This TED Talk features conservation biologist Steve Boyes recorded live at TED 2018.

Visible from space, the Okavango Delta is Africa's largest remaining intact wetland wilderness.

This shining delta in landlocked Botswana is the jewel of the Kalahari,

more valuable than diamonds to the world's largest diamond producer,

and celebrated in 2014 as our planet's 1,000th UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Now what you see here are the two major tributaries, the Quito and the Kubangu,

disappearing up north into the little-known Angolan highlands.

This is the largest undeveloped river basin on the planet, spanning an area larger than California.

These vast, undeveloped Angolan watersheds were frozen in time by 27 years of civil war. In fact, Africa's

largest tank battle since World War II was fought over a bridge crossing the Okavango's Quito River,

there on the right, disappearing off into the unknown, into the terra da fiendamundo, the land at the end of the earth,

as it was known by the first Portuguese explorers.

In 2001, at the age of 22, I took a job as head of housekeeping at Bundumtiki camp in the Okavanga Delta,

a patchwork mosaic of channels, floodplains,

lagoons, and thousands upon thousands of islands to explore.

Home to the largest remaining population of elephant on the planet.

Rhinos are airlifted in C-130s to find sanctuary in this wilderness.

Lion, leopard, hyena, wild dog, cheetah, ancient baobab trees that stand like cathedrals under the Milky Way.

Here I discovered something obvious.

Wilderness is our natural habitat too.

We need these last wild places to reconnect with who we really are.

We, all seven billion of us, must never forget, we are a biological species, forever bound to this particular biological world.

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