This is the Environment Show. It's about our stewardship of the Earth and the beauty
and mystery of life in all its forms. I'm Peter Burley.
Coming up.
PCBs. What risks do they pose for human health?
Scientists review the cancer data and the damage PCBs do to baby's brains while still
in the womb.
Ray Whales are making a comeback from near extinction. Sometimes there is good news.
We meet the bear woman of Idaho who raises orphaned cubs and puts them back into the wild
at hibernation time. Swats and lumps come with a job.
And on the Earth calendar, blue-footed boobies are nesting and mating in the Galapagos
Islands. These stories and more coming up on the Environment Show.
You're listening to the Environment Show and I'm Peter Burley.
Polychlorinated by phenols or PCBs were considered benign when the chemicals were first used
in the manufacture of electrical equipment more than 50 years ago. By mistake, huge doses
were mixed with rice oil in Japan in the 60s which had a serious effect on people who
ingested them. Efforts have been underway ever since to determine their toxicity.
The use of PCBs was banned in the United States about 20 years ago, but since they do not
break down in the environment, 70% of the PCBs ever manufactured are still out there.
Debate about their impact goes on and on. The general electric corporation was responsible
for dumping PCBs in the Hussetonic and Hudson rivers. It's facing huge potential liability
for the cost of cleanup and health-related claims by GE workers. A recently concluded
GE sponsored study is being heavily promoted by the company to show cancer risk from PCBs
has been overstated. I asked Lynn Goldman, who for the past five and a half years was
US EPA's assistant administrator for prevention, pesticides, and toxic substances to assess
the PCB risk.
Most of the risks that we are concerned about are risks with low-level chronic exposures
such as the exposures that may occur environmentally and also in the workplace.
The really two sets of risks that we are concerned about. One is cancer risks and we are aware
of the hazards of PCBs for cancer largely because of animal testing. The second issue
has to do with risks to children and particularly development of children's brains. That we know
about because of studies of people who consume high levels of PCBs, whether very high levels
because of accidents that have occurred in different places in the world or moderately
high levels because of having a lot of PCB contaminated fish in their diet.
Deborah Lee Davis, former member of the Federal National Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation
Board, and now a senior scientist at the World Resources Institute, describes what laboratory
tests indicate about PCBs and cancer cells.
There have been a number of studies finding a link with PCB similar compounds and breast
cancer, but these studies are more difficult to interpret because there are negative studies
and positive studies. But the bottom line is if you take PCBs in a laboratory and expose
it to breast cancer cells, you can dramatically increase their growth.
The recent GE Funded Cancer Study was conducted by Dr. Renata Kimbrough. She says her research
had oversight from an independent review committee that was not picked by GE. She analyzed the
death certificates of 7,075 GE workers who were on the payroll sometime between 1946
and 1977 and worked in plants that used PCBs.
Basically we found that the death rates for all causes and all cancers was lower than expected
and the death rates for all other chronic diseases such as heart attacks and strokes was also
lower and none of the specific cancers were significantly elevated in any of the different
groups.
Kimbrough says her study shows that animal data is not applicable to humans.
You see I was the person that did the initial animal study and published that in 1975 where
we found increased numbers of liver tumors. Also my study is not the only study, there are
a number of other studies and if you look at all of them in the aggregate, I'm talking
now about the worker study again, if you look at all of them in the aggregate, nothing
really falls out. And so I would conclude from all of that that PCBs, even though they
cause tumors in rats, they may not be potent human cocinogens.
Lynn Goldman, who has reviewed the Kimbrough study, says it does not settle with cancer
issue and that press reports have blown it way out of proportion.
This study will contribute to that body of evidence but it certainly does not trump all
of the other evidence that is already in place.
And some of the reports that have suggested because it appears to be quote negative that
therefore we should not be concerned about cancer risks from PCBs and humans, that would
be a foolish way to utilize a study of this sort. There are plenty of other data that
indicate the contrary.
