“The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaire to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaire and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I'm not sure that that's an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living, there's a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don't find out you're in town. At least with the gorillas you know that there's no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history.”
— Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
On a hot August night in 1998, Douglas Adams and I strode along a boulevard in Santa Barbara. He had relocated there to oversee Disney’s script rewrites for the movie production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We had just enjoyed a lavish vegetarian meal at Emilio’s bistro, with tech and film creatives Kai Krause, Savannah Brentnall, Jody Boyman, Berkeley Breathed, and Mike Backes, during which I regaled them with highlights of journeying down the Pacific Coast Highway, meeting influential people in Silicon Valley and pitching our appeal to Bill Gates. “Timing is everything,” I said. “I mean, showing up in Cupertino on the day they launched the iMac was fortuitous. They were easily coerced into donating a few more Macs.”
“How many AppleMasters have joined the cause so far?” asked Douglas. An offshore breeze blew, and the air was infused with orange blossom and sea salt. Tall fan palms lined the boulevard, silhouetted against the pastel hues of twilight reflected on the Pacific Ocean.
“Let me see,” I said proudly. “Michael Crichton, Richard Dawkins, Michael Kamen, John Perry Barlow, Michael Backes, you…”
“An orchard,” quipped Douglas.
“Couldn’t have done it without you, mate,” I smiled, patting him on the back.
~~~
British writer and humorist Douglas Adams is best known as the creator of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which evolved from a BBC radio comedy into a “trilogy” of six books that sold more than 15 million copies. His work blended science fiction, absurdist comedy, and philosophical wit, turning the cosmos into a backdrop for jokes about bureaucracy and the meaning of life. Beyond Hitchhiker’s, he wrote the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency series, scripted for Doctor Who, dabbled in far-reaching tech projects, and championed endangered species — which resulted in his favourite book, Last Chance to See.
Toweringly tall, famously procrastinatory (who can forget the “whooshing” sound of a deadline flying past?), and deeply curious about science, Douglas had a rare knack for making the absurd feel profound. He was a self-proclaimed “radical atheist,” adding “radical” for emphasis so he wouldn’t be asked if he meant agnostic.
On 11 May 2001, after resting from his regular workout at a private gym in Santa Barbara, California, Douglas died of a heart attack due to an undiagnosed coronary artery disorder. He was 49. His funeral was held on 16 May in Santa Barbara. A memorial service was held on 17 September 2001 at St Martin-in-the-Fields church, London — the first church service ever broadcast live on the web by the BBC. His ashes were placed in Highgate Cemetery in north London in June 2002.
~~~
Last September, I visited Douglas’s gravesite with his long-time assistant Sophie Astin. We met at The Flask pub on London’s Highgate Hill. She was sitting in the beer garden, sheltering from the downpour with a glass of wine in her hand. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly a quarter of a century. Despite the solemn purpose of our reunion — a visit to Douglas Adams’s gravesite — the mood was decidedly bright and cheery. We embraced.
“Has it really been that long?” asked Sophie. Her smile and piercing sapphire eyes were a tonic to my jet lag.
“Not since Douglas’s wake at the Groucho Club in 2001,” I said. I rubbed my travel-weary eyes. She hadn’t aged much. Dressed in white sneakers, black track pants, and a grey camo jacket with a dragon motif, she positively glowed.
When the rain ceased, we set off walking to the cemetery. Sunlight burst through the clouds, glistening on the fallen leaves of autumn. Everything sparkled.
At the entrance to Highgate Cemetery East, we joined a queue of visitors. A tall, hirsute man from the Friends of Highgate Cemetery approached us and asked if we had tickets.
“We’ve come to visit a friend’s gravesite,” I said, “but we don’t have a grave pass.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You can go right in.”
“Cheers,” I smiled. “Could you direct us to Douglas Adams’s grave? It’s our first time visiting.”
He looked at us with disbelief.
“No kidding,” I insisted. “We were his friends. We worked with him.” Pointing at Sophie, I added, “She was his personal assistant, and I enlisted his help to save gorillas.”
