comes with a similarity in the human and chimpanzee brain. i should say the other great apes also have these similarities in structure of the brain. it's just that the great ape brain is a bit smaller, but it shouldn't surprise us that they are capable of intellectual performances. we used to thank unique to us, like abstraction and understanding -- well, they can learn sign language. they can learn up to 140 different signs, and use them in the relevant context or they can invent signs for which they haven't been taught by. they can do sophisticated problems on computers. they have been shown to have an extraordinary pictorial memory, photographic memory, and there is one young chimp in japan, everybody has been and try to compete with him with his memory

skills. and so far people have failed. it will probably be one of these who will finally be able to keep up with that. so for me of course these intellectual similars are not even as exciting as some of the behavioral's similarities that we've uncovered in these 50 years. the long-term supported bonds between mothers and their offspring, the long period of childhood. it's obvious that young chimpanzees like young humans have a lot to learn, and this is the time when the brain is most plastic so it's new behaviors can be required. it's during infancy we believe that new behaviors may actually appear as if they are adaptive, made into incorporated into what we could call the cultural behavior of the brute. one of the definitions of human culture is behavior that is passed from one generation to the next through observation,

imitation and practice. and it's very clear that this is the kind of mechanism that is enabling behaviors such as tool use in a toolmaking to pass from one generation to the next. and we know now that in different parts of africa, where ever chimpanzees are being studied, there are different kinds of objects used as tools in different contexts. you can see the young ones watching and imitating and practicing. and so we can define these, described these primitive cultures. it was very exciting when i first saw a chimpanzee, david gray beard, in fact the first one who lost his fear of me, because chimps are very conservative and they never have seen a white eighth before, just what i was. they would take one look and vanish into the vegetation. but david for some reason lost his chair before the others.

and it was he whom i first saw, not only stick a piece of grass and use it to fish for termites, from the underground, but actually pick a leaky twig and strip off the leaks. that's being a toolmaking. that was suppose to make us more different than any other behavior from the rest of the animal kingdom. only we were defined as man, the toolmaker. so louis leakey had sent me out to study the chimpanzee because his work was digging up the fossils of our earliest ancestors. and he believes ahead of his time that if we find behavior shared by chimpanzees today, and humans today, that may be that behavior was present in a common ancestor to go back about 6 million years ago, apelike, humanlike creature, if that was true, then perhaps in the kind of the stone age being who's

remained lewis was uncovered in. that was his rationale. and indeed, any of you studying anthropology, you have probably will be textbooks which suggest that chimpanzee behavior may be a reasonably good model for how early humans may have behaved when they kind of came down to the trees and moved out onto the plates. learning about hunting, successful hunting of medium-size mammals, very successful. and once they kill has been made, sharing the prey. this was very exciting when it was first discovered. it's been amazing to unravel their nonverbal communication, and i demonstrated the distance call, attended, there are many sounds that each of them being used in a different context and clearly indicating quite a lot about that context to other championship's who hear the

sound. but there's also this very rich repertoire, and kissing, embracing, holding hands, padding on the back, swaggering, shaking their fists, tickling, throwing rocks, waving branches. that kind of conjectures that we use and chimpanzees used in the same kind of context that we do, and they clearly mean the same kind of thing. i already mentioned the long-term supported friendly bonds between mothers and their offspring. we also see these bonds develop between the brothers and sisters, the maternal brothers and sisters. because when a new baby is born, the first job is about five years old. and that five year old child is still emotionally dependent on the mother. so will remain traveling with her, learning, continually about different food and where to find them, how to behave in different context, and so the bonds

gradually get stronger between riders and sisters. now until very recently we haven't no, we sometimes get but we have never known who the fathers are. because a female chimpanzee who was sexually receptive will me with most or even all of the males opportunity. but now through genetic profiling, all we have to do is to collect fecal samples sent him off to a lab and lo and behold we now know for sure who some of the fathers are. this can open a whole new area of study which we haven't really got into yet. could there be a mechanism for a father to recognize his biological offspring? it seems unlikely, but the chimpanzees are filled with surprises. the similarities continue in so many ways. chimpanzees resemble us. their emotions, sadness, despair, grief, harder to prove

conclusively to a scientist who wants to have empirical data. nevertheless, anybody who has worked with chimpanzees in some kind of fairly normal situations has no hesitation in believing that those emotions and chimpanzees are very similar i may be identical to some of our own human emotions. and given the similarities in brain and nervous system, it makes sense to think that at least this is probably true. so i have talked a lot about similarities. and i could continue to talk about similarities. and i could give you stories which illustrate on the one hand and chimpanzees can show love, compassion and all tourism. but on the other side, on the other hand, rather shockingly they also have a dark side. and they are capable of violent and brutal behavior, and even a kind of primitive war.

but what about the differences? and of course, there are many differences of all different physiological and behavioral kind. but if i'm asked to pick one, the one thing that makes us more different than any other, i would pick the sophisticated language, whether it is spoken, whether it is written, today it is electronic. but i believe that the first time in evolution, here we have in ourselves a species that is able to communicate about events of the distant past, to make plans for the distant future, to discuss, sit around with a group and make use of the different knowledge, skills of the different members of that group and come up with new ideas. for the first time we have a species where the young ones can be taught about things that are not present.

