Jane Goodall |
May 22, 1997
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Jane Goodall
Founder and Director, The Gombe Stream Research Center; Director, The Jane Goodall Institute; Director, Roots & Shoots Global Peace Initiative; Messenger of Peace appointee, United Nations; Hubbard Medal recipient, National Geographic Society; Author
Thank you and good afternoon everybody. I think when one addresses a group of people like this and you have to stand up after being introduced. Well, I always think of that fable where, the birds have a contest, which one can fly the highest. And the mighty eagle is quite sure that he's going to win the contest and he flies higher and higher. Gradually, all the other birds drop back, but when he's reached the limit of his endurance, up from his back flies a little wren and wins the contest. And I like to think of my progress through life as being riding on an eagle because none of us get very far by ourselves and all of us have eagles who help us on our way.
There are so many amazing people who have been around me to support to me, to help me, to advise me ever since the beginning. Fantastic students and other field staff at Gambe National Park helping to collect up this data, some of whom are still out there today, some of whom are busy analyzing and working out results from this amazing long-term record, 37 years now. Then there are so many friends, people who take me in when I'm traveling on one of these crazy lecture tours. There are the staff of the Jane Goodall Institute and one of those is here today, Mary Lewis. Mary Lewis is traveling with me trying to get me around this seven-week tour, among many other things that she does. And you really do need to thank Mary for the fact that I'm here today because I don't think I would be but for her.
There are two trustees here. There's Paul Case with his wife, Maureen, who's a local trustee. And then a very, very special person is Genny de San Faustino, who's up here, the second from your, what are you, left, second from your left at the high table, and Genny's the one who started the Institute here in San Francisco back in 1976 we were talking about it, so, another very special person. And then, of course, there's my family and it wouldn't be nice if I didn't start off by acknowledging my enormous debt to my mother. She's been there for me consistently from the very beginning. I spoke to her this morning. She's 93, she broke her hip, but she's walking again and she said, "Oh, I wish I could be there", she wants to be with Genny. And she also said, "Well, say hello for me to all those people out there." So hello from Mum.
It's absolutely true that I wouldn't be here without her, in many ways. When I was just a little, tiny thing, mad about animals like so many children, I had the wonderful excitement of going to stay with my father's family on a farm and we lived in London at the time. And there, for the first time, I met cows and horses and pigs and it was fabulous. But one of my jobs was to collect hens' eggs and, you know, when you're a kid, you play this game where there's a board with different shaped holes and you get pegs and you fit them into the right shaped hole. So as I collected these eggs every day, where was the hole big enough on the hen for the eggs to come out? I couldn't see one. So, apparently, I asked everybody and obviously none of them explained it properly. So I worked out my very first animal observation. I hid in a little stuffy henhouse because there were no cool battery farms in those days and I waited. And I waited and I waited and I waited. And my family called the police, they didn't know where I was.
As dusk was falling and the police were on their way, my mother out there searching saw this excited little creature rushing towards the house covered with straw. She didn't reprimand me. She saw the excitement and sat down to hear the story of how a hen lays an egg. As I was growing up, I met Dr. Dolittle and then came Tarzan. When I was 10 years old, I was madly in love with Tarzan, terribly jealous of Tarzan's Jane. I thought I'd been a much better mate for Tarzan myself. Well, I would, don't you think?
So when I was 10 years old, I was dreaming about going to Africa and living with animals and writing books about them. But we're going back now 50 years. We're going to a very different world. It was towards the end of the Second World War in Europe. Africa was the dark continent; we heard rumors really coming from that dark continent about poisoned arrows and drumbeats sending out sinister messages through the jungles, all kinds of things like that. But there were also all those wonderful animals and I suppose I thought there was Tarzan out there somewhere, too and in addition to all that, we didn't have any money. I mean, we couldn't afford a car. I couldn't have a bicycle. We had enough to eat. And so my mother's friends would say to her, "Why don't you tell Jane to dream about something she can achieve? She can't go and live with animals in Africa." Nobody did in those days. But, you see, what my mother said was that if you really want something and you work hard enough and you take advantage of opportunity and you never give up, you find a way.
