Black culture is oral, the talking drum speaking from one village to another across that gre at perplexing triangle, in the middle of the map of the world, which is called.

The African music that fills the world today has as its basis the antiphonal call and response of the talking drum. This drum is macic all of wood, usually, with a fissure for sound (you remember the drum of Bander the Masked Man, a square log with a fissure, and two holes on the sides), or with skin laced tight, like the drums that produce the Ju-Ju music of the spirits, among the Yoruba of Nigeria.

The black prince, King Sony Ade, plays this music--an ultra-modem sussurrus of sound asking so many questions mysterious to us, and with equally mysterious replies.

The great Wole Soyinka, too, the Nobel Prize-winning poet (the first black in history to wina Nobel), with his periodic melody of infinite rhythms plays talking Ju-Ju music.

How can a blond Lombard, now a white-haired man, from northern Italy, speak with the same rhythms and create a book not written but talking?

Perhaps because even in childhood I heard this music pulsing with magic, pursuing the future, weaving a pattern that, because never completed, "needs" the future.

Like an athlete who in a race plunges forward precipitously and must keep his speed to avoid a ridiculous fall.

The Blues, and especially Boogie Woogie, born on the guitar and pianola, simply transposed the rhythms of the talking drum to European instruments.

The incredible outpouring of energy in these rhythms, energy masterfullv calibrated in the spasm of syncopation, completely overturned our placid, gentle musical tradition.

From that rhythmic howl the most incredible phenomenon in musical history was born: Jazz. And now jazz lives on in Rock. In a very short time, jazz and rock have flooded the world with Afro-Latin--and above all Afro-African!--music.

Perhaps because this is the only music I have listened to for forty years.

Perhaps because in adolescence I tried to capture these throbbing rhythms. At once I felt the essence of this music. I investigated, and discovered it was not American. The Afro-Americans, the blacks, the ex-slaves from the great mother continent, had re-invented it.

Perhaps because with enormous effort I managed--and still manage--to create its bass rhythms. the notes played by the left hand on the piano keyboard: rhythmic magic, the devil that slips under the bedcovers, as one of jazz’s greats, Huddie’Ledbetter, said. Guitarist, singer, member of a prison chain gang.

Perhaps because in South Africa in the 1950’s, in the midst of white racism, I discovered the melodious counterpoint of Zulu music.

Perhaps hecause I have a daughter with a black woman. Because I regard the peoples of the great Tropical Continent--with their haughty, regal way of walking--as the true aristocrats of our planet.

Perhaps because I would like to be buried in one of the last great primeval forests in Gahon. on the border with Cameroon. where I know a family of Pygmies.

Perhaps because I play the talking drums.

Perhaps for these and other reasons I will manage to sing in the bewitching rhythm of a talking book that is a real thing: the Ipassa-Mingouli Project.

Born in Milan in 1936, I am an entrepreneur and a conservationist. I have worked all my life to defend the rights of tribal peoples, and protect their environments.

1972: I went to Marocco to report on environmental conditions there.

1974: A trip to Togo (West Africa) to get an idea of its flora and fauna, and to neighboring Ghana to study the forest conditions on the Lower Volta River.

1976: I founded the Eco-tourism Association; its work is mainly to promote environmental conservation in Italy and in Africa. The aim is to save wild eco-systems and their peoples: first, by giving an economic value to untouched nature through a tourism with no negative impact on the environment; and second, by giving value to native peoples’ cultures. This Association is recognized by the Italian government; and the Italian Ministry of Defense has accepted it as alterrnative service for conscientious objectors.

1976: A trip to the Congo (formerly Zaire) to report on the protection of wild gorillas and, with the help of local Pygmies, to study the eco-tourism practiced in Kahuzi Biega Park on Lake Kivu. I also went to Virunga Park (formerly Albert Park). In both parks I made documentary films to take to Gabon in order to show the Gabonese government the concrete economic value of actively protecting the primates and primeval forests.

1978: Trips to Congo (Zaire) and Rwanda for more study of the protection of wild gorillas and to exchange ideas with Diane Fossey at Karisoke Center. Unfortunately, on the day I anived in Ruhengeri, poachers killed the famous male gorilla Digit and I wasn’t able to reach Fossey to tell her about it. A young naturalist was with me, Gustavo Gandini, at that time a student and the head of the International Protection League for Italy (IPPL), now a docent in population genetics on the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Milan. He had been working on an Italian -sponsored project in Senegal for the rehabilitation of the chimpanzee population.

From Rwanda we went to Gabon to tour the interior of the country and the Lope Preserve. We found that hunting and poaching were taking a dramatic toll. We sent an urgent S.O.S. on the situation to all the important conservationist associations in the world.