so there's a question that i want to come back to. later, given that we humans are without question the most intellectually superior beings that ever walked the planet. we and perhaps some of our hominid ancestors. how come we are destroying this planet? and this is where i rely on sophisticated audience such as you. i don't need to go into all the details of what we are doing to this planet. because i suspect that you know. and i'm talking about things like the absurd use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and the continuing use of such things even when it's been proven beyond more possible doubt that they can lead to cancer or other diseases, which plague us at this time. and yet, these chemicals leaching down from agricultural land, from households, and from industry, leach into the water,

streams, the rivers, lakes and busy creating seat creating an incredibly polluted water systems. and in addition to that, we find that surface water is shrinking, that the great aquifers are shrinking and polluters. we find terrible soil erosion. we know that the great rain forest and the woodlands around the planet are disappearing at an incredibly fast rate, and that particularly in the tropics is leading to soil erosion and hunger. we know that we are losing biodiversity. window this entire ecosystems are being destroyed. we do not yet know the effect which may be caused by removing one small and seemingly insignificant creature from an ecosystem, and yet there have been demonstrations of how this can lead to a complete collapse of an ecosystem.

because remove one thing which turned out to be the main food of another, which turned out to be the main food of another, and so you work your way up the food chain and can cause some kind of terrible collapse of a whole ecosystem, as has happened from time to time. we know about greenhouse gases. we certainly know about the effects of burning fossil fuel. it's less widely realized that the larger percentage of the greenhouse gas is caused by the methane which results from a intensive farming of animals of food. that methane accounts for more of the greenhouse gases than all the cars around the world put together. and of course, not only does this intensive farming of

animals leads to the production of methane, but large areas of wilderness are continually being destroyed to create new agricultural field to grow corn to feed the animals aren't grazing for cattle. it's very wasteful. is wasteful of water, and in addition, we find that to keep animals alive and intensive farms, is necessary to regularly feed them antibiotics. that's just to keep them alive in these stressful conditions. these antibiotics are getting out into the environment, and the bacteria of becoming resistant. so actually people have already died from a simple scratch because there was a strong enough and the body. if anybody is interested in this, there is a rather terrifying book called the killer within, one of the authors is mark plotkin. and people i think are less prepared to think about that than fossil fuels, because people want to be fed two or

three meals of meat a day. we need to reduce our meat eating, even the united nations has put out a directive that we should try to reduce our consumption of meat. especially in view of the fact that countries like china, if you develop a middle class, are wanting more and more meat because they are hobbling along us. so all of these problems. and then of course the melting of the ice, and you know, in the year 2000, i attended the millennium peace summit of the united nations. and it was something of spiritual and religious leaders, 1000 of them from 100 countries. and very few of them had address environmental concerns. only one or two, but one of them was representing the indigenous people of greenland. he was an inuit although he calls himself an eskimo. and he was there with other

indigenous people from nine countries. and he stood there in the dedications assembly in front of these 1000 religious and spiritual leaders, and i will never forget the message he gave. up in the north, we know everyday what you people are doing in the south. i have a message from my brothers and sisters in the south. up in the north, the ice is melting. what will it take to melt the ice in the human heart? that stayed with me. and just three weeks ago i was with this same inuit in greenland standing there watching that slabs of ice crack off and drop with a thunderous roar from what they called the big ice, where until 30 years ago no water ever came, no melting had ever occurred. and what started off as a tiny trickle of melted water is now a roaring, raging river.

every so often swollen, and yet another piece of ice cracks off. and i flew over where he told the. at that time of the year which was july. he used to drive with his dogs in a sled. that it is water. and i landed on a piece of ground out in that seat, which entailed a couple of years ago had been trapped under the ice since the last ice age. and now it is emerged. so it was a very -- is one thing to know when your mind was going on, and quite another when you actually experience it. and i came away from that trip to greenland feeling, it is so desperately important for every single one of us to do everything we can within our power to slow climate change, slow global warming.

we can stop it. we can suddenly reversed it, but we can buy our concerted action to something to slow it down. there's a lot of initiatives. al gore started it. i left england last week on the very day that they launched 1010, that we hope to launch in the u.s. as well. it is a commitment and so far they have 2000 organizations, companies or universities, schools, individuals also, in the year 2010 or by the end of the year 2010, to reduce their carbon footprint by 10 percent of it is to look at each one of us can actually do that. and we hope to spread information about that. but it's not really surprising that so many people have lost hope. if i just think of the chimpanzee. when i first went to gombe.

gombe is on the eastern shore on the long skinny leg in africa. you go along the east shore and it was chimpanzee habitat everywhere. just a few couple of towns and a few villages. you could climb the hill to look away from the legs, chimpanzee habitat as far as you could see. and then in the early '90s i had the opportunity to fly in a small plane over this whole area. and although i knew there was deforestation outside the park, i was totally unprepared for the almost total deforestation. the only trees left in the really steep goalies and valleys were even desperate farmers couldn't try to cultivate or even desperate women looking for firewood couldn't scramble. and i will come back to how we try to do something about this. but it's just to say that the gombe chimpanzees were now are then caught in a small island,

and they were totally surrounded by cultivated fields. they were trapped, less than 100, not sufficient gene pool, almost only for long-term viability. and across africa, where there were way over 1 million in 1960 when i began, we don't know exactly, but based on the amount of forest cover a cross their range, crossed the 25 nations, today 300,000 at the most and probably less. due to habitat destruction, they can use new growth of human populations, and the illegal commercial trade that is not subsistent hunting made possible by the logging companies that go deep into the heart of the last remaining rainforest. and even if they practice sustainable logging, open up the forest with roads, and this provides access for the hunters