Linda Bernbaum, Director of Experimental Toxicology for the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, says we need to focus on other effects
of PCBs.
Well, I think cancer is probably the least of our problems when we deal with PCBs. Certainly
from our animal studies, we know that PCBs are associated with a plethora of responses
ranging from immune suppression, from liver toxicity to dermal toxicity to um,
effects on our hormones and possibly most importantly to effects on our developing nervous
system and reproductive and developmental effects. So that I think that that's probably
where we have greater concern.
The impact of PCB exposure to the developing human fetus has been observed in children
of a great legs region. Dr. Peter Orris, Director of Research at the Great Lakes Center
for Occupational Environmental Safety at the University of Illinois School of Public
Health, describes findings that were made from 313 births by mothers who had eaten great
legs PCB contaminated fish during pregnancy.
There was a difference in head circumference and prematurity and a couple of other items,
but you know, you don't really know what to take of that because there are many causes
of these things. They then followed them up to four years of age and they still found
that the weight differentials were still there, which is unusual for prematurity. And now
they additionally found poor memory and attention problems in the four-year-olds that were
exposed. This cohort now has been followed through 11 years of age and it was published
a couple of years ago now in the New England Journal of Medicine. At 11 years of age,
startlingly enough, they have found that those highest exposed are more likely to be two
years behind in school. There seems to be an average IQ drop of around six points.
It appears that debate about PCBs will continue. The one fact that all scientists agree on
is our bodies accumulate PCBs in fatty tissue throughout our lifetime.
Few animals have been at the center of as many news stories over the last 12 months
of the California Grey Whale. Last year, the Macai Indians in Washington State decided
they wanted to resume a tradition of hunting grey whales in the Pacific. Meanwhile in
Baja California, the Japanese industrial giant Mitsubishi continues to create controversy
over its plan to build a state-of-the-art, solid-of-apparation complex near lagoon where grey whales
breed and give birth. 50 grey whales beach themselves along Baja California over the winter,
making some scientists wonder whether human forces are the cause. Despite these recent events,
the scientists say the future of the animal is bright. It's a remarkable success story
of a species that is returned from the brink of extinction. Stephen Westcott reports.
Native Americans have hunted grey whales on a subsistence basis for centuries, but it
wasn't until European settlers found them wintering along Baja California that their
populations began to decline.
Around the 1850s is when the whalers discovered the lagoons. That gave them the opportunity
to take their vessels in and anchor up, and they could just kill them as fast as they
wanted to. It also gave them access to cows with calves, and they found those to be the
easiest animals to chase down and to kill. So not only were they taking the cows, but they
were killing off all the new young calves. So it just drove the population down very rapidly.
That's Wayne Perryman, fisheries biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Services,
Southwest Fisheries Science Center near La Jolla, California. Perryman says in the mid-19th
century, grey whales and other marine mammals were in high demand for their oil, fur, and
meat.
And remember back in the 1850s is when the gold rush was taking place, so you had all
of those mines, you had all of those landerings, and not only whale oil, but also oil from
seals, was very, very valuable at that time.
Meat from the grey whale was used for food, bone was used for bicycle saddles and bootlaces,
and whips and umbrellas were made from their baleen. It's estimated that at the peak of
commercial whaling around 1855, more than 470 grey whales were being killed annually.
The whales that at one time may have numbered around 50,000 or more were decimated. So much
so that scientists find it difficult to determine just how many were slaughtered.
Well, we weren't around to count them back then, so the only way we can estimate how low
the population really got is by trying to track down whaling records to see how many
animals were taken. We know about how fast they can reproduce, so we can kind of work backwards
from now and try to calculate how many were there. It's pretty much a seat of the
dance guest, but I would say down to maybe a few thousand, they were certainly economically
extinct, which is probably what saved them.
With the grey whale so close to extinction, efforts began around the middle part of this
century to protect the medium size whale.
Well, the abundance has steadily gone up. There are some ups and downs in it, but it's
very convincing upward trend since the start in the 60s, and now the abundance is around
26 to 27,000.
