started taking on bigger roles. So overall management of security across wider regions, in particular along the Kruger National Park border in Mozambique at the time was the hot spot for rhino poaching on the planet. At any time or on any day. We'd have about 11 armed units crossing through that area into Kruger National Park. It's quite an intense place and we went out, we scaled up. This operation eventually had 165 personnel involving four different government departments. Helicopters, aircraft, K9 attack teams, a whole bunch of vehicles going up and down military grade optics. We set up this offensive against the local population. We played a major role in driving a downturn in elephant and rhino poachers from entering Kruger National Park into the heart of the highest concentration and population of rhino in the world. We stopped them from coming in from Mozambique into South Africa. Then coming back out with something worth $35000 a pound and a rhino can easily have 20 or 30 pounds of horn on it. So you've got something that should be locked up in a safe. Yeah, running around an area the size of a small country, and our job was to stop that.
Elizabeth: [00:27:14] You did. I mean, a lot of it?
Damien: [00:27:15] Yeah, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:27:16] So everything's going pretty well, I mean?
Damien: [00:27:19] Yeah, it is going good. Now I would come over here and do lectures, and I would say, Listen, don't think of us as being the right answer. I don't know what the right answer is. Think of us as being a paramedic, trying to get the situation to the operating table, so someone with a better solution can come along and fix this. That's what we were doing. We're trying to stop the hemorrhaging of poaching that was going on. I knew that guns and ammo was not the way forward. We were on a continent that the UN population division, it says, is going to have two billion people by 2040. We had to find a way to bring conservation and communities together rather than having an ongoing sustained battle. There are very few examples in history. Not just modern history, but in history of an occupying force coming in and having a long term good relationship with the local population. In Mozambique, on the border there we were just doing the same thing we're doing in Iraq, which was a mistake. We're an occupying force coming in there and trying to exert our authority. What we might have had were some short term gains. It wasn't a sustainable long term program. We had to find the bridge to rebuild back between conservation and communities and building bigger fences and defending them with guns was not the way forward.
Elizabeth: [00:28:30] Were you really aware of this at that moment? Like for the next steps in terms of trying to come up with a solution?
Damien: [00:28:37] I used to lie in bed or awake at night, wondering, it's a tough place to be when you're absolutely dead certain about what you're doing in life. Like in regards to conservation, if it is the right thing to do, but you're not doing it the right way. It's very confronting, particularly when you've poured your life savings into it and you're seven seven going on eight years old as an organization and you still don't know exactly how to do what it is you need to be doing.
Elizabeth: [00:29:05] How does it start to shift for you?
Damien: [00:29:07] Yeah, it was a combination of a few things. The deep understanding that this was not a long term solution. A recognition that we're taking donors' money now. Spending donors money on something that deep down I knew wasn't sustainable, even though it was working. Even though we're getting the results that donors were asking for and the donors were expecting, even though we're getting international attention from a conservation industry and from the media and people around the world that were giving us kudos for what we're doing. I knew that what we're doing is not right. So we had to try and find a way to evolve, and I didn't have the answer at this stage. I started to see other industries getting ahead by getting more women in positions of authority and management on boards as CEOs. Looking internally at the conservation industry which stagnated and women actually in the field are outnumbered by as much as 100 to one. I mean, women in terms of staffing levels sit at around seven per cent in conservation, but they're normally stuck sitting on a desk or at a checkpoint or walking a fence line. They're not actually fed into the operational roles in the field very seldomly. So if you're not given access to that sort of experience, it's hard to genuinely put a woman into a management position because she hasn't been given the opportunity to gain the experience that is necessary to command that position and command that unit. To be able to make the right decision when things are going south very quickly and people's lives are on the line. In those sorts of times, you can only really rely upon your training and experience to get your team and yourselves out of that position. So if women weren't given that opportunity, then conservation stood to continue stagnating. We're looking at other military or law enforcement units that were putting women through training the US Army rangers. I was actually here in New York reading an article in the New York Times, and there was a link within that article that led back to another article about the US Army Rangers training women in preparation for front line deployment, that was in early 2017.
Elizabeth: [00:31:14] It's crazy that it took that long.