from the cities with their more sophisticated weapons. and they are using editing, it even mothers with babies, monkeys, birds, anything that can be cut out and smoked and sold. not only in the local market, but into the big city where the urban elite will pay more for this that a piece of chicken or goat as their culture they say. and some of it is even shipped to african communities in exile in other parts of the world. totally unsustainable. and very difficult to do anything about it because large amounts of money are involved. this is a big trade. and as you know, once money is involved in something, it gets harder and progressively harder to control. particularly when in this case there are quite high politicians involved. and we all know about this. that's not just africa. is everywhere. a vested interest, the pressure that is put upon people in power

by companies by corporations, by those making money. so the plight of the chimpanzee is just one example of what's happening to animals species around the world. and not surprising that so many people seem to have given up hope. not surprising that so many people ask me, jane, you can really have hope, not after you've seen what you've seen. and that's why i wrote this recent book, that congressman paul is was just mentioning. "hope for animals and their world: how endangered species are being rescued from the brink." and the idea for this book has been with before very long time. and i think the first really exciting story that i heard that i wanted to share with people was in new zealand, where i met don martin i decided he would

say the black robin from extension of the blackout is a cute little bird about this big living on the mainland. they never had any predators. completely tame. and because of introduced rats and cats. the population of robbins, like so many other of the indigenous birds, began to decrease. and finally dawn and a handful of biologist got permission to remove the remaining ones, there were only 27 by this time, to an offshore island with no cats and rats. when they went back in the spring, you can get there in the winter. it is a very, very wild and desolate and crashing seas and rocks, they found only seven birds left. so everybody said give up. seven birds? and of the seven, only two were females. these two females, only one was fertile. she left her long-term mate, which normally they don't do. and she picked a young male to

be her mate. [laughter] deck well, she did. and good for her. [laughter] >> because that her eggs were fertile. and dawn, he was the first to do the turkey was the first to try out double clutching they call it that you take away, you destroy the nest in which there are eggs. yankee bait the eggs, in this case he gave the eggs to another kind of bird to raise. the black robin then made another myth that he took those eggs also, put them with another kind of bird and left her to raise her third brood. and then because these other babies that were being raised by different species wouldn't know her to behave like black robin, he took the first match back -- she was known as blue. she had a blue van. he took the first batch back to

blue and yellow. and they began looking after them along with their own new tiny babies. and then he took the next batch to hatch and he said she looked up at me and say, what next? [laughter] deck and he said it's all right, darling, we will help you. enzo while this was going around to collect the food. anyway, there are now about 200 black robin's. this was a project being stupid, waste of money and impossible. but because somebody wouldn't give up, because he had a passion and because he freely admits he just loves them, there are now 200. of course, identical but they are separated under four different islands. there's hope that there may be some genetic drift, and at least if some disease hits one of those populations, they will still be three other. and they are now working on a fourth. so that was the first very

exciting story that i wanted to share. and then i met people who were wanting to save the last of the california condor is. i don't have time to describe all these stories in detail, but i was talking earlier this afternoon on c-span with john nielsen. and he gave me an amazing poster which we want to show you now. i should have a long set but of course i don't have a condor feather. but this extraordinary burden, the california condor, was reduced to just 12 individuals in the wild, and one in captivity in the los angeles zoo. so people said give up. don't bother. you wasted a lot of money. you probably will kill some in the capturing of them. you will never breed them in captivity, and even if you do, you will never be able to put them back in the wild. answer this extraordinary bird

with its amazing wingspan, which is a true master of the error, a beautiful glorious bird would have been gone, if again there wasn't a group of passionate and dedicated biologists who were determined to at least give it a try here and so now, from 12 wild individuals and one captive, guess what? there are 300, slightly over 300, and of those slightly more than half our free flying in the wild. are there problems? gets. thank you. there are problems and it has to do with the environment that is the same with so many of these animals species. you can perhaps say them through captive breeding, through collecting some eggs and incubating them, but unless you can get the environment stable, then introduction back into the wild is going to be a risky business. and that's what we find again and again and again.

the black footed ferret. that was reduced to a think there were 17 adults left. and eventually the biologist got permission from fish and wildlife to capture some of them. and they were taken into captivity, and i always carry this, you can't see it, but is the cast of the last adult female to be taken into captivity. and because they are such beautiful creatures, the spirits of the great prairies, eyes that gleamed emerald at night and lowlight, the biologist went and got drunk that night, they were so sad to take the last one. they felt terrible, but they are now released back into most parts of their race. but a big problem, because they live in prairie dog girls. and there are all these ranches who feel that prairie dogs can be with own livestock. grass, or because of their homes, these burrows in the ground cause broken bones of cattle.