David Rue is a wildlife biologist at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, Washington,
which is also part of the National Marine Fisheries Service. He and other scientists,
like Wayne Perryman, were able to monitor grey whales as they make the long spring migration
to the bearing straight in the North Pacific. Rue says the listing of the grey whale as
an endangered species in 1972 played an important role in the animal's recovery.
The grey whales were one of the first species to come off the endangered species list.
So we found that they were on the list, probably appropriately because there was concern,
but as we looked at how many there are and saw how well they were doing and continued
to do, we couldn't no longer justify calling them endangered. There are others that are
truly endangered out there, so we dropped them from the list. And just yesterday we finished
a five-year review of how the whales have done in the past five years since being removed
from the list, and it was concurred by a group of scientists and conservation groups.
Both from Mexico and the US. They are not endangered, they are not threatened. They should stay off the list.
While this population of grey whales is rebounding, others have not been so lucky. A population
that lived in the North Atlantic became extinct as a result of hunting in the 17th century.
Another population residing off the coasts of Russia and China today has been decimated,
and scientists fear only 70 animals may be left in the wild. Researchers are so used to
dealing with dwindling whale populations that the resurgence of the California Grey now
presents scientists with an interesting question. Will the population cap off or continue to grow?
Nymphs biologist Wayne Perryman.
We really don't know much at all about whales at population levels that are approaching
carrying capacity. Most of our data comes from whaling, and so the only animals we really
get to study are from populations that are depressed. So this is pretty exciting stuff to watch
this population. We have a lot of theories of what should happen, but to see what really
happens as a population of large whales approaches the limited environment is going to be pretty exciting.
Perryman adds that there is some evidence that populations of small crustaceans that grey
whales feed on in the North Pacific are declining. Some believe it could be due to overgrazing
by the rebounding whales. If this is the case, it is possible the number of grey whales
may soon level off.
Wayne Perryman says over the next five years, scientists should have a better idea as to
whether this environmental success story continues to grow or reaches its carrying capacity.
For the Environment Show, I'm Stephen Westcock.
The Environment Show is a national production. It's made possible by the W. Walton Jones Foundation,
the William Bingham Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and Heming's
Motor News, the monthly Bible of a collector car hobby. www.hemmings.com
Give us your thoughts about the environment and what you hear. Our number is 1-888-49-Green.
That's 1-888-49-Green. Email is green at wamc.org. That's green at wamc.org.
www.hemmings.com
I'm Linda Anderson and this is Ear to the Ground with stories about people affecting
change in the environment. This week, Bear Essentials.
Bear seems so invincible that it never occurred to Sally Maun that there could be such a thing
as an orphaned bear. That is, until the Idaho Fishing Game Department brought Maun,
a wildlife rehabilitator, a traumatized black bear cub. That bear, she says, turned
her life around and led her to founding Idaho Black Bear Rehab Incorporated out of her home
in Garden City. For the past 10 years, Maun, dubbed by local wildlife officials as the
Bear Lady, has taken in 42 black bear cubs. Cubs who became orphaned when their mothers
were either hunted or poached, killed by cars, fires, or died for other unknown reasons.
Maun says the cubs arrive as early as March and as late as the end of December and range
in age from 6 weeks to 11 months. Left on their own, they would surely die, but luckily,
they have Maun as their den mother. When you're talking about young cubs that I've raised
from five weeks old or even four or three or four months old, they pretty well identify
me as Maun and they treat me like another bear. That means I take my lumps, I get the
swats, I get the bites just like they do when they're playing on top of their Maun or looking
to get into trouble as kids will do. The older bears that come in, we get some in the fall
from having been orphaned during summer, perhaps. When they come in, they of course don't
recognize me as Maun, but it doesn't take them very long to react to the way the other bears
are treating me and they pretty much then begin just treating me like another bear as well.
Though the bears require a lot of attention and pull at the heartstrings of Maun, the business
of rehabilitation is about getting them back into the wild. After spending months in a chain
linked enclosure with 160 gallon swimtub logs and dog houses, it's time to move on.
