Human Migration

by William H. Benson

June 30, 2016

     A constant in human affairs is migration. Ever since the days of Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of us all, Homo Sapiens have moved, migrated, and transported themselves toward the illusive distant horizon. According to paleontologists’ best estimates, Eve’s descendents departed Africa within the last 80,000 years, followed the Indian Ocean’s coastline, spread across Asia, and then stepped onto the North American continent as recent as fifteen thousand years ago.

      Then, within the last forty thousand years, another batch of Eve’s descendents, departed Africa and veered west into Europe, where they encountered the Neanderthals, whom the Homo Sapiens proceeded to kill off or welcome into their own families, but no one is sure.

     Over the past two or three millennium, several peoples have laid claim to the British Isles. First, there were the Celts in the years before Christ; then, Julius Caesar and his Romans in the first century; then, northern Europe’s Germanic tribes —the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians—in the fifth century; then, the Vikings in about 1000 A. D.; and, finally, the French Normans. Each group thought it their duty to cross the English Chanel and conquer the people already there.

     I am sure there is a lesson somewhere in this history, in light of the Brexit vote last Thursday. One British commentator said, “God dug the bloody Channel for us, so why do we keep trying to fill it in?”

     Another constant: migration leads to conflict. One displaced person explained it, “These people came out of nowhere, after we had lived there for eons, and they said that they now owned our land.”

      Certain cultures have built the memory of their long ago migration into their religion and psyche. Jewish people say the words to the Passover Haggadah, “We ourselves went out from Egypt,” and in the midrash, they say, “All generations stood together at Sinai.”

     Reasons for migration fall into one of two categories: either a “push” or a “pull.” People find themselves pushed out because of a lack of jobs, few opportunities, insufficient land, inadequate living conditions, a hostile climate, famine, drought, fear of persecution, slavery, natural disasters, a poor chance to marry, or war. People are pulled to new lands because of better employment, an excellent education, religious or political freedom, or a more attractive climate.

     For example, Gambia’s youth are fleeing their small African nation because of Gambia’s dictator, Yahya Jammeh, who, The Week reported, “is erratic and brutal even by African standards. He claims to be able to cure HIV, ‘though only on Thursdays,’ and he threatens to personally slit the throats of gays.” As a result, Gambia is “one of the world’s leaders in producing refugees.” Many have fled to Europe.

     Even more tragic is the Syrian civil war between Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ruler, and the rebels. Now in its sixth year, the war has displaced millions. Five million Syrians are stranded in Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan; and another seven million are displaced inside Syria, and would migrate, if they could. Europe though has hesitated to open its doors to the Syrians, who are caught in the war’s cross-fires.

     On August 4, 1942, at World War II’s beginning, when many young men were leaving the family farms to serve in the military, the U.S. and Mexico signed an agreement, called the Bracero Program. By it, Mexican laborers legally entered into the United States to work on the country’s farms. They were paid thirty cents per hour, and authorities expected them to return to Mexico after the harvest.

     The program created a problem, that of undocumented laborers, those who did not bother with pursuing work here through the proper channels. By 1952, 1.5 million Mexican workers lived and worked in the United States, but did so illegally. Many were rounded up and deported. Then, on December 31, 1964, the Bracero Program officially ended, but the need for laborers still continued.

     One journalist wrote, “The allure of American prosperity combined with the desperation of the unemployed Mexicans worked together to create a problem too big for both governments to control.”

     The Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, now wants to stop all human migration between the U.S and Mexico. He begins with a worthwhile goal, to “secure our border,” but then he jumps to an unworkable solution, build a 1,300-mile wall, and, he says, “Mexico will pay for it.”

     The U. S. has spent millions just trying to build a fence between the two countries, and it has failed to stem the tide of migrants daring to seek jobs in America. A wall would cost far more, perhaps $10 billion, but the U. S. taxpayer would pay for it, because Mexico’s government would refuse.

     No one likes to feel pushed aside, and yet the Native Americans, the Palestinians, the Celts, the Neanderthals, the Syrians, and the Gambians have felt pushed off and out of their native lands. For tens of thousands of years, persecuted peoples have packed their bags and fled, and if people sense job opportunities elsewhere, they too will pack up and leave. A wall will not stop human migration.

     The difference between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down the wall.” Donald Trump says, “I will build a wall, and I will make Mexico pay for it.”   