And so, even though I couldn't go directly to university from school because we couldn't afford the fees and to get a scholarship you had to be good in another language and I simply wasn't able to learn any other language. In fact, there's only one language I've ever been able to learn fairly well. And just so that you shan't think that I'm a complete simpleton, I will greet you in chimpanzee.
So anyway, my mother said, "Well Jane, if you do a secretarial course, you can be a secretary anywhere in the world." So I did my course, got a job in London, had a letter from a school friend whose parents had moved to Kenya - the opportunity - would I go and stay? Well, still no money. So I gave up my lovely job at Documentary Films and I went and lived at home for free and I worked as a waitress and I saved up my wages and my tips until I had enough for a return fare to Africa. Not by plane because in those days planes were new and rather expensive to carry passengers, but by one of the good old boats. So off I went at 23 and then I heard about the late Louis Leakey and went to visit him at the National History Museum. He took me around and asked me so many questions. And because I'd gone on reading books about animals in Africa, I could answer most of the questions. He gave me a job. He let me go with himself, his wife, and one other young English girl to the now famous Aldavai Gorge. But in those days it wasn't famous because no early human remains had been found. No human fossils and so there wasn't a road, there wasn't a trail. There was nothing, it was wild, untouched Africa, and so many animals in those days.
Every day, after a hard day's work, Jillian and I were allowed to walk out onto the plains among the animals and, you know, gazelle and giraffe and zebra, one night a rhino. One evening, two young male lions came and followed about twice the length of this room, which was a bit scary but terribly exciting. And every morning when I woke up, I was in my dream. What magic. And that was when Louis Leakey realized, he says, that he'd found the person he'd been looking for, for many years. Someone to go and try and find out something about the behavior of our closest living relatives in their natural habitat. He didn't even know then how closely related to us chimpanzees were, but it was thought that they were very, very close and he believed that learning something about their behavior would help him to have a better feeling for how our own ancestors may have behaved.
So off I went, but there were two problems to overcome. First of all, how did he get money for a young, untrained girl? Most people thought he was amoral, but finally a wealthy American businessman said, "Alright, Louis, here you are, enough money for six months." Then the British authorities, because Tanzania where the study is, was Tanganyika in those days; the British protectorate. "A young girl out on her own in the bush," said the British officials, "Impossible, preposterous." But eventually, they agreed that if I took a companion that it would be all right. So for the first three months, who came with me but that same, remarkable mother. She brought simple medicines with her and set up a clinic and because she cared about people, even though she wasn't a medical person, she made wonderful cures. She was known as a white witch doctor and established a terrific relationship with the local people that has stood me in good stead ever since.
So, that's how the study began and why are we still studying the chimpanzees today after 37 years? And what sort of things have we found out? Wll, we certainly have found out how like us they are, not only in their biology - in the structure of the DNA; they differ from us by only just over one percent. Which says something about the length of time that we've been separated on our evolutionary journey from an apelike, humanlike creature and we know that the blood and immune system of chimpanzees is more like ours than that of any other living creature, which is why they are used by some scientists to try and learn more about human, infectious diseases, searching for cures and vaccines. The brain and central nervous system of the chimpanzee is also uncannily like ours. So it's logical to assume because of that that we would expect to find similarities in social behavior, in intellectual performance, and in emotional response. But when I began in 1960, the scientific attitude at the time was very hard. When we were studying etiology, the study of behavior, we couldn't talk about personalities, only humans had personalities. Animals couldn't reason, they didn't have minds. Only humans could do that. Above all, it was a terrible sin to talk about emotions in animals. Only humans had emotions like joy and sorrow and fear and despair. Only humans were capable of feeling emotional as well as physical pain.
But, fortunately, you see I hadn't been to university when I went out in the field. I didn't know those things. So instead of numbering the chimpanzees, I gave them names and I described their vivid personalities. Many of you know about Flo and Fifi and Figan and Passion and some of the other ones who have been made very famous around the world today, largely thanks to the National Geographic Society and I described how chimpanzees used and made tools in a seemingly very reasoned way and that was an amazing observation because at that time, we were described as man, the toolmaker. The fact that we used and made tools, it was thought, differentiated us more than anything else from the rest of the animal kingdom. It was that observation that brought the National Geographic in, in the first place, to continue the funding when that original seed money disappeared.