Sometime between mid-November and late December, when the bears weigh between 60 and 100 pounds,
Maun begins to prepare them for hibernation. When the weather starts getting cold and about the
first part of November, I will start tapering off the food and cutting back a little each day.
And then usually by the middle of November, we have a pretty good idea of what we're facing,
weather-wise in December and when we might go. So at that point, I will pick a date about three
weeks out and just stop feeding all together. And it sounds horrible and is a wildlife
ability. The first time I did that, it was horrible because you're used to piling on the food when
you're getting ready to release. So they have plenty of fat, but these guys need that, the lack of
food and the cold weather is what kicks them into hibernation. When they're ready, the bears are
tranquilized and transported to den sites that include small caves or dugouts under trees.
And there they will remain Maun hopes until spring when they are left to forage on their own.
Maun says in all the years she's been doing this, only four bears have died before release and only
one became a nuisance bear and was sent away to a university for a research project. The success of
her work has been receiving a lot of attention and recently attracted aid from the world's
society for the protection of animals based in London. A bear specialist there says, on a global
basis, there's no one doing what she's doing as well as she's doing it. However, since black bears
are not an endangered species, some argue that saving a few cubs is not worth it. Some Maun says
feel the cubs are just a nuisance to which she responds. They are not endangered and there would
be two arguments to that. One is it's the right thing to do and in many cases the cub is orphaned
because of human interference or human problems that created the situation that caused it.
And it's a chance to correct that and give it a second chance. And then what happens at that
point is the cub when it's released has to take its chances just like the other bears in the wild
and face the same dangers. So all you've really done is give it a second chance to offset and
correct some of what probably we caused in the first place. The second and probably even more
important is the fact that when you have a good population of black bears which we do here in North
America, one bear doesn't make a difference. It isn't going to impact the population whether you do
or don't put it back. But when you have a threat during danger population as they do, for example,
in South America and some other areas, then what we've learned the past 10 years can be taken and
adapted to that because then every single cub becomes important and you need to be putting those
coasts back where you're going to lose your population. With ear to the ground, I'm Linda Anderson.
And now it's time for the Earth Calendar. As you listen to the show, blue-footed boobies are nesting
and mating in the Galapagos Islands and are nearby coastal Ecuador in South America. Dr. Gregory Miller
is vice president for the Andean Southern Division of the Nature Conservancy's International Program.
He says the process begins with males choosing nesting sites. Blue-footed boobies will pick
flat areas just off generally cliffs or beach areas. They don't nest on sand. It's generally on a
hard surface either a lava flow or another flat cliff-like area just off from the edge of the water.
After a male has chosen a spot, he marks off the nest by placing stones in a circle. He then
deposits guano around the stones which tells other males that this is his territory. Dr. Miller says
that's when the male attempts to attract a mate through an elaborate courtship display.
He will then build this little ring of stones, defecate, and then he will do what's called a
sort of sky-pointing behavior. When females will then fly over groups of males, they're a colonial
nester, and then the male will put his bill in the air. The males whistle. The females have
kind of a duck-like honker and a duck-like kind of sound. The male puts his nose in the air,
which is called a sky-point, extends his wings fully, and raises his bill up, puts his tail out,
pointed almost at a 90-degree angle from his bottom, and then does a very prominent whistle.
And this is demonstrating some kind of characteristics of suitability as a mate.
Once mating is complete, females lay eggs that both mom and dad help to incubate. The eggs hatch
about 40 days later. It takes generally seven to nine months for eggs to be produced,
to be hatched, and then the young to be to fledged or to leave the nest. So let's say a maximum
cycle could be up to even seven to nine months between sort of what we call breeding events,
from when they breed, produce eggs, and then have a clutch, which is two to three eggs.
Blue-footed boobies are a member of the Pelican family. In maturity, they're about the size of
a goose and weigh between three and four pounds. They can live to be more than 17 years old.
