In 1993, he led a campaign to persuade the Congolese government to set up a national park to protect 400,000 hectares of the Nouabale-Ndoki forest, a vast preserve teeming with forest elephants, an antelope called the bongo, and lowland gorillas.
Then the company launches Balanchine's "Midsummer Night's Dream," teeming with forest fairies brought to life by Mendelssohn's entrancing score.
It's a blue-tinged room, booming with surf-roar and the cries of gulls and rimmed with marine dioramas: teeming kelp forests and coral reefs, a walrus lost in thought, dolphins and tuna fleeting through twilit seas.
On the edge of a town a forest, teeming with life and protected by law, comes under threat.
Gabon has plenty of problems, including corruption and misspent oil revenues, but it is also covered by dense, uninhabited forest teeming with wildlife.
It has the feel of a teeming tropical rain forest, but its dead patina makes an ominous suggestion that it may be dying off.
Alternatively, try Headwater's 11-night Costa Rica Wildlife Walk (0808 281 1572; headwater.com) for a guided trek amid volcanoes, lagoons and cloud forest teeming with everything from resplendent quetzals to swinging spider monkeys.
Dozens of volcanic peaks offer treks through rain forests teeming with a rich biodiversity.
They spent a mild, snowless winter on the shores of the lake, in a camp named Hop ("tidal pool"), where there were fields of "self-sown" grain, streams teeming with fish, forests with deer and "vines growing on the hills".
These plants grew in a very different world, dominated by spore-producers such as ferns, horsetails and clubmosses, which formed immense tropical forests teeming with over-sized dragonflies, millipedes and other nightmare arthropods.
The elevation also produces vast expanses of forests teeming with quaking aspen and Rocky Mountain maple trees, complete with a sea of colourful wildflowers that threaten to grow over the hiking paths.