So over these years at Gambe, we've learned such amazing things. We've charts of the life histories and family histories of these amazing chimpanzee beings. A little story: a young female, nine years old, is walking along a forest trail, she's followed by her three-year-old brother, he's a little bit tottery on his feet. The mother is way behind. It's dim and green and brown and the ferns are up beside the trail and the vines hanging down. And suddenly, Pom, the adolescent, stops and she stares at something just down beside the trail. "Hoo, hoo, hoo," and her hair stands up a little, which is a sign of fear and she rushes up the tree, well, her little brother doesn't hear the sound or he doesn't know what it means and he comes closer and closer to this thing at the side of the trail and as Pom is watching every hair bristles with fright and she gets this big grin of fear on her face. And finally, she can't stand it any longer so she rushes down, picks up little Prof and climbs back up the tree. And there coiled up at the side of the trail is a big, poisonous snake. That's just one example of ways in which chimpanzees behave like us. In their nonverbal communication, they kiss, they embrace, they hold hands. They pat one another on the back, they swagger, when they're angry they shake their fist. They tickle with their fingers. And they don't just show these behaviors that are so like ours in any old context; they show them in contexts which are very similar, sometimes identical to those in which we show them ourselves. They are capable of sophisticated co-operation. They're hunters and they share prey. They're capable of true altruism. They understand the needs of others. They show emotions, we all believe who've worked with chimpanzees for any length of time, similar to joy, sorrow, fear, despair. They can actually die of grief, like a youngster of eight whose mother died, just gave up. Showed symptoms like clinical depression in young human children who have been orphaned and in this situation with his immune system weak and he fell sick and was dead within a month of losing his mother. We've seen so many other things like this. We've recorded so many amazing stories. I could story-tell for you for the next hour and a half and it's a fascinating occupation, but we don't have time for it.
The problem today is that chimpanzees are disappearing very, very fast across Africa, which is where they live. And their treatment in captivity around the world is sometimes extremely harsh and cruel. At the turn of the century, it is estimated that there were way over a million chimpanzees, extended across the central equatorial forest belt from the west coast to the western parts of Tanzania, Uganda, and so on. Well, at the very most today there are 250,000 chimpanzees remaining. There isn't a forest belt anymore. It's a series of fragmented patches of forests. These 250,000 - quarter of a million - are in 21 countries stretched across Africa and many of them are in very small fragmented populations where the gene pool is so small that it's almost certain that their long-term future is doomed. That's the case for the chimpanzees I've been studying all these years in the Gambe National Park. It's a tiny national park, it's 30 square miles. There are three separate communities of about 50 chimps each inside that park. And outside now, on three sides, the park is surrounded by cultivation and on the fourth side is Lake Tanganyika. So that little population, 140, 150 chimpanzees is so small that if major epidemics continue to sweep through those numbers, as they sometimes do, then, and also with the effects of inbreeding, then that population is doomed as well.
There are two other major threats facing chimpanzees in addition to habitat destruction. First of all, hunting for the live animal trade. Secondly, hunting for food. There is not so much hunting for the live animal trade today, but hunting for food has become a very serious problem threatening chimpanzees in parts of west and Central Africa. The hunters used to practice subsistence hunting. They would go out in the forest, they'd shoot a few animals to feed themselves and their families. But today it's different and it's mainly because of the logging companies. The logging companies come in, and they make roads deep into the heart of the remaining rainforests of Africa and that opens the forest up to settlement and it also opens it up to hunting and when these trucks bring out the last great giant forest trees, destroyed by modern technology in just a few minutes, they bear also the cut up and dried remains of countless animals of all species, including chimpanzees and gorillas. It's not going to feed the villagers now. It's become commerce, it's become commercialized and these meat remains are sent off into the town, sometimes very long distances, on the trucks belonging to the logging companies.
Logging companies aren't African owned. The logging companies belong to industrialized corporations, coming from North America, coming from Canada, coming from various parts of Europe, Japan, and more recently Indonesia. These are the countries that are raping the last of Africa's rainforests, very often just so that we can buy tropical hardwood furniture because we think it looks nice and the wood's hard and it gets us a status symbol.