Convinced of our sincerity, he showed us the way.
Not far from the entrance, we found the gravesite. Devotees of the Hitchhiker books had left bouquets of pens, themed paraphernalia, and personal tributes. Festooned with a clutter of random bits and bobs, the gravesite seemed out of keeping with his stature.
“Douglas Adams, Writer, 1952–2001,” read the headstone.
Sophie was surprised by its understatement. “No ‘husband’?” she asked. “‘Father’? ‘Son’?” She scratched her head. “And ‘writer’…? I think towards the end of his life, Douglas no longer considered himself a writer. On his Digital Village business card, his job title was ‘Chief Fantasist’.”
We grieved in silence for a time, missing him terribly.
The weatherman had promised funereal weather for our remembrance, but sunshine pervaded as we tramped on through London’s celebrated graveyard, sharing memories of Douglas, pondering his greatness, and lamenting the unfathomable void he left behind when he died.
She told me about the time she flew to California to hand-deliver the “gold disc” CD-ROM master of Starship Titanic, a video game Douglas was developing at The Digital Village — back when bandwidth couldn’t handle such huge files.
“I landed in Los Angeles, handed over the package to the publisher, then turned on my heels and flew back to London.”
I reminded her of walking through Soho after his memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields on our way to his wake at the Groucho Club, alongside the likes of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Peter Gabriel, and Richard Dawkins.
“What an honour to pay my respects to Douglas in that way,” I said, “as part of a cortege that included a few of my heroes.”
“I’m glad you documented your memories of that surreal day,” said Sophie, “because mine are distinctly hazy… How did Douglas’s death affect you?” she asked sympathetically.
“For me, things were never the same again.”
~~~
A billion southern stars shone in the night sky as I aimed my six-inch reflector telescope at the shoulder of Orion and scanned the vicinity of Betelgeuse. A balmy southeasterly blew in from the sea, nudging the telescope so that Betelgeuse — a red supergiant some 500 light-years from Earth and 700 times the size of the Sun — trembled like a flower in the wind. It was 1978, and BBC Radio had just aired The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I was a 15-year-old ne’er-do-well sci-fi buff who kept a pet ring-tailed lemur in my dorm room. But at the American Lutheran Missionary School in southern Madagascar, where I boarded, Hitchhiker’s hadn’t yet reached our airwaves.
My passion was astronomy — not least because, in the southern hemisphere, the universe hung upside down. Had I known about Douglas’s creation, I’d have been a towel-carrying fan, scanning the vicinity of Betelgeuse for Ford Prefect’s home planet — Ford, the seasoned galactic hitchhiker and field researcher who, at the start of Hitchhiker’s, saves Arthur Dent moments before a Vogon Constructor Fleet destroys Earth.
Seven years later, Douglas himself arrived in Madagascar in search of the elusive aye-aye lemur. By then, I was a budding freelance writer and university dropout, hitchhiking through Southeast Asia, chasing warlords by day and dragons by night. Douglas hadn’t given much thought to wildlife conservation before then. One look at that aye-aye, though, and he was hooked.
“Here in a rainforest was a monkey meeting a lemur,” he said.
That encounter set him off on a year-long journey with zoologist Mark Carwardine to find endangered species around the world — a project that began as a piece for the World Wildlife Fund and The Observer and became Last Chance to See, a hit radio series and book. Conservation is rarely part of the bigger conversation. Seldom do ecological themes enter mainstream popular culture. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth are all fine examples. But Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine’s Last Chance to See stands alone, if only for its iconoclastic wit. That book helped shift conservation storytelling away from doom-laden moralizing and paternalistic narratives towards curiosity, humility, and moral clarity.
In 1992, when I began running the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund UK, Last Chance to See was my bible. As a 29-year-old former bartender and self-taught fundraiser, I was a tenderfoot — well out of my depth. The responsibility was overwhelming. But Douglas’s satirical take on endangered species helped ease me into my scary new job. He had a knack for telling a serious story with rare insight and irreverence, and he made wildlife conservation relatable (“Not only has the kakapo forgotten how to fly, but it has forgotten that it has forgotten how to fly”).
