Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

Well, raise the minimum wage, for one. Raise the floor. Give a green light to fair wages. Provide universal health care.

  Because?

  Because people are dying preventable deaths. Because our present system is a giant redistribution of wealth and income with money pouring into the pharmaceutical companies, to highly paid insurance executives, and others. It’s destroying a lot of small businesses in the sense that they want to give health care to their workers, but the cost is astronomical.

  Your organization includes small-business people. What’s your mission? What are you trying to do through Business for Shared Prosperity?

  The mission is to say that we can change direction. We believe that what’s really good for business is also good for workers, and good for communities, and good for the country. Instead of this low-road path we’ve been on—low wages for workers and lower taxes for the wealthy, reckless deregulation, irresponsible disinvestment in our infrastructure—we can go to a higher road, where we shore up the economy from below. And this is not only what’s good for us today, it’s what’s good for us in the future, and it’s exactly what will make us more healthy and competitive economically in the long run.

  JANE GOODALL

  When Jane Goodall walked into the building for this interview, faces lit up. Our security chief told me she does animal rescue work after hours because of Goodall. Our stage manager whispered into my ear, “She’s been my hero for decades.” And the nine-year-old daughter of our video editor hurried into the studio because she was writing a school report on Goodall (she got an A, by the way). Everyone was aware of who Jane Goodall is and what she has done to close the gap between the animal world and our own species.

  Goodall herself evolved from a youthful enthusiast of animals—inspired by her father’s gift to her of a toy chimpanzee he named Jubilee—to the world’s leading observer of chimpanzees and a global activist for all of life on earth. Through a chain of unintended consequences the young Goodall met the famous anthropologist Louis Leakey in Kenya, was hired as his secretary, and then was sent into the forest as his primary researcher on chimps. Over many years in the Gombe Stream National Park, she came to know her subjects as individuals with distinct personalities, and with social and family lives shaped by their emotions, as are our own. Her landmark studies diminished the distance between human and nonhuman, and her television specials were so popular it became easy to think all of us had grown up with her and the chimps.

  She and I were born a few weeks apart in 1934, and I am in awe at the pace she keeps, traveling more than three hundred days a year for the Jane Goodall Institute, challenging audiences to see themselves as caretakers of the natural world. Her Roots and Shoots program nurtures young people in 114 countries, teaching and encouraging them to improve and protect the environment. In a time of gloom and doom, as species disappear every day, development consumes more and more land, and global warming roils the climate, Jane Goodall insists that all is not yet lost. She makes the case in her book Hope for Animals and Their World, and as the focus of a new documentary, Jane’s Journey.

  —Bill Moyers

  This life you’re living now is such a contrast to the life of the Jane Goodall we first met many years ago, living virtually alone in the forest in the company of chimpanzees, sitting for hours quietly taking notes, observing. And now, three hundred days a year, you’re on the road. You’re speaking. You’re lobbying. You’re organizing. Why? What’s driving you?

  It actually all began in 1986. In the beginning of the year, I was in my dream world. I was out there with these amazing chimpanzees. I was in the forests I dreamed about as a child, I was doing some writing and a little bit of teaching once a year. And then this conference in Chicago brought together the people who were studying chimpanzees across Africa and a few who were working with captive chimps, noninvasively. We were together for four days and we had one session on conservation. And it was so shocking to see, right across the chimpanzees’ range in Africa, forests going, human populations growing, the beginning of the bushmeat trade, the commercial hunting of wild animals for food, chimpanzees caught in snares, population plummeting from somewhere between 1 and 2 million at the turn of the last century to at that time, about 400,000. So I couldn’t go back to that old, beautiful, wonderful life.

  My team and I were just looking the other day at that great old classic—the National Geographic special—which shows you meeting the chimps for the first time.

  Among the Wild Chimpanzees. That’s still one of the best films. Hugo shot it, my first husband. I love that film.

  Were the animals not affected by the presence of a camera crew?

  Well, once they are used to you, they seem to pay very little attention. It’s something which has surprised visiting scientists, who felt that the chimps’ behavior must be compromised by our presence. But they accept you. And they by and large ignore you.

  Do you miss them?

  I miss being out in the forest. I do go back twice a year, not for very long. But a lot of those old friends, or nearly all, are gone. The very original ones have all gone. They can live over sixty years, but still. And, you know, we’re now getting onto the great-grandchildren of the original chimps. And there’s a research team following them, learning about them.

  I’ve long wanted to ask you about the chimpanzee you loved best, David Greybeard. What was there about David Greybeard?

  Well, first of all, he was the very first chimpanzee who let me come close, who lost his fear. And he helped introduce me to this magic world out in the forest. The other chimps would see David sitting there, not running away, and so gradually they’d think, “Well, she can’t be so scary, after all.” He had a wonderful, gentle disposition. He was really loved by other chimps; the low-ranking ones would go to him for protection. He wasn’t terribly high-ranking, but he had a very high-ranking friend, Goliath. And there was just something about him. He had a very handsome face, his eyes wide apart, and this beautiful gray beard.

