Jane Goodall on Chimpanzee and Human Emotions

chimpanzees more like us than any other living creature it's absolutely extraordinary how biologically we realize far more today than when I began in 1960 how like us they are the DNA of the chimpanzee and humans differs by only just over one percent I'm sure that some of you read about the unraveling of the chimpanzee genome and when I talked to geneticists they tell me this shows that chimpanzees are even more like us genetically than we thought before and that the main differences are the expression of the genes and that the genes can actually be affected by the environment the blood of the chimpanzee so like ours in composition you could get a blood transfusion from them if you match the blood group the immune system so like ours that they can catch or be infected with all known human diseases which is why some scientists have incarcerated them in five foot by five foot cages to investigate otherwise uniquely human diseases unfortunately these scientists were reluctant to admit the equally dramatic similarities in the behavior of chimpanzees and it shouldn't surprise us that given the similarity of brain and nervous system that they are capable of intellectual performances like the tool-using and tool-making which used to be considered the hallmarks of the human species and chimpanzees are capable of so many fascinating intellectual performances for captive chimpanzee can learn more than 400 of the signs used by deaf people American sign language and they can use those signs when communicating with each other as well as communicating with their teacher in the wild I think one of the most fascinating expression of intelligence is the way they manipulate each other socially it's quite extraordinary how adept they are in fact books have been written about chimpanzees political skills because they form alliances they're so quick to pick out the weakness in a superior someone who's normally dominant to them but maybe he's got a little wound or he's hurt himself or he's got a headache and he's just not up to par today and instantly a younger one will take advantage and challenge him and sometimes in that way actually rise up in the social hierarchy the way infants manipulate their mothers well anybody who's a mother here knows that kids can do that and chimpanzee infants certainly are very very good at at this the chimpanzees as the president said they do each have their own vivid and unique personality they also have emotions similar to those that we call happiness sadness fear despair they're capable of mental as well as physical suffering and all these things that I've just said were considered absolutely not possible when I first went to Cambridge University in England in 1961 I have done everything wrong I shouldn't have given the chimpanzees names they should have had numbers I couldn't talk about them having personalities or minds or feelings because those were unique to us and you know by that time I was 27 by the time I actually got the Cambridge Louis Leakey had told me I had to get a degree because he wouldn't always be around to get money for me and we didn't have time to mess with the BA I had to go straight for a PhD which was you can imagine a little intimidating since I've never been to university at all but I was excited to go and learn how to deal with all this data I'd been collecting so it was a shock to be told I'd done everything wrong and I suppose I might have just kowtow to these erudite prefer so since that okay if you want it that way flow can be number two and David Greybeard can be number six and so forth although I would never have remembered who they were if I'd done that but what gave me the courage of my conviction that however erudite these professors were they actually were wrong that animals other than us did have personalities minds and feelings was the teacher I had as a child some of you know this but the teacher I had all through my childhood who taught me so well was my dog Rusty and any of you who have or have had a dog or a cat or shared your life in a meaningful way with some with some animal will understand and agree that this is right and now finally all these years later we're moving into a world where even science is beginning to accept but these things are true where in most major universities you can study animal mind you can study animal emotion you can even try to come to grips in the psychology department with animal personality so we are moving there and by and large the main pockets of resistance are those people who in some way or another are exploiting animals in painful and invasive ways but gradually I think the voice of the animals is is growing a couple of stories about chimpanzees and I say they're so like us more like us than other creatures not just in using tools but their emotions happiness sadness fear despair their nonverbal communication kissing embracing holding hands patting on the back swaggering shaking the fists throwing rocks sometimes with very good aim the fact that they not only hunt but share in response to begging the fact that you have these long-term supportive relationships between mothers and their growing young that can last throughout life and they can live to be more than 60 years by the way the oldest chimpanzee alive too is said to be 73 or 74 and that believe it or not is the original cheater of the original Johnny Weissmuller stars on and he lives in Palm Springs and I really want to I know his old trainer and I really want to go and visit cheetah before he dies I have a painting he made but anyway he's very very old mostly chimpanzees don't live to be that long but let's imagine for a minute that we're walking through a forest were following a splendid young male in his prime he's about 23 years old his name