Right, I am going to give a presentation now that I gave to the Lancashire Wildlife Trust er late last year and . They were really fascinated to see that vets were interested in this area, there are so many areas that I think we can help, and they'd asked me to speak on back from the brink. Again, I, you know, I think there is so much positive things that are happening in the profession, and sometimes we're not aware of those.

But before I do start, I'm super thrilled to have John de Jong on the line, coming in early, earlyish in the morning from America. I know you've been very busy with World Veterinary Association events, John. We, we did a a small presentation at the beginning.

About the amazing legacy that er Simon has left us. I'm actually wearing the Northern Irish Veterinary Association tie. I was lucky enough to go over a couple of times to speak.

It was where I first met Simon actually. But before I start my talk, it would be great to hear from you, John, because, as we saw, you know, you were there in, in Cape Town with him on the stage as he received the event, received the award. It it shows how .

Fragile life can be in all its senses, but I know you wanted to speak a few words around what Simon had meant for you. Thank you so much. You know, as World Veterinary Association president, I know how busy you are, so it's over to you to give your .

Your valedictory to to Simon. Anthony, thank you very much. It's very, very, kind and generous for you to have me here to say a few words.

I think I just like to reflect a little bit on how I got to know Simon and what he meant to me and what he meant to the greater veterinary community, as was evidenced by him receiving the One Health Award as well as the Veterinarian of the Year Award from the World Veterinary Association when we met in Cape Town in April of 2024. I first got to know Simon at the World Veterinary Congress, World Veterinary Association Congress in Costa Rica in April of 2019, and we immediately found a common bond. We connected, had a lot of great discussions about veterinary medicine, but also I think if he were here and we were just sort of patting each other on the back, he'd probably be saying that we connected on a lot of levels besides just veterinary medicine, just as human beings.

He was an extraordinary individual with great capacity for warmth and caring for others. He was there with his camera taking photographs of all of us in the many different areas we were, whether it was in the meetings or whether we were out on a, A visit to some beautiful sightseeing some nature and some wonderful birds and all sorts of wildlife, and he shared those with all of us, as he was always so generous to do. We did lose touch somewhat after that, although we connected periodically touching base and seeing how things were going for each other in our lives.

He was supportive when, when, I was pursuing the World Veterinary Association position as president-elect. And then it was a real thrill to reconnect physically with him in South Africa. My wife got to meet him as well.

We spent a lot of good time together, just, just being the jovial kind of human being that Simon was known to all of us to be. And I, as so many others, and I know how close you were to him, we're so just shocked when we find out, found out the diagnosis. Of, of what he was dealing with and being in the hospital.

And immediately I reached out to him in the fall of 2025, 2024, a few months back, just expressing to him how saddened I was to hear what he was doing, but that I knew his positive energy and the kind of individual he was that he was gonna do the very best he could to maintain the positive attitude, to try and get through it. But I also asked him. You know, to be candid what he thought his chances were, what he was dealing with, and I think he had not, I hate to use the word resignation, but come to the realisation that things were not good and that he had very limited time.

And so over the next month or so prior to his death, he and I exchanged emails on a regular basis as him from his hospital bed, including, you know, I wrote him on Thanksgiving and told him that You know, Thanksgiving is in the United States today that we give thanks for all that we have, and I, I told him that I gave thanks for him as a friend and as a colleague. And he wrote back that, and I still have the email that he was thinking of all of his friends in the United States and how we were celebrating Thanksgiving, but that he was so thankful for so many things in his life as well, despite the gloom that he was facing and the realities of what was to come. I, at last I shared communications with him was less than a week before he actually died.

And so as I look back at his life at the extraordinary Accomplishments, but contributions to one health and veterinary medicine as a whole, not enough can ever be said about the kind of person he was and everything that he did. Thinking about sustainability and, all the things that so many of the people on this call are well aware of his capabilities. So his award was, well, so well deserved.

The rest of the World Veterinary Association shared, in the sadness of his passing, we, we put that on our newsletter on our website to let the greater world veterinary community know of the immense loss that we all felt, . With him going on to heaven and I hope that he is peaceful and in a better place, and he will not be forgotten. With that, I don't have a whole lot more to say other than I know that personally, I will miss his collegiality, his camaraderie, his friendship, and his joyful outlook on life, and, .

I wish all of you today as you celebrate his life with the Doherty sustainability summit so well and aptly named. I've got other things I've got to run to today before I fly back from Florida to Boston, but thank you for giving me the opportunity to say a few words and be with you for a short while this morning. Thank you so much, John, and I think another word that you you may or may not be aware of, it's an Irish word.

He loved the crack. Which meant the conversation, you know, having a good chat, usually with a glass of wine or a pint of Guinness or something, so he obviously enjoyed collegiality, crack, and of course Costa Rica is such a great example of a country that is doing so much reforesting and so on. But yeah, I really appreciate your time.

