by Bill Moyers
Yes. And it’s happening faster than the others, and you only have to look around. About two months ago I was in Greenland, and I was standing with Inuit elders at the foot of a great cliff of ice which went right up to the ice cap that covers the top of the world. And hearing and seeing huge slabs of ice come crashing off and thundering down, looking at this water that emerged from the ice cliff, which before, even in summer, had never melted, the Inuits had tears in their eyes. Some of them hadn’t been there since they were children. And they said, “This is our country crying out for help.” I think it should give us a sense of responsibility. We’re the ones who have set ourselves up as masters. We can change any environment to suit ourselves. So we’d better start thinking about the long-term consequences of those changes.
It may help that human beings can attach emotionally to animals. How do you explain that?
I suppose it comes from the time we domesticated wolves and got ourselves dogs. It’s amazing. Like the scientific proof now that if you’re sick, a dog can actually help you to heal, and so can a cat. So there is something in this bond, and it’s again another window into the fact that we are part of the animal kingdom.
Is there any evidence that the animals, the chimps in particular, have this “spiritual awareness,” this sense of other beyond themselves?
They understand the difference between “me” and “you,” we’re pretty sure. They’re definitely aware of things going on around them. Over and above that, I don’t know. I mean we, with our words, want to question, “Why am I here? What’s the purpose of it all?” We call it a soul. So if I have a soul and you have a soul, then I think my chimp has a soul and my dog has a soul, too.
You even find mysticism in the whooping crane.
Well, I did, yes. I had the opportunity to visit those amazing birds. They’re so ancient. It was in Wisconsin with Joe Duff of Operation Migration. We were flying up in an ultralight craft, which are used to teach the cranes a new migration route. The cranes normally learn from their parents. And they want to create a second migration route, in case the birds using the existing route are hit by bird flu or something. So some are being trained to fly from Wisconsin to Florida. I think it’s the twelfth migration that’s happening right now.
I went up in the ultralight for one of the training flights. Being up there was almost like being a bird up in the sky, open all around and looking down at the wetlands below. It was just so beautiful, training them this way. It’s so impressive to meet people who say, “I won’t give up. We will not let these amazing, beautiful birds disappear.”
There’s a report that somewhere around 17,300 species are actually endangered right now. That’s what we’re up against, right?
Absolutely. And wouldn’t it be easy just to say, “Well, it’s a trend. And it’s just happening. The pendulum is swinging. We just better sit back and let it swing. And maybe one day it’ll swing back.” If everybody stopped, if everybody gave up, then I wouldn’t like to think of the world that my greatgreat-grandchildren would be born into. The forests would go—they’ve been going so fast—the tropical rainforests and the woodlands as well. So there’d be huge areas of desert. The droughts which are already happening in Australia, in sub-Saharan Africa, would be worse. There would be very few wild animals. People would probably be living in some kind of bubble, a very artificial life. The water would all be polluted. The groundwater would be almost gone. I suppose we’d be desalinating the sea for our water. But I don’t want to live in that sort of world.
About the time you started at what is now Gombe National Park—it was 1960—I was joining the Kennedy administration. I made many trips to Africa then, for the Peace Corps. When I’ve gone back over the years, as a journalist, it’s been astonishing to me that what I used to see as green, verdant, rich countryside is now a desert.
It’s this explosive overpopulation. There are two main causes of intense environmental destruction. One is absolute poverty, because what can you do except cut down some more trees and try to grow food. In the tropics, cut the tree cover down, and you soon get a desert. And that’s happening all over the developing world. It’s happened in the United States, the great Dust Bowl. Agricultural overuse. So poverty is one. And unsustainable lifestyles are another. And that’s you and me and all the others like us.
Why don’t we have the imagination to see what is happening but hasn’t quite materialized as yet?
Well, I’ll tell you. First of all, I have spent years watching chimpanzees. They are more like us than any other living creature. The brain is almost the same. The intellectual abilities are extraordinary. But even the brightest chimp, it doesn’t make sense to compare intellectually with the average human, let alone an Einstein. It doesn’t make sense.
Think of what we’ve done. Think of our technology. We’ve gone to the moon. We’ve got little robots running around Mars. I mean, it’s extraordinary what we’ve done. So how come this most intellectual being, as far as we know, to ever have walked on this planet is destroying its only home? I think E.O. Wilson was the first to say that if everybody on the planet had the same standard of living as us, then we would need three new planets. Some people say four or five to supply sufficient nonrenewable natural resources. But we don’t even have one new one; we’ve got this one. So do you think we’ve lost something called wisdom? We are not asking: “How does the decision we make today affect our people generations ahead?” Is there a disconnect between this incredibly clever brain and the human heart?
We started out talking about the chimps. What is it that you learned from them that might help us cope with this world?
