Jane Goodall: Mind and heart working together

a conversation with Jane Goodall

by Joseph Roberts

Jane Goodall with Mr. H, her stuffed monkey. The “H” is for hope.
Photo by Stuart Clarke

•Jane Goodall is a British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 55-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots program and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. As part of the R&S program, a grant was awarded to a group of grade 11 and 12 at the Aldergrove Community Secondary School in BC to design and construct an outdoor learning space. Twenty-five students, of whom seven were Indigenous, led the project. The learning space will be used by hundreds of students as well as people in the community.

Become a chimp guardian at www.janegoodall.ca, www.rootsandshoots.org

Common Ground: So much has happened since 1998 when I first talked to you about Roots and Shoots and your wildlife research, education and conservation.

Jane Goodall: (Laughs.) Well, in my world – the Jane Goodall Institute – everything’s grown. The chimpanzee sanctuary we talked about 18 years ago is still going strong and the JGI isn’t actually involved in running that particular sanctuary. We have a huge sanctuary in the Republic of Congo with about 165 orphan chimps. We acquired three large forested islands from the Congolese government and around 60 of our chimps are there; they’re not exactly free because we still have to supplement their food, but there’s forests on the islands so it’s way better than the over-crowded sanctuary. And some of them are being prepared for possible release back into the wild.

The national park where the Gombe chimps live is still protected. The trees outside, which were cut down by desperate villagers, have now regenerated because we’ve been working to improve the lives of those villagers. And one really important thing is that our youth program, which began in 1991 in Tanzania with 12 high school students, is now in 140 countries around the world. There are about 100,000 active groups of young people of all ages and they’re all working to make this a better world for people, for other animals and for the environment we share.

CG: How is the Roots and Shoots whole-school approach evolving?

JG: We have several schools, which have become Roots and Shoots schools. They must fulfill certain criteria and have the same ethics and principles, but the young people choose the projects. They’re not told what to choose although there are certain themes we encourage all the different groups to take part in for the feeling of unity. We’re trying to develop a family around the world of young people sharing a philosophy.

In some schools, the curricula include roots and shoots and it is woven into every subject; those are the Roots and Shoots Schools. Then there are others where they don’t actually have it in the curriculum, but students get together for after-school clubs. There are also family groups. It’s completely amazing.

CG: I promised a young person I would ask this next question: if you could study another animal as well as the chimps, what would that be?

JG: I spent around six months studying hyenas. That may sound like a strange choice, but it taught me so much because they’re incredibly intelligent and fascinating. Of course, they’re nocturnal, which makes it harder to study them, but it helped me understand the chimp social structure: there’s a long childhood dependency. The child is dependent on the mother for milk and reassurance and everything for five years. The chimp males are dominant, but in the hyena society – roughly the same size community – the females are dominant and the males are subordinate.

So you see these two different systems. In the hyena society, the babies are left down in the dens when the mothers go hunting and they have to survive on the mother’s milk. Unlike other carnivores, the mother doesn’t take food back. Like the chimpanzee, the youngster is dependent on the mother’s milk so it makes sense for the female to be dominant; she then gets the bigger share of meat so her milk is better, whereas for a female chimpanzee to go around fighting and striving for dominance would be very bad for the baby she’s carrying on her chest! It helped me how these things evolve. The hyenas have personalities and I’d really like to learn more about them. But I’d also like to study elephants. I’d like to study just about everything. It’s all fascinating.

CG: People protect the things they love so how can we learn to care and love better?

JG: That’s part of Roots and Shoots: learning to love and care, learning compassion, trying to introduce it to very young children, helping them understand that we and the animals are in the same boat. We’re one family, really. It used to be thought only humans used and made tools. Not true. It used to be thought we were the only creatures with personalities, intellect and emotions. Not true. So if young children learn that animals have feelings like us, that they’re all different like us, then the bonding with animals actually helps make people nicer to other humans. It turns out that youngsters who take a gun and shoot people very often have had a history of cruelty to animals when they were children.

CG: Do you sense people are becoming more compassionate?

JG: It’s hard to generalize. I think there’s a greater awareness, but there’s still so much cruelty, so much unfeeling behaviour. If people really knew what went on in factory farms – if when they ate a piece of chicken, pork or beef, they knew the intense suffering, the cruelty. When I learned about factory farms, I looked at the next piece of meat I had on my plate and said to myself, ‘This symbolizes fear, pain and death. I don’t want to eat that.’

We now know that people eating more and more meat around the world is destroying the planet. Forests cut down to grow the grain, to feed the animals, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere and, you know, food in one end, gas out the other – that’s methane. It’s wasting huge amounts of water, vast amounts of fossil fuel. We can live without petrol, but we can’t live without water.

CG: How can we become better stewards of our precious water?