Father’s Day

Lincoln vs. Montaigne

by William H. Benson

June 16, 2016

     Abraham Lincoln’s father, Tom, was of a different substance than his son. Tom uprooted his family again and again. They moved from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois, and in each he expected his son to help him build a home and a farm. There were trees to chop down, fences and cabins to build, stumps and boulders to dig up, seeds to plant, and grains to harvest in the fall. It was nonstop work.

     One of Lincoln’s biographers said, “Abraham Lincoln was like a slave to his father.” As Tom’s health and eyesight failed him, he came to depend upon young Abe’s strong back and arms, and then he sent his son to work in the neighbors’ fields to generate a few coins that Tom then collected and spent. Hence, Abraham’s chilling words written years later, “I used to be a slave.”

     Indeed, the domineering Tom Lincoln exploited his son’s skills with an axe, his ability to wrestle a rock or a stump out of the ground, and his command of a horse hitched to a plow. Abraham Lincoln detested all the work and said, “My father taught me to work, but he never taught me to love it. I never did like to work, and I won’t deny it.”

     In Indiana, Tom was a leader in the Baptist church, located just a mile across the Lincolns’ field. Another of Lincoln’s biographers said, that as a teen-ager, “Abraham lived in an atmosphere that out-Calvined Calvin himself.” The pulpit, the pew, and the plow loomed large in young Abraham’s life.

     When still a young man, Abraham set upon a course of reading and self-education that lasted until his final days. He rejected Tom’s monotonous farm work and his terrifying religion. Instead, Abraham sought to learn about life and ideas beyond his wretched existence. He wanted to read books, to ponder others’ thoughts, and to consider other pursuits in life. Soon, he took up the study of law.

     David Herbert Donald said of Lincoln, “In all his published writings, and indeed, even in reports of hundreds of stories and conversations, he had not one favorable word to say about his father.” When Abraham married Mary Todd, he did not invite Tom to the wedding, and Tom never met Mary or their children. When Tom passed away, Abraham did not attend the funeral.

     Now contrast the Lincolns’ estranged father / son relationship with that of the sixteenth-century thinker and writer, Michel de Montaigne and his father, Pierre.

     Pierre first hired a Latin tutor and then a Greek instructor for Michel, who grew up in a state of “constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation.” Because his father never expected him to work on the estate’s fields, Michel learned nothing of field work.

    He admitted, “I can hardly distinguish between the cabbages and lettuces in my garden. I don’t even know the names of the chief implements of husbandry, nor the rude principles of agriculture, which every boy knows.”

     Pierre hired a musician to play his lute every morning to awaken Michel in a most gentle and soothing manner, because he believed “that it troubles the tender brains of children to wake them in the morning with a start, and to snatch them suddenly and violently from their sleep.”

     Whereas Lincoln had a slim chance for a superior education, and Tom expected him to work hard, Michel had the best education, and Pierre never expected Michel to work in any field.

     Montaigne retired early, to his country estate at Bordeaux on February 28, 1571, on his 38^th birthday, because, he said, he was “long weary of the service of the Court and of public employments.” There, he jotted down his essays for the next twenty-one years. Lincoln’s self-improvement scheme propelled him into the White House, and he never enjoyed any retirement.

     The difference in the two parenting styles reminds me of Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue.” 

     “Well, my daddy left home when I was three, and he didn’t leave much to Ma and me, . . . But the meanest thing that he ever did was before he left, he went and named me ‘Sue.’ It seems I had to fight my whole life through. Some gal would giggle, and I’d get red. Some guy’d laugh, and I’d bust his head. I tell ya. Life ain’t easy for a boy named ‘Sue.’”

     Then, one day Sue meets his father in a saloon, challenges him, and the two grown men fight. Sue’s father then explains to Sue that he ought to thank him “for the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye, because I named you Sue.” Sue then says, “I came away with a different point of view.”

     Unlike the fictional boy named Sue, Lincoln was constant in his rejection of his father, and all the arduous work, and when Abraham had children, he was loving and most indulgent. On the other hand, Montaigne was constant in his appreciation of Pierre and called him, “The best father that ever was.”

     What can we take from this? That certain parenting styles are ill-suited for certain children. I wonder though, “If Tom Lincoln had loved Abraham and directed his son’s education like Pierre had done for Michel, would Abraham have achieved all that he did?” I wonder.   

