Contact:
Dr. J. Irish
Coordinator: Namibian Biodiversity Database
P.O. Box 30061, Windhoek, Namibia
Tel.: +264-81-269-6602
email: jirish@mweb.com.na
So, how did I get to be here and doing this?
I grew up in Windhoek, at a time when it was just another 'dorp in Suidwes'. I attended Orban Primary School, which was housed in a beautiful old historical building on Peter Müller Street in the city centre. Orban has long since been moved to the suburbs, the same building today houses Namibia's College of the Arts, and the street has been renamed to honour Fidel Gastro. Times have changed. At least Windhoek High School is still more or less where I left it in 1975.
Then, as now, kids hated staying at home. Since there was no television, computer games or shopping malls, we spent our time in the great Namibian veld that began just beyond the last houses (which were also quite a bit nearer then). Somewhere along the line my interest in the living things I encountered there was kindled, and I wanted to learn more about them, but there was simply no information available. The local library had books about Europe or America, and sometimes South Africa, but the animals and plants occurring around Windhoek were not in those books. Eventually my quest for biodiversity information became a career choice and I attended the University of Pretoria to become a wildlife researcher (this was before Namibia had universities). Halfway through my studies I realised that, though elephants and lions and such were interesting, lots of people were already working on them. By contrast, very few people were working on the very many thousands of invertebrates out there. I believed, and I still do, that this is where the most work needs to be done, so I became an entomologist instead.
In late 1981 I began working at the State Museum in Windhoek, now called the National Museum of Namibia, doing my modest bit at generating knowledge on Namibian entomology. By now I had realised that my childhood impression that there was no information on Namibian biodiversity was actually wrong - there was a tremendous amount of information already available, it was simply inaccessible. It was published in obscure journals, often in languages I could not understand. Assuming one somehow learned of the existence of such information, actually getting to see it was not always easy. Those journals were not available in Namibia, and the cost of international interlibrary loans was exorbitant. It would have been great to have had a resource such as the Namibian Biodiversity Database back then. It is here today because the need has not diminished, by contrast, the need for accurate and comprehensive biodiversity information is greater than ever. Namibia's natural environment is one of her greatest assets. It is an asset that can be either sustainably developed, or exploited and ultimately destroyed. The choice is ours, and the difference between the two options often rests heavily on the information available when the choice needs to be made. The Namibian Biodiversity Database aims to provide decision makers, policy makers, educators, students and ordinary people with the best possible information, in order to ensure that choices are made in the best interest of not only us, but also our children.
"Sustainable development means, we did not inherit Namibia from our fathers, instead, we are borrowing her from our children."
So, how does one get a handle on a subject so vast and wide as biodiversity information? In 1983 the answer seemed to be one of those newfangled things called computers, but the powers that be did not want to pick up the price tag. As a result, I bought my own computer and began entering information. It was an Amstrad PCW 8512, a product of the since-extinct British computer industry. It had an 8080 processor that ran at a blazing 4 MHz (or, almost 1000 times slower than today's entry level machines). There was no hard drive - all the programs I ever needed fitted on one stiffy, and all the data I ever entered fitted on a few others. The operating system was CP/M, a Unix variant - I first heard of MS-DOS much later. The machine was good for word processing, but if you wanted to do anything else you were on your own. It came with BASIC, so you could write your own programs, which I eventually had to learn to do. I still have that computer. It still works, though of course I don't use it anymore. The baseline Namibian insect list which eventually became incorporated into the Namibian Biodiversity Database began life on that Amstrad many years ago, and has been transferred from machine to machine and across operating systems and architectures to where it is today.
On the shelf beside me as I write this is what might be considered an early paper-based prototype of NaBiD: a loose-leaf file with handwritten literature records and sight records of Namibian birds and mammals, complete with tiny distribution maps. I made this sometime in the 1970's. It was never even put on to the Amstrad, but because the sight records have acquired historical value by now, they will be going into NaBiD soon. Somehow it feels as if a circle would be completed when that happens.