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tv   Jane Goodall  Al Jazeera  June 25, 2018 5:32pm-6:01pm +03

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they've released images of another in the city of north of the capital sana'a a news agency says twenty four civilians most of them women and children were killed in the attack and meanwhile the warring sides have exchanged prisoners in southern. and southern province of. the spokesman says seventy four of their faces were released and exchanged for forty five from the coalition environmental organizations are often pressure on the un to investigate what they describe as a strain is failure to protect the great barrier reef and to the un as the unesco world heritage committee meets in bahrain global warming is seen as a major factor in the death of large parts of the reef but environmentalists also accuse a strain is government of adding to the problem this agricultural and mining policies . with all the headlines talk to al-jazeera next african heads of state and government gather in mauritania for the thirty first assembly of the african union
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ongoing conflicts in the fight against corruption will take center stage al-jazeera will bring you extensive coverage of the summit and its outcomes the african union summit on al-jazeera. in the world it was born for me to eat and eat you see. i'm malcolm webb income part of the capital of uganda which is one of the countries where thousands of chimpanzees can still be found after the highland forested slopes because other countries they've already completely disappeared and wherever they live there on the tremendous pressure chimps like humans living through the same feelings they used tools these are qualities that were discovered only in the one nine hundred sixty s. why young british woman she lived with chimps. and grew closer to them than anyone before jane goodall widely seen as the world's leading primatologist
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conservationist talks to al-jazeera. you one of the world's most recognized. him pansies what's so special about chimpanzees are our closest living relatives on planet earth we share ninety eight plus. of our d.n.a. with chimpanzees a great deal of our communication non-verbal is the same kissing a brazing holding hands patting on the back swaggering shaking their fist begging for food if you what your group of chimps you know exactly what they're about because we do the same they were the first wild animals in the scientific community to demonstrate tool using and tool making and it was that observation where chimpanzees were picking grass dams to fish for termites but also picking leafy twigs and having to modify them beginning of tool making by stripping the leaves on
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the side branches and it was that that brought in the national geographic society to fund my research when the first six months money ran out so you know since then we've followed. the life history of chimpanzees in the wild and in captivity because we work on captive chimps as well learned about the different cultures in different countries and like in west africa the rocks used as hammers to open the same knots are gone but they don't use that so it's a cultural tradition passed from mother to child we've learned a great deal about the importance of the mother mothers have different personalities some are much better mothers than others and the good supportive mothers are the ones whose offspring do well the males get higher in the male hierarchy the females are better mothers so that the thing that's for me exciting about that is the reason i've done what i've done i had
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a supportive but what were the most interesting things that you discovered and greatest disappointment as well as the greatest similarities for as i've said in my non-verbal communication but in addition they actually have a kind of primitive war and they are territorial and the males patrol the boundaries at the territory and if they spy an individual from a neighboring community they will follow give chase keep very quiet for maybe over an hour looking they're looking for individuals and then they will kill them they will actually kill them so you know they have war on the one hand but also altruism and love and compassion so in both these ways the aggressive and the loving they're so close to us and when you first meet some of these discoveries you came under quite a lot of criticism for the implications that you made about done chimpanzees but
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also about humans in the press including criticism you as a woman were making discoveries about mankind that was possibly controversial enough in your. what kind of things did the what did you think about. what i was criticized for was first of all when i saw tool using and the scientists said well she's just as i haven't been to university we couldn't afford it. and so they wanted to disregard everything but then when the geographic center you got and loic and he filmed it they could no longer deny what i had seen in fact even before that my sister came out i said i don't want anybody coming but she sounds like me and she looks a bit like me so she came with a camera and she actually filmed termite fishing so. then they had to believe it but the next thing was the aggressive behavior because at that time in the early
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seventy's it was a it was a political issue and science was divided i guess more than science but certainly science as to whether human infants are born with like a clean slate everything is learned from your culture from the society from your mother. and then on the other hand there were those who said well there's a lot of learning involved and. chimpanzees and human beings learn by watching each other and learning about their cultures so it was a very political issue believe it or not and we had one of the first russians primatologist taking part in an international conference and when it came to aggression before he said a word he had to go off and telephone his boss in moscow so eventually i went to cambridge university after i'd been with the chimps for two years. so i
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had a supervisor who was wonderful for me but he was also one of the top people are just and when we had this conference he was there to. and he was on the side of everything is law and that's what he talked about and i was saying you know. some things are inhabited it's instinctive that we have these aggressive so i know as a mother because when your child is threatened you get the surge of adrenaline and sometimes anger it's not rational but it's there so when i sat down with him to have a cup of coffee i said what do you really believe about where that aggression is that made it you know what he said to me he said jane i'd rather not talk about what i really believe that gave me such a bad attitude toward science i thought how can you be like this. so these things are as has progressed since then in his understanding of these things mainly the
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people who who. don't believe in all this inherited stuff and don't believe that animals have personalities and emotions and so forth they're mostly the people who are either in primate research labs where animals are tortured still or intensive farming and we know how cows and pigs are treated chickens and turkeys but it's mostly those people who don't want to admit that animals have personalities minds and above all emotions and one interesting observation which i never forgot when you were thinking about different personalities. the other from hell at that time mike. i think it was humphrey anyway an aggressive male so when an infant began screaming because his mother wouldn't nurse him the aggressive male went to attack the infant screaming so of course the infant
