Fifty years ago, a young Jane Goodall first walked into the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Things have changed dramatically. She talks about the changing political, environmental and ecological landscape in which she has dedicated her life's work of studying the social and familial interactions of wild chimpanzees. She says that what used to be a densely forested area is now "an island of forest surrounded by cultivated fields and people struggling to survive."

Yesterday, a rare piece of positive news came from the BP camp when they announced that engineers were successful in their attempt to siphon off some of the millions of gallons of crude oil still leaking from the Deepwater Horizon well site in the Gulf of Mexico. But, even as they admit that the procedure of threading a four inch diameter tube through the broken pipe is successfully pulling out some of the oil, this isn’t a complete solution to the region's environmental catastrophe

Over the weekend, BP made major headway in containing the flow of oil still leaking from the site of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, which ruptured back on April 20. Since that day, oil has flowed into the gulf at a rate of at least 210,000 gallons a day, and some argue that the rate may be as high as 3,000,000. (For comparison, a standard gasoline tanker truck holds 9,000 gallons: Imagine a line of 24 tanker trucks pulling up to the Gulf every day, dumping their crude oil, and driving off.)

Over the weekend, ice crystals clogged the inside of a 98 ton steel dome that BP hoped would contain the ongoing flood of crude oil spewing from the site of their broken rig. The crystals, called hydrates, which formed inside the dome made the structure too buoyant to settle on to the seabed, where it could have formed a water-tight seal around the site of the oil drainage. As BP plans more attempts to cap the gusher, we listen back to what has been tried so far.