although there is no documented example of a broken bone of a horse or a cow, but that's what they all say. so they are doing these mass poisonings of prairie dogs. so there is so much to be done, and yet people don't give up. and some species of course it's much easier to get public interest and support and get people to write letters and phone interest groups. because they are charismatic. all of the three c's i've mentioned are very charismatic, but what about a beetle? just a bug. that's harder. and yet, listen to the story of this bug. this is the american burying beetle. it is about so big, you can see about that big. and what it will do is it can smell from 2 miles away if an animal -- it has to be a small creature. they say the perfect size of the passenger pigeon, the beatles

decline began with the slaughter of the passenger pigeon. until there were very few left, but they are fascinating. and luca roddey who is one of our contributors, is absolutely not only fascinated by the beatles. he loves them. why do you love a beetle? listen to this. the male and female arrive at a caucus. they bond. they work together very hard. it takes a couple of hours to bury something the size of the passenger pigeon. they get it down to the ground as quickly as they can. even though a few flies would have laid a precious few eggs. they make themselves a little chain. there they made. and weight for the eggs to hatch. they wait there. why do they wait? because when the babies hatch, these larva, the jobs aren't strong enough to eat this course, which is their larva.

so the male and female go into to up the food and feed the babies. this is a beetle. they feed their babies. this is another little piece to the story, writing on the back of the adult beetles is a little tiny, very pushy, bright orange might. and once the male and female are in their chamber, the mighty jumpoff. they run over to the carcass and their job is to eat the young fly maggots as they emerge. and then when the parent finished feeding the young, and are ready to leave, the little might've done their job jumped back on board and off they go to start the process again. [laughter] >> and lou roddey lies with a couple of days ago, he said jane, after i started talking about this, an elderly lady came up to me and she said, she said

doctor, your beatles look after their children a lot better than my children looked after my grandchildren. [laughter] >> and she gave him $75000 for his work. [applause] >> so anyway, the burying beetles, read the story. but they are for the moment, they are okay. they don't have quite enough of the right sort of care that they can be held for a while and maybe we don't know what's going to happen out there. and the other thing which has given me great heart is the restoration of our entire ecosystems. and one of the stories that i encountered about 10 or more years ago, i visited candidate. and there had been nickel mining to the companies doing nickel mining. and the landscape had been absolutely destroyed.

it look like a lunar landscape. it was one of the worst destroyed areas in the whole of north america. and in this case, it was the people who decided they wouldn't tolerate this any longer. so the missions from the nickel factory had actually leached away almost everything. it was just visit there blackrock, but the people begin getting fertilizer and spreading under sprinkling it on the rocks that they get support from their local government, and now it is beautiful. >> we have a question in about three minutes. >> well you have to wait about five minutes. [laughter] [applause] >> i can't stop in three minutes. are we in a hurry? must be stopped exactly on time?

thank you. thank you. thank you. so if you have to go, you have to go. but i'm not going to be back here for ages, and i really have stuff to share. [laughter] >> and i had played guitar for another 10 minutes. so if that's okay with all of you. [applause] >> so now if you go, you can not only see that it's got trees that could have wild animals come back. the falcon had been locally extinct for 50 years and that's another story in the back. they gave me a feather from one of the two pairs that were nesting there. and this is an amazing photograph, perak photograph in the book which shows you before and after. which is really encouraging. the example is even close to my heart is the area that i

described around gombe that was totally devastated. this was by too many people living on the land, and the land could support. and we started a program called take care, which you can again read about in the book or look at our website, because i am obvious enough going to be allowed to tell you the whole story. [laughter] >> but basically we approach the villages in 24 villages. and sat down and talked with them, not me. it was a team of tanzanians, and the villagers said what they felt was important to them, which was education and health. so we begin there, and then introduced different farming methods, programs for women, microcredit, and scholarships for girls. so that the women would be empowered and better educated, all around the world it's been shown that as women's education improves, families sized drops that it was the overpopulation that led to the problem here.

well received. family planning information, and of course hiv-aids, education as well. and so today, these are bare hills, i just want to look at them about four months ago, and such a resilience of nature, that the trees were 20-foot high, that the villages had decided that they put land for regeneration so that it formed a buffer zone around the gombe national park, between chimpanzees and the villages, in such a way that the chimpanzees could link up with other small resident groups. that is the one hope for the gombe chimpanzee. the programs work so well that where rather getting it in other parts of africa and it would work perfectly well in places like india, australia, as well. anywhere where you have people living in real poverty around wilderness areas. and of course, if you live in

poverty, then you've got to try and feed yourself and your family, and you do destroy the environment. so on the one hand, we have poverty leading to environmental construction, sometimes on a massive scale around the gombe. on the other, we have the unsustainable lifestyles of so many of us in the elite communities around the world. and that's unsustainable as well. so my question about hope, well, my reason for hope are pretty simple. but first of all, there's the human brain. and we are coming up with new technology's all the time, and as individuals we are beginning to think how we can leave a less heavy ecological footprint, how we can deal better with wildlife, how we can deal better with society. and then secondly, this extraordinary brazilians of nature, whether it is a whole ecosystem or whether it's an

animal species. that's what i've been talking about. but then we got something which is very important which is why i have to continue talking to you. unless i get handcuffs. [laughter] >> and that is the tremendous power of youth. one's problems are understood and used is empowered to ask under act. and so when people say to me, but jane, i thought you were interested in championship's and forth, why are you spinning so much around america? why are you spending so much time with young people? because of new generations are not being raised to be better stewards than we have been, there is no point in any of these efforts to save any of these animals, or any of these environments. and i was so shocked and upset when i was traveling and meeting and people, particularly university students, college

