Chimpanzees, humans, and the environment depend on one another much more than anyone would have thought 36 years ago, when Jane Goodall first set foot in Africa. After conducting the longest continuous field study of animals in history, Goodall has expanded her busy schedule to include much more than chimps.
Jane Goodall, recently awarded Tanzania's highest honor, the Medal of Mount Kilimanjaro, visited Taiwan late last year to promote her Roots & Shoots international conservation program. Goodall talked with the Free China Review about her life-long love of animals and decades of research in Africa, as well as her concerns about the protection of endangered species and the need to stimulate conservation awareness among the world's youth. Excerpts follow.
FCR: Why did you choose to study chimpanzees?
Jane Goodall: When I was very small, I was always watching animals and writing about them. And as I got older, I read books about them. By the time I was eight or nine, I knew that when I grew up I wanted to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them. But it seemed almost impossible, because Africa was very far away, especially in those days, and we didn't have any money.
But I have this remarkable mother [Vanne Goodall] who used to say, "Jane, if you really want something, and you work very hard and take advantage of opportunities and never give up, you will find a way." So I carried on with my life, went on reading books about Africa and animals, and waited for an opportunity. Finally, I was invited to Africa by a school friend, whose parents had moved there.
At that time, I was working on documentaries--it was very interesting, but it paid very little money. So I left the job, which was in London-an expensive place to live--and went home to Bournemouth, a seaside town on the southern coast of England, and worked there as a waitress till I'd saved enough money. Finally I had enough for boat fare, because in those days planes were expensive.
After I'd been in Africa for a while, I heard about Louis Leakey [destined to become a renowned paleontologist] and went to visit him. He asked all kinds of questions about animals, and of course I could answer so many of them because I had studied a lot, so he gave me a job as his assistant. Then he let me go with him and another English girl to explore the Serengeti Plain, where so many fossils have been found. But in those days, it wasn't famous at all; no human fossils had been found, only fossils of prehistoric non-human creatures. There wasn't even a road or a track. It was wild Africa. I was allowed to go out on the plain, and there were so many animals.
How did you feel about that?
It was amazing, because suddenly my dream had come true. Instead of waking up and finding myself in the real world, I found that waking and dreaming were suddenly all the same. It was so magical, and that was when Louis realized that I was the person he had been looking for to study chimps. If he had asked me to study antelopes or rhinos or elephants, or anything, I would have.
But he actually offered me chimpanzees--it was like fate, you know. I was there, at the right place, at the right time, and it all came together. But it still took him m ore than a year to get the money for my research, because I didn't have any qualifications, at least not the kind that people expect you to have. And then he had to get permission for me to actually go to the area where the chimps are. In those days, young people didn't go tramping off looking for wild animals like they do today. At the time, he was criticized for sending me there [because Goodall was a young, single woman]. Finally, he persuaded the authorities to let me go--in those days, it was Tanganyika [part of present-day Tanzania], and under colonial management--provided I took a companion. So I went with my mother for three months. She volunteered.
Was being a woman without academic training an advantage or a disadvantage in your research?
The lack of academic training, I think, was a huge advantage, because back in the early 1960s the scientific thinking, as far as animal behavior was concerned, was very mechanistic. Scholars didn't admit personality--they didn't use all kinds o f terms we use today for animals, like adolescence and childhood. So if I'd gone to university, maybe it would have biased my attitude. I doubt it, but you never know. Anyway, Louis didn't want anyone with academic training, so in one respect it was a great advantage. Being a woman, I think, is always very helpful. The locals were extra special, wanting to help me.
Why can you communicate so well with chimpanzees?
You know that my main work is in the wild with chimpanzees, and that work began in the 1960s and is still continuing today. I'm learning about their life history, because chimps can live up to sixty years.
But nowadays, I primarily communicate with orphans--chimps whose mothers have been shot in other parts of Africa. I didn't actually want to get involved in this program, but what can you do? We persuaded the government to confiscate baby chimps [from illegal traders], and now we have the Jane Goodall Institute to look after them. It's very expensive. We have sanctuaries in Congo, Uganda, and Burundi. There really isn't any poaching in Tanzania. We do have three orphans in Tanzania, but they all came from Zaire. This is a major financial burden, especially because chimps can live so long. We can't put them back in the wild, so we care for them in sanctuaries. It's these chimps that we can communicate with.