Satan not because he's particularly wicked but because when he was a youngster my mother was out visiting she was writing a manuscript and Satan took it from her tent and chimps loved chewing on paper we had to bribe him with a banana to get it back but that was long ago in his youth now he's 23 and suddenly as he's going along this trail he hears the sound of excited feeding chimpanzees ahead of him and 20 of them making that sound big sound in the forest so Satan's hair bristles with excitement he hastens along the trail then he comes to this huge tree filled with ripe fruits and feeding chimps and he climbs up the trunk he sees a nice bunch of ripe bread figs he swings towards it there's a younger male feeding there about 19 years old but Satan is dominant to him so he threatens him and the young male backs away screaming and Satan begins to feed what Satan didn't realize is that higher up in the canopy is that young males older brother who now comes swinging down and the two brothers together start attacking Satan and now he screams to my amazement a very ancient female who's been feeding very peacefully up in the branches comes swinging down she drops her frail self onto these three battling males had teeth a worn to the gums her hair is sparse and with her frail little fists she starts hitting on the two brothers who are so amazed that they mildly threaten her and Satan gets away and that was Satan's ancient mother sprout so this is just one day after Mother's Day and we don't only think of mothers on Mother's Day anyway so we talked about my mother and now I'm talking about sprout what happens when a young chimpanzee loses his or her mother if they're under three years old they're still dependent on milk and they can't survive and even much older individuals are so emotionally shattered when they lose their mothers that they may fall sick immune system depressed and actually die because in the wild the young chimp suckles although less often after three but sleeps with the mother and night and less and less frequently but still rides on her back in travel and is totally dependent until the birth of the next baby when the older child is five or even six and one infant lost his mother when he was three-and-a-half just able to survive on solids we didn't think he could live he didn't have an older brother or sister if he had had he would have been adopted but he was alone in the world and for two weeks he wandered around following this group and that group and everybody was nice to him but there was none of that special nurturing bond that is as important for chimpanzees as it is for humans and then to our amazement a twelve-year-old adolescent male called spindle adopted Mel he waited for him in travel he left the infant right on his back if Mel begged whimpering for food spindles shared when Mel came up to sit at the edge of spindles nest at night they make these leafy platforms Mel would sit and give little sad little whimpers and spindle would reach out and draw him close and they would sleep curled up together and I think most most impressive for me is when the adolescent male around spindles age about 12 years they're beginning to rise up beginning to challenge the lower ranking young males and challenge the females but they are very cautious when the big males the dominant males are socially aroused then when these big males are competing for dominance they will show these dramatic charging displays they hurtle across the ground they're stamping with their feet they're slapping with their hands hair bristling lips bunched in a ferocious skull leaping up swaying the vegetation hurling rocks if an infant gets in the way that infant may be dragged or even thrown it's as though the big males lose their inhibitions and the mother's job is to make sure that that doesn't happen spindle even took that on even though it meant that he was often buffeted by these males who by now he's hero-worshipping watching learning from but normally keeping out of the way as I say when they're socially aroused there's no question but that spindle saved Mel's life and we might ask why did this adolescent male really devote himself to this small sickly infant not related to him at all and maybe we'll never know but what's fascinating to me is that the epidemic that claimed Mel's mother also claimed spindles ancient mother none other than that old sprout spindle was Satan's younger brother and although at 12 years old you certainly don't need your mother when you're a chimp if she's around and things go wrong for you if you get attacked if you get injured and she's alive you go and seek her out you spend peaceful days and you gradually recover until you're well enough to go back into the world of the adult males so maybe just maybe losing his mother left a sort of space in spindell's heart which was filled by this close contact with a small dependent in and that's how I felt after I lost my mother there's a space that we have which can never quite be filled it's not at all scientific to talk in this way but then it was perhaps the fact that one can develop intuition for these beings that's really helped us to understand what it's all about what their lives are really like in the wild and then we can test what we feel intuitively with scientific rigor that's the way I've done my study and that's the way I would do it again it's clear that chimpanzees more like us than any other creature have really helped us to redefine our position in nature it's very clear once you've spent time with the chimpanzees that you can no longer draw a sharp line between humans on the one hand and the rest of the animal kingdom on the other it's a very blurry lines getting more blurry all the time and it's absolutely definite I think that we are not the only no it's definite we're