  When you and David Greybeard were communing, what language were you speaking?

  We didn’t. I always tried not to use chimp language in the wild because we really do try and look through a window. And now we know how dangerous it is to transmit disease from us to them. So we keep further away, which is sad for me.

  I ask the question because it seemed to me, watching the films, that there was some language being spoken, a means of communication without words that even communicated feelings.

  Right in the early days there was this wonderful situation when I was following David Greybeard. I thought I’d lost him in a tangle of undergrowth, and I found him sitting as though he was waiting; maybe he was. He was on his own ... I don’t know. And I picked up this red palm nut and held it out on my palm. And he turned his face away. So I held my hand closer, and then he turned; he looked directly into my eyes. He reached out and took it. He didn’t want it. He dropped it. But at the same time, he very gently squeezed my fingers, which is how one chimp reassures another. So, there was this communication: He understood that I was acting in good faith. He didn’t want the nut, but he wanted to reassure me that he understood. So we understood each other without the use of words.

  And where do you think this empathy comes from?

  It’s the bond between mother and child, which is really, for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.

  I know that you consider cruelty the worst human sin. You wrote, “Once we accept that a living creature has feelings and suffers pain, then if we knowingly and deliberately inflict suffering on that creature, we are equally guilty. Whether it be human or animal, we brutalize ourselves.” But you learned from the chimpanzees that animals can be cruel, too.

  Yes, but I think a chimpanzee doesn’t have the intellectual ability, or I don’t think it does, to deliberately inflict pain. You know, we can plan a torture, whether it’s physical or mental. We plan it, and in cold blood we can execute it. The chimpan
zee’s brutality is always on the spur of the moment. It’s some trigger in the environment that causes this craze, almost, of violence.

  You saw gangs of males attacking single females. You saw cannibalism, including females who eat the newborn infants of females of their own community although there’s other food available. You describe primal warfare among the chimps. Since you’re looking at them to see what we can learn about us and about our evolution, what conclusion do you reach about their aggression?

  Some people have reached the conclusion that war and violence are inevitable in ourselves. I reach the conclusion that we have brought aggressive tendencies with us through our long human evolutionary path. I mean, you can’t look around the world and not realize that we can be, and often are, extremely brutal and aggressive. And equally, we have inherited tendencies of love, compassion, and altruism, because they’re there in the chimp also. So we’ve brought those with us. It’s like each one of us has this dark side and a more noble side. And I guess it’s up to each one of us to push one down and develop the other.

  You even wrote once that it was your study of chimpanzees that crystallized your own belief in the ultimate destiny toward which humans are still evolving. What is that ultimate destiny? And how did the chimps contribute to your understanding of it?

  When you have the creature that’s more like us than any other living being on the planet, that helps you to realize the differences, how we are different. We have this kind of language that’s led to our intellectual development, that’s led to refining of morals, and you know, the questions about the meaning of life and everything. So I think we’re moving or should be moving toward some kind of spiritual evolution, where we understand without having to ask why.

  But “why” is the fundamental question, isn’t it? Isn’t that one of the things that makes us human, that we can ask why?

  Yes, but maybe we ask too often. Maybe we should sometimes be content, just being satisfied with the knowing, without saying, “Why do I know?”

  Where does your own composure come from?

  Possibly from months and months on my own in the wilderness. But I think I had it before.

  I have an image of you in my mind, of a little girl in Bournemouth, England, reading relentlessly from Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan. That’s what you did.

  Absolutely. I’ve still got all the books. They’re still there in my room.

  And that’s where your imagination was formed about Africa?

  Yes.

  Well, I read the Tarzan books when I was growing up. You actually did something about what you read!

  Yes, it was a passion, and I had a wonderful mother. I attribute a lot of what I’ve done and who I am to her wisdom, the way she brought me up. It was very supportive. She found the books she knew I would be interested in—animals, animals, animals. Everybody was laughing at me for dreaming of going to Africa. I was eleven, World War II was raging. We didn’t have any money. We couldn’t even afford a bicycle. My father was off fighting. And Africa was still thought of as the dark continent, filled with danger. And, you know, I was the wrong sex. I was a girl, and girls weren’t supposed to dream that way then. I should have been dreaming of being a nurse or a secretary or something.

  I was in love with Tarzan. I was so jealous of that other wimpy Jane. I knew I would have been a better mate for Tarzan myself. I was jealous!

  You would have made a better mate for Tarzan than I would have made a Tarzan.

  But my mother never laughed at my dreams. She would say, “If you really want something, if you work hard, if you take advantage of opportunity and if you never give up, you will find a way.” See, how lucky I was. I’m now working so much with young people because I could kill myself trying to save chimps and forests, but if we’re not raising new generations to be better stewards than we’ve been, then we might as well give up. So I can go to kids living in poverty in Tanzania or the inner-city Bronx, and tell them my story, and say, “Follow your dreams.” And they write to me and say, “You taught us that because you did it, I can do it, too.” And that is just right.