A primatologist from Stirling University, Caroline Tutin, with the help of an expert on conservation in Africa, Michael Fernandez, did a five-year study of the forests in the interior of Gabon. The results she published are amazing: she found about 35,000 gorillas and 64,000 chimpanzees in Gahon--one of the greatest concentrations of primates in Africa, greater by far than preceding estimates for these two species in the African interior.

The Gandini-Vassallo mission had obtained some good results, although conservation of these species is still far from satisfactory today.

1980: Working with the town council of Lacchiarella, a small town 15 kilometers from Milan, I created a nature park, set apart from roads and people, out of land that belonged to my family. The public authorities had threatened to appropriate this land, and it had been in danger of being turned over to real-estate speculators, but I denounced this maneuver in the newspapers, and succeeded in making the land a naturalistic oasis instead.

Panda s.r.l., the business firm that I am head of, has long sponsored conservationist campaigns for defense of the forests of Gabon and of the rights of Gabon’s tribal peoples. The journalist Marco Paini. a friend and fellow eco-warrior, before he died wrote of our ecological battles, publicizing our campaigns in many newspaper articles.

1981: Two trips to Gabon, the first in February and the second in August. to the land of the Pygmies of Belinga (in northeast Gabon), to help with the above-mentioned census of gorillas and chimpanzees made by Caroline Tutin of Stirling University and Michael Fernandez; the American psychologist Bill McGrew was also engaged in the work.

1982: Marco Paini, with my help, drafted a report requested by Italy~s prime minister on "the relation between the destruction of tropical equatorial forests and world hunger." This report was read with interest by the President of Italy. then Sandro Pertini, and by various Ministers, in particular the then-Minister of the Interior and present President of Italy, Luigi Scalfaro. (See the enclosed letter.)

1982: Two business firms--Fiorucci, and my firm. Panda s.r.l. --sponsored a congress in Milan of associations that support human rights and environmental conservation.

The international president of Survival International came to the congress. This group is dedicated to the defense of endangered tribal populations. I made a speech denouncing the barbaric practice of hunting down Indians in Amazonian Colombia. a practice in which even some Italians had participated. And I founded the first Italian chapter of Survival International. I was elected head of Survival International in Italy.

1983: I was elected to the council of the Milan branch of WWF.

1984: I converted two important people to the cause of saving forests. One is Edward Luttwak. then an adviser to the President of the U. S. He invented the Swap. which is an exchange of nature for foreign debt. He arranged the first Swap: in exchange for forgiveness of some of its foreign debt, the government of Bolivia Thrned over a vast forest for conservation, a forest containing some important Indian communities.

The other important person I converted to the cause was the famous Italian writer Alberto Moravia. On 26 February 1984. Moravia wrote a long article in Italy’s most famous newspaper, Corriere della Sera, describing the marvelous forests of Gabon and calling for protection of them.

Two years later he published a book entitled "The Leopard Woman," about a secret sect of men in Gabon who call themselves the Leopard of Gabon. The book is based on fact: in the past in Gabon there were in fact secret societies like the Mwiri who were ". ..in some sense associations for the defense of nature" (as reported in Raponda Walker and Sillan, 1962).

1984: I was named Honorary Consul of Gabon in Milan, a post I accepted--and still hold--mainly as a way to help conserve the primeval forests of Gabon, with their wealth of bio-diversity. and to help the Pygmy population.

1985: I created the Rainforest Action Group of Milan, the Italian chapter of the Rainforest Action Network, an American association for the defense of tropical forests.

This Network has since become the most authoritative international organization for defense of these ceo-systems, today under serious threat worldwide.

1986 & 1987: Missions to Gabon to sound the alarm on the forest destruction there and the poaching of primates.

1989 - 91: Two trips to Gabon to study the creation of forest areas as protected preserves. At the first such area, around Minkebe, the WWF--after finally opening an office in Gabon--planned the conservationist Minkebe Project.

The second area chosen for protection was the Ipassa-Mingouli forest, with the Ivinda River running through it. I planned a Project for the Ipassa-Mingouli, and began a long struggle with Groupe Rougier, a logging company working the forest and reducing it yearly to ruin. The Ipassa-Mingouli Project is dedicated to saving the long, beautiful Ivinda River with its splendid waterfalls, the forest enclosing it, and the abundant wildlife--elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, and more--that live along its banks.

1991: In Thailand, with the help of the Thailandese authorities I visited conservation projects in the forest zone along Thailand’s borders with Burma and Cambodia.

1993: A return trip to Thailand to denounce--both to the local newspapers and to the Rainforest Action Network--the logging in Cambodia by Thailandese entrepreneurs. who then sold the wood in Thailand in violation of United Nations regulations.