Damien: [00:31:17] Yeah, yeah. No, it's yeah, it is. I mean, I came from the Ultimate Boys Club Special Operations, and there's no membership fee for that. It's probably one of the most elite boys clubs there is. After that I built a career across three continents in training men for front line deployment and never worked with women. I never deployed with a woman in any sort of operational capacity. So then seeing these other units that were starting to do it, the US Army Rangers, a decade before reading that article, we were on a mission in northern Baghdad with our convoy that had been blown up. We'd been surrounded with a duska anti aircraft gun pointed at my head. So we're in a pretty shit position, to be honest. Then the US Army rangers were the ones that eventually got us out. So reading that article a decade later talking about the unit that saved my life is now training women for front line deployment. It's like, Okay, there's something here.
Elizabeth: [00:32:13] When you're staying up all night, not being able to sleep and thinking, how can we do this differently?
Damien: [00:32:17] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:32:18] On the other side, you're thinking, Hey we should try women. But are you thinking at all at the time that women could actually shift this whole thing?
Damien: [00:32:28] I knew that having a sustained war with the surrounding communities was not the way forward. So it was. So I wasn't looking at this from a conservation standpoint. I was looking at this as a social standpoint. How can we have a relationship with this community? So it was.
Elizabeth: [00:32:44] Ok, Ok.
Damien: [00:32:45] It's about trying to de-escalate a militarized approach to conservation. We saw some case studies in Iraq and Afghanistan where all female counterinsurgency terms were being dropped in to negotiate with traditional leadership structures in rural areas. It's just because there's only so many times you can kick someone's door in the middle of the night and put a gun in their face and try and get some straight answers or some cooperation. So women have a different value system in a way of approaching conflict. That was something that we looked at as well when we started sculpting this plan together and then we had the idea. We got the approvals from the board and that wasn't easy. Even when we did it and it came down to a majority vote to put it forward, it was going to be a very small trial with a limited timeline to basically tie this thing off. Then okay with the assumption from several key members that it wasn't going to work. I sort of pushed, I said, we've got nothing to lose here, other than the only thing we've got to lose if we keep putting donors' money into this massive operation. Yes, getting the results, but it's not it's not the way forward. First, we had to get the approvals, then from the local chief and the Rural District Council. So local government and you know that in itself. So we're in a very patriarchal area of Zimbabwe in the lower Zambezi Valley, a community that is largely dominated by men. If there's a job available, it goes to a man. If there's an education opportunity, it goes to the first born male, the second born male, the third born man. A woman's role is, over and over again, to be enforced, in the kitchen or with the family or in the fields working for nothing. So this was the perception of the role and women in these communities. So for us to then come in and say, we want to get a group of women and put them into uniform and train them to do one of the hardest, most dangerous jobs and in one of the harshest regions on the continent. One of the most prestigious roles. We want to pay them well to do it and give them control of the salaries that they earn. Pitching that was a pretty far stretch. What we did is we shrunk down the pitch and said, just give us the opportunity to do a three day trial and see what these women are made of. If there's hope that this program can be taken further, it's going to lead to a lot of jobs and investment in the community. We'll also be helping with a lot of other things such as education, health care, roads, water. So just think of this as a pilot program to get us started in the area, and that's essentially how it got going. When I arrived in Zimbabwe in 2009, It had the lowest life expectancy in the world for a woman, and that was 36 years of age. So we're like, Okay, well, who's struggling the most in this area, where everyone's struggling, who is struggling the most? We came back with survivors of serious sexual assault, domestic violence aids, orphans, single mothers and abandoned wives. That's with consultation with traditional leadership in the communities. This is what we came back with. So we had 87 women with that sort of background come in for what we call pre-selection. So during the interviews we sat down and listened to their stories. They were accompanied by an elder from their village because people say, If the women are just making these stories up? They're sitting there, and they’ve got an elder over their shoulder. Because a lot of these women were orphans too. All their stories were verified. I can say, after all the shit that I've been through in my life, there's some of the hardest two days of my life, like listening to those stories. It was hard in a way because they were genuinely tough stories. But it was also hard in a way to know that even though I hadn't done anything directly to these women, I was part of a culture that kept women just like this oppressed, the boys club, the macho club, all of those sorts of things. Its just part of, I suppose, this macho culture. Sometimes you don't even realize that you are part of it. It's just how we'd grown up.