While their most prominent feature is their beautiful blue-webbed feet, they also are fierce hunters.
They frequently hit the water at speeds that might crush the skulls of other birds.
Air sacks in the blue-footed booby skull cushion the impact. The name booby is
Spanish slang for bobo, meaning clown or stupid fellow. The birds were given this name because of
their comical behavior, their clumsy appearance on land, and because they lack the fear instinct
of other birds. So next time you're at the circus and see a clown with blue feet, ask him if he
has relatives on the Galapagos Islands. If he starts placing stones in a circle, get out of the way.
You know he isn't clawning around. You're listening to the Environment Show, and I'm Peter Burley.
Still ahead. We celebrate the arrival of spring with music director Jeff Reynolds, who introduces us to two
classical compositions which commemorate the change of season. We talk green with Jane Goodall,
world-renowned scientist whose research has given us an appreciation of the intelligence of our
closest animal relative, the chimpanzee. Now she's organizing environmental education on a global scale,
and listeners comment on solar power, bias in the funding of research, and the effect of poverty
on the environment. Stay with us.
Spring is here, which means in many parts of the country animals of all kinds are becoming active,
plants are blooming, and there is a fresh smell in the air. For centuries the newness of spring and
the rebirth of the natural world has inspired musicians. In celebration of the end of winter, we turn
our attention to the music of two classical composers with a help of Jeff Reynolds, director of
choral activities at the University of Alabama Birmingham and music director of the International
Cathedral Music Festival. In talking about classical music and spring, classical music is
replete with instances where composers were encouraged and inspired by spring coming off of a cold
winter, and one cannot talk about spring and classical music without starting with Antonio Vivaldi.
Vivaldi, the Italian red-headed priestess, he was known not only because of the color of his
hair, but also because of his temperament, was born in Venice in 1678 and died in Vienna,
1741, thus bringing to an end the Italian Baroque era. He was son of a baker, a profession he
adopted before becoming a professional violinist, and worked for a long time at an orphanage for
girls, where he was the music director and composed a great deal of music for them. We know him today
for his 500-plus concertos, many of which have descriptive titles, just like his La Quattro Stagione,
or the Four Seasons. The first four of these 12 concertos, Opus Aitor, published under the
title the Contest of Harmony and Invention. Each of the movements is prefaced by a sonnet or a poem,
which we presume the composer composed himself, and phrases were inserted into the solo line of the
solo violin, at the appropriate point to explain the music more easily as Vivaldi put it.
His first La Primavera, or Spring, is for solo violin and strings. In the first movement,
which he marks a leg row and is an E major, we find the coming of Spring by a gay and joyous
melody that gets rid of winter altogether, and joyously marks the beginning of the warmth,
weather. We find it also, singing of birds brought about by trills in the violin,
a storm, which we in music know as the steely agitato, or a fast repeated series of notes to affect
thunder.
From Vivaldi, we go to the classical composer Franz Joseph Heiden, who lived 1732 to 1809. Heiden, along
with his Austrian compatriots, Mozart and Beethoven, was a quiet gentleman. A servant to the
Esther Hasey family, for most of his life, he lived in Eisenstadt, a small town just outside of Vienna.
Later in his life, as the prince began to release him and let him travel a bit, he
went to England on two very well-known trips and was very impressed with Hendelian oratorios.
He wrote the wildly popular The Creation, or known in his tongue, Dishruppfum,
later the Oratorio The Seasons, or Diat at Sighten in 1798, which was first performed in his native
Vienna in 1801. This work, the seasons, depicted simple farm people and their love of work,
play, hunting, and of course the Austrian drinking. Like the creation, it is filled with vivid
tone painting in the orchestra and the chorus. The introduction to this depicts the passage from winter
to spring. Simon, the character, one of the characters in this Oratorio, is a farmer who begins the
Oratorio with the announcement that spring has finally arrived. The chorus then joins
welcomely with Come Lovely Spring.
