The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-26)

E2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021

Editors: Kathy Lally, Margaret Shapiro • Art Director: Alla Dreyvitser

Advertising Information: Ron Ulrich, 202-334-5289,
[email protected] • To contact us: E mail: health-
[email protected] Telephone: 202-334-5031 Mail: The Washington
Post, Health, 1301 K St. NW, Washington, D.C. 200 71

HEALTH & SCIENCE

SCIENCE NEWS

tallahassee — Manatees have starved to death by the hundreds along Florida’s east coast because algae blooms and contaminants are killing the sea grass the be- loved sea mammals eat, a wildlife official told a Florida House committee last week. Sea grass has been decimated in the 156-mile-long Indian River Lagoon and neighboring areas. The aquatic plant thrives in clear, sandy water, but murkier water because of the algae and pollutants has made it harder for sea grass to survive, said Melissa Tucker, director of the Division of Habitat and Species Conservation at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “Our statewide death count from all sources has been higher than it’s ever been reported before,” Tucker told the House State Affairs Committee. “This is a star- vation issue. There’s not enough sea grasses that are available to the manatees.” Officials noticed a s harp rise in manatee deaths from December through May, when the sea cows congregate in warm waters. Dur- ing that period, 677 manatees died, when typically only 156 die, Tucker said.

While manatee mortality lev- eled out after May, when the mammals extend their range in summer and fall, the state has recorded 968 manatee deaths in 2021, with more than two months left in the year. The previous an- nual high was 830 deaths in 2013, Tucker said. Big manatee die-offs in past years have been attributed to more transitory events like algae blooms and unusually cold weath- er, but the sea grass problem could take longer to reverse, Tuck- er said. Efforts are being made to replant sea grass and restore clam and oyster beds so the mollusks can help filter the water, she said. “This is something that we’re going to be trying to manage and improve over the course of years and maybe decades,” she said. Republican state Rep. Thad Altman, who represents Brevard County, where manatees typically thrive, said it will be dif ficult to regrow the sea grass unless the water gets cleared up. He said the ma natees are now even eating sea grass roots, permanently killing the aquatic plants. “We literally have a catastrophe on our hands,” Altman said. — Associated Press

Hundreds of manatees die in Florida because of pollutants that kill sea grass the sea cows eat

SCIENCE SCAN

Milli ons of years ago, giant beavers roamed what is now called Minnesota. More than twice as heavy as modern beavers, the 200-pound mammals had long teeth and powerful jaws. The megafauna were about the size of a modern black bear. Now, Castorioides ohioensis is expected to become Minnesota’s state fossil. About 11,000 people cast votes in an online election held by the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the museum plans to ask the state legislature to vote to make the extinct animal the state’s official fossil. Most states have official fos- sils. In the Atlantic, Ed Yong reports that the designations began in the 1960s, elevating animals like mastodons, plants like the dawn redwood, and aquatic creatures such as the megalodon — an extinct species of mackerel shark — to state symbols. The giant beavers were aquatic, and they used their teeth to grind and cut through wood. It is

unclear whether they encoun- tered early humans during the Pleistocene, an epoch in which huge mammals like mammoths were common in what is now the United States. Minnesota has attempted to install the giant beaver as its state fossil before. In 1988, el- ementary school students pro- posed the mammal. But although the bill received the support of some state senators, it fizzled and the state remained officially fossil-less for the next two decades. D.C. elected its official fossil in

The Capitalsaurus, as it is
known, was discovered a century
earlier by construction workers
digging a sewer connection be-
neath First and F streets South-
east. The dinosaur remains the
only specimen of its kind.
— Erin Blakemore

PALEONTOLOGY

Ancient beaver the size of a modern black bear may become the official fossil of Minnesota

Minnesota state fossil election Science Museum of Minnesota

Q&A WITH JANE GOODALL

SUMY SADURNI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

British primatologist Jane Goodall at a chimp rescue center in Entebbe, Uganda, in 2018. “We’ve got to get everyb ody around the world to
say, ‘We will not be defeated by climate change, we will not be defeated by loss of biodiversity,’ ” she says in an interview with The Post.