student, sometimes high school students, sometimes young people out in their first jobs, who seem to have lost hope, who were depressed, who are angry, who were apathetic, and when i talk to them they all said more or less the same, we feel this way because we feel you have complex our future and there's nothing we can do about it. i've got three grandchildren. we have compromised. and if you are a young person feeling that your future has been compromised by those who went before, you couldn't be more right. at a few think there's nothing that can be done about it, you couldn't be more wrong. and roots and shoots is a program for young people from preschool right the way through college and universities that and it has even jumped into a build communities now. so we have roots and shoots groups in prisons, and senior citizens complex is, the staff of big corporations. what is it? it's a program with the main

message everyone of us makes a difference everyday. and what the roots and shoots groups to do is youth driven. the young people are it happens to be adults decide what they want to do. but they choose in three different kinds of project to make this a better world. first of all, for people, for their own human community, or raising money to help the victims of the tsunami or hurricane katrina. they choose a project which helps animals, wildlife or domestic animals. some of these cows and pigs i was talking about, dogs and cats. and a third project which improves things for their environment that we all share. and so young people are choosing to do projects, depending on the nature of the problems that surround us. and obviously, young people in a city will choose to do different

things from young people living in a rural area. those in america will choose differently from those in china, or australia. rich children will choose different things from poor children. and in some cases, it's religious culture that is feeding the young people's minds. but it is youth driven. is roll up your sleeves and get out there and do something. it is very much about drinking again breaking down the barriers that we tend to different countries, different countries, different religions and between us and the natural world. so there is a theme of learning to live in peace and harmony. and because i was made a un messenger of peace, that was because of roots and shoots because i told that we were planting seeds of global peace, all these young people sharing a

philosophy. and i think we have a surprise for you, have we? i think so. we will see if it happens. one of the roots and shoots created to support the united nations international day of peace, a giant piece stock picker we've been flying since the seventh year, that on a day very close to the 21st, which is the un international day of peace, we fly these giant piece of his. this hope untrimmed year we hope to fly in about 50 countries. we do have one somewhere here but it seems to have disappeared. it is coming. okay. all right. is coming. and so i want to you right now, that the day of peace this year is coming very, very soon. it is on the 19th of september, which is what, just over a week or something. it will be 12:00 noon and it

will be at the irca lake park. listen to the words that were made for the peace. which is actually about to come. having trouble with its wings, made of recycled. >> made by everyone. once a year we circle the world saying ain't it time to bury the guns ♪ ♪ our time has come ♪ and we have begun ♪ fixing the world. [applause] ♪ it's a dream and it's a vision. it's a prayer that we may see ♪ ♪ when every person, every

creature ♪ ♪ will be treated with dignity. ♪ when every war will be a memory, we never shall repeat ♪ ♪ our time has come and we have begun ♪ ♪ to circle the world. ♪ what if we can circle the world, beneath the sun ♪ ♪ giant 20-foot wings of fabric about our handmade by everyone, ♪ once a year we circle the world, saying ain't it time to bury the gun? ♪ our time has gone and we have begun to circle the world ♪

♪ [applause] >> thank you, thank you, thank you. [applause] >> in our recent roots and shoots university, sean sweeney, will be here on september the 10th talking about roots and shoots, telling you more about the peace day. but this only takes three hours to make. so any of you, come and join in and whatever i said, berkeley park. i will be in new york flying a piece dubbed there. los angeles because i am 75 years old this year, they decide to have 75 of these. so we think we can film them from a helicopter. and we hope to fly in 50

countries and it is more than just a symbol. is actually bringing together the different parts of the community to share music, to share food or apps, to share dress, and to envision peace because if we don't dare to make a vision of peace, peace will never come. peace is possible. it doesn't seem like it now, and we must dare to dream of a time when this fighting between nations is killing this bloodshed, this horrible, horrible war will come to an end. it has to. [applause] >> right. so my last work i said i would come back to why is it that we, this amazingly intelligent species, have so destroy our planet and we can include the war and the violence, the ethnic violence and the genocide? what has gone wrong?

i believe we have lost wisdom. the indigenous people would make major decisions based on how the decision we make today affects our people generations ahead. we are are intending to make on how to does affect me now or me and my family now, will the next shareholders me or my next political campaign. that's the kind of criteria we are facing major decisions on. and so, we need to reconnect, i believe, this incredibly clever brain with the seed of love and compassion, the human heart. and that's what i hope and i pray roots and shoots is doing. it is creating family. is creating young people now in 111 countries, not 30. 111 countries around the world, all ages, bringing them together, sometimes electronically, whenever possible in person, sharing

successes, discussing failures. and one young man said to me, i love about roots and shoots best is that wherever i go in the world, even if i know nobody, if i find roots and shoots, i will have found my family. so let's hope that young people with different values to understand that this life is about more than just making money, that we need money to live but we shouldn't let for money, let's hope that this group of young people, the next doctors and lawyers and legislators and parents and teachers, can help us once again to link the brain with a heart. and thank you, and thank you, sir. i really apologize. [applause] . .

