Tapescript 27.

P To begin tonight's debate, I'd like to welcome Greg Tyler, who is a well-known wildlife journalist. Greg, what do you think?

J TV channels nowadays are always showing documentaries about wild animals like the tiger becoming extinct, and we see horrible scenes of them being hunted and killed. When people see these programmes they immediately think 'Oh no! How terrible, we must do something.' But the documentaries don't usually tell us why the tiger is being hunted. If they did, we'd probably find that in most cases it's because the local people depend on hunting animals and then selling them to earn a living. Some of you may remember the film Gorillas in the Mist. It's a film about a young American woman, a conservationist, who was trying to protect some gorillas in a very poor region of Africa. At the end of the film the local people killed her. Why? Because they depended on hunting and selling the gorillas to foreign zoos and collectors. By protecting the gorillas, the conservationist was destroying the local economy. So I think it's all a question of priorities. We can't just say 'stop hunting wild animals'; first we have to solve the problem of how people in poor countries can live without hunting. You often see in the newspaper campaigns for 'Save the tiger' or 'Save the gorillas', but it really should be 'Save the people'. If we save the people first and make sure they can survive, then they'll be able to stop killing the animals.

P Thank you, Greg. And now, it's hello and welcome to Nina James, who's a biologist from California. Nina, what's your point of view?

B I'm a biologist and ecologist, and I can tell you that the most serious problem facing this planet today is the destruction of our ecosystems. For those of you who aren't quite sure what ecosystems are, let me just explain. By ecosystems I mean the relationship not only between animals and plants but also between them and their environment. There are many well known reasons why they are being destroyed, for example, air and water pollution and the destruction of the rainforests. But there's another very important reason and that is that thousands of species - birds, fish, and animals - are becoming extinct. They're becoming extinct mostiy because of too much hunting. Now, you may ask, why is this a problem? Does it really matter if some species disappear? After all, the dinosaurs became extinct, and that doesn't seem to have been a problem. But what people don't realize is that when one animal species disappears, this has a chain reaction. It makes other animal and plant species disappear too. It will eventually cause a complete collapse of our ecosystem. And if, or rather when, this happens, the results will be catastrophic. The more animals that become extinct, the less food there will be for man, and that will mean starvation on a world-scale, with millions of people dying of hunger. Although I agree that it's a question of priorities, the fact is that we have to protect animals first, not people, because if we don't protect the animals then we haven't got much of a future on this planet.