Crocodile Hunter's work admirable

Conserving koalas, dolphins, tigers or baby seals is easy. People love them. They're charismatic, furry, anthropomorphic. We connect to them because they remind us of us. The sexy issues in conservation. The pretty pictures, the easy causes. The charismatic megafauna.

What Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, did was make people see the beauty in the terrifying. Making people care about manatees is easy. Making people care about scorpions, jellyfish, crocodiles-that's hard. Brash, reckless and enthused, in his shows he was the charismatic megafauna.

He was a solid and pervasive reminder in the conservation world that we cannot just protect the things we love, we must also protect those that we fear. His antics connected people to him in a way that differs from the likes of David Attenborough. He wasn't just a narrator, he was part of the story and he drew his viewers in with a passion that forced you to see the creatures he loved the way he saw them. We watched his show as much to see him as we watch to see the animals. It didn't matter why we watched, only that we did.

He was more than just a figurehead. He lived his ideals in a very real way. Most of the money he made went straight back into conservation, either by funding the Australia Zoo that he ran or though charities and other conservation issues. His passion was never an act, and people could see that. There are others fighting the good fight, and there are others who see the Croc Hunter as a clown. A caricature of a conservationist, crazy and opportunistic.

Like Timothy Treadwell, his contribution to conservation and education is ambiguous, but one thing is certain: The world is poorer for having lost him.

This is what conservation is about: Protecting organisms not because they are cute, not because we connect to them in some deep way, but because no matter what, this world is as much theirs as ours and we never have the right to take that away.

Andrew Thaler

Trinity '07