You have been listening to The Environment Show. This is Jeff Reynolds at the University of
Alabama in Birmingham and we've been talking about classical music and spring themes.
We're Talking Green and I'm Peter Burling. My guest today is a scientist who is known to just
about everybody in the world who's interested in animals and wildlife. She's written extensively,
lectured around the globe, spent a lot of time in the jungle in Africa, and one almost every
environmental prize there is. The world's foremost researcher on chimpanzees, her books include
Wild Chimpanzees and In the Shadow of Man. She is Dr. Jane Goodall. Dr. Goodall, welcome to our
program. You've undertaken a project which has the name Roots and Shoots and my understanding is
you're spending some time now promoting and talking about that. What is it all about?
Well, what really the Roots and Shoots program is,
branched from a sort of life-changing event for me, which was a conference in 1986
in which all the chimps, field experts came together under one roof and during that conference there
was a session on conservation and it was utterly shocking to see how all over Africa,
wherever people were studying chimps, the same grim story chimps caught in snares,
the forestation, fragmentation of populations, hunting for the live animal trade, and perhaps
worst of all today, the so-called bush meat trade, hunting animals to feed people in cities who
prefer wild flesh to domestic animals. And that led me to realize that I couldn't sit in my
beautiful forest anymore and go on learning about these amazing chimps. I must leave that to others
and I must move out and see what I could do to try and conserve the chimps and their forests.
And corny, though it may sound, the future of the world really is in the hands of the young people
today. So I began working extensively with youth in Tanzania, realized that the problems of Africa
are so closely linked to economic interests of the developed world which took me to work with youth
in the developed world. Roots and tutors are a program for young people from kindergarten
to university to try and make their world a better place for animals, for the environment,
and for their human community. And what they do depends on where they're living and what the
problems are. It's a hands-on program. And I take it, it is ongoing both in Africa and throughout
the United States. Absolutely. There's about 1,500 groups in North America. There are not sure
how many there are in Tanzania but altogether throughout 30 to 40 countries now. There are about
2000 or slightly more groups of roots and tutors of different ages. And you know it's incredibly
inspiring to read from the reports what these different groups of young people are doing,
how enthusiastic they are, how utterly convinced they are that they are changing the world. And they
are. That's the point. If we can't give them hope, if we can't empower them as well as teaching
them the problems, then I think there isn't much hope for the future. Are these programs focused
in classrooms then or are they setting other contexts? They're all over the place. They started
in secondary school in Tanzania and then they came over to North America. Then they started
creeping downwards into kindergarten. Even we have preschool groups. And we've actually got an
amazing program in a woman's prison in Dambri which I visited yesterday. So the inmates are
beginning to feel that they are after all some use to society. It's quite extraordinary what's
happening. And by the way, the name is symbolic. Roots creep under the ground, make a firm foundation.
Shoot seems very small and weak, but to reach the light they can break through brick walls.
And we see the brick walls as all the problems that we've inflicted on this poor old planet,
you know, over population, deforestation, spread of the desert, whole in the ozone layer,
predicted global climate change or maybe we're seeing it. And on top of all that,
we've got human greed, and cruelty, crime, and war. But the message is hope that hundreds and
thousands of young people root in shoots around the world can break through. And the main message
every individual matters, including non-human and each one of us has a role to play and make a
difference. And this obviously inspires, hopefully, activism, and the part of the people that are
involved. How do you see the roots and shoots graduate fulfilling this role of making a difference
in terms of environmental sustainability? Well, I think they develop a kind of philosophy,
which many environmental groups around the world also develop. You know that they can make a
difference. But hopefully, as this roots and shoots program takes off and it really is taking
off now, I mean it's growing faster than I can keep up with. But the graduates will have the,
you know, they will build a support each other when they get out of school, out of university,
in the real world where they have to make a living, where they may have to choose to,
or be forced to work for an organization which they consider is damaging the environment.
But if they don't compromise their own values, I always tell them you can work inside. You can
very gently try and change attitudes in this company that you disapprove of.