     On Sunday, celebrate Father’s Day, perhaps at a picnic in the park, and think of your father.

Cancer

by William H. Benson

June 2, 2016

     Beau Biden, the Vice-President’s son, passed away on Saturday, May 30, 2015, a year ago, of brain cancer. He was 46. In January, of this year, in his final State of the Union Address, President Obama announced that he was naming his Vice-President, Joseph Biden, to spearhead his “moonshot effort to cure cancer,” part of the president’s $202 million Precision Medicine Initiative.

     Two weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a special series of articles entitled, “The New Anatomy of Cancer,” and a journalist named Sam Apple wrote a most interesting article.

     In it, Apple described “the Warburg effect.” A mid-twentieth century biochemist named Otto Warburg, who survived the Holocaust, noticed that cancer cells drawn from a rat tumor did not require oxygen to multiply. Instead, those cancer cells gobbled up “enormous amounts of glucose (blood sugar) and broke it down without oxygen,” which made no sense to Otto, because there was plenty of oxygen available. “The cancer cells,” he noted, “were ravenous only for glucose.”

     In a normal cell’s cytoplasm, glucose is converted into a form called pyruvate that then passes into the cell’s mitochondria, where it is burned in the presence of oxygen to create abundant amounts of energy. Scientists call this process “respiration.”

     But in a cancer cell, the mitochondria are by-passed, knocked out of the process, and the cell ignores the oxygen. Instead, the cell stuffs itself with glucose again and again. “Unlike healthy cells, growing cancer cells are missing the internal feedback loops that are designed to conserve resources.”

     This frenzied gorging upon glucose produces a waste product in the cell called lactic acid that passes into the liver, where it is broken down a second time to create more glucose. The cancer cells then gobble up the reconstituted glucose. This perpetual cycle will, at some point, overwhelm the host’s body. Scientists call this process “fermentation.”

     Healthy respiration vs. unhealthy fermentation.

     Apple said that the “positron emission tomography,” or the PET scan, “works by revealing the places in the body where the cells are consuming extra glucose.” In simple words, if you find the areas where there is a rapid uptake of glucose, there you will find the cancer.

     Warburg’s research was dropped from cancer textbooks with the advent of genetic research. James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA’s curving double helix structure in 1953, and the pursuit was on to discover the genetic mutations that lead to cancer’s several forms and structures. Researchers believed then that if they discovered the mutated genes, they would find the path to a cure.

     In recent days, Apple met with James Watson, now 88, who admitted that “locating the genes that cause cancer has been ‘remarkably unhelpful,’” and that “the belief that sequencing your DNA is going to extend your life [is] ‘a cruel illusion.’” In other words, an oncologist may know the specific mutated gene that causes a type of cancer, but that knowledge does not clear the path to a cure or a therapy. 

     Certain researchers today have renewed their focus upon Otto Warburg’s work on metabolism. One who has done so is Lewis Cantley, who has discovered a tentative connection between diabetes and cancer. Their commonality is “elevated levels of insulin, that is produced in the pancreas.” Insulin’s job is to tell cells to take up an excess of glucose, if detected in the blood. Cantley says that “cancer cells behave as though insulin were telling it to take up glucose all the time and to grow.”

     A drug of promise is “metformin,” a drug that diabetics now take to reduce their blood sugar. Apple says, “Diabetics who take metformin seem less likely to develop cancer than diabetics who don’t.” 

     In 2010, a young oncologist named Siddhartha Mukherjee published his best-seller, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction the next year. Mukherjee says that he wrote his book in response to a patient’s complaint. “I’m willing to go on fighting,” he said, “but I need to know what it is that I’m fighting.”

     Mukherjee calls his work “a dismal discipline.” He describes his first meetings with new patients as “hyper-acute.” He writes, “It’s a moment when you get to erase everything that’s irrelevant and ask the most elemental questions—about survival, family, children, legacy.”

     The President’s Precision Medicine Initiative is a step in the right direction, but researchers know more is needed. One writer said, “Does anyone truly imagine prevailing without bringing the fight everywhere—without matching cancer in its inventiveness, its nimbleness, its sheer relentlessness?”

     “Relay for Life,” the American Cancer Society’s fund-raising program, occurs once a year. Let us run, not walk, at this year’s relay.