I know how busy you are, so it's been a big thrill for us to, to get you on and, and for you to speak so warmly about, you know, a great friend of many of us. Who will be sadly missed, but, you know, as a man of faith, he did have that hope that he'll see us all again, you know, sometime in the future. Indeed, and Anthony, I, in closing, I would say that you mentioned about earlier before you as you introduced me about how life can be so fragile.

And I cannot help but wonder because all of us meet certain individuals in our lives that are just extraordinary as far as just being decent human beings. I mean, Simon and I when we first started talking when we first met, we were, I played rugby till I was 52 years old, and we talked about rugby and had a lot of fun talking about that, but I came to our home here in Florida because I have a golf partner here the last couple of years. And we were supposed to play in a tournament in January and in December he emailed me from Denver, Colorado, where his other home was, to say that he was not going to be back and I had to find another partner because his multiple myeloma, which had been in remission, had resurfaced and that he was battling it.

Well, he was there for a month in the hospital, much like Simon was, with pneumonia, again, the parallels are pretty interesting and . Then eventually the doctors told him with the the newest, most. Advanced kind of chemotherapy that there wasn't much they could do for him and he should go home and, and be ready to, to, say goodbye to his loved ones and his friends and his family.

And so he came back to Florida and he came back here about a week and a half ago, and I've been emailing and texting him like crazy almost every day, saying, I want to see my partner, I want to visit with you and what have you, lives all of about 1 mile and a half away from me or 1 mile away in the same community, and . Sadly, on Monday, we went out to dinner two days ago with friends of ours, and they said that he had died on Sunday night, the night before, and I didn't even know that. And I was, the chills went through my body, the tears streamed down and I felt the same way when I heard about Simon in December.

So, with that, life is fragile. Everybody live life to the fullest and enjoy every day with your, and, and tell the people that you care about that you love them, because you don't know if you'll ever have that chance again. And those relationships are just so massively important, and he's enriched many of our lives.

Hopefully this is just gonna be a celebration of his life today, and John, again, I appreciate so much you coming on. We know how busy you are, and good luck with the rest of the presidency. Thank you and amen and join us in celebrate Simon again this summer if you can make it to Washington DC for our Congress, July 16 to 22.

With that, have a great, great session today and God bless. Take care. Thank you again, John.

Cheers. Just very quickly, this slide shows the London Wetlands Centre where we held our 3rd veterinary green discussion forum. We'll be talking about that a bit later on, but obviously we'd love, some of you to be able to attend the one in south, south of France in June this year.

You know, we always have to start, I think, talks like this to say that we are in a bad position. I was born in 1966, the World Wild Fund for Nature, sent out their Living Planet Report 2024 to cover the period 1970 to 2020. And over that time, we've had.

About 73% of our biodiversity is gone, so to put that into context, the average size of wildlife populations, all of the wildlife throughout the planet, if there were 100 animals in 1970, there are only 27 left. So biodiversity is really struggling, and yeah, I think there is hope, more and more people are starting to take this really, really seriously. We still need more companies and more governments and more individuals to do more.

But sometimes as humans we wait until the situation seems almost out of hand before we do anything about it and. There was a crisis in, in the 1890s. It was first of all, written in the Times in 1892, and a gentleman wrote in and he said, I've been doing calculations, and I reckon that within 20 years, most of our major cities will be 10 ft high in horse manure, because of course horses were used extensively to transport people, products, etc.

And so a conference was called in New York. For urban planners, for local government, international government, it was an 11 day conference, but after 4 days they actually called a halt to the conference because they saw no way that they could solve this situation. There was a feeling of hopelessness.

And yet of course within 1020 years the problem had been solved by clever business people like Henry Ford, Daimler, Benz, Rolls and Royce, by inventing the motor car. Now, we talk about carbon and and climate change, and obviously the car down the line has caused its own problems. But certainly.

I believe that a lot of problems in the world can be solved by inventive people and companies. And I think this is something that you know, we can certainly look towards, with some excitement. This is a picture of me.

I was in NEP, which is a rewilding site in the UK. It's just very close to Gatwick Airport in the er south of England. And the Sir Charles Burrell had a 25,000 hectare dairy farm that he was pouring all sorts of fertilisers, pesticides, etc.

To try and make this farm work for him. And he ended up finding that he just could not make money running the farm. And so he decided that he would sell off his milk quota, sell off all his machines, and basically let the estate become a rewarding project.

He'd heard about Ostwades Plasen in the Netherlands, and he, he allowed the place over a 20 year period to just rewild. I read the book. Rewilding or wilding by his wife Isabella Tre just before the pandemic and a few years ago, post pandemic, I was able to get down there.