  Roots & Shoots, your program of training young people to be active in conservation movements, began in Tanzania, didn’t it?

  Yes, it began with sixteen high school students in ’91. And it emerged from Tanzania as a very new sort of thing. It’s now in more than 120 countries and involves all ages, from preschool through university. And more and more adults are taking part, even in prisons, the staff of big corporations. It’s basically choosing three kinds of projects to make the world better. One, for your own human community. Two, for animals, including domestic ones. And three, for the environment. There is a theme of learning to live in peace and harmony among ourselves, between cultures and religions and nations and between us and the natural world. Youth drive it. They choose the projects.

  Are those young people the source of this hope for animals and their world that you write about?

  They are a large part of it. I mean, isn’t it great that high school students in some inner-city area will greet me as I walk in as though I were a pop star? That is so amazing, because they’ve got out of what I’ve done a message of hope. And the fact that our main message is, “You make a difference every day. You matter. Your life is important.”

  This is why they want to come to my lectures. And I’ve met many people who say, “Well, I was really depressed, and a friend said, ‘You’ve got to go and hear Jane.’” And they come up in the book-signing line, which can be three hours long, and say, “I’m not as optimistic as you, but at least I now realize my life has more value than I thought, and I’m going to do my bit.” That’s what we need, isn’t it?

  You once said that you have the peace of the forest in you. What is that?

  Being out there in the forest, all those months alone, there was a growing sense of this great spiritual power all around, something greater than me. So you could lie and look up at the stars and feel yourself tiny. And yet, somehow, having this extraordinary awareness that we have as human beings that we can encompass a vague sort of feeling of what the universe is. And all in this funny little brain here. So there has to be something more than just brain. It has to be something to do with spirit as well.

  You had a very powerful experience in the spring of 1974, when you visited Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

  It was a sort of low time in my life. And there I was. I went into the cathedral, and as I walked through the door, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor just suddenly filled the whole cathedral. And the sun was just coming through that rose window. It just was so powerful a feeling. You know, how could this amazing cathedral, all the people who built it, all the people who’d worshipped in it, all the brilliant minds that had been within it, how could that all be chance? It couldn’t be chance.

  But does the meaning come with the DNA, or is meaning something we create out of life? As you have created meaning with your life?

  I don’t think that whatever you’re being faithful about really can be scientifically explained. I don’t want to explain this whole life business through science. There’s so much mystery. There’s so much awe. I mean, what is it that makes the chimpanzees do these spectacular displays, rain dances? At least that’s what I call them. They dance at the foot of this waterfall. And then sit in the spray and watch the water that’s always coming and always going and always here. It’s wonder. It’s awe. And if they had the same kind of language that we have, I suspect that would turn into some kind of animistic religion.

  You’re a scientist who observes the world and reaches your observations. Spirituality can’t be observed, it can be felt, and you reconcile those two in your own life.

  But I also had my mother. And she said she never saw the conflict between religion and evolution. Louis Leakey, my great mentor who dug up early man, he felt the same. So I had this, and then, yes, it all came together in the forest. But you have to remember, I didn’t start as a scientist. I wanted to be poe
t laureate, and I wanted to be a naturalist. That’s how I began. I didn’t have any desire to go and be a scientist. Louis Leakey channeled me there. I’m delighted he did. I love science. I love analyzing and making sense of all these observations. So it was the perfect rounding off of who I was into who I am.

  There’s a poem you wrote that I came across recently. I had not read it or heard it before. It seems autobiographical. I’d like to ask you to read it.

  THE OLD WISDOM

  When the night wind makes the pine trees creak

  And the pale clouds glide across the dark sky,

  Go out, my child, go out and seek

  Your soul: the Eternal I.

  For all the grasses rustling at your feet

  And every flaming star that glitters high

  Above you, close up and meet

  In you: the Eternal I.

  Yes, my child, go out into the world; walk slow

  And silent, comprehending all, and by and by

  Your soul, the Universe, will know

  Itself: the Eternal I.

  I want my grandchildren to read that one. By the way, I took one of my grandsons up to the American Museum of Natural History, to their marvelous Hall of Biodiversity. And we read there that 99 percent of all the mammal and plant species that have existed since time immemorial have disappeared. I told him extinction is a part of life. It’s a part of the history of the world. What’s unique now?

  Since the Industrial Revolution, our human impact on the planet, our greenhouse gas emissions, our reckless damage to the natural world, our continual growth of our populations, they have had a tremendously damaging effect, which has led to the sixth great extinction.

  The exhibit at the museum shows that reportedly five times since time immemorial, we’ve had a speeding up of the extinction of species. And that now this is happening again. And that’s why they refer to it as the sixth great extinction.