So, when the chimpanzees are sold for meat, very often mothers are shot and the baby is sold in the market because there's not much meat on a chimpanzee of that age. So the hunter hopes a few extra dollars will be gained by selling the chimpanzee - maybe somebody's sorry for it. I'll never forget the first infant I saw like that because I went up to him, he was surrounded by a great crowd of people. He was dehydrated, sweating under the hot sun, his eyes were glazed. I knelt down beside him and I made the little [chimpanzee talk] sound, which is chimpanzee greeting. And to my amazement, he sat up, reached out and touched my face. Well, I was in a dilemma because if you buy them, there's a chance that the hunter will deliberately go and shoot mothers in order to sell babies. But how could I abandon him? Fortunately, in the Congo, as in so many of the other African countries, there's a perfectly good law that makes it illegal to hunt and sell endangered species and chimpanzees are endangered. So when we went to the Minister of the Environment, he was quite prepared to confiscate this infant. And so, I went back that evening with a wonderful Belgian woman, Graziella Cotman, and she agreed to try and nurse little Jay, as we called him, back to health. So she dug out the shotgun pellets and she gave him good nourishing food and a lot of love and affection. She was successful. Other confiscations were made and, as a result, it became less and less frequent to see infant chimpanzees for sale.
We, of course, were landed with the problem of caring for these infants. Graziella had to give up her job as her family grew and eventually she could no longer care for these chimps in her backyard. We were fortunate in that the oil company, Conoco, stepped forward and offered to build a sanctuary, and I say we were fortunate because of all the oil companies exploring at that time, Conoco, without any question, had the most enlightened attitude towards the environment. And, at any rate, they built us this sanctuary and this family has now grown to 55 in number, not only confiscated by government officials but also handed over by pets.
So what began for me as a research project in Tanzania, learning about these amazing nonhuman beings, has increasingly involved me in conservation projects in different parts of Africa and also in the business of looking after, often, chimpanzees, because we cannot put them back in the wild. The wild chimps are aggressively territorial. They show the loving, compassionate side of human nature, which presumably we've inherited from our ancient primate past, but they show the bad side, too, and can be very violent, very aggressive, and show warlike behavior, and they hate strangers. So because the young chimps also have become bonded with people, they might wander into a village if we let them free and either hurt or be hurt. So we have to care for them.
We try to use these chimpanzees as ambassadors to teach the local people about these marvelous beings, part of their natural heritage. We also employ as many of the local people as we can from the surrounding villages. We buy produce from them. We've raised money for a little primary school and a little dispensary, which we're managing to get support from the medical school of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The government asked us to develop a large area around the sanctuary where there still are some remaining wild chimpanzees and some forest in this amazing savanah forest, land along the coast of the Congo. It's unfortunate that most of that amazing country has gone. Not to logging this time, but to Shell Oil in partnership with a local company planting mile upon mile upon mile upon mile of eucalyptus. So it's for these reasons that I'm traveling around trying to raise awareness. In addition, the sometimes extremely cruel way that chimpanzees are treated in captivity; the cruel pre-training, harsh pre-training, beating them over the head with iron bars that is specifically practiced by those training them for entertainment, whether it be circus or any other form of entertainment. Also the conditions in the medical research laboratories, whether or not we believe it's ethical to use our closest living relatives. I think all of us would agree that to keep them in cages five foot by five-foot, by themselves, for maybe 30, 40, or 50 years because the longevity… the oldest chimps we know are 64 today. These are beings who have committed no crime, they may be helping to alleviate human suffering. Five foot by five foot is not an appropriate prison cell for our closest living relatives.
I think the question I'm asked most often as I travel around is, well, " Jane, do you think there's hope?" If you fly over Africa, you see the forest gone. If you travel much in any part of the world, you find this terrible poisoning, the pollution of the air and the water and the land. And, on top of that, this human greed, this human cruelty, there's crime, there's violence, there's drugs, and there's warfare. Is there really hope for us, the planet as we know it today? There are many environmentalists who would stand and say to you that it's already too late. That even if we all changed the way we behave today, we've gone so far in our overpopulating of the world and the destruction of the forest and the spread of the deserts and the increasing hole in the ozone layer and all these other things that you all know about, it's too late. Imagine being on a big ship seeing rocks ahead, everyone rushes to turn the wheel, but by the time the ship changes course, it's too late and you're going to hit the rocks and have a shipwreck.