Osama bin Laden and Mao Zedong

  by William H. Benson

May 18, 2016

     In recent months, the journalist, Seymour Hersh, published his most recent book, The Killing of Osama bin Laden and the Importance of Truth in Democratic Governance. In it, he criticizes the Federal government’s official narrative of bin Laden’s death, and calls it “a fabrication, a fantasy,” worthy of “Lewis Carroll.” “The story stunk,” he says, “from day one.”

     Hersh lambasts Mark Bowden’s popular book, The Finish, because it parallels the government’s narrative, unlike Hollywood’s alternate version, Zero Dark Thirty.

     First, Hersh points out that the CIA’s barbaric torture of informants, as depicted in the movie, did not help at all in finding bin Laden. Instead, one of Pakistan’s disaffected agents, motivated by the $25 million reward, walked in and gave to CIA officials bin Laden’s location.

     Hersh contends that certain of Pakistan’s officials had nabbed bin Laden in 2006, and that they had detained him at the compound at Abbottabad, less than two miles distant from Pakistan’s version of West Point, where they could watch over him.

     Once the Americans knew of bin Laden’s location, Hersh believes, they confronted Pakistan’s officials and demanded that they release him to them. Pakistan’s officials agreed but demanded more United States taxpayers’ money. It was the White House and the United States military that decided upon a stealth operation at night that included twenty-three Navy seals.  

     Hersh wonders, how did two Black Hawk helicopters fly into Pakistan’s territory, without any response from Pakistan’s military? Where, he asks, were the guards at the compound on the night of May 1, 2011, when the attack began, and why did the local police fail to respond?

     Finally, Hersh argues that the Navy seals did not transport bin Laden’s body back to a U. S. naval vessel where they then prepared it for burial at sea in accordance with Islamic law. Hersh claims that we may never know where the Seals buried Osama bin Laden’s body that night.

     Which version of bin Laden’s killing is true? The Pentagon’s? The White House’s? Hollywood’s? Mark Bowden’s? Or Seymour Hersh’s?

     Most would agree that Hollywood’s version is the most questionable. Federal government officials have dismissed both Hollywood and Seymour Hersh’s versions. Also, Mark Bowden wonders about Seymour Hersh’s claims. If Hersh’s ideas are correct, Bowden asks, then how were so many Federal and military officials duped into believing in the ruse, in the fabrication of events, that Hersh lays out?

     We may never know the truth. Like the Bay of Pigs fiasco, many files are classified and unavailable.

     China’s Cultural Revolution began May 16, 1966, fifty years ago this month, when Mao Zedong unleashed the fury of student militias that he called the Red Guards, who, according to the New York Times, killed “a million or more people, persecuted tens of millions, and destroyed thousands of historical and cultural monuments.”  

     Most Americans have little, if any, knowledge of the terror that gripped the Chinese people for ten years, until Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. For Americans, the late sixties and early seventies was a time of growth, an expansion of freedoms, a change in music and lifestyles, and anti-war demonstrations.

     For the Chinese though, those years meant misery and terror. It was as if a giant iron block had dropped upon the Chinese people, who felt smashed and crushed.

     Mao insisted that his officials push anyone—university professors, writers, intellectuals, doctors, or even common laborers—who was suspected of capitalist or bourgeoisie thinking, out of their respective positions in society. Thousands found themselves exiled to the countryside where they were forced to slop the hogs, toil in fields, clean houses and barns, and endure endless hours of Marxist instruction.

     Accusations and finger-pointing were rampant. Employees turned on their supervisors. Students turned on their professors. One son turned on his own mother because she criticized Mao Zedong for causing so much confusion and havoc. The Red Guards seized her, lined her up, and shot her. Many took their own lives. Mao’s appetite for social upheaval was unchecked.

     The result: the economy collapsed, hunger and privation resulted, and people starved. Today, China’s government remains reluctant to admit the truth, to seek justice, and to punish the perpetrators.  

     In America, people possess a Constitutional right to state their opinion, but in dictatorships, people have no such right, and can do little, other than wait and keep their heads down.

     In his book, Seymour Hersh makes his case. “Good leadership requires vigorous and honest debates, a multiple number of disagreements, different perspectives, and a consideration of all possibilities.” It is a messy business, but, he insists, it leads to truth, to better judgments, and to wiser decisions.

     The killing of Osama bin Laden, and China’s Cultural Revolution. Hersh believes that the American people have not heard the whole truth about bin Laden’s killing, which may or not be true, but we know that the Chinese people have not heard the whole truth about the Red Guards’ deplorable actions during China Cultural Revolution. 