>> also i'd like to tell you that there will be a book signing of her wonderful new book right after this talk. >> and before you ask your first question, i would be very remiss if i didn't thank the people of the jane goodall institute and the people who made this evening possible. i especially want to thank john from my own organization who's really worked to make this happen. we have -- [applause] and he's also making it possible as i travel 300 days around the

world for you to check on to our web site, and there's a blog. and you can see where i'm going through this blog. >> thank you so much for coming for this talk at georgetown. my question's a bit personal, i was wondering if you could tell us about your religious beliefs and how your work in the field has been influenced by those beliefs. >> well, i grew up as a christian, i grew up, my grandfather was a congregational minister, and we just sort of, you know, i wouldn't say we were a religious family. we went to church sometimes, and i just would climb a tall tree, and i'd be near the birds and the blue sky, and god seemed to be all around. and then when i was out in the forest day after day, month after month by myself i just sense a great spiritual power around, you know? it was all tied up with lying

and looking up through the leaves at the stars, the rain coming, the cycle, the endless cycles, life and birth, death, all seeming to make it very easy to forget the rat race of the modern world. and i got this feeling that because we have this questioning mind we're asking can ourselves, you know, why, what's the meaning in life? and i believe there's a spark of this divine in each one of us, and that spark we've given a name to, we call it a soul. and i believe that this divine has all these different names and different countries with different religions, but surely it's the same great spirit of the indigenous people. and if we have this spark of life in us, then i believe that so, too, the animals have this spark of life. and they don't call it a soul, and i don't suppose they care

two hoots about it. but if i'm asked to call it something, i would say if i have a soul, and i think, i hope i do or something like that, then chimpanzees and dogs and all these other amazing beings, surely, they have the same. [applause] >> thank you so much. >> hi, dr. goodall. first, i want to say it's a joy to have you come speak to us today. my question kind of targets the political spirit of georgetown and being in our nation's capital, and that is if you're in a position of political power, what is the the fist policy to -- first policy to improve our environment that you would enact? >> well, that's, you know, it's so difficult because the longer you consider the environmental problems, the more you realize how everything is interconnected. but i think the, you know,

obviously the, the creation of greenhouse gases is an enormous problem, but so, too, the pollution that's leading to the pollution of the water and also of our food and how kids are getting sick from the food they eat, the air they breathe, the water they drink. so i would find it really hard. i would want to have a really great cabinet of people and each one of them would be tasked with one of these, and they would all be very, very charismatic people who would go out and talk all around the country. not from the political platform at all, but simply, do we care about our children, grandchildren and theirs? well, if you do, this is what's happening. what should we do? ask them, what should we do? what would you like to do? so that's how i would try and deal with it. sound simple, doesn't it? but -- >> thank you. [applause] >> hi, doctor, thanks for coming

again. my question's about evolutionary psychology, something i'm very interested in, and some of the models of early human behavior. as you said, chimps might be a very good mod of that. and i had heard -- model of that. and i had heard a theory about earth, we may have discovered bo know bows earlier and their unique way of solving problems. instead of -- >> with sex, yeah. >> yeah. [laughter] i was wondering your opinions about the difference between bonobo and chimps on their influence on human behavior. >> well, i don't know. i mean, i haven't really spent time studying bonobos. they -- humans, chimpanzees and bonobos have a genetic difference. we're sort of all equal. bonobos are less dominant and aggressive, but i personally

feel looking around the world that we have more closely followed the chimpanzee pattern, sadly, although sex is very important too. so maybe we've just taken boapt. [laughter] >> thank you very much. [applause] >> hi, ms. goodall, it's a pleasure to hear you speak. i'm a student, and you spoke a little bit about developing countries. and i was wondering, when you see in china and india, you know, the exponential growth of meat and poultry and the expansion of dams and coal power and the legitimate argument they have for development in progress, what kind of words of hope do you have for the environment in these countries? >> well, all i can do, you know, i don't have the ultimate solution to anything. but we have been working now for 14, 13 years developing roots and chutes in china. it's right across the country. we've got more than 600 very

active groups. there has been terrific response to the last book i did which was called harvest for hope which was about food and meat eating and stuff like that. there are many -- if you were to go to the universities in china where we have these roots and chutes programs, you would find people thinking and feeling exactly like you do, and with rather more desperation because the country is so huge, so the problems are so huge. so the only way to have hope, i think, is to take it in pieces and say, you know, it's like the global problem. if we spend time thinking about what's happening wrong in the planet, we do nothing because it's too big. but if we tackle local problems and say, well, this is something i can do, and i will do my best here. and then know that this is happening in other places as well. that's the only way that i think we can look forward with hope that there is a new understanding and i think i feel really sorry for the young students in china because they get very, very depressed.

there's a lot of tears. and they're desperate for hope. >> thank you. [applause] >> thank you so much for speaking to us tonight, dr. goodall. i wanted to know what are your feelings on testing of cosmetics and medicine on chimpanzees for our benefit and at their expense? >> well, of course, you've raised a question that we could spend the next hour discussing because it, obviously, is very controversial. i think that while they haven't been testing makeup on chimpanzees for a very long time, but they do test on other creatures. i don't think we should be testing for makeup on these creatures at all. and in europe the european union is a little further advanced in its thinking about the use of animals in medical and pharmaceutical testing. so rather than get mired into the pros and the cons, i think

this way, that about ten years ago there were people who worked with animal experimentation who would say, well, yeah, we're beginning to understand, yes, animals do have feelings, and so we will try and use as few as possible, treat them as well as possible. but we're always going to need animals for this, this, and this. now, some of this, this, and this there's already alternatives being found because of the animal rights movement and because more people are working on it which, who weren't before. so if we could just change the mind set, you know, if i could wave a wand, i'd stop it all. but i can't. but if we could have a mind set that instead of saying, well, we'll always need some, but we'll treat them as well as we can, i want a mind set that says let's admit that from the animal's point of view it's torture, it's probably not ethically responsible of us as human beings with a capacity for compassion, so let's get together and find as fast as we

can ways of doing without live animals in this kind of experimentation. it's just a different way of looking at it. where are the nobel prizes for this kind of work? they don't exist. [applause] >> dr. goodall, i was wondering, first of all, is there a particular project that stands out to you that's been undertaken by a local roots and chutes -- roots and shoots organization -- >> chapter? >> that you'd like to share with us that has been particularly effective you think? >> there's so many amazing ones. the web site of this book if you go to it, you'll find some incredible projects. one was a group of 9, 10-year-olds. they were outside chicago. they heard there was a factory planning to be built way up river, and they got a bit concerned. i suppose they heard people talking.