It now has very high concentrations of pebble emperor butterfly, it has the most nightingales in the country. And so we can see that if we give nature a chance, nature will bounce back. And it is just giving it that chance within rewilding or regenerative agriculture that these things can happen.

I was very excited to be invited by Sean McCormick, who's a very good friend, a veterinary surgeon in the UK and I, I see vets doing such great work, we're gonna be celebrating that more today in the presentations. But Sean. Had been the first person within his group, the Ealing wildlife group, to release beaver back into the wild in London for the first time in 400 years.

London, capital of the UK, a very urban city. But on the outskirts of London, we now see beavers back and, and, these beavers have been released October in 2023. They'd not been seen much of by Sean since that time, and after we'd had the veterinary green discussion forum in London, I went over that evening to the site and was very excited to see the mumma beaver there and then in the next slide you can see all the baby baby beavers swimming around.

And again, beavers have added so much to that particular environment. They help in, in, as landscape architects rewilding creating wetlands. Wetlands are great for sequestering carbon, but they're also great against mitigating against floods which are becoming more common now because of climate change.

We've seen an 83% increase in climate related disasters in the last 20 years. You only need to think about this year in California, last year in Canada, the terrible floods in Valencia, to see that these problems are becoming just more and more common, and there's a lovely picture of the beaver there. And there's Sean, and, and this was the wetland, and actually where he was showing me, the mayor of London had released the beavers in, in the October and by June, there was already about 1020 ft of water where the where the beavers had been released, so the dry land had had decreased and this was holding more .

More water, frogs were coming back in, fish were being reintroduced by birds flying on the, on the water, what had been quite a dead environment was coming back to life. And you can see they're cutting down trees, creating dams and a lovely big beaver footprint at the end. This is in fact a little piece of land very close to me, which I was encouraging the council to give back to us.

Government moved slowly, 2 years down the road, we still haven't been able to plant any trees and make it a community orchard. But last year I said to them, please, you know, it's been mown almost to obliteration, it's a green monoculture. Just allow the grass to grow, no more may and see what happens.

And after grass that had been mown, you know, for 20 years, was allowed to flourish, you can hopefully see there that there's bee orchids, have returned to the site. We're quite close to the beach where I live, but bee orchids are rare species, and it was so, incredibly exciting to see them coming back. So nature will rebound if we give it a helping hand.

Sparrows, you know, 20,000, sorry, since '66, I used to have sparrows fighting on my street where I lived in a very urban area close to the football grounds in Liverpool. 50 million er sparrows have been lost in my lifetime in the UK. And yet it's been really satisfying in my own garden.

Again, very small patch of land, but trying to keep it, it maybe a bit more scruffy, less Victorian. And now I see sparrows back in my garden again, so we can all make those efforts, and they can be really small efforts. The small patch of garden that I have, I'm not you know, putting herbicides on, I'm not putting pesticides.

We get large numbers of birds and mammals like hedgehogs and mice coming into the garden. Because I'm not obsessed with tidiness. And we all know what the problem is, you know, the floods, the fires, the droughts, paradoxically droughts, huge numbers of cars on the roads.

So it's, it's so important that all the work we do, you know, trying to car share going into trains can make a massive difference. Because there is certainly now a condition it was recognised and spoken about in one of the webinars we did with the Royal College called Solastalgia. It's a condition seen mainly in young people who get to the point where they say there is no hope.

The world is screwed, eat, drink and be merry cos tomorrow we die. Or let's just go to bed, stick the duvet cover over our heads and give up and get depressed about it. But I'm still a believer, you know, a, a pilgrim of hope that we can turn the ship around, but we all must do our little bit.

And what do we need to do as a veterinary profession? You know, as a veterinary profession, because we can only impact the area that we're in, we need to reduce our carbon by 50%. If we all put solar panels on our roofs and our practises, that would have a massive effect.

I've done that at my own house in the UK and. One, it saves me money now, but, you know, more importantly, it's helping to reduce carbon within the atmosphere. Also 30 by 30, you know, countries all over the world have committed to, By 2030, 30% of their land within their country and their oceans and seas around them will be given over and will be, have high biodiversity value.

We're not there in the UK we have a lot of public and national parks that look beautiful, but are actually green monocultures, and how can we change that? Then also, you know, the circular economy, 0 to landfill, but we need to do more than that. How do we, repurpose, how do we rethink, how do we reduce, how do we refuse, how do we use less and less plastic, you know, the plastic is slated to double in its production over the next 20 years.

I go down to our beach, I see lots of plastic there that I never saw when I was a young boy. We need to be. Sorting these situations out, reducing the amount of plastic we're using in veterinary practise, and then making sure that we are reusing, recycling as we can do and finding alternatives if we can.