Elizabeth: [00:36:55] Conditioning, right?
Damien: [00:36:56] Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it, I suppose. It doesn't mean it's right. It's just the way that we have become. I'd gone from the military where, I mean, that was it. That was the culture. Then into conservation, it was the same culture. I didn't mean to go to conservation because I was hoping to get the same sort of culture that I'd had in the military. It's just the way it was. I suppose there's a hell of a lot of other industries out there that are the same
Elizabeth: [00:37:28] A lot of the world.
Damien: [00:37:31] Yeah, you're absolutely right. So anyway, I mean, the only thing that really mattered to me was, could these women be trained for front line deployment? That's what the selection was about. So we started the selection with these women, I mean, it's a long story short, it's just to expose people to the four pillars of misery and to be hungry, cold, tired and wet. You do that for long enough and you see who's got the mettle.
Elizabeth: [00:37:57] Did you have faith like the hope that, I mean, what are you thinking? Yeah, like some of these women are going to get through it?
Damien: [00:38:03] Skeptical of the first two hours and then after that we never look back. We realized very quickly that we have something very special and very tough here. The area where we were trialing this program was in a former hunting trophy hunting area. In the lower Zambezi, part of the wider Zambezi Valley ecosystem. But the region around this reserve and there's no fences here, so it's an open ecosystem. The region around this reserve had lost 8000 elephants in the 16 years prior to this program starting. We knew very quickly, ok, this isn't this isn't a gimmick. This isn't a maybe this program is going to happen and we need to train these women in preparation for front line deployment. Because 8000 times in recent years teams of poachers are coming here willing to kill elephants or anyone standing in their way. So that was the stark reality of what we now had started, a train that couldn't be stopped. There's no way we could turn around because everyone had seen, like the people from the village had seen how tough these women were. We didn't realize when we sort of set those parameters around who we were taking for pre-selection, a selection we didn't realize we were getting the toughest.
Elizabeth: [00:39:13] Of the 87, how many made it through?
Damien: [00:39:15] Thirty seven finished well, actually, while 37 were chosen. I think we only had three pull off, three pulled off voluntarily. Thirty seven made it through. Then from that 37, we had to choose 16 to go on and start training, which is tough. Subsequently, most of those women have now been employed in other intakes. But it was very tough to see how hard those women fought through that selection period.
Elizabeth: [00:39:41] So you have these 16 that you start with. So then what happens? What do you do? Like now you have 16 that made it through the three days.
Damien: [00:39:49] So they're training, so we go through basic training. So that's three months of basic training, which is patrolling camouflage, concealment, operating radios, and first aid. I had to deal with the wildlife that they're surrounded by. Quite often the biggest threat isn't the poachers that are trying to stop us. The animals we are trying to protect, how to do navigation, how to operate at night. So all this so they do three months in a training environment and then they go straight into intermediate training, which is on the job, so they go operational towards the end of 2017.
Elizabeth: [00:40:20] Once they were out there, what happened?
Damien: [00:40:22] One of the things that we feared with the women is that the women would want to go out and have retaliation for the upbringing that they'd been subjected to. We saw completely the opposite. It was a very sort of nurturing approach to the way they looked at law enforcement, to the way that they approached their job, to the compassion they had for the animals that they were protecting. We saw it as a very different value system. So previously when we'd employed men. So Zimbabwe sits around 156 out of 175 countries on the Global Corruption Index. It's safe. Denmark is number one as the least corrupt country. Zimbabwe is right down the list. So to try and counteract the ongoing corruption that you would see in most industries in the country, we would employ men that came from. In some cases, hundreds of miles away from the area that they were protecting. So they're not influenced by family members or friends that they may have grown up with to give out information on where, say, an elephant or rhino might be where they are patrolling. They could then give out information that would allow poachers to come in and kill those animals and get away with it. The biggest amount or biggest line item in our budget is salaries for staff. For field operators. Okay. So what we're doing then, by employing men from hundreds of miles away. We're dispersing the largest line item in our budget across the country rather than it going into the local community. So with women, we haven't. We're almost four years into this, this program now. We haven't had a single incidence of corruption either. They're just really good at being corrupt and we haven't caught them yet.