His account of meeting a silverback gorilla in Zaire is, in my opinion, one of the most superlative natural history narratives ever written.
“I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.” — Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
~~~
In the early 1990s, mountain gorillas were under siege in a region of Africa torn apart by war. Only 650 remained. Conservationists faced chronic underfunding and an urgent need for ranger support as field teams evacuated under fire. When Rwanda’s civil war descended into genocide, the crisis spiralled. And yet it was in this intense heat that new strategies, alliances, and thinking emerged, forged in ways that could never have happened in calmer times — a crucible of conservation. Enter Douglas Adams, who saw extinction as the ultimate absurdity and chose to give a monkey’s. For him, there was one final reason to care: “the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.”
In May 1994, I sent him an unsolicited appeal, and he replied right away: “Your letter arrived just as I was about to take some foreign currency to the bank. So I thought I’d just ship it straight round to you instead.” I called to thank him. We immediately hit it off.
Soon he was batting for Team Gorilla and opening doors for us in Silicon Valley. He wrote to Apple Computer: “We are planning to do a major TDV website with them and, in the long term, have even more ambitious plans — real-time gorilla tracking in virtual models of the Virungas on the web. The Fund already has use of a satellite for transmitting data back from Africa. They desperately need equipment right at the moment, and I have been strongly advocating Apple to them.”
As a result, we received an array of high-end Macs.
His involvement emboldened us. In conservation, often the hardest part is simply keeping going. It can be profoundly depressing. I took courage from our successes, but burnout still found me. The real challenge is to stay positive. Protecting a species at the edge of extinction in the midst of war is an extraordinary challenge. It requires not only vigilance and resilience but a shifting of global attention, funding, and imagination.
Douglas understood this. He redefined the role of patron. He wasn’t content with having his name on our letterhead; he was a hands-on strategist and advocate — fundraising, speaking out, and opening doors in places we could never have reached alone. Even while his own company, The Digital Village, was struggling, his determination was undiminished. He backed up his words with energy, commitment, and innovation.
“I’m meeting people who are sitting on pots of money,” he told me. “When I’m with them, you’ll be the parrot on my shoulder.”
~~~
In 1996, the First Congo War erupted, disrupting gorilla conservation in Virunga National Park yet again. Douglas became disillusioned. In a live online chat with AOL, he was asked how the world should react to what was going on in central Africa.
“I have no idea. I was talking today to a friend of mine who runs the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in the UK about the plight of the gorillas in the area which particularly concerns me, and it seems to me that, over the period of time that I have been interested in these kind of issues, virtually anything that anyone tries to do from outside has wildly different effects than those one intends. And I must say that I now feel terribly pessimistic about coming up with new and better ideas about how to help.”
He was perplexed by my proclivity to write one pleading appeal letter after another.
“Nothing wrong with them, as such,” he said. “It’s just this tendency to continually put Band-Aids on the problem that bothers me. I mean, you put all that effort into asking for donations, but only ever raise enough to keep the gorillas safe for a few more months. How much will it take to draw a line under this problem?”
After some consideration, we arrived at the sum of $35 million. Held in an endowment, this amount would earn interest of around $2 million a year — enough to pay for mountain gorilla conservation in perpetuity.
The idea of a once-and-for-all fund reinvigorated us both. We decided to ask the one person in the world at the time who could effortlessly cut a cheque for $35 million: Bill Gates, chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corp.
Douglas first wrote to Microsoft’s CTO, Nathan Myhrvold: “You remember the conversation we had about gorilla conservation, and the plan to put together a once-and-for-all fund to ensure (as far as is humanly possible) their future survival? The author of that plan, Greg Cummings, is flying over to the West Coast very shortly, and I wonder if you could find the time to see him. He's the head of the UK end of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. He's a good guy, and I'm sure you'd enjoy talking to him, and if there's any way you could help us further the plan, we'd be very grateful.”
