Dirk Draulans, Applause for Nature

Biologist and journalist Dirk Draulans is known for his long career at the weekly magazine Knack and his many appearances on radio and television. In the winter half-year of 2009 to 2010, he sailed around the world for eight months for Canvas and the Dutch VPRO in the wake of his great hero Charles Darwin. In his lecture ‘Applause for Nature’, he looks back with a mixture of humor and slight anger on his life as a nature conservationist at home and abroad. He tells, among other things, about scared bonobos and flamboyant blue herons, about fairy-tale wolves and frog females who fake that they are dead, about a wrathful chiffchaff and virginal bat sex. But he also tells about the not always equally cheerful role that man has played on the world stage. In it, he weaves two long evolutionary threads: fear of the unknown and changing man-woman relationships. Both have had a major influence on the way man dealt with nature. His final conclusion: perhaps we need a restart!