And for the listener to the environment show who would like to get involved with this or bring
it to their school or community, how do they do that? Well, it's very, very easy. All they need to,
they can either look up our website, which is jengoodle.org and that tells them all about roots and
shoots. Or they can call our 800 number, which is 592 Jane. Great. Dr. Goodall, let's talk about
chimps for a little bit. Over your long career in research, you have taught us all things that we
never anticipated. As you look back at the whole sum of it, what is the most important things
that you found and what is the significance for us? Well, I think the significant findings fall
into two categories, really. One is things that pertain directly to certain aspects of chimed
behavior. And the other is the sort of general philosophical way in which the study of chimps
has taught us more about our own place in relation to nature. So if we take the first aspect first,
the thing I think which is most significant for us is the what we've learned about chimpanzee
infancy, the importance of early experience, the tremendous importance of the type of mothering
that an infant receives and how these events in early life really do shape adult behavior.
And I think with what's happened in the developed world, with the change in family structure,
with the increase of women in the workplace, with the increased breakup of families,
we would tend to be nervous as to what effect this is having on our children. And you only have to
look around in societies today to think, well, yeah, maybe that does have some part to play in the
the increased troubled years of youth. I take it then that your research with chimps
gives you some pause about what we're doing in our own society as it relates to the family and
women and how we organize ourselves. Yeah, it really does. I mean, as more and more women are working,
some of them work if they want to, but they're careers, some of them because they have to for
economic reasons. But specifically for the second group of women, then society must find some way
of attending to the needs of the children. And there are so many daycare centres, if you
well know, where the staffing is always changing, there's too many children per group, and they're not
getting the kind of reassurance, they're not getting that close contact with one or two responsible
adults, which I think is terribly important for them. And over and above that, they're spending
hours watching violence on television, and they're becoming more and more wrapped up as they get
older in the virtual reality of the computer world and less and less time to live in the real world.
And so we're breaking their ties with the natural world. And I think that's a disaster.
Dr. Goodall, another issue that you've commented on frequently has to do with medical research and
where we're going. Given the proximity between the chimps and the human, they obviously are targets
for continued medical research. What kind of guidelines should we as a society apply to that kind
of activity? Well, there are again two issues here. And the first one is what kind of conditions
are we keeping these chimps and these in? Our closest relatives who are intensely social,
who should have the freedom of the forest, the opportunity to decide each day what kind of day they're
going to live, which group to travel with, where to go, what to feed on. And we're confining hundreds
of them, hundreds and hundreds, in cages of the five foot by five foot, their prison cells in which
their infalletry confinement punishes for crimes they never committed. And then there's the much harder
ethical issue as to whether we should be using them at all. Do we have the right to use other creatures?
For purposes which may or may not be beneficial to mankind. And I think this is where that comes
directly back to the other thing I think is so important that the chimps have taught us. They've
helped to blur a line that was once perceived so sharp between humans and the rest of the animal
kingdom. You know, once they, once they teach us that we're not the only creatures with personality,
capable of rational thought, knowing emotions like happiness, sadness, fear and mental as well as
physical suffering, prepared to admit that it gives us a new respect, not only for chimps I think,
but for the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet. And that raises such an interesting
question again about the research. Should we be thinking about chimps as objects of scientific research
differently than we might say mice because of their proximity to ourselves?
Well, that again is the species' argument which obviously the degree of suffering that you inflict
on animals whether it be in research or intensive farming or fur farming whatever it is. The degree
of suffering you inflict presumably has an impact on how you view, evictly, the use of those
animals at all. But if we just take medical research, is it not possible that had we never been so
arrogant as to think that we could just use other animals for our own purposes might our very
brilliant brains have found other ways of doing this kind of research. I mean, today there are
so many techniques like cell culture tissue culture computer simulation which enable scientists to do
the same research they used to do on animals without using any animals. And these are things which
even 10 years ago there were animal experiments who said well it's bad luck but we're always
going to have to use some animals for this kind of procedure and that turns out not to be true.
