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Dale Peterson | |
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| Born | November 20, 1944 Corning, New York |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Science and natural history |
| Notable works | Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man |
| Website | |
| DalePetersonAuthor.com | |
Dale Peterson (born November 20, 1944) is an American author who writes about scientific and natural history subjects.
Dale Alfred Peterson was born and raised in Corning, New York, a small town known for glass manufacturing in western New York State. He obtained his BA from the University of Rochester in 1967, then began his graduate studies at Stanford University, first in the writing program under Wallace Stegner, later in the English Department. Stanford awarded him a Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1977. [1]
The Vietnam War caused a break in Peterson's graduate studies. As a conscientious objector, Peterson was assigned to alternative service in 1971 at a large U.S. Veterans Administration hospital, working as an attendant on a lock-up ward for severely disturbed or mentally ill patients, many of them diagnosed with schizophrenia. He wrote a novel loosely based on his experiences, which was never published, and began work on a non-fiction treatment of the social and psychological experiences of the mentally ill. That study became an insider's history of mental illness based on autobiographical accounts of madness written during the nearly five and a half centuries between 1436 and 1976: published at last as A Mad People's History of Madness (1982). [2]
After receiving his doctorate, Peterson turned to carpentry, becoming a high-end finish carpenter engaged in remodeling houses in Silicon Valley, incidentally developing some friendships and connections with various people in the computer industry. A young Steve Jobs, for example, gave him one of the early Apple II computers.
Using the Apple II as a word processor, Peterson turned away from carpentry and settled down to writing, first with four books about computers (personal computers, computers in the arts and education, and programming). In partnership with John O'Neill, a London artist who had emigrated to California in order to design artistic games, he also helped create a computer game on the theme of interspecies communication, The Dolphins' Pearl, which was released in 1984. [3]
The Dolphins' Pearl marked a shift in Peterson's interests from intelligent machines and to intelligent animals. Making the decision to write about primates, Peterson began to research the topic at libraries but soon took a more direct approach in a series of arduous trips into tropical forests around the world: starting in the coastal forests of southeastern Brazil, then floating for two thousand miles down the Amazon River from central to the eastern Amazon; exploring critical areas in West, Central, and East Africa; and proceeding from there to Madagascar, southern India, Borneo, Sumatra, and the Mentawai Islands. His proximate goal was to find the twelve most endangered primates (monkeys, apes, and prosimians) in the world. His ultimate goal was to write a book about those animals and their fate. Published in 1989, The Deluge and the Ark: A Journey into Primate Worlds was short-listed for the Sir Peter Kent Conservation Prize in Great Britain.
It also attracted the attention of Dr. Jane Goodall, the pioneering primatologist, who went on to join Peterson in writing a book about the ethical issues of using chimpanzees in captivity and the conservation problems threatening chimpanzees in the wild. Translated into Chinese, German, and Polish, Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People (1993) was distinguished as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Library Journal Best of the Year. [4]
With Harvard University biological anthropologist Professor Richard Wrangham, Peterson co-authored the classic evolutionary study of human violence Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (1996), which has been translated into nine foreign languages and honored by The Village Voice as Best of the Year. In 1995 he published a light-hearted book about his travels into obscure parts of Africa looking for chimpanzees (Chimpanzee Travels), and in 1999 he released a second travel book, describing a 20,000-mile road trip taken with his two children in the United States (Storyville USA).
Peterson also turned to biography. Through collecting and editing hundreds of her personal letters, he produced a highly personal, two-volume "epistolary autobiography" of Jane Goodall: Africa in My Blood (2000) and Beyond Innocence (2001). He next wrote Goodall's only full (according to Nature magazine, the "definitive") biography, Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man (2006). The New York Times honored it as a Notable Book of the Year, while The Boston Globe called it Best of the Year. [5] [6] [7]
During this general period, moreover, he joined forces with photographer Karl Ammann to tour Central Africa and produce a shocking exposé of the trade in ape meat, Eating Apes (2003), which was pronounced Best of the Year by the Denver Post , Discover , The Economist , and The Globe and Mail . [8] [9] Subsequent African and Asian travels with photographer Ammann resulted in Elephant Reflections (2009) and Giraffe Reflections (2012). Peterson's retrospective narrative of those rough travels in the company of Karl Ammann--Where Have All the Animals Gone? was published late in 2015. Additional recent works include The Moral Lives of Animals (2011) and a play for children entitled Jane of the Apes, which was co-authored with Randel Wright.