so they did their own project. they talked to people along, up there at the headlands, people who would get new jobs, how this would affect the economy of the people living there. then they went and talked to people along various parts of the river including the wetlands that went into the sea, and they apassed such -- amassed such good data that they were able to take it to environmental protection agency. no assessment had been done. one was done, and the factory was stopped. so that's just one example. but, you know, there are young people who have gone on year after year actually cleaning a stream until it was ready to put fish back who hadn't been there for 30 or 40 years, and aye been there when that happened -- i've been there when that happened in different countries. raising money for a no-kill dog shelter, i mean, there's just -- you think of all these things that you could imagine, and i think one of the reasons it's so great is that in every group of

young people some will care passionately about animals, and they can get involved in that. some care passionately about human community service, and some care about the environment and some want to be peace activists. it's all there. so you will learn more from sean sweeney on, what did i say? the 18th which -- 10th. sorry. 18th. tomorrow. tomorrow. sean sweeney tomorrow at 10:00? [laughter] where is it? >> [inaudible] >> 7:30. >> 7:30 p.m. 7:30 p.m. sorry, sean. 7:30 p.m., sean sweeney. where will you be? >> [inaudible] >> healey 104. healey 104. 7:30 tomorrow evening. sean sweeney, probably allison dean talking to you about roots and shoots. if you're part of an environment group already, that's fine. we have many, many groups.

you stay who you are. but this will bring you into contact with other young people who feel as passionately as you do, and maybe you join our youth leadership council, maybe you get to meet other young people like you from around the nation. and it's pretty exciting. it's changing lives, i can tell you that. >> and i do have another very quick question for you as well. a very close friend of mine who's a very big fan of all your work for wildlife and the environment as well as humanitarian issues and peace is, he's here tonight, and he's thrilled to hear you speak, but it also happens to be his birthday, and i was wondering if i could convince you and this warm, welcoming georgetown audience to congratulate him, preferably in song. [laughter] >> where -- >> his name is andrew. he's right up there in green. >> what's his name? >> andrew. >> andrew. okay, come on then. ♪ happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday

dear andrew, happy birthday to you ♪ [cheers and applause] >> how much did he pay you for that? [laughter] >> thank you for speaking, dr. jane, but i have a little question for you. if apes and humans only have a difference of 1%, why do people still do tests on them? is it, aren't they just like us? >> that is such a good question. and that's why i love working with young people because you go straight to the point. [laughter] that's exactly why we are so concerned, and it's not just doing the testing on them. they've been keeping these close relatives of ours in cages.

you work it out when you go home, 5 foot by 5 foot and 7 foot high with nothing in there except maybe a motor tire to sit on maybe for 10, 20, 30 years. completely bored, horrible, stale environment. so now we are trying to move chimpanzees out of medical research and out of entertainment because that's very cruel too because it means taking the babies away from their mothers, and then they don't learn to behave as chimpanzees. so thank you for asking that question. we shouldn't be, should we? no. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, dr. jane, for speaking. when was the first time you knew you were in love with animals? [laughter] >> well, apparently, i was just 1 and a half years old. and my mother went up to my room, and she found -- i'd taken a whole handful of wriggling earthworms, and i was watching them so carefully, and she said,

i think you were wondering how they walked without legs. [laughter] and so instead of saying, oh, throw those dirty things away, how dare you bring those into your bed, she said quietly, jane, without the earth, they'll die. so quickly we gathered them up and took them back into the garden. and from that moment on everybody's told me who knew me as a child that i was always, i was watching sparrows, i was watching insects, i was passionate about the dogs and the cats of our neighborhood, and so it went on to birds, and i watched birds, and i went on nature walks. yeah. so right from the beginning. [applause] >> thank you, dr. jane, for speaking. i have a question. if you had one wish in the whole world, what would it be? >> oh, you know, we asked a whole group of roots and shoots that question one by one, and an

awful lot of people said they wished they could fly. [laughter] that would be pretty wonderful. but if i had one wish and if i was as powerful as god or something, i would want to find a way to creep into people's hearts to open up the hearts so that we get back our wisdom and so we start thinking. not just about ourselves, but about what we do and how that affects other people and the environment and the animals. that's what i -- i want to find a better way of reaching into hearts. it's difficult when people that you're talking to think completely differently to yourself. and i've practiced a little bit, but it's not easy, so i want to get better at reaching into people's hearts all over the world. [applause] >> thank you, dr. jane, for speaking. i have a question for you.

when the chimps got over their fear of you, how did you and the chimps react? >> went -- sorry, when they were frightened of me? >> when they got rid of their fear for you. >> okay. well, they, they were frightened of me because they'd never seen any white creature before. it was me. they only knew africans, and they ran away from them, too, actually. they were not used to humans. so what i did, i found a peak, and i used to sit up on that peak with my binoculars, and i would always wear the same colored clothes, and i didn't try to get too close too quickly. so i was very patient. and i learned how to be patient when i was 4 years old and i was asked to help collect hens' eggs. and i was putting the eggs into my basket, and i started to wonder, but, where was the hole on the hen big enough for the egg to come out?