How do we learn to do it? By observing them, by seeing the effects of their sounds or gestures toward other individuals in the community. It took me a long time to work out what it meant. But the postures and gestures are the same as ours--kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting on the back, swaggering, shaking the fists--all these we share. So that's easy.
As for sounds, I think anybody with good mimicking capabilities can make the sounds. Concerning the meaning of the sounds, you watch as one chimp makes a sound, then what another one does in response. For example, he makes this food call when he is happy about the food, and others will come when they hear it. Or he makes these "uhh, uhh" threats, when somebody comes too close and he wants them to go away, and they go away. It's quite easy to figure out, once you get close enough. But that's the problem--they run away. Learning comes from direct observation, not from books.
What are some of the similarities and differences between human beings and chimps?
I've always found it fascinating to come out of Africa and find that the way I watch humans, I think, is very different from how I would watch them before. I'm more sensitive to body language and things like that. But for the last ten years, rather than sitting with the chimps, I've been traveling around the world to raise money. A decade ago, I realized how terribly endangered chimpanzees had become in Africa, and I thought I must use the knowledge I'd gained to try and help them, because they are going very, very, fast. Only 250,000 are left right across twenty-one countries, and that's nothing. Moreover, many of them are in small isol ated groups, which in the long run won't survive because of inbreeding.
The picture is pretty grim. Their survival is challenged by their use in lab research and circuses, and by other forms of human exploitation. I felt the time had come to use my knowledgeand the reputation and recognition I gained because of my articles for National Geographicto try and help save them. So these trips are a mixture of fundraising and awareness-raising. The fundraising I hate, but it has to be done. Luckily, I can tie it into the awareness-raising, so it's all of a piece.
For instance, people need to be aware that the loss of forests is a dreadful problem. The logging companies come in and open up forests with their roads, and this means that hunting penetrates ever more deeply into the wild. The trucks also bring out meat. It's cut up, so even if somebody worries that this may be endangered animal meat, how are they going to tell, if it's already cut up into small pieces? There are ways to tell, of cou rse, if you really investigate. But nobody does. So this meatthis bush meat, this wild animal meatis eaten in western and central Africa, but not in Tanzania. They eat chimpanzees, gorillas, elephants, everything.
What needs to be done to save the chimpanzees?
Well, I think human beings have somehow got to learn to control the rate of population growth. We need to level off now. We need to have some optimum size of the human population that enables people to live in harmony with nature. How that's going to happen, I don't know. But it certainly must happen for the planet to survive in the form we know it today. We humans seem to have an unfortunate greedy, cruel streak in usthe chimps have it, too--and that's leading to so much destruction of the world. Surely people can get together to help solve problems and learn to live in a less greedy, non-materialistic way, more in harmony with nature.
During so many years of research you must have encountered lots of dangers and difficulties. Can you talk about them?
To me, the forest is a lot less dangerous than most cities. I think the worst thing to happen in the past thirty-six years was when four of my students were kidnapped by a group of rebels from Zaire, across Lake Tanganyika [in May 1975]. That was terrifying. We didn't know what had happened to them, didn't know where they were, didn't know whether they were alive. Eventually the ransom was raised and they came back unharmed [two months later]. But I suspect that there will always be some psychological scars from that. It was a very, very bad time.
Most recently, there is this one dangerous chimpanzee. He is very big, very strong, extremely aggressive to chimps and humans. He is a bully, and he particularly, for some reason, singled me out. I've known him since he was a tiny baby. I don't think I had done anything to harm him. Maybe it's because I now leave and return so often. Some quite bad fighting now goes on between the chimpanzees when we've been separated for a while and then come back together. But this chimpanzee is very dangerous.
His name is Frodo, Fifi's second son [Fifi is the last survivor of the original chimpanzees that Goodall first studied at what is now Gombe National Park]. In all my thirty-six years, he is the only one I've seen who attacks people. Sometimes the other males will push you over. But they do this wild display when they're charging across the ground, and just knock you out of the way. With them, when they are doing those displays, they just hit anything that gets in the way. Very often it's done to intimidate other males, to get to the top [to be the alpha, or dominant, male]. They're very much like humans--one of the many ways.
Have you ever thought of quitting?
Oh no. That's a very simple answer. What keeps me going is that we still have so much more to learn from studying chimpanzees. Curiosity, finding out answers--that's what directs the sciences. And I really want to know.