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screamed more and that blew any chance of a stranger however another male on another occasion the same infant old so much more gentle individual and when the infant made a noise he went and embrace him so you see the difference in the two personalities this is what's so fascinating there is different from each other as we are you're going to become right and what's there why are you going when i first came to uganda it was in the mid sixty's and it was in the days of e.d.m. mean and at that time there was the intent to. and they had i think about eight or nine infant chimps whose mothers had been shot for bushmeat and they didn't have proper cages they didn't know anything about them they wouldn't really wire netting cages they had nothing to do they were very disturbed and so i managed to find a zookeeper from london zoo who volunteered and her parents gave her
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a car so she could get around and gradually that built up cages proper cages and introduced you know for chimps and many other animals to boredom is one of the awful things you see and in bad zoos they have nothing to do think of their lives in the wild and then think of being confined in a small space so one of the things that she did was give them paper and paint brushes some of them paint not a picture but they'd make found shapes or circular shapes and began selling them which raised money so that was the beginning of it and from there it led to some of the chimps being be located on to an island i don't know its name but somewhere near the su and. then we wanted to create a proper sanctuary for the chimps so the island was created for orphan chips
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whose mothers were either killed for bush meat or they were poached so that the infants could be sent off and sold as pets or entertainment in foreign countries so they'd get confiscated so it was a mixture of mother ship for different reasons conservation programs in you know africa even though we're half a century after. european colonialism continue to be dominated by white foreigners why is using that is well i'm not sure that it always is true. i'm not sure i think african politicians africans in all walks of life women are coming up and taking their rightful position in society and we got past the time when women in order to succeed decide that they have to have male characteristic a book rush and pushing those that now women are beginning to fall into place with
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the characteristics make women i think a little bit different you know nurturing compassion because of the inference that we raise so yes there is some male dominance and money coming in from outside but is changing you can't expect change to happen overnight after our brutal colonialism which actually destroyed some of the best people who might otherwise have taken over more quickly i mean we ruined that culture we were in so much about african society before european colonialism this was one continent maybe the last continents in the world where humans did live in a relatively sustainable way with wildlife. and when the european colonial this came they hunted the raids never done before they destroyed habitats as a rate never seen before. and then created nature reserves in almost every country
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which involved of course displacing people off the land and to this day many of those communities living on the periphery of those parks still in poverty having lost access to natural resources they want to using the preservation of this wildlife a symbol to anything being a story of great injustice for many communities in this continent huge injustice i mean what white colonialist did i think can never really be forgiven in africa because i've traveled to many different countries and everywhere the history of white colonialism is brutal and. so when finally the europeans thought oh gosh we've killed off nearly all the animals oh yes we can develop tourism how lovely so some of them actually cared about the animals so we began to set up these national parks and as you say people were driven out of those
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areas and lived in the peripheral and many of them in poverty and of course those communities. were growing human population growth so huge problem. so it was in eighty six that there was this big conference in which it became very obvious that chimpanzee numbers were dropping right across africa and that's when i decided to leave research i didn't know what i could do so the first thing i thought i would do is to travel around some of the african countries where there were chimp populations it was seven different countries but also learning about the horrible problems faced by so many of the african people living in and around chimpanzee habitat you know the crippling poverty in some cases the lack of good education the lack of good health and ethnic violence which was getting worse because of that and it came to
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a head when i flew over the gombe national park in the tiny plane and looked down going to be was once part of this equatorial belt that stretched from east africa and curled through west tanzania through burundi uganda and then right to the west african coast through the congo basin and when i flew over in nineteen ninety and looked down it was an island of forest a tiny island of four it's the smallest national park in tanzania surrounded by completely bare hills more people living there than the land could support they'd been moved from their traditional villages that was supposed to be doing communal farming and that was not european by the way. they were struggling to survive and this is when it hit me if we don't do something to help people we may as well give up conservation i'm very well aware of the problem you speak of when they've been
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forced out of the forest that's happened in burundi and i think it's happened in rwanda as well but i know about the brandy once and it is shocking it's really heartbreaking to see them thrown out of the forest of course there's been this genocide with the wind and we're trying to work with. the lot of people in africa and in many countries in africa. making a lot of money from wildlife trafficking or from destroying habitats for wildlife i mean there are many millions of dollars to be made from this every powerful people behind it. in your work have you run into conflict with these people of your being threats and or or anything like by the people whose interests your challenging well i haven't actually been threatened nobody from gombe has been threatened truly believe it's because we've always worked with the people ever since you know those
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early days it's certainly true we've got your. fossil fuel industry you've got logging you've got as you say the animal trafficking and various other problems caused by us and all you can do is to tackle them one by one but after raising money for our different jane goodall institute programs across across africa i began traveling around the developed world to raise money but also to raise awareness just because of the problem you're talking about that it was our society that were that were raiding the forests for timber and so for the africans who were just making money out of it. poaching and so forth so that's when i thought you know if unless we have new generations growing up to understand better our relationship with the natural world