JG: People don’t understand about water. It’s not surprising when you think of big agribusiness and the way they’re pulling up water from deeper and deeper in the aquafers. If you go to an area where food should never be grown because there isn’t enough water, they’re depleting the aquafers to grow food, very often to feed cattle.

CG: A difficult topic for people to consider is the use of animals for medical research.

JG: I find the use of animals in research to be really terrible, particularly when it’s pharmaceutical. You’ll torture rabbits to test cosmetics in their eyes. They get ulcerated eyes just so women can look glamorous with a bit of stupid make-up on their faces.

CG: You’ve raised public awareness about chimpanzees and given them a voice. What other issues need more attention?

JG: There are so many: protection of wild animals in North America. The fact that wolves are now being shot from helicopters in BC. In some places, they’ve lifted the moratorium on shooting caribou during the migration and the indigenous people say that’s the end of the caribou as we know them if they are killed going through this narrow corridor. Grizzly bears are about to lose their endangered species status in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem where hundreds of thousands of people flock to see them. It means every time a grizzly leaves the actual protective path, it can be killed. You know, they’re used to people, they’re sitting targets. Then there’s genetically modified food and the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers on the land. Bee colonies are collapsing.

I could go on and on. There’s so much pollution and so much waste of food. Gandhi said, “The planet can provide for human need, but not human greed” so another issue to tackle is profit because if you’re very poor, you will buy the cheapest food no matter how it’s made or how unethical or environmentally unfriendly it is because you can’t afford anything else.

If you look at the other end of the spectrum, many people have far more than they need. We need more people thinking about the consequences of all the little choices we make. We need a critical mass of people on this planet who understand that while we need money to live, we shouldn’t live for money unless we live to make money to make the world a better place.

CG: I totally agree. That’s what inspires me to do this magazine. I’m so happy to share this conversation with you. What keeps you healthy and happy, given your awareness of all these issues?

JG: I have four reasons for hope. One is young people because they get it. As this Roots and Shoots program spreads, and we collaborate with other youth programs with similar philosophies, I spend so much time with young people and they’re so excited to see me. Here I am, this elderly lady, and yet the kids are jumping up and down with shining eyes. They want to meet Dr. Jane and tell me what they’ve done to make the world a better place.

It’s very inspiring. There was a little boy of five in Victoria – very small and very serious – at the front of the book-signing line. He had spectacles so he looked very solemn. I signed his book and he followed his mother to the door and then he turned round and said, “I think you’re an angel.” Well, I was just melting. He was absolutely charming. So that’s one thing ­– the response I get from audiences, the people who cry because they get moved and that makes them want to do something more than they’ve been doing.

Then we’ve got this amazing brain; we are coming up with all kinds of innovative technology that can help us heal wounds, go into green sustainable energy and, in our own lives, have lighter ecological footprints.

There’s also the resilience of nature. Places totally destroyed can once again sustain life. Sudbury is an amazing example. Animals on the brink of extinction, like the Vancouver Island marmot, which was down to 12 and there are now a few hundred. The whooping cranes which nest in Canada – at one time there were 12 birds left and now there’s 500 because people work to protect them saying, “No, I will not let this amazing creature become extinct.” People laugh at them and say it can’t be done and they fight. That illustrates the indomitable human spirit, which is another reason for hope.

People I meet are completely amazing. The other day, I met a man who was a war correspondent, an American who was in one of the war zones, perhaps Afghanistan or Iran, I’m not sure. He lost both legs above the knee and one arm. When he was medevac’d back, he was crying saying, ‘Please let me die, my life is finished’ and there were two medics on the plane saying, ‘No, no, modern medicine can really do a lot for you.’ He now has two prosthetic legs and one arm and is back in the war zone taking photographs and reporting. That is an amazing spirit.

There’s also social media. For the first time in history, instead of just reaching the people you can speak or write to, issues can go viral. Instead of having several thousand people speaking up for a cause, you can have billions. It’s happening.

CG: How do you see art and science, the heart and mind, cooperating more in our society to achieve these goals?

JG: That’s one of the things we push in Roots and Shoots – the mind and heart working in harmony together. Only then can we achieve our true potential. To me, art and science are all one and it’s part of a spirituality and an understanding of the connectedness of all life. So we encourage this very much in all our young people.

I’ve got a blog called Jane Goodall’s All Good News – Stories of Hope. It’s coming out whenever I can get something written, but I’ll put other things in as well – only good news because people get so much bad news and they get so despondent. Once people understand what can be done, they’re more likely to try to do it.

CG: What do you see as the next step?

JG: The next step for me is carrying on doing what I’m doing. Somebody asked the other day, ‘What’s the next phase of your life?’ I said, ‘Dying.’ There was dead silence.

CG: Dying to what comes after.

JG: Yes. We all die, but it’s either a great adventure or it’s nothing. Whichever case, it’s okay.

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