1993: Lengthy negotiations with the government of Gabon to persuade it to turn over to our Ipassa-Mingouli Project some lots that Groupe Rougier had received from Gabon as logging concessions. Their logging on these lots, which are at the very heart of the future Ipassa-Mingouli Preserve, was--and still is--doing such terrible damage as to endanger creation of a Preserve.

1994: Two missions in Gabon. First, I went with the IUCN coordinator for Central Africa, Monsieur Charles Dournenge, to Libreville to ascertain the Gahonese government’s interest in the Ipassa-Mingouli Project.

Then Monsieur Doumenge and I, together with ten other people--research scientists from French and Italian universities, and technicians frorñ the Gabonese Ministry of Waters and Forests--went to check on the social conditions of the populations living on the borders of the proposed Preserve, and to check on the environmental conditions, the landscapes, and the bio-diversity of the area proposed for the Ipassa-Mingouli Preserve.

My company, Panda s.r.l., paid for these expeditions.

Afterwards, the IUCN drafted a Project, and also a Report on the results of these two missions. This Report and Project became the institutional basis for conservation of the site.

The Wilks Report of 1990, done for the IUCN and paid for by the European Union, had already chosen the Ipassa-Mingouli site for preservation, as had the government of Gabon too, in its part of the Plan of Action for the Region of Africa Centrale (PARAC, IUCN, 1989).

UNESCO maintained and still maintains a Biosphere Reserve within the borders of the Ipassa-Mingouli Project, and has given its support to this Project.

1994: A European Union delegation to Lihreville, Gabon. in the person of His Excellency Delegate Mazzocchi Alemanni, gave its hacking to our Project. It also set in motion a negotiation with Monsieur Jacques Rougier, owner of the logging company Groupe Rougier. As a result of this negotiation, Monsieur Rougier committed himself in writing to prepare, together with the IUCN, a plan for sustainable logging that would be in line with our Project’s demands.

1994: As part of the delegation of the International Prize for Environmental Culture, I was invited by the government of Thailand to the ceremony at the Royal Palace where Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindorn received the prize.

1995: I was interviewed by the Bangkok Post, Thailand’s principal daily newspaper, on the environmental degradation threatening an important primeval forest preserve on the island of Phuket in southern Thailand, and the consequent threat to the center for rehabilitation of gibbons that had been set up in the preserve.

1996: I went to Cambodia with an American friend of mine, Marshall Perry. and we talked with His Majesty King Sihanouk about a revolutionary project conceived by Perry. The project is designed to transform a good part of the interior of Cambodia into a nature park for ceo-tourism.

1997: Return to Gabon with the CNN journalist Gary Stryker, who interviewed me and did a documentary of the Ipassa-Mingouli, as we flew over the area by helicopter.

Looking down from the helicopter, I saw that the logger Groupe Rougier--in violation of its written 1994 agreement with the IUCN to carry on sustainable logging only--had for probably about a year been logging at a rapid, industrial rate right in the heart of the future Ipassa-Mingouli Preserve. It had created huge swathes of felled trees and had bull-dozed logging roads all through the area. And now the poachers of game had easy access, on these roads, to the biological treasures of the future Preserve.

1998: I developed a campaign to alert "enlightened capitalists" around the globe to the need for prompt, coordinated action to defend the planet earth.

Capitalists who aim solely at indiscriminate increase of their capital and goods threaten humanity and the environment. However, in the present emergency capitalists can provide the most effective, rapid forces for facing this PLANETARY CALAMITY.

I distinguish between "FIT" CAPITALISTS (who produce positive culture and energy) and "OBESE" CAPITALISTS (who only accumulate).

To a SUPER-TEAM of "FIT" CAPITALISTS, I propose support of the Ipassa- Mingouli Project as a concrete opportunity for developing prompter, more active techniques of planetary defense than those of the conservationist associations and institutions.

Once worked out, these capitalist techniques can be used in other cases of ENVIRONMENTAL EMERGENCIES caused by various factors but especially by destructive capitalism.

We must find really effective techniques for preserving native cultures and for preserving the most important ceo-systems of this organism the Earth, namely, forests, coral reefs, coasts, seas, and wetlands.

Besides "enlightened capitalists," the Ipassa-Mingouli Project proposes SOCIAL EVOLUTION as an interesting and lasting method for preserving nature and native cultures: the Project would create jobs that use traditional native wisdom in scientific research and give native peoples work in eco-tourism. In both cases, the local people would he working alongside personnel from industrial countries. With such collaboration, the costs of professional training would be minor. And the results would be immediate.