Kerry Bowman

Kerry Bowman is a Canadian bioethicist and conservationist based in Toronto, Ontario.
Career.
Bowman holds an academic appointment with The University of Toronto in Family and Community Medicine and serves with The University of Toronto's School of the Environment. He has also worked extensively with patients as a clinical bioethicist.
Bowman follows a range of bioethical issues, including end-of-life decision making, ethical questions in emerging technology, such as genomics, gene drive and CRISPR-Cas9, cloning and reproductive ethics. He is also concerned with a variety of animal and environmental ethical questions, particularly de-extinction.
Bowman's role as an ethicist informs the work he does as a wildlife conservationist, which focuses primarily on the great apes, as well as the interface of human cultures with conservation initiatives. Bowman has done fieldwork with all four great ape species in both Indonesia and Central Africa. He has observed in their natural habitat the Sumatran rhinoceros (Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia, 1981), the Bactrian camel (Gashun Gobi Desert, western China, 2012), the Javan rhino (Ujung Kulon National Park, Java, Indonesia, 2013), as well as all species of big cats, including the snow leopard (Hemis National Park, Ladakh region, India, 2015).
A former member of the board of directors for the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada, Bowman is an ethics consultant to Jane Goodall Institute Global and the founding president of the Canadian Ape Alliance. This organization operates and oversees projects in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Bowman established the Kahuzi-Biega Environmental School in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 2003. The initiative was designed to give young students an opportunity to acquire a basic education as well as an understanding of their role in environmental and wildlife conservation. "There's absolutely no way of protecting the environment without working with local people and enriching and protecting human communities", Bowman told reporters at a 2011 press conference.
Bowman was featured in a 2002 Discovery Channel documentary called "Bushmeat," which traced the path of the illicit bushmeat trade from the Congo Basin to an underground meat market in Cameroon and beyond, and in "The Ghosts of Lomako", a 2003 Nature of Things documentary in which Bowman traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to study the endangered bonobo ape. He also appeared in "Gorilla Doctors" (2014), a CBC The Nature of Things documentary focusing on the protection of mountain gorillas in Virunga, Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.
United Nations Environment Programme.
Bowman has served with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as author with the fourth Global Environment Outlook (GEO-4) in 2007 and as a contributing author and expert reviewer with GEO-5 in 2012. He was also involved in Global Environment Outlook 6, examining the connection between human health and the environment.
North Korea.
Since 2010, Bowman has joined a number of international delegations to North Korea (DPRK) that focused on environmental improvement and youth environmental education in relation to environmentally improved agricultural and environmental practice. "What is remarkable," Bowman notes, "is that DPRK may be the only country in the world that has adopted organic, sustainable agriculture as a national policy".
Uncontacted Peoples.
Bowman has recently turned his attention to the relationship between the protection of indigenous land and its environmental/climatic benefits. This work has brought him into the range of some of the world's last remaining isolated and uncontacted indigenous communities. Although never seeking to make contact, he is one of the few Canadian researchers to have actually seen uncontacted people, and has spent time with indigenous groups of the western Amazon, including those only just recently contacted by the outside world. His work has included remote regions of Papua New Guinea, as well as into the eastern Congo’s Ituri rainforest, where he cohabited among the Mbuti pygmies.