not the only beings on the planet with personalities minds and feelings and that gives us a new respect not only for the chimpanzees but the other amazing animal beings with whom we share this planet and this should be something very exciting for us because it's an amazing Kingdom the animal kingdom there's so much left to learn sometimes students come up to me and say but but Jane you know people have learnt all there is to learn absolutely not there's still so much to learn and some of it will never learn I think I mean will perhaps never know what does it feel like what does it feel like to inhabit a world of smell like a dog you know you've seen the dog with his nose out of the car window his eyes are kind of half closed his ears stream back and that nose is twitching what is that world like we can guess but we can never really know would it be like to be one of the great whales deep down in the dark of the ocean and communicating with these haunting songs what would that be like again I don't think we'll ever know and there are so many mysteries like that and so much to find out we just had after 45 years something happened at Gumby just last week I heard about it two days ago in an email and this was the mother of the only surviving twins gremlin she had another infant after weaning the twins successfully so they're about nine years old and her baby was two and then her eldest daughter Gaia had an infant just a few days ago and what happened something that's never happened before gremlin stole her grandchild and she's now suckling her little boy gimli two years old and Gaius baby who's yet unnamed probably will be called galaxies and it seems that Gaia the mother doesn't really mind and she just sits close and grooms her mother and grooms Gimbel gimli and sometimes grooms her own infants and seemed quite content to let mom look after it and somebody said well you know gremlin looked after those twins for so long she feels it's better to have two babies and one isn't quite enough so she better take her daughters as well anyway we now wait to see what's going to happen it's totally fascinating and I tell you that story one because it's brand-new and two because it just shows you how much we still have to learn about one community of chimpanzees that we've studied for forty-five years I mean my goodness that's amazing isn't it how sad that these extraordinary ambassadors from the animal kingdom both vanishing in the wild they're becoming extinct there were at least somewhere between one and two million a hundred years ago closer to two million there must have been at least a million across Africa when I began in 1960 and there's no more at the very maximum two hundred thousand but we think it's much more like 150,000 or even less and they're disappearing as their habitat is destroyed as human populations grow as logging companies make roads deep into the heart of the previously undisturbed forests in central Africa and as the bush meat trade which is the commercial hunting of wild animals for food takes its toll on all wildlife living in those forests elephants and gorillas chimpanzees down to birds and bats and the meat is smoked or dried in the Sun and now this transport to take it to the towns where the urban elite will pay more for it than they will for a piece of chicken or goat the Jane Goodall Institute is working along with a coalition of other NGOs and Carrie Bowman here in the University of Toronto is working on the bush meat trade and trying to see what can be done by product with the bush meat trade is little infants being orphaned in the old days no real self respecting hunter and subsistence hunting you don't shoot mothers with babies that doesn't make sense you want the stock to continue but now it's being done for money it's very different it is not the hunters from the forests it's the hunters from the towns making money and these little infants well they don't sell them for meat because there really isn't any meat on a baby chimp it's just very thin and small and so the hunters will sometimes sell in in the markets beside the cutout bodies of their mothers it's illegal to hunt and sell chimpanzees they are in danger they're classified as endangered in all 21 range countries but really for the most part there isn't anybody there who worries about that they have much more important economic and there's so much ethnic violence and warfare going on that they they can't be bothered to pay attention to whether an animal is endangered or not and anyway for the most part the government's are making money out of this bush meat trade - so it's a it's a very very difficult situation but these little orphans they government the government will confiscate them and hand them over to those prepared to care for them in sanctuaries and jgi is operating for sanctuaries in Africa the biggest is in Congo Brazzaville where we have 121 orphans because it's the heart of the bush meat trade even the Gumby chimpanzees are threatened because although within their national park they're safe although within the National Park the trees still stand outside the park the trees have gone and I realized this with shock and horror about 15 years ago when I flew across the areas along the shore of Lake Tanganyika the eastern shore and there was the forest of Gumby and outside bare slopes the only trees left were some that had been introduced for shade exotic species and those trees in the really steep ravines where people couldn't even climb down to get much for firewood and they certainly couldn't try to cultivate the slopes but everywhere else on this steep rugged countryside where the rift escarpment comes up out of the lake the trees having gone the land is becoming like a rocky desert the precious topsoil now that the root tree roots are no longer