 The literary agent, A. O. Scott, recently wrote, “The real culture war [or revolution] is between the human intellect and its human enemies: sloth, cliché, pretension, cant.” Mental sloth is lazy thinking. Cliché is passing around stock phrases. Pretension is a claim of doubtful value, and cant, according to the dictionary, is “the repetition of conventional, trite, or unconsidered opinions or sentiments.”

Housing Costs

by William H. Benson

May 5, 2016

     In 1890, a young Danish immigrant named Jacob Riis published his book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. He began his introduction, “Long ago it was said that ‘One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.’ That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.” Riis went where few other investigative reporters would dare to go.

     He visited the Italian ghettoes, Chinatown, the Jewish sweat shops, the Bohemian slums, and the black neighborhoods. In each, the tenements’ owners told their agents to “’Collect the rent in advance, or, failing, eject the occupants.” The landlords showed very little sympathy for their renters.

     This year, Matthew Desmond, a Harvard sociologist, published his book, Eviction: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a similar study to Jacob Riis’s. In May of 2008, Desmond rented a mobile home in the College Mobile Home Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and there he witnessed the results that high rents exact upon its very low-income residents.

     “Families have watched their incomes stagnate, or even fall, while their housing costs have soared,” he writes. “Today, the majority of poor renting families in America spend over half of their income on housing,” and some pay as much as 70%. Because of that high percentage paid towards rent, he says, “Fewer and fewer families can afford a roof over their head.”

     If renters pay the rent, there is little left over to pay the other essentials: gas or electricity, groceries, shoes and shirts for their kids, or gas for a car, or needed repairs on their home. The Irish proverb says it best, “Rent for the landlord or food for the children.”
     Desmond observes that this load often falls upon young working women with kids. “If a young woman does not have a boyfriend or husband to help pay the rent, gas, and electricity, then she will work two jobs.” For example, she might work a morning shift cleaning houses, and a night shift waiting tables, just to pay the landlord.

     For them the threat of eviction lies just around the corner. Desmond writes, “Black women make up only 9% of Milwaukee’s population, but 30% of its evicted tenants.” Here Desmond makes his case. “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

     In 2008, the landlord Tobin Charney owned the mobile home park and most of its 131 trailers, and he charged an average of $550 per month. When he collected the rent, he would knock on the trailer’s door until it opened, and then he would stick out a hand and say, “Pay me the rent,” or “You got something for me?” Those tenants who fell behind, he worked with, but not for long.

     Desmond writes, “Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all have a landlord.” 

     A forced move humiliates its victim. Once, when an eviction crew arrived, a woman said, “All these strangers, these sweaty men, piling your things outside.” Desmond observed her reaction. “It was the face of a mother who climbs out of a cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.” Without the rent money for another home that night, an evicted mother knows that she and her kids are now homeless.

     If a renter receives an eviction notice, she or he will, more often than not, refuse to show up at a housing court to argue their case. “Ninety percent of landlords are represented by attorneys, but 90% of tenants are not.” Also, an eviction reduces a renter’s chances of finding another home, because landlords insist that all applicants reveal their felony convictions and evictions for the past two years.

     An eviction leads to depression. The hopelessness overwhelms even the strongest, but for a single mother with children, the consequences destroy their will power, flatten their chances to escape deep poverty, and linger for decades. Often they turn to alcohol or drugs.

     In his book’s final pages, Desmond offers a solution, a government voucher program to reduce a renter’s percentage of housing costs to no more than 30% of a renter’s income. Today, the high cost of housing in some cities, such as in Denver, have skyrocketed. College students now pay $1000 per month for a modest two-bedroom basement apartment. A voucher may help those who work, but how would it help the poor college student without income?  

     Matthew Desmond and Jacob Riis write of the age-old battle between landlords and their renters, the other half. Most people win at the battle. They pay their rent when it is due, but for others, they lose, because of poor choices or circumstances beyond their control. They fall behind and cannot catch up. Those who survive do so by their wits and ingenuity. Being poor is not for the faint of heart.

     Sunday is Mother’s Day, a day when we remember our mother who fed us and paid the landlord. 

Jane Goodall

by William H. Benson

April 21, 2016

     The adventure writer Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote some eighty novels based upon two characters: Tarzan and John Carter. Tarzan lived among the apes in Africa, and John Carter transported himself from Earth to Mars, where he fought and conquered the Martians. In my younger years, I read several of Burroughs’s books, as did thousands of other American kids of the twentieth century.