BY RICHARD SCHIFFMAN

A

half-century ago, Jane
Goodall was spending
months at a t ime sit-
ting in the Gombe for-
est in what is now Tan-
zania waiting for wild chimps to
approach her so that she could
observe their behavior. Her su-
perhuman patience paid off.
The young researcher discov-
ered that chimps are more like
us than we had imagined — lav-
ishing affection on their young,
forming social hierarchies, mak-
ing tools and even warring with
rival bands.
But Goodall says that her most
vital work began when she left
the forest and started traveling
across the globe to talk about cli-
mate change and the tragic loss
of biodiversity.
The pandemic has kept the 87-
year-old naturalist at home in
Bournemouth, England, where
she continues to speak out on-
line, especially with the young
people participating in Roots &
Shoots, a volunteer program she
organized that empowers young
people in 60 countries to work in
their communities to improve
the lives of humans, animals and
the environment.
She also has been working on
“The Book of Hope: A Survival
Guide for Trying Times,” which
published last week. In a s eries
of dialogues with co-author
Douglas Abrams, she spells out
her four reasons for hope: the
amazing human intellect; the re-
silience of nature; the power of
young people; and the indomita-
ble human spirit.
In a r ecent interview with The
Washington Post, Goodall spoke
about climate change, the state
of the planet and why she has
not yet given up hope on the hu-
man species. The following has
been edited for length and clari-
ty.

Q: Isn’t it a bit audacious to
come out with a book about hope
at this moment when so many
are feeling anxious and fearful?
What makes you hopeful?
A: I was 5 years old when World
War II began. There was a time
when Britain stood alone in
Europe against the might of Nazi
Germany. The rest of Europe was
overrun and defeated, or they
capitulated. Actually there was
no good reason for hope. We
didn’t have the defenses. We
hadn’t built up an adequate
army, navy or air force. But we
did have some very brave young
men, and we had [Winston]
Churchill saying “We’ll fight on
the beaches, we’ll fight in the
cities, we’ll fight in the lanes and
we will not be defeated.”
I think that we can prevail
now with the same spirit. We’ve
got to get everybody around the
world to say, “We will not be
defeated by climate change, we
will not be defeated by loss of
biodiversity. We will defeat covid,
we will fight to prevent another
pandemic.”

Q: S ome people would have a
darker view of human nature.
They might think that humans
are basically selfish and

incapable of acting for their own long-term good, or for the long- term good of the planet. A: I think it’s true that a vast number of people feel just as you said. But on the other side of the coin, there is a growing awareness of the problems and also of the incredible progress that is being made in all sorts of technologies that can work against climate change. The media deluges us with doom and gloom, everywhere you look in the papers, on television. And yes, they need to tell us these things. But they also need to tell us about all the great projects around the world, the amazing resilience of nature, the incredible people that are making change in the most miraculous ways.

Q: S ome people say that we need to go through a period of real destruction before humans are moved to actually change the way we operate. A: Well yes, when I say “good news” don’t get me wrong, but the good news for climate change is that no longer is it mainly in the news about countries like Bangladesh, but it’s hitting the Western world. Think of the recent Hurricane Ida in the U.S., think of the flooding in Europe. It’s when people get personally hit by these things that they start to realize — “Wow, this is really terrible we need to do something about it.”

Q: Much of the land around the Gombe forest has been deforested. You speak in the book about how you’ve been inspired by young people and others are helping to restore it. A: Y ears ago I flew over this bleak landscape, the Gombe Forest surrounded by bare hills because there were more people than the land could support struggling to survive, cutting down the trees on the slopes in a desperate effort to get more land for crops and to make charcoal. That’s when it hit me: If we don’t help these people to find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can’t save chimps, forests or anything else. Now we don’t have bare hills around Gombe thanks to our TACARE [or “Take Care”] program, which has been planting trees and working with the villagers to help improve their lot. Alleviating poverty is a major task. But we need to do it if we are going to save the environment. And we have to think about population growth. Right now there are over

7.5 billion people. Estimates for 2050 are closer to 10 billion people, and we still continue with business as usual. Already we are using up finite resources faster than nature can replenish them. It’s supposed to be politically incorrect to talk about the population. But we have to think about it.