holding it is washed down into the lake with every rainy season and going along the lake it looked like a rocky desert so the question I asked myself 15 years ago was how can we try to save these famous chimpanzees when the people around are basically struggling to survive and that led to a program we called take care it's a program to improve the lives of the villagers in environmentally sustainable ways it's things like tree nurseries growing initially species them from which they can get immediate benefit like very fast-growing trees for charcoal and firewood and building poles that you can eat or sell the fruit and then moving into the indigenous species some of which play a very important role in the lives of the people their methods of farming most suitable to this steep and rocky ground most important of all I think reclaiming infertile land that's been over farmed so that within two years it becomes fertile again working with groups of children and adults to talk about conservation and the importance of conserving the water table the watershed working with groups of women in a microcredit system but any of you know the Grameen Bank started by my hero Muhammad Yunus these are programs where groups of women can take out tiny loans and start these environmentally sustainable development programs like buying some chicken or growing one of these tree nurseries and selling the seedlings for tiny amounts of money there's 98% return of the money loaned in these little micro credit banks which is extraordinary we give scholarships to gifted girls so that they can actually go to secondary school we're getting more and more support for this and so we also take people from the surrounding villages to help in the gamba research they know that their research the the tourists who come boosting the local economy now the people are our partners now they understand that we're there not only for the chimpanzees but for them as well and so we do have a chance of protecting these chimps but the tiny 30 square mile Gumby National Park isn't big enough there's less than 90 individuals there now they can no longer move out of the park like they used to because it was contiguous chimp habitat because it's all cultivated land so the only hope for them is to create leafy corridors so that they can move to other small remnant groups the closest of which is about 11 kilometers from Gumby so how can we do that well one of the answers in addition to this take care program which is putting the farmers on our side believe it or not it's coffee turns out that the hills around Gumby grow some of the best coffee in Tanzania and the farmers were not getting a price good price at all because by the time they got it from these remote hills down to where it could be shipped off to the coffee markets they just weren't making money just about breaking even so all the good coffee was lumped with the bad coffee and it was all sold together and it wasn't very exciting but when I talk to a group of specialty coffee roasters and buyers last spring in Seattle I said hey guys we need some help we need a specialty brand we need the farmers to get a good price and we need to build have a percent for JDI to help the chimps and they have they responded we had seven of them coming to help Green Mountain was out there like a flash Starbucks is out there now they have set up some roasting stations and so because of this we're able to persuade the villagers not the farmers the villagers to set aside between 10 and 20 percent of their land to leave it to regenerate and the magic about this part of Tanzania is if you leave them seemingly dead tree stumps alone in three years that can be a tree of about 20 foot high and little take care forests are beginning to spring up chimps don't like coffee they don't like the plantations they might drink it when it's made but they don't like the raw beans and so wherever possible we plan to flank these leafy corridors with coffee plantations and that will act as a buffer to protect the people from the chimps and the chimps from the people and also we shall be introducing shade-grown and organic coffee because the trees will be growing back and so this is a win-win-win situation and it's actually very exciting and we hope to create some other markets for other products that they grow so that we really can have environmentally sustainable living beside a protected group of very special chimpanzees the whole of Africa though it's a bit grim today there are indeed signs of hope president Bongo of Gabon saw some pictures taken by Mike Fay of the life in the Congo Basin he got tears in his eyes he instantly created eleven brand-new forest national parks even taking some land away that have been promised to timber concessions that's a sign of hope although the infrastructure of those parks is something different the new president of Tanzania who's been in office about four months is passionate about the environment can you imagine any other head of state who will say Jane I believe that you and I share the same kind of goals and I know that some of the things I want to do for the environment in Tanzania the effects won't be shown for the next 20 or 30 years but I want to do them anyway and will you help I mean imagine if all heads of state had this attitude and his motto for his environmental policy is protect and restore that's encouraging that's exciting for me and Tanzania being favoured by things like USAID and a lot of European donors is in a good position to take a leadership role in conservation efforts at least in in East Africa so that's a sign of hope but looking right across the continent there is so much overpopulation this bitter cycle of overpopulation with crippling poverty and the destruction of forests and the creeping of the deserts and the flooding