Elizabeth: [00:42:01] That's just not how they roll.
Damien: [00:42:02] Or all our powers of observation, if they've just failed or we just haven't had corruption.
Elizabeth: [00:42:08] They're all local. I mean, they're all from there?
Damien: [00:42:10] So, yeah, 95 percent of our staff come from within 20 kilometers. About 13 miles from the boundary of the area we're protecting. So employing women from the local community is now a reality because we don't have to worry about corruption. As we've scaled up from initially 16 staff, we now have 240 staff. We know that with a large degree of accuracy, that we can employ women from these communities, from these rural areas, and that corruption is not something we have to worry about with them. Yes, I'm sure it is going to happen at some point. But at the moment it hasn't. Even when it does happen, it's going to be negligible in regards to the impact we're having, by putting the largest line item in our budget directly into the community at household level.
Elizabeth: [00:42:54] So the community must have really shifted?.
Damien: [00:42:56] Yeah. So these women were raised in this community, their parents raised them there. The grandparents raised their parents there. These women are raising their own children, their own families. They have a long term vested interest in the well-being of these communities. They're all in, these women. This is where they grew up, and this is where they are now dedicating themselves to helping uplift these regions. Along with the evolution of this program and the women that are driving it. Is this sort of social engineering that's been taking place in these communities and from the beginning, day one, these women were told to go back home and go back to the family and that this is a man's job. They put their heads down and they just went about their work and the selection process and all that. Slowly, perceptions started to shift. Here we are four years later and the women have made over 300 arrests. They've helped drive an 80 per cent downturn in elephant poaching across the region. Some people may not like it, but they're damn well respected. That's what we teach the women. It's more important to be respected than it is to be liked. So you've got young girls and boys that look up to them like rock stars and the local community. They go back to their schools and do talks. The younger ones that were there only a few years ago, are sort of mobbed as rock stars. You've got, a lot of the elders in the villages are looking at this program as a way that's helping to uplift the whole region. We've got traditional leaders coming in from other parts of the country, spending time with the communities, then with us and then asking us to come and replicate this model in their areas. Which I think is the best form of endorsement you can get. We're not saying we're not trying to sell the expansion of this program anymore. It's selling itself through the results that it's getting. I think for me, we never sort of sat down and mapped this out in the beginning. We just didn't know that putting women at the center of the conservation strategy would give us the greatest traction in community development. Conservation would become a byproduct of a completely different way of looking at things. But one of the most impactful things for me was sitting with the chief of police. And he said, since this program has started, there's been an increasing amount of historical reporting relating to serious sexual assault and rape. So women that had now felt more open to discussing this with local authorities, we're coming forward about historical cases. He said, even though that's been happening. He said in the same time period, we've noticed over 60 per cent reduction in serious sexual assault and rape cases in these communities.
Elizabeth: [00:45:31] Why do you think both of those things are happening?
Damien: [00:45:33] I think other women were inspired by seeing the position that these women were taking and how well they were doing at that job.
Elizabeth: [00:45:42] The empowerment?
Damien: [00:45:43] Yeah, I think. But was it empowerment from both sides?
Elizabeth: [00:45:46] Yeah
Damien: [00:45:47] Men seeing women differently, I think maybe questioning their own behavior, their own activities in this. This movement needs strong men as well as strong, strong women.
Elizabeth: [00:46:05] What about financially with the community? Some money is going back into the community.
Damien: [00:46:09] Yeah, so almost two thirds of every operational dollar we spend is going into the community. About 80 percent of that is going into the community at household level, into the hands of women. So the traditional model for many of these areas has been trophy hunting, the economic model. So they've used trophy hunting to try and generate an income, sometimes tourism, sometimes other forms of commercial activity. Now, trophy hunting in many areas across the continent is dying as an industry is no longer economically viable. So what that means is that communities are looking for different models to try and support these areas economically. If they can't find it, then these areas are often lost to agriculture or to human settlement. We took an aggregate of how much income hunting bought in over the last three years before it failed in these areas, and we were able to take that and match it against what we were putting into the local communities. We worked out and we can show this to the communities on paper. That we're putting the same amount into those communities every 34 days as what trophy hunting was doing per annum.