Where are the big opportunities and challenges for research with chimps in their natural condition
taking us in the near term future? In the natural condition? Yes. Well, I think it's
tremendously important to have people out in the field because once you get a group doing research
in a patch of forest that does focus attention on conservation issues providing you work with
the local people which we always do and it will help to conserve chimps across Africa which is
desperately important because not only you conserving amazing individuals but each group of chimps has
its own primitive culture traditions passed from one family generation to the next through observation
and imitation. And that's disappearing as biological diversity is disappearing so too is cultural
diversity among the chimpanzees? Are you hopeful with respect to the future of chimps populations in
the wild? I'm hopeful that we shall conserve some across their range we shall lose others but with
education of young people helped from the developed world yeah we shall save some. Thank you so
much for being with us. My guest has been Dr. Jane Goodall and I'm sure you have comments about
what she has said so share them with us our number is 1-888-49-green we've been talking green
that I'm Peter Burley.
you
can listen to the environment show anytime on your personal computer go to our website
www.enn.com slash ENV SHOW
once you've done that write to us the environment show 3-18 Central Avenue Albany, New York 1-2-2-06
we hear now what some of our listeners are saying here's Stephen Westcott we received a lot of
comments regarding a recent discussion on solar energy and technology many listeners wanted more
information about solar power and one woman said we should follow up on how solar power can be used
to electrify appliances especially if the Y2K bug disrupts the power grid a listener named
Allison called our comment line to say I was delighted to hear you speaking of alternate
renewable resources and speaking of solar energy I was surprised though that the subject of
hemp fuel was not brought up and not discussed I would like very much for that to be something
that's discussed and put on the table and I know I'm not the only one it's been actually in
legislation people have been trying to rally to be able to vote for such things and I think it's
a really valuable resource that needs to be investigated and needs to be looked at
Wade listen to a talking green conversation and emailed us to say quote and that show you were
discussing environmental reporting with the CNN correspondent and the head of some university
department devoted to environmental reporting the reporter made a point of how he would make sure
that research funded by industry would be pointed out as a potential conflict of interest
would that reporter be so diligent about reporting the funding source of environmental research
if it came from a so-called pro-environmental group the problem with science reporting is that
self-appointed environmental groups are assumed to be unbiased while industrial groups are
assumed to be biased bias is created when a group stakes out a position and is unable or unwilling
to accept independent data that contradicts their established position by that definition many of
the environmental groups would have a potential for bias in their research and quote a listener by
the name of Jim call to express thoughts about another environmental issue my concern
environment or statement like to make is that one of the things overlooked is actually poverty
being one of the causes of the environment in the sense that if I can be Brazilian rainforest
that people will burn a great deal of the forest or an Indonesia makes space for themselves that
wasn't there and the poor use of fuel to keep warm such as what's happening inside
the area of the use of coal so I just like to bring that up. Lastly a listener contacted us
through the questionnaire on our website to recommend that we do a series on green consumerism
and how this can be fostered he says quote why don't the giant environmental organizations and
associations and clubs band together at the beginning of the new millennium and pool resources
to initiate their own ad campaign in other words engage people what their appetite and make them
want to buy green and quote we appreciate all comments questions and suggestions you can
reach our comment line by dialing one eight eight eight forty nine green that's one eight eight eight
forty nine green for the environment show I'm Stephen Westcott.
If you think it's PCBs that cause the feed of boobies to turn blue you weren't paying attention
also you should hear Jane good all again call one eight hundred three two three nine two six two
and order a copy of the show it's program number four eighty five the environment show is a
national production which is solely responsible for its content Alan Shartock is executive producer
Stephen Westcott is producer and Ray Graf is audio engineer the environment show is made possible by
the W. Alton Jones Foundation the William Bingham Foundation the Turner Foundation the J.M. Kaplan
Fund and Heming's Motor Do's the monthly Bible of the collector car hobby www.hemmngs.com
be good to the earth and join us next week for the environment show
we