gets worst and the worse and the droughts get worse and then you've got all the ethnic fighting and it's sometimes in some parts of Africa it seems almost hopeless and yet when you get to know the people when you spend time there when you see the extraordinary people doing extraordinary things you know there is hope for Africa how many of you are wonder read in The Globe and Mail this morning about that extraordinary woman in Burundi who's looking after all those orphans some of you must have read that yes I see hands that's amazing that's the kind of spirit that I know in Africa but if we move away from Africa for a moment sad Africa with so much environmental destruction and yet so much hope then we come to the the developed world what are we doing to our world have we done better than Africa I think we've done worse we don't have necessarily as many people but considering every single person living in an affluent society uses many many times the natural resources of someone growing up in Africa or India or one of the other developing countries you realize that numbers isn't so important it's the unsustainable lifestyles that we all have that's what's got to change large populations in some parts of the world over consumption among smaller populations in the other we have to get the right balance we have to redress this incredibly unfair world where so many people are living in total poverty on less than a dollar a day who are going to bed every night hungry and those few who have so much more than they need and we know about our reckless burning of fossil fuel we know about global climate change even President Bush has admitted there's something like global warming and that maybe we have something too with it I never thought that day would come but it has I remember being at a conference in in New York at the time of the Millennium it was the Millennium peace summit for the religious and spiritual leaders and they came from a hundred countries there were a thousand of them it was the most glorious sight to the eyes because they had all their all their you know costumes regalia whatever you call it and they were from all over the world and almost none of them addressed the environment but the one group that did consistently talk about the environment was people from nine countries the indigenous people from nine countries and they stood up on the platform in the great assembly room of the United Nations as a group and one of them who was the leader of the Eskimo nation from Greenland he sat there and he said brothers and sisters I have a message for you from your brothers and sisters in the north up in the north we know everyday what you people do in the south up in the north the ice is melting what will it take to melt the ice of the human heart and that stayed with me it's the most poignant description of global warming that I can think of what will it take to melt the ice in the human heart and it's not just the melting of the ice which is threatening the existence of polar bears and so many other forms of Wildlife threatening many low-lying countries some island nations have already had to evacuate their people it's not safe for them to live there anymore and we have acid rain we have the same kind of deforestation going on in the developed world as in the developing world and we have on top of all of that we have human greed and cruelty and crime which is everywhere we have a new threat of atomic or nuclear warfare and we have terrorism and it's a very dark world it was when I began traveling outside Africa because I realized how many Africa's problems could be laid at the door of the developed world that I began to encounter so many young people who seem to have lost hope and I'm talking about university students some high school students thoughtful thoughtful young people who look at the television who read the newspapers who listen to their elders talk ask questions and some of these young people were depressed some were apathetic some were bitter angry even violent and when I began talking to them they all said more or less the same thing we feel like this because we feel you've compromised our future and there's nothing we can do about it well we have I've got three little grandchildren and every time I look at them and think how we've harmed the world since I was their age I feel this pain their shamelessness this anger and there's a couple of young people in the frontier and know there's some other children around here have we compromised your future yes should you sit back and say there's nothing that can be done and become apathetic or depressed no and this is how this program roots and shoots began this is what I leave behind for the people of Toronto and beyond for the university especially and it's a program that actually began in Tanzania but 13 years ago began with a group of high school students on my veranda by the Indian Ocean and it's now in 97 countries we have programs from preschool right through University and the University section of it is really strong really dynamic and any of you here who are students at the University there is something very important for you right here it's a symbolic name that roots make a firm foundation should seem very tiny but to reach the Sun they can break through a brick wall and if we see the brick wall as all these problems that we've inflicted on the planet the environmental ones but also the social ones then it's a program of hundreds and thousands of young people around the world together can break through these world's walls and make this a better world for all living things so the most important message every single one of us matters every single individual has a life that's a gift and that gift can be used in ways that we choose every single day we make an impact on the