Environments evangelist

LONDON: Jane Goodall — a scientist-turned-environmentalist — is more prominent in the US, where the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is headquartered, than in the UK, where she was born in 1934. And after half a lifetime spent documenting the lives of chimpanzees, she now lives with her sister Judy in their old family home in Bournemouth.

In her 70s, Goodall is more shaman than scientist. She tours the world preaching the need for sustainability, harmony and respect for natural world.

It was in 1986 that, at a conference on chimps, she realised the extent of the crisis affecting them across Africa and determined a life as an environmental evangelist. One journalist who has followed her career likens her to a “peripatetic Mother Teresa”.

The message of her new book, Hope for Animals and Their World, with its stories about black-footed ferrets, American crocodiles and whooping cranes, is surprisingly upbeat.

“My job seems to have increasingly become giving hope, so instead of doing nothing people take action,” she says. “It’s very clear to me that unless we get a critical mass of people involved in trying to create a better world for our great-grandchildren, we’d better stop having children.”

She has chosen to focus on the heroes fighting — and occasionally winning — individual battles, to attract others to participate in a war she does not yet accept is lost. “I have seen animals that were almost gone have, with captive breeding or protection in the wild, been given another chance. We have to keep doing our best for as long as we can, and if we’re going to die, let’s die fighting.”

Do governments understand the scale of the crisis? Goodall argues that many are still in hock to “dark forces” — vested interests like the fossil fuel industry and agribusiness. “Unlimited economic growth on a planet of finite resources is not possible. I thought this financial crisis would help people realise that, but it seems very much like, ‘Oh, let’s get back to business as usual,’” she adds.

Much of her evangelising is directed at the young. JGI has a dynamic youth wing called Roots and Shoots, which started in 1991 when 16 young Tanzanians met in her home in Dar es Salaam to discuss environmental issues affecting their lives. Twenty years later, there are groups in 114 countries, with hundreds of thousands of youngsters involved in community projects. But apart from the HQ in Arlington, Virginia, which has 20-plus staff, most of the JGIs that coordinate these projects are shoestring operations, and the institute has been hit hard by the credit crunch.

The organisation had a meeting in Belgium to discuss how to dig itself out, and one priority is to recruit an executive director.

Is that sign of a time when someone needs to take over from her? Goodall says, “It will probably be a collection of four people taking over from me.”

The institute today is not just concerned with her chimps. “To me, it was obvious to grow from wild chimps to saving their forest to seeing about their conditions in captivity to working with local people and children,” she says. “You can kill yourself saving forests and chimps, but if new generations aren’t going to be better stewards there’s no point. That’s why I’m so passionate about Roots and Shoots.”

Until the 1986 conference, she had assumed she would spend her life studying chimps. “It was wonderful out in the forest collecting data and analysing it, giving a few lectures, writing books.”

This year is significant for Goodall and her institute, marking 50 years since she began studying chimps at Gombe.

“I loved animals as a child, read the Tarzan books, and decided at 11 I would go to Africa, live with animals and write books,” she says. “Everybody laughed at me except my mother, who said, ‘If you work hard and really want something and never give up, you will find a way.’”

In 1957, after earning the money for the boat fare by working as a waitress and a secretary, Goodall went to visit a school friend in Kenya. Someone suggested she get in touch with Louis Leakey, curator of the Coryndon museum of natural history in Nairobi. He barked at her down the phone but she kept her nerve, got to see him, was given an admin job and, in 1960, was given the chance to move to Gombe to start collecting data on chimps. Leakey also sent Dian Fossey to Rwanda to study gorillas and Birute Galdikas to Borneo to observe orangutans; the three women were known as Leakey’s angels or Leakey’s trimates. Each made

significant contributions to primatology.

What did Leakey see in her? “I think he was amazed that a young girl straight out from England with no university degree knew so much,” she says. “I’d spent hours in the Natural History Museum in London, and could answer most of his questions.”

Goodall had planned to spend only a year in Africa but was there for more than 30. She learned her science in the field, but Leakey was keen for her to get academic training. In the mid-60s, she did PhD at Cambridge in ethology — study of animal behaviour. She needed the qualification to counter critics who attacked her approach as unscientific and anthropomorphic — she gave the chimps she studied names, and prided herself on getting to know them as individuals.

“I was told at Cambridge I shouldn’t have named the chimps and they should have had numbers,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about them having personalities, and certainly not about them thinking or having emotions.” The scale of her observational data eventually silenced her critics.

She was the first scientist to observe an animal, her favourite chimp David Greybeard, not just using a tool (a stem of grass poked into a termites’ nest to dig out the insects) but fashioning it for that purpose. When she telegraphed a report of this to Leakey, he replied, “Ah! Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

Her work showed that the distance from one to the other was far less than previously thought. In his introduction to a revised edition of Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, biologist Stephen Jay Gould called her work “one of the western world’s great scientific achievements”.

Is she one of those naturalists, as Fossey supposedly was in her final years, who prefers animals to people? She says, “I certainly prefer a lot of animals to a lot of people, but then I prefer some people to some animals too.”

And does she miss the chimps? “All the chimps I knew so well have gone now,” she says sadly. “It’s not the same as it was.” But she still enjoys returning to Gombe. “When I get up on to my pe

ak where I sat for so long, I can get back into the skin I had and remember what it felt like”.

By Stephen Moss.