For 2013 and 2014, Peterson was named a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He also, in late 2014, co-organized the Harvard University symposium on Animal Consciousness: Evidence and Implications, a two-day public conversation among prominent American neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, and humanists on issues of animal cognition and consciousness. In 2015, he was a Scholar in Residence at the Erikson Institute for Education and Research, Austen Riggs Center. During this general period (from 2013 forward), Peterson co-edited (with biologist Marc Bekoff) a collection of essays on the influence of Jane Goodall (published in 2015 as The Jane Effect); and completed a nonfiction narrative based on events that happened at Jane Goodall's research station in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, during the late 1960s.
Published by the University of California Press (2018), The Ghosts of Gombe: A True Story of Love and Death in an African Wilderness focuses on the story of a young American volunteer at Gombe who on July 12, 1969, walked out of camp to follow a chimpanzee into the forest. Six days later, her body was found floating in a pool at the base of a high waterfall. In sweeping detail, The Ghosts of Gombe reveals for the first time the full story of day-to-day life at Goodall's wilderness camp—the people and the animals, the stresses and excitements, the social conflicts and cultural alignments, and the astonishing friendships that developed between three of the researchers and three of the chimpanzees—during the months preceding that tragic event. At the same time, it gathers together the story of the young woman's death, examines how it might have happened, and explores some of the painful sequelae that haunted two of the survivors for the rest of their lives.
In 2010, Peterson founded the Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing, an annual literary award designed to honor America's best nature writers. Originally conceived as a program supported and administered by PEN New England, the Thoreau Prize is currently supported and administered by The Thoreau Society, Inc. Since 1984, Peterson has also taught writing part-time in the English Department of Tufts University. He has been an adjunct faculty member of the English Department at Tufts University for more than thirty years and, for the last two, has organized and team-taught an undergraduate course on elephants and elephant conservation through the Tufts University Experimental College. [10]
His latest book, 33 Ways of Looking at an Elephant, is an edited collection of thirty three essential writings about elephants from across history, from Aristotle to the present, with geographical perspectives from Africa and Southeast Asia to Europe and the United States.
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The chimpanzee, also known as simply the chimp, is a species of great ape native to the forests and savannahs of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed one. When its close relative the bonobo was more commonly known as the pygmy chimpanzee, this species was often called the common chimpanzee or the robust chimpanzee. The chimpanzee and the bonobo are the only species in the genus Pan. Evidence from fossils and DNA sequencing shows that Pan is a sister taxon to the human lineage and is humans' closest living relative. The chimpanzee is covered in coarse black hair, but has a bare face, fingers, toes, palms of the hands, and soles of the feet. It is larger and more robust than the bonobo, weighing 40–70 kg (88–154 lb) for males and 27–50 kg (60–110 lb) for females and standing 150 cm.
Dame Jane Morris Goodall, formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, after 60 years' studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960.
The genus Pan consists of two extant species: the chimpanzee and the bonobo. Taxonomically, these two ape species are collectively termed panins. The two species were formerly collectively called "chimpanzees" or "chimps"; if bonobos were recognized as a separate group at all, they were referred to as "pygmy" or "gracile chimpanzees". Together with humans, gorillas, and orangutans they are part of the family Hominidae. Native to sub-Saharan Africa, chimpanzees and bonobos are currently both found in the Congo jungle, while only the chimpanzee is also found further north in West Africa. Both species are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, and in 2017 the Convention on Migratory Species selected the chimpanzee for special protection.
Washoe was a female common chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to communicate using American Sign Language (ASL) as part of an animal research experiment on animal language acquisition.
Charlotte Jane Uhlenbroek is a British zoologist and BBC television presenter.
Gombe Stream National Park is a national park in Kigoma District of Kigoma Region in Tanzania, 16 km (10 mi) north of Kigoma, the capital of Kigoma Region. Established in 1968, it is one of the smallest national parks in Tanzania, with only 35 km2 (13.5 sq mi) of protected land along the hills of the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. The terrain is distinguished by steep valleys, and the vegetation ranges from grassland to woodland to tropical rainforest. Accessible only by boat, the park is most famous as the location where Jane Goodall pioneered her behavioural research on the common chimpanzee populations. The Kasakela chimpanzee community, featured in several books and documentaries, lives in Gombe National Park.
Richard Walter Wrangham is an English anthropologist and primatologist; he is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His research and writing have involved ape behavior, human evolution, violence, and cooking.
Hugo Arndt Rodolf, Baron van Lawick was a Dutch wildlife filmmaker and photographer.
The Trimates, sometimes called Leakey's Angels, is a name given to three women — Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birutė Galdikas — chosen by anthropologist Louis Leakey to study primates in their natural environments. They studied chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, respectively.