world we'd make it environmentally we make it socially and we can choose what kind of impact we want to make to some extent we can choose how we leave these footprints as we go through life are they going to be deep everyone's leaving horrible scars on the planet or are we going to tiptoe and leave light footprints and leave the world as nearly as we can as we found it and if we really rise high enough we can leave it better than we found it and that's what we have to do today so the roots and shoots groups all choose three kinds of project and the kids choose the project is this until top-down although we have teachers involved we have parents Deval evolve involved we have adult mentors of course but certainly in university it's the students what are the problems around Toronto what problems do you think you could do something about and how will you do it so three kinds of problems first of all what can you do for your own human community there's always young people who are absolutely passionate to do something for those less fortunate than themselves and I know somewhere in here is Hannah who was only four or five years old when she saw an old homeless man poking around at Christmastime in the bins and she was so upset that eventually her parents helped her to fund and a ssin the ladybug fund Lady Bird fund which has now raised thousands of dollars for the homeless and Canada boasts many young people who've had this passion as children Craig and Mark Kyle Berger who started free the children Ryan who started Ryan's it seems that Canada is producing extraordinary children to answer a need in an extraordinary time and there are always children who are passionate about animals who want to help animals and Simon was one such child I first met him when he was 13 he had this passion for the spirit bears and what could he do and he's done so much so there is something here that's special and magic and I think it's called forth by the by the dark times we live in as we always do best when our backs to the wall that becomes an urgency and we've left it late we've left it very late there are people like David Suzuki who feel we've left it too long and that we can't turn it around and I don't believe that I believe this immense power of young people and there are young people who are really passionate about the environment who cleans dreams who restore wetlands who write letters who register who lobby in the legislature and get things done another young Canadian child fought for two years he went to every single meeting in the town hall to try and ban the pesticides which he associated with his cancer from golf courses and he won and these are shining examples shining lights but there are thousands of children around the world who are moving in these directions and they just need a little guidance they need to know what the problems are but then they need to be empowered to act rich and toots we know we need to change attitudes we know that we need to change this materialistic society we do not want bombs and guns and violence and knives we don't want that the tools of roots and shoots are knowledge and understanding learn the facts but understand the whole picture and hard work and persistence roots and shoots is about rolling up your sleeves and getting out and doing something learning as well but doing acting and hard work and if it doesn't work at first you carry on the little boy carried on until he got his pesticides banned Simon carried on until he got protection for the spirit bears in the legislature in British Columbia and love and compassion that's the third set of tools love and compassion that leads to respect for all life we don't always hear enough about love and compassion it's all about how do you raise a child to make the most money we measure success in sort of shallow kind of Fame like making being successful in business being successful in a pop star for instance so on the on the stage or you know successful in business and that's okay but it's not what we should be aiming for when we raise our children we should be raising decent honest human beings who understand that the you get the most out of life when you're actually giving and working to make the world better it's just it's lucky but it just makes you feel good and that's the perk because if you're if you're really working terribly terribly hard and you get very exhausted you've got to have some kind of reward specially when things aren't working that well and that's the reward we get that's something strange about being human that you actually can feel really good the more you work to try and make things better for somebody else and mother earth needs all of us it is Mother Earth Earth Day mother earth she's probably the most beleaguered mother in the world today and she's all of our mothers and we all need to help her so roots and shoots them 97 countries around the world and the question I get asked most I think is Jane do you really have hope for the future are you just saying that don't you I mean you've been unseen things happening to the chimps you've seen their numbers decline you've seen forests disappear you know about global warming you know these things are true so do you really have hope well my reasons for hope are very simplistic probably naive but they seem to work and I believe in them and I wouldn't stand here and give a talk called reason for hope if I didn't have hope how could I you wouldn't believe a word I said if I didn't have any belief myself so my reasons for hope is first of all it's this immense enthusiasm and energy and commitment and sometimes real courage of young people around the world once they know what they can do and we help them to do it it's an amazing port it isn't that children can change the well they are as we speak right now they