Chimpanzees can live up to sixty years, so we've only been there half of their lives. We're always learning new things. Each chimpanzee has his or her own personality and unique life history. We're collecting life histories, and out of these, we are learning the tremendous importance in early lives of mothers' behavior, the kind of family, the kind of experiences, and how those affect their behavior when they become adults. We're only beginning to work this out. So there is an enormous amount yet to learn.
What are the goals of your Roots & Shoots program?
About five years ago, I realized the only way really to try and help the planet is to work with young people. So I'm developing the Roots & Shoots program, from kindergarten to university, in which young people get involved in three types of hands-on projects to make the world a better place--one for the environment, one for animals, and one for human communities. We bring a message of hope: Every individual matters and can make a difference. And if people wo rk together, they can help solve the problems such as deforestation, spreading of deserts, holes in the ozone layer, pollution, and overpopulation.
The Roots & Shoots program is a Jane Goodall Institute program. The institute started twenty years ago in the United States, at first to conduct research on chimpanzees and focus public concern on their welfare, but it also had an element of conservation education. The Roots & Shoots program for young people began in Tanzania in 1991, and moved to North America two years later. At first it was a tiny program, but from the beginning of 1995, it suddenly grew throughout North America, going from eleven registered groups in January 1995 to almost 500 today.
It is very strong in Tanzania, where we began. Everywhere else, it's just little clusters of interested teachers and students, but they are all encouraged to work with other local schools and also to become partners with schools in different parts of the world. The program is being pushed in about twenty countries.
Roots & Shoots so far has spread mainly through people's enthusiasm. I've met wonderful people here in Taiwan, and they are also very enthusiastic. This morning I met with your President [Lee Teng-hui]. He was very enthusiastic about helping establish Roots & Shoots in different schools.
My goal is to start lots of pilot projects, to find out what things work and what don't by testing them on different schools with the help of enthusiastic teachers or coordinators. Only when I am personally sure something is going to work will I ask somebody for major funding, because I don't want to take money that is not going to be used correctly. It is much, much better to start small.
Why do you put so much emphasis on educating children?
Educating children also means working with teachers and parents. But children are the ones who are going to inherit the terrible problems that their forebears have created for them. They will need all the help they can get. And if they are not to be utterly depressed as they are taught about pollution, ozone-layer depletion, and the increases of cancer risks due to chemicals in the food and in the atmosphere, we have to give them hope and support. And that's what I want to do.
Animal rights activists have long complained about Taiwan because the people here used to buy and sell lots of tiger bones and rhino horns, for instance. Did these reports keep you from visiting Taiwan?
If I were put off by reports of behavior I don't agree with or I think is wrong, then I would be very ineffective. Unless you go and talk with people, there's no way that change will ever happen. It's the same kind of thing with the use of chimpanzees in research labs. If I hadn't gone inside the labs and met with the people, and talked to them calmly and tried to explain why I was upset, nothing would have changed. I was upset because I really understand chimpanzees and what their needs are, and what their nature is like.
It' s only when people begin to feel what you're talking about in their own hearts that they can begin to understand things from your point of view. Then change can happen. But if you become aggressive, certainly you don't talk to people, and then change can't happen.
What is your impression about the conservation work in Taiwan?
My impression from everybody I've talked to thus far is that conservation issues are really beginning to come up on political agendas, and that this is partly due to international pressure, but it is also a result of Taiwan's remarkable economic growth. It's usually when people have enough money to live on that they can begin to be concerned about the environment, even though by that time massive damage has been done. But it's quite remarkable how the environment is still giving us a chance, except tragically in some parts of the tropics, where if you cut down a forest you get a desert. And even though eventually you might bring trees back, as they have done in Israel , you don't get the biodiversity, you don't get the tremendous, fascinating variations of a rain forest that can never come back as it was, and so whole species disappear.
Here in Taiwan, I only had time to visit one national park, but I met some individuals who are so concerned about conservation, have such good ideas, and so much dedication, that I feel sure that the timing of my visit was really just about perfect. I have already made a commitment to come back to Taiwan to speak to groups of teachers, because I can't visit all the schools.
In many places, I've found that a visit can serve as a catalyst to bring together concerned people. We meet each other and can talk together, and start to build a network. And if the government at the same time is also getting behind this effort, then it can jump-start things. That is what I hope will happen here.
--interview by Huang Wen-ling