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Bridget Nicholls: The main reason we're all here - yes why are we here? [laughs]
- this morning is the Beecab, and the Beecab we're launching early and this
is going to go to schools throughout July and visit all the local schoolchildren and
make them realise that bees in urban areas are very important.
Alistair Hadley: And we blacked out the windows, sort of *** My Ride-style, and made some wings for it.
And then we went about and stuck fur all over it so it looked like a bee basically.
Pat Goodwin: People ask me why on Earth is the Wellcome Trust, which actually is a biomedical
research charity, why on Earth is it interested in the health of pollinators and bees? If
they disappeared there would be a big impact on the health of humans and animals and the
world would look a very different place. Robin Ince: Pestival is another fantastic
opportunity to get together a really disparate group of singers, dancers, a small orchestra,
comedians and musicians and celebrate insects and celebrate the world of the bee and come
up with ridiculous ideas which hopefully underneath it all afterwards people will even go 'I've
got to buy more books about entomology, I must know more about Karl von Frisch and the
waggledance'. Steve J Benbow: Within the taxi we'll
have a little observation hide as well, we're looking at showing a series of little films
in the back of the bee taxi at the Royal Festival Hall and to schoolchildren, again to show
the plight of bees, how straightforward it is to keep bees.
BN: Pestival is from the 3rd to the 6th of September, it kicks off at the London Zoological
Society Meeting Rooms and on the 3rd of September there's going to be a symposium: 'How
Insect are We?' And we've got Deborah Gordon who's kind of the new
E O Wilson and she's going to be talking about insect societies and her studies of
insect societies, and we've got John Gray the philosopher who wrote Straw Dogs,
who is going to be talking about insects in human society and how they interlink, and
we've also got Michael Pawlyn, who was one of the architects behind the Eden
Project and he's based a lot of his designs on the studies of insects, so it's
trying to show people and people start debating how insects are very useful in terms of biomimicry
and forging new ideas in technology and medicine and all sorts of areas in human life and cultural
life where insects are imperative. RI: First of all it's going to be fantastically
entertaining, I think the art installations that I've already heard about, the
Beecab as well, all of these things are just idiosyncratic, they're different, they're
one of those things which I think sometimes can be seen as being very British -
to tackle entomological subjects in such a way - so I think they're going
to be hugely entertained and I think they're going to come out of it as well and go 'I
am somewhat wiser than I was before and may well change my existence slightly'.
BN: And then it goes on to the South Bank Centre from the 4th to the 6th of September
and it's just jam-packed with content, we've got Robin Hitchcock, Robin Ince
doing comedy and music based around insects and we've got Chris Watson, the renowned
- David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth, he did all of the sound
recordings for that, and he was one of the founders of Cabaret Voltaire, and he's
commissioned a choir to duet with live bees on the stage, so it's going to be pretty
impressive. And we're turning the whole of the Queen Elizabeth Hall - the Queen
Bee Hall, sorry - into Bee Social, where people can come and discuss colony collapse
and meet beekeepers, learn how to keep bees, see how bees work in different ways in culture
and in industry for humans. RI: I think the best form of entertainment
is where someone leaves and goes 'well I was laughing all the way through or clapping
along or whatever it may be and now I know a little bit more about the fact that bees
are in decline' and that the loss of bees is not just 'oh well there goes
another little creature', it's a major knock-on effect for the whole world
and it makes us I think look at lots of different species. Every year more and more species
die and it's not just the death of one object, one thing, it's the death
of part of an ecosystem and part of the whole chain of life.
BN: Urban societies and urban societies are getting bigger and bigger and bigger, they
don't really have a connection with the natural world any more, there's
kind of - it's a 'them and us' approach and the whole point
of Pestival is to bring the environment straight *** into the culture of the city and say
that actually 'them and us' doesn't exist, there's no boundaries, there's
no boundaries between human disciplines of science, art, literature and there's
no boundaries between species, we all exist on the same planet, we all need to conserve
the planet and we all need each other to survive and that's every species on the planet.
You need good and bad vectors and pollinators, good and bad humans and you need every discipline
to create a cohesive society and Pestival is about an understanding of that and an appreciation
of it and making people want to be part of the society in which we live.
AH: It's going to be fantastic.