are working so hard they're cleaning environments they're raising huge amounts of money to help people like in Katrina after the tsunami in Sudan and so forth they're changing the world as we speak my second reason for hope is this extraordinary brain that we have I mean we've sent people to the moon we've had extraordinary advances in medical technology kept my mother alive ten years after she would have died and think of our electronic communication I mean we can with a flick of the finger or press of a knob we can communicate to the other side of the world instantly we can have video come to them it's magic to me it's just magic we've got instruments that can measure stars that we can't even see we only see their light we're learning things about the universe that that are quite extraordinary so how can it be then that this this intelligent primate that's us how can we be so stupid as to be destroying our poem our planet how what's happened and you know okay it's materialistic society it's this passion for money it's making decisions not based on how will this affect our people seven generations ahead which the indigenous people used to do the elders would gather and ask that question so many decisions now made on what's going how will this affect the next shareholders meeting three months ahead that's what we're basing our decisions on and I have a real question if it but he can answer it for me I really want to know this is a puzzle for me and I'm always asking people if you take a very successful businessman ahead of a big multinational corporation and this corporation is destroying lives in some part of the developing world where poverty is increasing where perhaps local cultures are being swept aside and knowing about the devastation of the environment and this guy has grandchildren and you ask him you know do you care about your grandchild I love my grandchildren well don't you understand what's happening to the planet waste there's a disconnect isn't there there's something there's something not right here and I think what happens is that somehow there gets to be a disconnect between the brain and the heart if we think of the heart is the seat of human love and compassion and something goes wrong and I don't know what it is but we've got to put it right and the kids can the kids don't have a disconnect like that there start off where they're really pure and as they get older they learn more they learn some of the bad things but they get more passionate and we've got to support them my last reason for hope is the indomitable human spirit and my goodness we all know people who tackle impossible tasks seemingly impossible we all know people who refuse to give up and these people are like shining lights they inspire those around them the cost that is true of these children I mentioned as well but there's plenty of adults who are just I find one of the perks of my 300 days a year traveling around the world is some of the extraordinary people I meet like Nelson Mandela I mean fancy being 27 years in prison 23 years of hard physical labor and coming out of prison with this extraordinary ability to forgive so that he could lead his nation out of the evil regime of apartheid without a bloodbath and there are people who overcome seemingly insurmountable physical disabilities and they sometimes lead lives that are absolutely inspirational I don't know if any of you know the mayor of Vancouver he's paraplegic he lost the use of his legs and most of his arms when he was 19 in a skiing accident and that man has as much life and vigor in his personality as anyone else and more than most and he's a very successful mayor and I just had the privilege of having dinner with him last week Simon introduced me and I won't forget it that was an extraordinary experience my mascot here he was given to me by one of these people lost his eyesight when he was 25 decided to become a magician was told Oh Gary you can't be a good magician if you can't see well I'll give it a try he's so good the children don't know he's blind and at the end of the show he'll say things may go wrong in your life he must never give up there's always a way forward and he does scuba diving and cross-country skiing skydiving how can you be afraid if you can't see the ground he says he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro well he gave me this ten years ago thinking he was giving me a stuffed chimpanzee this has become my best teaching tool for kids I said Gary I know you can't see it's the wrong color but what about this chimps don't have tails and he said never mind take him wherever you go and you know my spirits with you so we've been to 55 countries he's probably been touched by about nearly 3 million people because I say when you touch him some of the magic some of the inspiration rubs off he'll be sitting out on the book signing table for anyone who feels they want to be inspired and the last story then some of you heard it before it doesn't matter it's about a chimpanzee who was born in Africa whose mother was shot when he was about 2 perhaps one and a half it's the only way you can catch a baby chimp is to shoot the mother and he was shipped to North America to a zoo and for about ten years he lived by himself in an old-fashioned zoo enclosure though you know the iron bars and the cement floor alone he was named Joe Joe he started off with chimp tea parties which happened to be quite cruel I know how they managed the chimps with electric collars and prods you don't see that under their pretty clothes that used to be everywhere and then a new zoo director decided to create the biggest enclosure in North America for chimps and he surrounded it with a moat filled with water because chimpanzees don't swim he got 19 other chimps carefully introduced them it always takes