Elizabeth: [00:47:13] That is absolutely incredible.
Damien: [00:47:15] Yeah. So we had a viable economic alternative to trophy hunting, which for us was only working with women at the center of the strategy. To get back to your question before about how much did women spend? So a woman will generally spend between 80 and 90 percent of her salary on family and local community versus a male that'll spend around 30 to 40 per cent. So the bottom line is actually triple gears. In terms of investment, we get to spend the same dollar three times first on women's empowerment. Second is the most effective dollar that can be spent on community development. Third, as it was initially intended on conservation.
Elizabeth: [00:47:51] I read the paper you sent me. It's just astonishing to me that why isn't everyone doing this? Like, Why isn't this happening?
Damien: [00:47:58] It's getting more and more traction, and more and more units are starting to introduce all female sections to their units. But you can't just go in and sack a whole bunch of people and everyplace.
Elizabeth: [00:48:10] No I didn’t mean like that.
Damien: [00:48:16] For us, as I said, we're starting with blank canvases. We don't go in and compete against hunting companies for an area that's already working and to remove the ethics from the conversation that's working on a practical standpoint with financial gains to the local community. So what we want to get is the areas where everyone's pulled out. It's like, OK, from a commercial standpoint, this is a lost cause. Then what we do is we sit with the traditional leadership and local government and we work out long term contracts similar to what the hunters had when they were there. We work out long term contracts. We said we're not going to do any hunting here. That's not our model, but we are going to put X amount of investment into these communities every year. So we get the actual contracts quite cheaply. But where the benefits of the community comes in is the amount that we pledged to put into those areas each year. For me, after coming from Mozambique and where we're waging war against the community to now realize every dollar basically it's every dollar you put into community development is $2 less. You have to spend on the arms race and conservation. Now, we've got programs that focus on education. We started in 2009 looking after elephants and rhinos. We now protect biodiversity on mass. So the whole thing is sort of scaled up and evolved. It's not just about elephants and rhinos and the law enforcement side of things, it's the whole picture. A lot of areas, when we go into these new reserves that we either buy out the hunting company or we acquire the lease, the clinics there. You've got women delivering babies under candlelight with no medication. Just to come in and be able to put in some basic solar electricity, lighting, drugs and a paid nurse there, it makes such a huge difference. I mean, goodwill is a currency. It's a currency and to be able to get the goodwill from the community, it means there's less people likely to poach. It means there's more hope and opportunity for them in the communities for prosperity. I mean, there's an overwhelming body of evidence that tells us empowering women is the single greatest force for positive change in the world today. We've taken conservation funding and turned it into the most effective form of rural development funding. And conservation has become the byproduct of women becoming the bridge that we had to build together between these two industries of conservation and community or social development.
Elizabeth: [00:50:43] It's just awesome.
Damien: [00:50:44] Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:50:45] Absolutely. It's astonishing. When you first started with the first 16 women. Was it a plant-based beginning?
Damien: [00:50:52] I won.
Elizabeth: [00:50:53] It was?
Damien: [00:50:54] I won. It started. It started with our staff. There was a training team and the unpacking, unpacking the truck, I'd gone and done the shopping and there's people looking around like, where's inyama the meat? In our other programs then, when I started in conservation, I wasn't vegan or plant based. So our programs didn't start plant based. Then we tried to get a male team of rangers that we were working with. We even offered them a trial. I said, I'll bring in a chef, whatever food you guys want, plant based food, I'll get it and we'll give you a pay increase just for a month while we trial it. I nearly had a mutiny on my hands. They're like, No way you're interfering with the culture and our nutrition. It's almost bordering on human rights violations. Okay, all right. Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, everybody, just calm down. Then so, with the beginning of this program, we had an opportunity to get the right systems in place from the get go. We did a plant based shop and we cooked up some plant based food. That's how we started.
Elizabeth: [00:52:06] Was there a lot of resistance?