One way is to help us be less arrogant and realize that we’re part of it all. Some people say, “Well, you know, a few animals, what does it matter if they go extinct?” But I’ve been to places, as you have, where absolute crippling poverty as a result of environmental degradation is meaning that people are suffering horribly, too. And it’s getting worse and worse. People are moving because their islands are going underwater. And, I mean, we should be able to understand the consequences of our selfish behavior by now. So we can learn from the chimp that we’re different in these ways, and we should be able to do more to make change than they possibly could.
Do they seem concerned about or aware of their environment? The disappearing forest around them? The difficulty getting the food that they used to get rather easily?
They obviously know it’s tough times, but I’m absolutely sure they don’t know why. “Yeah, the forest was there yesterday and now it’s not. I could wander there last year, but now I may get shot.” I mean, they know there are changes, but they can’t work out why.
They are endangered. You said there were about a million of them when you went to Africa in 1960.
Less than 300,000 now.
Almost two-thirds of them have disappeared in your lifetime.
Yes. And what’s more, many of those remaining are stretched over twenty-one nations in Africa. Many are in tiny, isolated fragments of forest separated from others. They have no hope of surviving in the future because the gene pool’s too small.
What do we lose if the last chimp goes?
We lose one window into learning about our long course of evolution. I’ve spent so long and looked into these minds that are fascinating, because they’re so like us. And yet they’re in another world. I think the magic is, I will never know what they’re thinking. I can guess. And so it’s like elephants and gorillas, and all the different animals that we are pushing toward extinction. Are our great-grandchildren going to look back and say, “How could they have done that? They did understand. There were lots of people out there telling them. How, why, did they go on not trying to do anything about it?”
When I told someone yesterday that I was talking with you, he said, “I just read that there are 3, 200 tigers left in the world. And that their Asian habitat is disappearing very quickly. ” And he said, “But, you know, when the tigers are gone, will they
be missed any more than the dodo is missed? What difference does it make?”
It’s just that we don’t know what difference it might make if some of these creatures that we’re pushing to the edge disappear. You can take out a tiny insect from an ecosystem. Who cares? Well, it may turn out that some other creature depended on that tiny insect. So that will disappear. And goodness knows what effect that one had on something over there. So that will change. And so, in the end, you get what’s been called ecological collapse.
Is there good news?
There’s lots of good news. Can I start with Gombe?
Sure. That’s where you yourself started.
When I got there, there were 150 chimps in three different communities living on the lakeshore. And from where I was, near Kigoma, you could go for miles along the lake, chimp habitat. You could climb up from the lake, look out, more chimp habitat. Few villages.
Then in the early ’90s, I flew over in a plane. I knew there was deforestation. I had no idea it was virtually total. Just gone. So, this tiny little island of forest, 13.5 square miles, is surrounded by cultivated fields, eroded soil, landslides, horrible poverty. Too many people there for the land to support. How could we even think of saving the chimps with so much suffering? So that led to the Jane Goodall Institute’s TACARE program [Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education].
And that program, over the years, has worked to improve the lives very holistically of the people in the twenty-four villages closest to Gombe. Everything from different farming methods, helping them with water projects, and such. Especially important have been microcredit programs for women. A group of five women take out a tiny loan, each one for a different project, or sometimes all together. It’s got to be environmentally sustainable. So, maybe buying a few chickens, selling the eggs, raising chicks, selling some more. Pay back. Then you can take out a slightly bigger loan. So all these women have been empowered, because they now have something that’s theirs. They haven’t had a handout.
The real encouragement is that as soon as their lives began to improve, they began to allow trees to come back. As a result, they have set aside the land the government requires them to put into conservation in such a way as to make a buffer between the Gombe chimps and the villagers. And so, other small remnant groups and Gombe chimps will be able to interact again.
In other words, as people’s incomes increase the quality of life increases, and they’re more interested in preserving what is around. They understand more clearly what’s at stake with the environment on which their local economy depends.
Exactly. They understand saving the watershed. They understand that you can’t destroy the trees along the edge of a stream or the water level will decrease. They’ve seen it happen, and they completely understand. The trees and the water and the environment and their future wealth and happiness are all mixed together. And you must have had the same experience as me, traveling around the world. And realizing, you know, Africa’s problems aren’t just generated within Africa. They’re generated outside. They’ve been generated through hundreds of years of colonial exploitation.
And there’s something else that always irritates me. There’s a saying, “We haven’t inherited this planet from our parents, we’ve borrowed it from our children.” When you borrow, you plan to pay back. We’ve been stealing and stealing and stealing. And it’s about time we got together and started paying back.
JAMES CONE
Students walking to school that September morning in 2006 looked up to see three nooses hanging from a tree. For the black children, the scene was both infuriating and frightening. Days earlier they had asked school authorities for permission to sit under that same tree, a spot traditionally used only by white students.