     The science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury, said this of Burroughs, “I have been astonished to discover how often a leading biochemist or archaeologist, or astronaut when asked, ‘what happened to you when you were ten years old?’ replied, ‘Tarzan,’ ‘John Carter,’ or ‘Mr. Burroughs of course.’”

     Bradbury also said, “By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special.”

     But it was not only American boys whom Burroughs influenced. There was an English girl named Jane Goodall who also read the Tarzan stories and fell in love with Africa and its wildlife and longed to live there. Jane identified with the English girl, Jane Porter, Tarzan’s wife in Burroughs’s first Tarzan adventure novel, Tarzan of the Apes, that he published in 1912.

     Unable to afford college tuition, Jane Goodall worked as a secretary and hotel waitress long enough to save her money to buy a ticket to Mombassa, Kenya. The year was 1958, and she was twenty-three. Once there, she arranged a meeting with Dr. Louis Leakey, who invited her to join him and his wife, Mary, at an archaeological dig at the Olduvai Gorge.

     Leakey then suggested that Jane should move to the forested mountains on Lake Tanganyika’s western shore in Tanzania to study the chimpanzees in their native habitat, because he understood that there was a scarcity of information about the chimp’s social habits and behavior.

     Jane, with her mother Vanne, arrived at the Gombe National Park in the summer of 1960, and there the two English ladies camped in a tent, surrounded by African fishermen, as well as bushpigs, tsetse flys, shrews, red colobus monkeys, baboons, mongooses, leopards, buffaloes, cobras, and chimpanzees.

      Daily she climbed alone to what she called, “her Peak,” a rocky outcrop that permitted her a panoramic view above and below, and with her binoculars she watched and waited. The chimpanzees though were fearful and held their distance from this strange white hairless female ape. Six months passed, and she confessed to Dr. Leakey that she had learned very little.

     Yet, she started to recognize the chimps as individuals, and she gave them names. One day in October of 1960, she observed David Greybeard insert a long piece of grass into a termite hole in order to extract termites, that he then feasted upon. This, she claimed, was evidence that chimpanzees can fashion a rudimentary tool, a skill that anthropologists had reserved only for human beings. 

     It was bananas though that won the chimpanzees’ trust in Jane. She would leave them around her and then watch as they approached. She soon met Goliath, Flo, Mike, Fifi, and Flint. She counted about fifty in the troop: fourteen males, as many females, and also the infants and adolescents.  At night, beside her campfire, she recorded into her journal all that she had observed that day.

     She noted the chimps’ dark side, their aggression. They would snatch a monkey or baboon, kill it, and eat it. They would go to war and attack a neighboring chimpanzee troop and kill all its members except the adolescent females, whom they then adopted. Then, if given a chance the male chimps would kill their own females’ infants.

     Jane wrote to Dr. Louis Leakey, and he sent a Dutch photographer named Hugo van Lawick, to capture on film her chimpanzees. Leakey told Vanne Goodall that “he had found someone just right as a husband for Jane!” Jane and Hugo did marry in 1964, and they had a single son, also named Hugo.

     In the August 1963 edition of National Geographic, one can read Jane’s article, “My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees,” and two years later National Geographic televised a documentary on Jane’s work.

     Over the years since then, she has published many books, and numerous anthropologists have joined her to observe the chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream Research Center. In 1977, she established the Jane Goodall Institute, and dedicated one program, “Roots and Shoots,” to reforesting barren lands.    

     Jane and Hugo divorced in 1974, and her second husband died of cancer in 1975. She is still thin. Her once blond hair has now grayed, but she still pulls it back into her distinctive ponytail. She travels and speaks 300 days out of the year.

     On April 3 this year, on her 82^nd birthday, she spoke at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and she mentioned her worn copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s book, Africa’s animals, Tarzan, and Jane Porter. She said, “And that is how the magic of my life unfolded.”

     Friday, April 22, 2016, we mark the 46^th Earth Day. Early on Jane Goodall recognized the premier importance that both animals and plants play in our planet’s existence. So we celebrate Earth Day. We can plant a tree, or we can liberate a captive chimpanzee, if not on Earth, perhaps someday on Mars. Edgar Rice Burroughs would be pleased.