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then. soon there will be nothing left and will suffer so that's when i began our roots and shoots program and it was basically there because they understand the diversity in the rain forest how everything is interconnected. from the very beginning we had our roots and shoots groups will work on different interrelated problems to help people to help other animals because we are animals too and help the environment and you work with many of the governments for heads of state or senior politicians in the countries where these invented species are found i let the people who know each roots and shoots in each country does that sort of thing itself but all the other programs do you do you work with all sorts of these laws well. the point is that we try to be completely apolitical
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so in the us for example if we work with or with a democrat will also work with a republican and that sort of thing i'm not sure about now but the old days it worked or wondering if it's possible to be a political going back to the wildlife trafficking smuggling timber concession. in africa in the countries where many of these endangered species or precious habits are found then it's not possible to run a multi-million dollar rockets on the the radar of the people in power in fact it's not possible to run it without the complicity of the people in power and we've seen many leaks documents all wildlife investigations over the implicating heads of state and very senior politicians in these things so surely it's not possible to separate the politics from the very greatest threats to you know conservation that's true but but with katie i you know we don't directly tackle the government
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in a political way but go and meet with people in the government and talk to them and that's kind of different so but i i'm not pretending that i know the extent to which the jane goodall institute in uganda is working. in the government you would have to talk with peter pell who runs the program here but by and large it's sharing information it's reaching people's hearts that's the key so you're also patron of population matters which are briquet for voluntary reduction in human population to try and create some sustainability for people and everything else. i wanted to ask you about how this could possibly be achieved and give the example of china was the only government ever actually tried to address population reduction but they didn't do it in a voluntary way and it's widely seen by many years as
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a human rights abuse and causing a great deal of unhappiness for a very large number of people. is there a way or is there another way to reduce the human population well i mean again to talk about what i know about. and what i know about the cory program in tanzania around the chip a bit that where we began working all those years ago now there are people coming up and asking for. you know ways in which they can control their population and so we provide all the things that women need. we've had men coming in asking for specific to muse and the point is that now they are more in control of their own lives they're realizing you know we just don't have the natural resources to grow our populations so their culture is changing the sort of wanting a lot of children they want to have two or three children so that they can give
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them a good education. so that they won't be starving it's we've watched it change and so we have family planning initiatives in every one of these villages that i've talked about seventy five and it's worked so we didn't push it on as their own people they do it we don't do it and this is the secret i think they're also still increasing carbon emissions still increasing your on the united states of america recently pulling out of the paris agreement and opening coal mines right. and scientists even saying that the powers agreement would save us from the point of no return as they call it anyway. things don't look very optimistic there either but what do you think well all i can say is that i know many people in the us were taking matters into their own hands and trump was elected.
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i don't know what the future is in the united states i can't predict that some people say he'll be reelected which will be very harmful but on the other hand like take california if he even wants to succeed succeed. they are taking their own environmental problems into their own hands and it's working in california it's definitely working and there are other states as well in this time of changing climate destroying. reducing not resources the things that we talked about there anything you've learned from chimpanzees humankind would be well advised to pay attention to right now well one thing i really think is maternal behavior because we're in danger in our modern society with women playing an ever larger role which they should i'm not saying they shouldn't but it's really
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important if you're going to go on with your career and have children maybe you're not overturn all type but you must ensure that your child has one two three stable people in the child's life who will be there to give support to give nurture. you know if they're on happy to not just an hour in the evening of quality time that's not enough that's that's something different also they're really good at making up quarrels so you have a big fight. and sometimes it's so bad that the victim will run away but if it's not too bad then the it's usually a male who's the aggressor and very often it's a female adolescent male who's been the victim of a fight and the big male is sitting there with his hair out and the victim will come up crouching screaming but begging for reassurance with
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a hand like this or sometimes they're so frightened that they've got their back to the big male and they'll reach back like this so once the big male perhaps the hand and sometimes that ends up with embrace social harmony is restored and we're not too good it. would is your message to young people today well the message is basically the roots and shoots message you are an individual you matter you have different options in front of you but the first thing people come up to me young people high school and they say i really you know i want to make a difference i don't really know what to do so i usually advise them if they're going on to university to take a gap year and to leave their minds open i said you will probably find something that will make you say this is what i want to do and you can't imagine the number of young people who said i took your advice and i went around visited different
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countries and i suddenly knew what i wanted to do and then they go all out for it and that's i think the most important thing is to be passionate about what you do doing good to primatologists conservationists thank you for talking to around it been a great i. on counting the cost a stronger daws spells trouble ahead for developing market economies digital addicks will of hit how the tech industry uses human psychology the fight for control of libya's oil present. counting the cost on al-jazeera when the news is restricted and cent said the press is not free and is external interference and influence in the zoos to exploit not explained. when
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journalists access to information is prevented is still a tough time but i want us to press. them out of the costs. and just as never sees the light of day no i knew that anybody in. the team of course she doubted what the show was. and the stories that matter go on told and the press is not she. neither are we. i'm sorry. to. press.
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