My meeting with Myhrvold was constructive. He agreed to help us fine-tune our endowment proposal and to deliver it to Gates. Subsequently, Dutch entrepreneur Eckart Wintzen, co-founder of WIRED magazine, earmarked $50,000 specifically for the task. And Douglas’s business partner, Ian Charles Stewart, volunteered his services to polish our proposal. We produced a compelling film. Armed with a small digital camera, Mike Backes — a Hollywood screenwriter and co-founder of the digital gaming company Rocket Science — travelled around the world in just eight days and asked Arthur C. Clarke, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Dawkins, and Douglas Adams why it was so important to save gorillas.
After more than a year of preparation, our appeal eventually landed on Gates’s desk. We were optimistic. The Microsoft founder had visited gorillas in the wild and called them one of the natural wonders of the world. A month after receiving our appeal, however, he informed us that he would not be supporting our effort. Really? Not? It’s still a knot in my gut.
How could he not support us? Our proposal was sound — still is. He knew the years-long effort we had put into it, the great and the good we’d rallied to endorse our plan. The reasons he gave were the political uncertainty of the region and the “multiplicity of the agencies working in this area.” I never did figure out what he meant by that.
The Gates Foundation subsequently sent us a $10,000 donation. Douglas’s response: “That’s approximately one ten-millionth of his net worth. Good going, Bill.”
Late afternoon in Primrose Hill, as my colleagues prepared to catch flights back to Africa on the last day of our strategy meetings, we sat in silence at a long wooden table in the Pembroke Castle, solemnly nursing our drinks. The mood was heavy after Gates’s rejection. And civil war had returned to Congo. It was a dark day for the mountain gorillas.
Just then, a gleaming Porsche 911 pulled up outside, and a six-foot-five-inch-tall ape descendant unfolded from the driver’s seat and strode into the pub. Douglas Adams. He had come to see us off. For the next hour, over beer and scratchings, he regaled us with stories from his far-flung ecological jaunts — riffing off the plight of various endangered species.
~~~
The last time I saw Douglas was in April 2001 in the lobby of One Aldwych in London. I was due to fly to San Francisco to attend a “salon” with a group of influential tech journalists and sought his advice. I hadn’t seen him in months. His hair was white and closely cropped. He looked every bit the new media guru and blended in faultlessly with the plush surroundings.
“How can I help you this time, Greg?” he asked with a beaming smile.
“Coltan,” I said. “An entirely new threat. The mining of it is decimating Congo’s population of eastern lowland gorillas. We had no idea what coltan was at first until I circulated an email about it. None other than Gordon Moore, inventor of the microchip, wrote back to say it was probably short for ‘columbite-tantalite,’ an ore. Apparently, it’s processed into tantalum, which is indispensable to computers. I mean, there’s no point in us pointing a finger at the slaughter when we’re the ones buying up the proceeds. Is there?”
“So now tech’s the villain,” smiled Douglas. “Interesting.”
He leaned back, crossed his impressive limbs, and gazed up at a pair of azalea bushes above his head.
“You need a really constructive solution. Talk to Nokia — they’re the industry leaders in mobile phones. And see if you can’t get an article into WIRED about it. Ask John Perry Barlow to pen something.”
“Did I mention that Leonardo DiCaprio has agreed to lead our campaign?”
“Has he now,” said Douglas, without a hint of patron envy.
“Yes. The other day I got a call from Ken Sunshine, his image consultant. He wanted to know if I was certain about putting the movie star’s photograph on the cover of a mining magazine. I assured him that I was. How else are we going to get through to these nabobs? Next, I plan to write an appeal to all the companies involved in coltan.”
“Don’t appeal,” said Douglas. “Write your letter to inform. Ask them to take the initiative. And make sure you send me a copy of the draft before you circulate it.”
Two weeks later, I was in a taxi cab on Sierra Point Parkway, returning to my hotel on San Francisco Bay. The window was down, and the night was comfortably cool. I attached my Palm Pilot to my modem and phone, then logged onto the Net. There was an email from a well-known German software designer, headed: “Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few hours ago.” What? This cannot be true. I read the email with scepticism.
