Bernhard Grzimek

Grzimek started the Zoo in Frankfurt and wrote one of the most detailed Encyclopaedia of Animals together with Konrad Lorenz, who was perhaps more famous for his breakthrough studies with the geese.

Bernhard Grzimek is one of the top conversationists of the last century. He had this prediction:

Large cities continue to proliferate. In the coming decades and centuries, men will not travel to view marvels of engineering, but they will leave the dusty towns in order to behold the last places on earth where God’s creatures are peacefully living. Countries which have preserved such places will be envied by other nations and visited by streams of tourists. There is a difference between wild animals living a natural life and famous buildings. Palaces can be rebuilt if they are destroyed in wartime, but once the wild animals of the Serengeti are exterminated no power on earth can bring them back.

Grzimek is most famous for the work he undertook for the conservation of the Serengeti. He spent several years studying the wildlife there along with his son Michael, especially on areal observation and counts of large scale annual migrations. In 1959 Michael was killed in an aircrash while flying the Dornier Do 27 due to a collision with a Griffon Vulture. He wrote a best-selling book called Serengeti shall not die, which appealed enormously to the public and was key in driving the creation of the Serengeti National Park.

Many of his predictions did come true and we now have a chance to play our part to create a more beautiful and stable world.