Damien: [00:52:07] No, there wasn't because it's not like we were trying to change something that we'd set in stone. It was like, Okay, no, this is it from the beginning. Then that evolved into a program that we now call back to black roots, and it's focusing on indigenous crops and teaching out in four stages. First, our staff, teaching them from an environmental, nutritional and an ethical standpoint as to why we're implementing this diet. That gives them the tools to take that back to their families and teach them. We have workshops in the communities and then we build ambassadors as well. So we're talking about some very water stressed parts of the continent where it's much easier to grow vegetables and fruit than it is to grow beef. We're talking about villages and communities that have severe issues with diabetes, with heart disease, with cancer. We're talking about areas that have limited access to health care, where food is the best prevention that we can offer in terms of getting sick. So when you teach people how to grow their own food and speak about it from those different perspectives. How to be able to prepare or put together a meal plan and start eating healthy. You start looking at a downturn in the amount of medical attention that these people are going to need throughout their life.
Elizabeth: [00:53:30] Can you already see a shift there within the community like these women bringing the vegan thing back home?
Damien: [00:53:36] It's actually funny, so we've had some really good media come in from 60 Minutes, BBC National Geographic, the doctor that was done with James Cameron. They always come up to me. At some point they say, You know what? The thing that we doubted the most about this was the whole vegan thing. They say, Listen, we've just had some side talks with some of the women. That was the question that we wanted to know. What do you do when you go back home? They said, Look, some of the women said, Yeah, look, we're happy to eat vegan here. They said, when we're at work, most of them are saying, Yeah, when we're back home, we're taking this into the families and into the community.
Elizabeth: [00:54:12] So that is amazing. Yeah, wow, It's beautiful.
Damien: [00:54:16] So I mean, we're rocking it out there. We've got huge gardens. We've got gardeners that are working. We've got seven plant based chefs working out there. Above all, we've got an awesome team of women and support around them that are doing one of the toughest jobs in one of the harshest places. They're absolutely thriving on it and they're doing it a lot. A plant based diet. Yeah, they are rock stars.
Elizabeth: [00:54:38] I love it.
Damien: [00:54:39] So I mean, my perspective on that was, I'd been walking around the bush for four years back in 2013, protecting one group of animals and coming home and eating another group of animals. It just didn't make sense to continue that. I sort of grew up, I was this big meat eating guy. I used to eat my steak blue just sort of like, slap it on and flip it over. I used to hunt and just all that shit. You realize you come to see that the only difference in the capacity for a cow to suffer versus a rhinoceros is the difference we allow ourselves to accept or believe humans are masters at creating levels of bullshit to convince ourselves that we need to do one thing that we prefer as opposed to one thing we should. I was guilty of that. I'd come up with all these different excuses. Oh, it's alright. I'm doing all this work to protect these animals. I'm entitled to go and eat the other animals, there's no shortage of cows or chickens out there. So I'm focused on the elephants or rhinos and all this crap. But deep down, I knew that I was responsible for their death as an alpha male. You get to a point where you say, Okay, I've sort of evolved to be defending those that can't defend themselves with the wildlife that we're out protecting. Here I was paying someone else to go and exploit this other group of animals because I wasn't willing to do it myself. That's a hard thing to swallow. That's sort of a line in the sand for me, really. Which I think should be for everyone.
Elizabeth: [00:56:18] I agree.
Damien: [00:56:17] Our job is, particularly in conservation, to protect animals. The biggest threat to animals on this planet is the meat industry. The biggest degradation of the natural world is the meat industry. Cutting down forests to put livestock or to grow the grains that are fed to livestock. So I just didn't want to. I don't want to be a part of that anymore, and honestly beth, that's the single best thing I've ever done in my life. Because once you stop putting that stuff in your body. I mean the shift in conscience, the way that you approach everything. I mean, just the load that's lifted off of you, getting out of bed every day knowing that you're not part of that system, you're not carrying that guilt, you're not carrying that, that hurt, that you're inflicting on other sentient beings.