Q: Y ou discovered that chimps make tools, solve problems and experience many of the same emotions that we do. We are now finding out that other creatures who are not close to us in an evolutionary sense are highly intelligent in their own ways. A: A bsolutely, whales, dolphins, elephants and lions, all these amazing birds, many of whom perform better than chimps.... When I started my work, I was told that I should have numbered the chimps, that was scientific, that I couldn’t give them names, as I did, I couldn’t talk about intelligence, personality or emotions because those things were unique to us humans. But I’d already been taught by my dog as a child that this was rubbish. You can’t share your life with an animal, can you, and not know that we are not the only beings with these things.

Q: We’ve sent probes to the planets looking for life elsewhere in the solar system. But we haven’t figured out how to communicate with other species on the planet. Do you see this happening in the future? A: Y es, there are people working on animal language. But the main thing is to understand that we’re trying to look for other life before we have discovered everything that is on this planet. Every time people go down into the deep oceans, they find new species.

Q: Y ou say in the new book that humans are intellectual but not necessarily intelligent. What’s the difference? A: T he intellect solves problems and it can do intricate mathematics and work out what’s out there in the universe, galaxies and solar systems and so on. But if you are intelligent, you don’t destroy your only home, that isn’t intelligent. We seem to have lost wisdom.

Q: Wisdom implies the head and heart working together. A: That’s right. With the head and heart together we achieve our true human potential. Recently I was talking to the CEO of a big corporation in Singapore, and he said, “Jane there are three reasons why I changed my company,” which had previously been destructive, into a green and carbon neutral operation. One was seeing the writing on the wall, seeing that natural resources were diminishing and realizing that if he kept on with business as usual, that was the end of his business. The second was consumer pressure, people demanding ethically produced products. But he said that the last thing that convinced him

was his little girl when she was

She came back from school
one day and said, “Daddy,
somebody told me that what you
are doing is hurting the
environment. And that’s the
world I’m growing up in.” That
went straight to his heart.

Q: T here is a well-known saying, “We have not inherited the world from our ancestors, we’ve borrowed it from our children,” but you change the last part of that in the book to “we’ve stolen it from our children.” Stolen? A: I f we cut down a forest that we are relying on for clean air and clean water, that’s stealing the future, it’s not borrowing. Because when you borrow, you pay back. How are we going to pay back a destroyed forest or a polluted ocean?

Q: S till you’re hopeful? A: We’ve already got the solutions to all these problems. There are amazing ways to restore fertility to overused farmland, we know what to do to minimize future pandemics by closing wildlife markets and banning the factory farming of animals. We know how to improve biodiversity and the health of the soil by changing from monocultures and industrial farming to regenerative agriculture, permaculture and so on. We’ve got a window of time to do these things. But it’s not a big window and it’s closing.

Q: Y ou write in the book that you feel that you have been personally guided by a higher intelligence. A: I don’t know what to call this higher being, but I feel it very much in the forest, this deep spiritual connection. I love it that so many top scientific brains have also come to this conclusion that there is an intelligence behind the universe. Einstein was one. Francis Collins, the director of NIH, who unraveled the human genome, started as an agnostic and ended up being convinced that there is a higher being.

Q: I t’s customary to end interviews like this by asking what you would like your legacy to be. But you are someone who is more concerned with the planet than with Jane Goodall. So my question for you is what kind of future would you like to see? A: I f we respect nature, if we respect animals, if we respect one another, things would be very different. I want a future where we’ve learned to live in harmony with the natural world, where we develop new ways of living, ways of growing food, ways of making money. You know we’ve got to lose this arrogance that just because we’ve got a brain that can design a rocket to go to Mars — but that doesn’t mean that we have any more right to be on this planet than an octopus. We need to realize that we’re part of this natural world and our lives depend on it.

Primatologist hopeful about our future

The famous naturalist reflects on her work with wild chimps, climate change and loss of biodiversity

“We’ve already got the

solutions to all these

problems.... We’ve got

a window of time to do

these things.” Jane Goodall

WILFREDO LEE/ASSOCIATED PRESS A manatee in the Stranahan River in Fort Lauderdale. Florida has recorded 968 manatee death s in 2021, with more than two months left in the year.

SCIENCE MUSEUM OF MINNESOTA Fossilized remains of the Castorioides ohioensis. More than twice as heavy as modern beavers, the mammal weighed 200-pounds and had long teeth and powerful jaws.

The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-26)

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources