How does what we’re learning about the great apes teach us about our humanity and hopes for survival on planet earth?
Our guest on this week’s Planet Watch is Michelle Merrill. She is currently an independent consultant (perplexedprimate.org) and the founder of Novasutras.org. She taught anthropology and sustainability courses at Cabrillo College from 2006 to 2013. She then had a 2 1/2 year research fellowship at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, doing work that led to her book on education for sustainability in Asia.
She earned her Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Duke University in 2004. She worked with bonobos at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University, then in the rainforest of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) in the mid-1990s. She went on to do her dissertation research on social learning and the evolution of culture through a study of orangutans in the Sumatran rainforests. Air Date: June 24, 2018 on KSCO radio station AM1080