Jim Fowler

Our challenge for the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the earth’s ecosystem, and we must learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature.

I remember very much there in Falls Church there was a creek that was flowing down into 4 Mile Run. I believe it’s now covered up where it goes under Columbia Street. I found a whole family of weasels down there.

The Zambesi is a big river; there’s no crocodiles on 4 Mile Run.

I don’t think we’re going to save anything if we go around talking about saving plants and animals only; we’ve got to translate that into what’s in it for us.

Then a neighbor, Mr Smith, had a dairy cow and an couple bulls. He showed me how to bluff a bull.

I had travelled pretty widely around the world even before then, so I knew where to go to film wildlife.

My father was a soil scientist with the Geological Survey.

The biggest challenge is how to affect public attitudes and make people care.

The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans.

Everybody has a camcorder now, and they exploit these incidents and blow them all out of proportion.

The most powerful argument of all for saving open space is economics; in most states, tourism is the number two industry.

Most of what you see now emphasizes animals being dangerous to humans.

But I’ll tell you what, there was a lot of farmland between Falls Church and Washington.

Preserving a river or a creek can bring a lot of revenue.

Almost all these hotspots around the world, most have been destroyed to the point where there is no wildlife and very little of the natural world left.

I was amazed at the house that I grew up in; it looks practically identical to the way it was, but I couldn’t recognize it because of the size of the trees.

I don’t want to save a creek for the creek’s sake, but what’s in it for human beings.

There’s no denying that television is one of the most powerful propaganda media we’ve ever invented.

Johnny Carson started the jokes about me and Marlin in his monologues.

We moved over to Silver Spring, actually near University Park.

My father being an outdoors person, he used to take us on quite a few adventures thorugh the wild areas down there, introducing us to alligators and rattlesnakes and all the trees and plants.

I’m a little different from all those conservation types.

We used to play baseball back in that field and keep an eye out for the bulls.

Sooner or later we’ve got to tie the saving of the natural world to our own public welfare.

I have a lot of memories of Falls Church. I went to grade school in Madison Elementary School.

Somali is turning into a desert. Rwanda, you can hardly find a place to plant a potato, it’s so crowded.

That’s really the challenge of this century, to develop spokespeople.

The other thing is quality of life; if you have a place where you can go and have a picnic with your family, it doesn’t matter if it’s a recession or not, you can include that in your quality of life.

Along 4 Mile Run, there was a nice woods down in front of the house. I used to run around there.

The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we’ll start thinking of doing something about it.

According to Johnny Carson, I was the guy who Marlon sent out to do all the dirty work.

Marlon was more of a formal zoo director type.

I always said it was to be dumb enough to do what Marlon Perkins said to do.

Haiti looks like a bomb hit it.

There’s no country in the world that’s more devastated from natural resources than Afghanistan.

How we treat the earth basically effects our social welfare and our national security.