As we said, the constituents and government business individuals, we can only do, you know, impact our own areas, which is as individuals, so small actions by many people adds up, and then by the businesses that we either run or that we use as suppliers, you know, we can go to them and say, what are you doing like Mars, how can you do more? Government are doing some good things, we've seen the biodiversity net gain, . Information coming through in the UK brought in by the last administration.

This is a real opportunity for vets to get involved, to advise farmers how can some of their land be used for biodiversity net gain, to make money. If you don't know about biodiversity net gain, do go and look it up. It's a really interesting area and it is an area that brings a lot of hope to me that we can improve on that 30 by 30 target.

You can see Na England were at our conference last year, our forum in in June, and they were talking about some of the super reserves that are being created like the Mendip Hills. So we are moving in the right direction, we need to do more. Kate Brandt, who is the chief sustainability officer at Google, talking about this very much being the, the key decade, the decade when we need to do things.

If we don't reduce our carbon, if we don't improve biodiversity in this decade, it's going to become more and more difficult to do it. And you can see that actually, you know, big business banks, companies like Mars, Unilever are taking this whole area very seriously. We need to make sure that we're encouraging them and using the banks and the finance companies that are doing more and those that aren't doing, maybe we pull our accounts from them.

WWT, the world's, sorry, the wetland and wild flat wild, wildfowl Trust has been doing some fantastic work about creating wetland strategies. Wetlands help us in many, many ways. Tony Junifer has spoken at one of our conferences previously.

He's the chair of Natural England, and he said that humankind's future lies not in the endless degradation of the natural world, but in its restoration. Including for the vital services and benefits provided by different kinds of wetlands, they are a vital asset for society and now is the moment to plan for their protection, recovery and expansion. And we do this not because they're just pretty, but we know that they help to bind carbon in a way, you know, better than even trees will do.

We know that they'll improve wellbeing, people spending time in green spaces generally feel better about themselves than if they don't. Of course we know that floods are happening and my local nature reserve flooded during Storm Christopher a few years ago and prevented a lot of flooding in one of the local areas in Liverpool called McGull, saving about 7 million pounds for the insurance company. And of course if we do all of these things, we're creating a real fantastic haven for nature to thrive.

So we can also be restoring biodiversity. It's a beautiful holistic approach that we should be doing more of, you know, if we just think about carbon, plant trees that are non-natives in the wrong place, then this isn't going to help with increasing biodiversity and bringing species back from the brink. And you can see here Neil Heseltine er doing some fantastic regenerative agriculture up in Mallon.

Robin Hargreave's a, a good friend of mine, a fellow vet, also very interested in this whole area, an attendee at the Veterinary Green discussion forum, talking about the fantastic work that he's doing in making regenerative agriculture also cost effective as well. And you can see the beautiful wildflower sward which has all but disappeared from the UK but is hopefully coming back as we allow nature to regenerate. And I think the key with all of this is that we listen to each other, we learn from each other, and the Chinese have this great symbol for listening, which says we don't just listen with our ears, but we listen with our eyes, with our undivided attention, with our hearts.

And by doing that we can learn so much more and, and. Begin to see that the solutions to all these problems are not black and white, but grey, and we need to listen and learn from each other. From the doing the biodiversity, the veterinary green discussion forum, the the veterinary greens discussion forum has already been able to contribute to Lancashire Wildlife Trust to help over 30 hectares of Of wildlife, of of exhausted livery to be regenerated for the benefit of wildlife, and I was very excited to be involved there to actually start planting some of the wild flowers that hopefully we will see this summer time.

So Fantastic work that we're gonna be demonstrating as the day continues, starting first with Anna, in her presentation about golden eagles being released back into the south of Scotland. But I wanted you to understand that, you know, all is not hopeless, that we still have time to turn the ship around, for the benefit of the environment, and I think as vets, we're almost duty bound to be leading in this area. I wanted you to know that there are some fantastic veterinary stories that are happening, to encourage you to do, if we all do our bit it adds up to a lot.

And Saint Augustine was supposedly quoted as saying, Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage. I think it's right sometimes when we see the litter on the beaches, when we see trees and and forests being cut down, that we get angry about things.

So angry at the way things are, but courage to see that they do not have to remain as they are. So I think it is about us talking about it, you know, as leaders of our community, if people see us putting solar panels on our roofs, if people see us putting wildflower meadows at the front of our practises, they will learn and they will maybe start to copy. To know and not to do is not to know, so.

If you can just take one thing from today's sustainability summit and take it into your own life, into your own business, then as we all act together, small actions add up to really big results. So thank you for listening. This was a skein of pink-footed geese which are increasing in number in the UK.

Very close to my home where I live at the beach at Crosby, and it was, it's thrilling to see those in the morning, you know, the natural world raises my spirits, it brings joy, helps with my own mental health. Let's just carry on doing more of it to save the planet. So thanks so much for listening.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing the geese there. Thanks very much, bye bye.