“While working out at a gym in Santa Barbara, Douglas’s heart stopped beating today, and he died instantly.”
Tears welled up in my eyes and blurred my vision as I struggled to read it again.
No. This could not be. The news was too grim to bear. Not Douglas Adams. He was my friend, my mentor, my North Star. He had moved mountains for the gorillas, invested his time and imagination into saving them, and he was their best damn hope. There was so much more still to do. I was numb, wounded — a parrot without a perch.
Soon after, at Mike Backes’s house in Sherman Oaks, we learned that Douglas’s funeral was going to be held that afternoon in Santa Barbara.
“Let’s go,” said Mike.
“But we weren’t invited,” I said.
“So what? Let’s drive up there anyway.”
“We won’t make it in time, Mike. It will take us at least ninety minutes to drive to Santa Barbara, and the service starts in half an hour.”
“We’ll take the Porsche,” smiled Mike.
What followed was a white-knuckle ride on a busy freeway in his 928, with Mike rapidly changing lanes, pedal to the metal. How ironic to die on our way to a funeral. We made it in forty-five minutes.
As we crept into the chapel, an organist was playing The Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” and a full house of mourners sang along: “Na na na na, hey Jude!” Standing room only. At the altar lay Douglas’s wooden coffin. How did they ever find a tree tall enough?
Sophie and I continued on our remembrance tour of Highgate, strolling between overgrown tombstones inscribed with quintessential Victorian names like Eliza Brood, Galsworthy, and Wombwell, and effigies draped in ivy, crumbling under the force of new growth as nature reclaimed the interred. Many famous people are buried here: Karl Marx, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Malcolm McLaren. The list goes on. It’s also the final resting place of Queen Victoria’s chiropodist, who wrote A Treatise on Corns, Bunions, the Diseases of Nails, and the General Management of the Feet, a landmark work in the field.
Of the thinkers, Douglas would surely have favoured some over others. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, for instance, who coined the term “survival of the fittest.” Both men grappled with the question of how humans fit into a vast, indifferent universe. Spencer mapped it with rigid laws; Adams dismantled it with satire and wit.
I was privileged to have spent seven years working alongside him on a campaign to save mountain gorillas. We were fearless outliers, not cut from the starched khaki of convention, who proved that even the most unlikely partnerships can change the course of things, if only briefly. Even without the eight-figure endowment we’d tried to raise for them, the mountain gorilla population grew by more than fifty percent over the past thirty years — a conservation success story for which Douglas Adams deserves some of the credit. His death affected so many of us.
“I know you will practically swoon with the thrill of being honoured in this way,” Douglas wrote, “but… what can I say? It’s all in a very good cause. Hell, it’s two free tickets to the movies and a party. Go on, say you will.”
“He was always so full of life, ideas, and humour,” wrote Peter. “We miss him.”
~~~
Losing my mentor still stings. On Vancouver Island, where I now live, the Douglas firs grow to up to sixty metres tall. And when a harsh wind blows, they stand firm. When I think back on our campaign, I imagine I’m a bald-headed eagle returning to my favourite perch on a trusted old Douglas fir high above the Salish Sea — a sweet spot where I typically mark my most prized salmon — only to find the tree has been felled. Realizing I can never again enjoy that vantage point, my sense of loss is incomprehensible — contrary to instinct and belief. It’s a rip in the space-time continuum. And yet I keep returning.
Decades after he’s gone, I still feel the great man’s presence. That’s how larger than life he is. Sometimes I sense he’s looking over my shoulder, smiling, urging me on.
“Don’t feel stranded, Greg. If this was easy, we’d all be doing it…”
Welcome back, old friend. I’ve missed you. Our plan to save the mountain gorillas is no less compelling now than it was thirty years ago. For today’s crypto bros, $35 million is chump change. And there’s still a chance one of them will read this, step up with the cash, and save a species.
“A bargain at the price!” says Douglas.
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