Now, the hangman’s halter dangled from its limbs—three of them, grotesque reminders of a horrific past when innocent black people would be seized by white mobs, tortured, and lynched. Yet school authorities in the little Louisiana town of Jena didn’t seem to take the nooses seriously, and when black students protested, they were told by a local district attorney to knock it off or “I can make your life disappear with the stroke of a pen.”
That entire school year of 2006–7 trembled with tension, rage, fistfights, catcalls, arson, and eventually, after they beat a white male schoolmate, the arrest of half a dozen African American high school students for attempted second-degree murder. The black students became known as the Jena Six. After a public outcry, charges were reduced.
No doubt triggered by the media’s continuing coverage of the turmoil in Jena, nooses, real or depicted, began to show up elsewhere in the country; not many, just enough to shake our complacency about a “postracial” society. Just enough to invoke memories of Billie Holiday’s signature song, “Strange Fruit”:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
James Cone grew up in the shadow of the lynching tree, in the little town of Fordyce, Arkansas. He went on to a life of teaching and scholarship, and in 1969, his book Black Theology and Black Power established him as the founding figure of black liberation theology, the interpretation of Christianity through the experience of black people. As the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theolog y at the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, he has used the lynching tree as a metaphor for race in America, telling his students that “the lynched black victim”—falsely accused and put to death—“experienced the same fate as the crucified Christ.” In a remarkable coincidence, as the students in Jena came upon the nooses swaying in the tree, James Cone was preparing a lecture that he would soon deliver on the subject at Harvard Divinity School: “Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” You can view it at www.hds.harvard.edu/news/events_online/ingersoll_ 2006.html.
—Bill Moyers
I know you’re familiar with that old Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit.” It has traces deep in our DNA, doesn’t it?
Yes, it’s deep. Because lynching is so deep. And that song is about lynching. It’s about black bodies hanging on trees. And, oh, that’s deep in the American experience, particularly after the Civil War. Lynching wasn’t a part of slavery, because black people were worth too much. After slavery it was used to put fear and terror in the hearts of black people so that they would be forced to obey and stay out in the fields and work and not loiter—and to remember that whites controlled the South even though they had lost the war. That’s when lynching started. They wanted to remind black people that whites were in charge. Some of the same reasons why the Romans crucified people in the first century.
It worked.
Yes, it worked to a certain degree, but only in the sense that it reminded black people—and white people—that whites actually had the political, social, and economic control. Of course they didn’t have control of their humanity. See, that’s what religion is about. Religion is a search for meaning when you don’t have it in this world. So while whites might have controlled the black people physically and politically and economically, they did not control their spirit. That’s why the black churches were very powerful forces in the African American community—always have been. Religion has been that one place where you have an imagination that no one can control. As long as you know that you are a human being, then God is the reality that enables you to know that nobody can take that away from you.
Even though you’re living under the shadow of the lynching tree.
Even though you’re living under the shadow of the lynching tree. Because religion is a spirit not defined by what people can do to your body. They can kill your body, but they can’t kill your soul. We were always told that. There is a spirit deep in you that nobody can take away from you because God gave it to you. Now, if you know you have a humanity that nobody can take away from you, they may lock you up, they may
lynch you, but they don’t win.
You and I grew up about a hundred miles or so apart. My home was in east Texas; you were in southwestern Arkansas. Did people where you lived talk about lynching very much?
Yes, my mother and father did. Not so much publicly, but all the time at home. They told us stories about lynching. I think that was true for many black families.
I don’t remember whites in my deeply segregated hometown talking about it. But when my father died, I found in his effects a yellowed newspaper clipping from the town where he was born and lived the first years of his life. It was a photograph of a lynching near his farm. Several thousand people had come to watch this man lynched. That was not too long before I was born.
Spectacle lynchings were especially prominent just after the Civil War and in the beginning of the twentieth century. They didn’t stop until the late 1930s.
Here’s a recent story from the suburbs of New York City. A noose is found in the locker room of the village police department. The deputy chief of police is black. And then you’ve got what’s been happening in Jena, Louisiana. Do you think people understand what the symbol represents? Do they know what actually happened to human beings when that noose was placed around a neck?
Well, you don’t have to know all about the Holocaust to understand what a swastika is. You don’t have to understand all about the history of lynching to know what a noose is. That symbol is in American culture. As you say, it’s in the DNA. It’s white America’s original sin, and it’s deep. I think you know that for a long time, people didn’t want to talk about slavery, all 246 years of it. Then came a hundred years of legal segregation and lynching after the Civil War.
But you don’t get away from that experience by not talking about it. That’s too deep. Germany is not going to get away from the Holocaust by not talking about it. It’s too deep. So America must face up that we have this ugly thing in our history. We are one community, and you can’t escape our history. Black people and white people know we’re one community and there’s a tussle in this land we can’t get out of. It’s a history of violence—246 years of slavery. Black people built this country. White people know that. Then, after slavery, segregation, and lynching, we still helped build this country. We’re one people, and violence is a recurring experience in our relationship.