Elizabeth: [00:57:04] I agree, and same with me. But on top of that, it makes you kind of come alive and awake in so many other facets that you don't even seem connected. The veils keep coming down. It brings a lot more meaning. Yeah, without any trying, right? It just keeps happening. Which is yeah, it's a gift.
Damien: [00:57:24] Yeah It's like a different perspective
Elizabeth: [00:57:26] Things get bigger. It doesn't make your life smaller. It doesn't diminish anything by getting rid of all these things. It's expansive.
Damien: [00:57:36] Yeah, it is. So it's a very important part of the program. As I said, fueling this sort of group of elite athletes and they are, I mean, these women are walking 20+ miles a day with heavy loads in tough terrain, and there's very few people that could do that day in, day out and be completely switched on. I mean, these women aren't just staring down at the ground, just wandering out and looking at their clock, seeing how many keys they're done. They're looking for armed groups of environmental terrorists coming in to kill, kill these animals.
Elizabeth: [00:58:07] Talk about superheroes.
Damien: [00:58:10] Yeah they literally are. So they've got to be switched on the whole time. As I said before, we've got to be right all the time. Poachers have got to be right once. Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:58:19] What's next?
Damien: [00:58:21] Just expansion. So we, if someone has said to me 18 months ago. Damien, there's $50 million going, just take this model and just get as much land as you can in collaboration with these local communities and protect as much as possible. The bottleneck would have been in training the amount of people that had to go out and protect those areas. So we've spent the last 12 to 18 months building a training college in Zimbabwe, and we've just trained a team of 14 instructors and they're now training the next groups of women that are coming through. So we've got 75 more women coming through now being trained, they'll be deployed very soon, actually, and then we'll get another group through. So now, we've got the mandate from the government. We've got contracts with the local government and communities. There's a huge amount of land that fits into our strategy. Looking at not only this first landscape in Zimbabwe, but the second one that we're moving into. The track record and data to back up what it is we do. There's an unlimited amount of women that are waiting to become warriors. There's a real need for these areas to be protected and the animals inside them. So this is why I'm here in the states raising bucks.
Elizabeth: [00:59:40] Yeah.
Damien: [00:59:43] So going around and speaking to people about what we're doing. It's, I've got to say, it's actually been a really good trip so far. It's not like it's a ‘sell.’
Elizabeth: [00:59:50] It's more like ‘how can I help?’ Yeah, right?
Damien: [00:59:52] It's yeah, exactly. How much do you need this type of thing? So it's good, and I came from being a simple soldier, really. So there wasn't.
Elizabeth: [01:00:04] Really about evolving,
Damien: [01:00:06] Right. We didn't really do the whole scale, a multinational charity course, you know, in between snipers and diving. So there's been a lot that I've had to figure out and get wrong along the way. We're in a position now where we've got an awesome team and it's actually really fun. I'm really enjoying it and really proud of the team and what we've all achieved. Just being able to watch this thing grow now and knowing that. So all the work that we're doing is innovative. It's new to the conservation industry, the Akashinga model that we're doing and then the leadership component lead ranger with the training of instructors and dispersing them out amongst the industry. It's changing the way that conservation is done and it's. I mean someone described it as like the Swiss Army knife of conservation and they've got all these and rural development. You've got all these different angles that are intersecting at one point with this program, and it's become a very powerful tool for uplifting regions.
Elizabeth: [01:01:08] It's never been anything like it?
Damien: [01:01:10] I read an article some years ago that the heading was again in the New York Times. The heading was just add women and stir. And essentially, that's pretty much what's happened here. A lot of the positives in the form have just spun off. Yeah, there wasn't a grand master plan at the beginning. It's just sort of evolved into where we are now. It's been very productive.
Elizabeth: [01:01:37] I'm a huge fan. I think pretty much anyone who hears your story is a huge fan. How can anyone not be? So thank you Damien so much for this.
Damien: [01:01:47] Thanks Beth. Thank you very much.
Elizabeth: [01:01:59] To learn more about Damian, about the International Anti-Poaching Foundation and about Akashinga. Go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything. While you're there, click Become a member and join us. You will get all sorts of wonderful membership benefits and join our Species Unite family. We'd love to have you. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @Species Unite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate, review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santino Polky, our intern Talia Fine and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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