Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality
with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we
allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.
Indeed, among hunter-gatherers, peace is common 90 percent of the time, and war takes place
only a small part of the time. Chimps cannot tell us anything about peaceful relations, because
chimps have only different degrees of hostility between communities, whereas bonobos do tell
us something: they tell us about the possibility of having peaceful relationships.
From “The Bonobo in All of Us,”
Nova
, PBS, January 1, 2007,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
Gorillas have on rare occasions been seen mating in the missionary
position.
117
Savage-Rumbaugh pushed
Many other primatologists and researchers have studied ape lan-
guage among chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. The essays in Cavalieri and Singer's
Great
Ape Project
provide an overview of these studies.
117
The difference between their species
Carole Jahme,
Beauty and the Beasts: Woman, Ape and
Evolution
(New York: Soho Press, 2001), 284, referenced in Frances Bartkowski,
Kissing Cousins:
A New Kinship Beastiary
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 114.
119
During the hundred days
Stearns,
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters
, 8.
120
It recalled her childhood
Sally's story reminds me of what David Sobel writes about how we
learn to feel affinity for the natural world. “What's important is that children have an opportunity
to bond with the natural world, to learn to love it and feel comfortable in it, before being asked
to heal its wounds,” he writes, citing studies showing that children given classroom lessons about
the plight of nature are far less likely to develop an affinity for it than those who get to explore
it in a carefree way, to enjoy being outdoors. It's hard not to wonder how successive generations
of urbanized children will grow up—whether they will have a desire to see places like these, or
to protect them. David Sobel, “Beyond Ecophobia,” in Lopez, ed.,
The Future of Nature
, 186; es-
say originally published in
Orion Magazine
(Autumn 1995). See also Richard Louv,
Last Child in
the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder
, (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books,
2008).
121
“
It was never my goal
. . .”
On the subject of the Jane Goodall syndrome, BCI advisor John
Scherlis explained the following to me:
My impression around 2001 was that some other bonobo people, longstanding field research-
ers, believed that Sally sought to be regarded as the Jane Goodall of the bonobos, a status it
seemed they wished for themselves. In fact, Sally's strongly held and overwhelming motiv-
ation was to facilitate effective conservation of bonobos by whoever could do the necessary
work. Her time with the Bonobo Protection Fund, which was not allowed to engage in conser-
vation work, reinforced her rightful conviction that another organization was needed, and that
the best way to do this was by unifying the disparate bonobo people in an alliance that would
speak on their behalf and foster their efforts. Only the emergent power of a coalition could im-
prove the effectiveness of bonobo conservation activities, whether collaborative efforts or indi-
vidual actions by members of the coalition. But the suspicion and needless vigilant territoriality
of the others thwarted her original goal of creating the umbrella advocate. They wrongly pro-
jected onto BCI what one might assume to be their own motivations and goals and erroneous
implicit assessment of it all being a zero sum game; that was tragic and incurred opportunity
costs for bonobo conservation, but was explicable given that both resources and opportunities
to do bonobo work were then very limited indeed, as were the opportunities for face-to-face
communication between the bonobo people. Of course, none of the bonobo researchers could
meet the criteria to be the “Jane Goodall” of bonobos, because circumstances have changed.
