In Their Own Words

Frank Hawkins & Sean Whittaker

International Union for Conservation of Nature Director Frank Hawkins is an expert in the birds of Madagascar. At the 2018 Sustainability Exchange he spoke with IFC senior renewable energy specialist Sean Whittaker about how their professional lives have become intertwined.

Transcript

Sean Whittaker: Do you remember when we first met?

Frank Hawkins: I’m pretty sure it would be in one of the very agreeable restaurants in the capital of Madagascar, known as Tana.

Sean: I think it was in 1994. By that time you had been there for how long?

Frank: I first went there in 1987.

Sean: When I first met you it was kind of intimidating, because I’d heard about you — people said “Frank knows more about birds in Madagascar than anyone on the planet.” And I probably knew the least about birds than anyone, because I came there to do windmills.

Frank: Basically what I did for 20 years was spend as much time as I could go into the more recondite little corners of the country and figuring out was going on in terms of the ecology. And you were there building windmills.

Sean: I just had this little project that I was pursuing, I had received some money from the Canadian Development Agency and my job was just to design and build and install and maintain these windmills for water pumping.

Red-tailed tropicbird. Courtesy of Frank Hawkins.

Long-tailed ground-roller. Courtesy of Frank Hawkins.

Sean Whittaker: Do you remember when we first met?

Frank Hawkins: I’m pretty sure it would be in one of the very agreeable restaurants in the capital of Madagascar, known as Tana.

Sean: I think it was in 1994. By that time you had been there for how long?

Frank: I first went there in 1987.

Sean: When I first met you it was kind of intimidating, because I’d heard about you — people said “Frank knows more about birds in Madagascar than anyone on the planet.” And I probably knew the least about birds than anyone, because I came there to do windmills.

Frank: Basically what I did for 20 years was spend as much time as I could go into the more recondite little corners of the country and figuring out was going on in terms of the ecology. And you were there building windmills.

Sean: I just had this little project that I was pursuing, I had received some money from the Canadian Development Agency and my job was just to design and build and install and maintain these windmills for water pumping.

“The contribution that wind power and solar can make to having a habitable planet in 20 years’ time is absolutely enormous. And you have to be able to balance that against the relatively small residual impacts of the installation of wind power.”

– Frank Hawkins, Director, IUCN

Frank: We used to drive around the south of Madagascar and you could spot Sean’s windmills as you went past “there’s another one of Sean’s windmills,” he’d kind of planted his flag across large swathes of southern Madagascar which was really great.

Sean: At the time if you had asked me if I would do this as a living I would have laughed for a very long time. Because at the time in the early 1990s wind was more of a hobby than an industry. I remember going to industry events that were held in barns and in sheds. It was very much a cottage industry. And no one ever thought that it would ever evolve to what it is now. It’s remarkable to see how things have changed. Wind has become one of the cheapest sources of new generation and you’ve got wind turbines that are 100 meters tall with blades that are 70 or 80 meters long and the amount of power that they generate is remarkable.

Frank: The notion even five years ago that you would be able to run a country like the UK using no coal power at all for a week on renewable energy – plus a bit of gas – I don’t think that anybody would have dreamed that that was possible. There’s a great deal of energy going into figuring out how those marginal, remaining impacts of wind power on birds can be managed. There are places where you could certainly improve that. But the contribution that wind power and solar can make to having a habitable planet in 20 years’ time is absolutely enormous. And you have to be able to balance that against the relatively small residual impacts of the installation of wind power.

Sean: You’ve spent a lot of time down in Fort Dauphin, a place that I went to quite a bit. Just in terms of economic development I remember the electricity situation that they had was unreliable, extremely expensive, and I remember that was around where I worked and there was tons of wind.

Frank: When I was about 12 I discovered that there were these birds in Madagascar called mesites, and they didn’t look quite like anything else, they were just a very odd-looking thing, and I kind of mentally registered that they existed. But when I actually got to Madagascar and went to find these birds it turned out that they really aren’t related to anything else on earth. They’re an endemic order of birds, which is really extraordinary – there’s no other comparable land mass in the world that has any endemic orders of birds. And if you look at these guys they look like they have no idea what they’re doing in the modern world, they’re kind of completely baffled. You know, “how did I get here, I’ve been here for 40 million, 50 million years and I don’t really understand what’s going on.” So you feel like these are guys who need help. And I can help these guys make it for the next 50 million years. There are lots of other comparable cases in Madagascar of species like that – you look into their eyes and they look slightly worried because they’re not sure what the future has to bring, and it’s like “okay, I can do something about this.”

Sean: I have a vision that our fate is to end up in Madagascar together working on a project in Fort Dauphin, where we’re dealing with an integrated approach to wind power, conservation, biodiversity protection, economic development for the community.

Frank: I’d love to do that.

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