time for the male's to sort out their dominance order and finally it's done and they're all released onto the enclosure and is fine for a while and then one of the new young males challenges the senior male as young males do and the senior male was Jojo well Jojo having lived alone all this time losing his mother when he was so young no opportunity to learn which young chimps have to learn about chimp behavior and he's terrified at this male swaggering and hunched shoulders and bristling hair and swaggering and shaking his fists and throwing things and he rushes into the water and in his fear he manages to get over the safety barrier that was to stop the chimps drowning in the deep water beyond and he vanishes under the water after coming up three times gasping for air and luckily for him on the far side of the moat is a little group of people with a man who visits the zoo once a year with his wife and three little girls and he jumped in and he jumped in even though the keeper who was there grabbed on to him and said you'll be killed this chimp weighs 130 pounds he's much stronger than you are which is true and male chimps can be aggressive which is true but Rick pulled away and he had to swim feeling under the water touched jojo's in her body managed to get this hundred and thirty pound deadweight over his shoulder got over that barrier pushed Jojo up onto the bank of the enclosure and turned to rejoin his slightly hysterical family there was a woman there with a video camera and she just kept filming she didn't know she was filming but that little piece of film enables you just to see and particularly here what happened next because it's all over the place but you hear the people on there on the far side of the moat suddenly screaming a trick to hurry back he's going to be killed because from their higher elevation they can see three of the big males coming down to see what's going on hair bristling and at the same time Jojo is sliding back towards the water because the bank was too steep and the camera amazingly steadies on Rick as he's standing there he's got one hand on that railing you can see him looking up at his wife and little girls you can see him looking up to where these three males are coming and then you see him looking down to where Jojo is disappearing under the water and for a moment he stood there absolutely motionless and then he went back and once again he pushed Jojo up and he ignored the screaming people he ignored the approaching chimps he's pushing as hard as he can Jojo is making feeble efforts to grab on to something and just in time with Rick pushing it's very dramatic slipping in the mud Giorgio Armani's manages to get hold of a thick tuft of grass and pull himself up to where the land is more level and just in time Rick gets back over that barrier and that little piece of film was flashed across North America and the been director of jgi USA saw it and he called Rick he said that was a very brave thing you did you must have known it was dangerous as everyone was telling you what made you do it and he said you see I had happened to look into his eyes and it was like looking into the eyes of man and the message was won't anybody help me and you see that's the look that I've seen in the eyes of these little orphaned chimps for sale in the African markets I've seen it looking out from under the frills of the circus knowing how harsh that training is I've seen it looking out from the five foot by five foot prison cells of the medical research labs I've seen it in the eyes of elephants chained swaying from foot to foot I've seen it in the eyes of dogs thrown out on the street but I've seen it in the eyes of street kids with nowhere to go and I've seen it in the eyes of children caught up in gang violence with no one to protect them and I've seen it in the eyes of little children who've seen their parents killed in the ethnic violence in Africa and in the refugee camps and if you see that look in your eyes and you feel it in your heart you have to jump in and try to help and I don't know if there's more problems in the world now than they used to be it seems that there are it may be just that there's better reporting of them I don't know but I do know that wherever I been and found a problem there has always been a person or more usually a little group of passionate dedicated people trying to put that wrong right trying to to reach social justice trying to save some piece of habitat or species from extinction and destruction and sometimes they work for nothing they often work for very little sometimes they risk their health sometimes they risk their lives they lose their lives but they're out there fighting for justice and for the protection of Mother Earth and that's really my greatest hope it's the best hope for the future and if there's any of you who want to help to make this a better world and I believe it's all of you there's so much you can do every day you can do something don't think that the little things you do don't make a difference they do because it's not just you it's a growing number of millions and millions of people around the globe who care who do see problems with their eyes and feeling them in their hearts just like you do and together we can make this a better world because for our children grandchildren and theirs we must thank you support Ontario's public television donate at TV org

Channel: TVO Docs

Views: 23,211

Rating: 4.9069767 out of 5

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, TVOKids, polka, dot, door, polkaroo, education, public, television, Elwy, Yost, Steve, Paikin, big, back, yard, ideas, Canada, Jane Goodall, Animals, Science, Big Ideas, Primatology, Environment

Id: FXsYIeg9WNQ

Length: 54min 46sec (3286 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 17 2012