The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is a global non-profit wildlife and environment conservation organization headquartered in Washington, DC. It was founded in 1977 by English primatologist Jane Goodall and Genevieve di San Faustino (1919-2011). The institute's mission is to improve the treatment and understanding of primates through public education and legal representation, to protect their habitats in partnership with local communities, and to recruit and train young people for these missions.
The Jane Goodall Institute (Hong Kong) (Chinese: 國際珍古德（香港）協會), founded in 2002, was established as a local registered charity involved in the promotion of the well-being of the community, animals and environment. The Jane Goodall Institute Hong Kong is one of the Asian branches of the Jane Goodall Institute which was founded in 1977 in California by Jane Goodall and Genevieve, Princess di San Faustino. With its headquarters in the US, the Jane Goodall Institute is a worldwide non-profit organization with 17 overseas offices.
Karl Ammann is a Swiss conservationist, wildlife photographer, author and documentary film producer. He initiated a campaign focusing on the African bush meat trade, which gained worldwide attention. As a conservation activist, he has specialized in investigative journalism involving undercover exposés dealing with the illegal wildlife trade. In the process, he has exposed NGOs and international conventions for their lack of effectiveness and the promotion of feel-good tales.
Barbara Boardman Smuts is an American anthropologist and psychologist noted for her research into baboons, dolphins, and chimpanzees, and a Professor Emeritus at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The Kasekela chimpanzee community is a habituated community of wild eastern chimpanzees that lives in Gombe National Park near Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. The community was the subject of Jane Goodall's pioneering study that began in 1960, and studies have continued ever since, becoming the longest continuous study of any animals in their natural habitat. As a result, the community has been instrumental in the study of chimpanzees and has been popularized in several books and documentaries. The community's popularity was enhanced by Goodall's practice of giving names to the chimpanzees she was observing, in contrast to the typical scientific practice of identifying the subjects by number. Goodall generally used a naming convention in which infants were given names starting with the same letter as their mother, allowing the recognition of matrilineal lines.
The Mitumba chimpanzee community is a group of wild eastern chimpanzees that inhabit a 10-kilometre-square area of the Gombe Stream National Park, near Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. This community borders the well-known Kasekela community of chimpanzees. The Mitumba community became well-known following the migration in 1996 of the female chimpanzee Flossi from the Kasekela community, becoming the first identified female chimpanzee to migrate from her natal group. In 2010 the community numbered 25 members. Mitumba males have occasionally been killed by males of the Kasekela community. The Mitumba community's range and size has declined since the 1970s largely as a result of competition with the Kasekela community and due to habitat destruction. Rivalry with Kasekela community in the 1990s and 2000s resulted in several Mitumba chimps being killed by Kasekela males, including the infants Rejea and Andromeda and most likely the adult male Rusambo. During this rivalry, Mitumba males killed the Kasekela adult female Patti.
Toshisada Nishida was a Japanese primatologist who established one of the first long term chimpanzee field research sites. He was the first to discover that chimpanzees, instead of forming nuclear family-like arrangements, live a communal life with territorial boundaries. His discoveries of the medicinal use of plants by wild chimpanzees helped form the basis of the field of zoopharmacognosy.
The Gombe Chimpanzee War, also known as the Four-Year War, was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in the Kigoma region of Tanzania between 1974 and 1978. The two groups were once unified in the Kasakela community. By 1974, researcher Jane Goodall noticed the community splintering. Over a span of eight months, a large party of chimpanzees separated themselves into the southern area of Kasakela and were renamed the Kahama community. The separatists consisted of six adult males, three adult females and their young. The Kasakela was left with eight adult males, twelve adult females and their young.
Animal faith is the study of animal behaviours that suggest proto-religious faith. Whether non-human animals can have religious faith is dependent on a sufficiently open definition of religion. Thus, if by religion one means a "non-anthropocentric, non-anthropomorphic, non-theistic, and non-logocentric [behavioural and ritualistic] trans-species prototype definition of religion", ritual behaviour can be interpreted in the actions of chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins and other animals.
Anne Elizabeth Pusey is director of the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center and a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. Since the early 1990s, Pusey has been archiving the data collected from the Gombe chimpanzee project. The collection housed at Duke University consists of a computerized database that Pusey oversees. In addition to archiving Jane Goodall’s research from Gombe, she is involved in field study and advising students at Gombe. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Jane is a 2017 American biographical documentary film directed and written by Brett Morgen about primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist Jane Goodall.
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