[laughter] and because nobody told me, i hid in the hen house for four whole hours and that's quite something when you're four and a half. and i saw a hen lay an egg. so i learned patience. and i was patient with the chimpanzees, and eventually they realized i wasn't as dangerous as they first thought. and it was that wonderful chimpanzee, david graybeard, who lost his fear first. when i would call up on a group in the forest who were all ready to run away, but david would just sit there looking at me. so they would look at him and look at me and think, well, perhaps she's not so frightening after all. so really he introduced me to his friends in the forest. patience, it was patience. not trying to do it too quickly. it's a good, good question. thank you. [applause] >> dr. jane, thank you so much for your very wonderful

presentation, your thoughts, your wisdom and all that you brought to us tonight. [applause] >> thank you. and now it's the book signing. thank you all, thank you for being a wonderful audience and putting up with my talking too long, but maybe it wasn't too long after all. anyway, thank you. [applause] >> jane goodall, founder of the jane good an july institute is the author of in the shadow of man, reason for hope and the chimpanzees i love. and to find out more, visit jane goodall.org. >> charles eagles' book, the price of defiance, tells the story of james meredith, the first african-american student

to attend the university of mississippi. mr. meredith's enrollment at the university was followed by a riot, and president kennedy sent soldiers into oxford, mississippi. memory of books in jackson, mississippi, hosts the 25-minute event. >> we thank everyone else for coming. i have a couple of confessions to make at first. one is i'm not a public speaker. this is a foreign environment for me. so whatever your expectations are, i hope they're met, but i won't be surprised. second, i don't go to book signings as a general rule, so i have no idea what goes on at these. so i'm going to do what i feel comfortable doing, and i hope it works. however this turns out, i will make one guarantee and that is that the book is better than the presentation. [laughter] so i guess the moral is so far don't judge a book by its

author. [laughter] probably the first question some people ask is why do we need another book about james meredith and the riot at ole miss in 1962? when i started working on this book about 1991 and not working intensely, but that was when i first started playing with the topic, there were already four books out. this book is published in 2009, and there are in the interim four more books on roughly the topic or something closely related. and there has just been another book on the topic published. so why this one? why should you read this one? well, i think first of all you need to understand that this is not a book about james meredith, and it's not a book about the riot. over the years people have asked me many times, you're working on a book about james meredith or the riot, and my reaction was one of various, really a couple of things.

i would either say, yeah, that's right and go on if i didn't want to take the time to explain, or i would say, no, it's not really about that, but that's involved. so what i did in the book, i think, makes it different and maybe will interest you. my primary motive originally was to explain why the riot took place in 1962. and i don't mean in terms of immediate policies, but i mean in terms of long-range policies. how can we understand this? so what i try and do in the book is explain the confluence, the coming together of race, politics and ole miss in 1962. and to do that i had to back up and look at events dealing with the university in race and politics since world war ii. and trace those and show people

how all those ingredients fit together. and that's important because it's the context that is vitally important to understanding why meredith, his actions in 1962 coming to the university had the result it did. james meredith himself could not have caused the controversy. it's the context of mississippi in the 1950s and early '60s that provides the context. it's that social/cultural situation that he inserts himself in that triggers the reaction. so that's one thing i do that is quite different in this book than what anybody else is doing. i try and let the reader see what mississippi in the 1950s and early '60s was like. jim silver, the professor at the university, described this in the mid 1960s as the mississippi closed to society.

well, i don't want to tell you about it, i want to show you. so i study a number of incidents and watch them build. the second thing that i do that i think a number of people don't do, haven't done is i do focus on james peridi. -- meredith. and in focusing on him, i examine him as a real person more than others have. he's not a care rickture, he's not a stereotype, he's not what people think he is. i wanted, i wanted to explain him as he really was. and i benefit greatly from an interview with him and from having access to his personal papers which no one else has done. and the third thing is i had the good fortune to have access to lots of sources no one else has looked at. in 1991 when i first started this, i can identify the beginning date in a way because

that's when i first asked the fbi for the meredith file. and it took more than a decade to get all those papers. they filled three file drawers, and no one else had ever asked for the papers, no one else had ever seen them. i also got papers from the united states marshal service, university papers which no one had ever seen. i had access to state records and documents here that no one had ever seen. so the research for this is, i hope you will see if you look at the footnotes -- a lot of people don't bother with the footnote, some of us that's what attracts us to books -- i hope you'll appreciate the research is very wide and very deep and in sources that no one else has looked at. this allows me, as i say, to show the reader what happened instead of just tell. i don't label people, i don't

pass judgment on them as much as i just let the characters walk through the book and do what they did and say what they did, and you are, i hope, i'm confident that you're smart enough to see and make your own evaluation of them. i don't like people and authors who tell you something but don't really tell you why you should think or come to that conclusion. so the context here is essential, and the context is, i think, very rich and detailed. so what, how is the book organized, what does it do? rhyme going to -- i'm going to read only one passage from the book at the end, i hope you'll read the book. but let me tell you what it's about if you have not started it, and i assume most of you are like my students, you have not done the reading assignment for the day, so i'm not going to be going