Well, I have three reasons to hope and I want to end by quickly sharing those with you. First of all, my hope lies in the amazing nature of the human brain. We have an incredible intellect stuffed into our skulls up here. For heaven's sake, we've sent people on to the moon. The primitive tools used by the chimpanzees, rocks and bits of twigs, have been transformed over the eras into sophisticated modern technology. Much of which is tremendously improving the quality of life of people and sometimes animals around the world.
It's unfortunate that we've used that same technology to create weapons of mass destruction and also that we have used it to create so much terrible, terrible destruction of the natural world. It's our destructiveness, along with our propensity for breeding large numbers of other human beings, that is threatening the planet today. So why am I hopeful? I'm hopeful because it's relatively recently that around the world people have begun to realize that there really are environmental problems. Don't you think that with our brains we can now get together and try to find some solutions, heal some scars, live in a more environmentally friendly way? The good news is that some companies already are moving quite fast in that direction. And companies that go green, whether they do it for ethical reasons or whether it's good P.R., it really doesn't matter as long as they do it.
There are some exciting things happening. I was in Cleveland just two weeks ago, and I like to travel around with symbols of hope because sometimes one does get a bit despairing. A little boy of seven went out; in fact, his grandfather is here today. It's Philip Broman's son. He went out to Lake Erie, they live on the shore and about, I'm not sure how many years ago, 10 15, something like that - Lake Erie was so polluted it was actually a fire hazard. And this piece of driftwood came from a shore of a lake where today you can catch fish and eat them without danger. So things can get a lot better.
I went to Nagasaki a few years ago where the second atomic bomb was dropped that ended the Second World War. The scientists at the time predicted that nothing would grow for at least 30 years. The green came back quickly just as it did, amazing scientists today, after the eruption of Mount St. Helen. But at Nagasaki there was one little sapling that didn't die and it's a very strange tree today quite large with a very gnarled trunk and gnarled branches with great cracks in them. Black inside, but every spring it puts forth new leaves. This to me is a sign of hope. Just last week in Los Angeles I had my first ride in an electric car. It's 100 percent recyclable, it doesn't put out any emissions, it was a fantastic experience to be in that car and these are signs of hope for the future. We can do things in a way that's less damaging to the environment.
I was in Canada. Some of you may know the nickel mining there caused the most horrendous environmental damage. And yet, when they decided about 15 years ago to make a concerted effort to bring back the environment, they actually got a prize at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro for accomplishing a miracle. And I asked them for a symbol and they said, "Well, Jane, the Peregrine falcon has been reintroduced, is again nesting, and flying so beautifully over our skies." So they sent me this feather, which arrived two weeks ago.
So some of those are signs of environmental hope, but it's never going to work until you and I take responsibility for our own lives. We love to shrug off responsibility. We love to point fingers: "It's not my fault, any of this, it's the fault of science. The fault of politicians, why didn't they make laws? It's the fault of industry," but we're the consumers. We have tremendous power with choosing what to buy and specifically what not to buy. This can have a very major effect on the development of environmentally friendly products, and can really encourage those companies that are trying to do it right because they need our support if they're going to compete out there on the marketplace today. A cutthroat world as many of you know. My real fear is that we've become apathetic because of what I call "just me-ism." I mean, I'm one person, there's millions of people out there. So, what little I can do can't possibly make any difference, it's just me. But if we turn that around, then as more and more people become environmentally educated, you can have millions, indeed billions, of people all out there saying, "What I do does matter. I do matter, what I do does matter." And suddenly you have tremendous environmental change sweeping through our society.
This leads me directly into my second reason for hope, which is the tremendous energy of young people. And as they become aware of environmental problems, they have all this energy that they want to direct into making the world around them a better place. They're going to grow up and have all these problems to solve, so the sooner they start helping to solve them, then the better. That led to this program I call Roots & Shoots. Roots creep under the ground to make a firm foundation. Shoots seem new and small, but to reach the light they can break through brick walls. Let's see the brick walls as all these problems that I've mentioned that we humans have inflicted on the planet, ranging from overpopulation to crime and warfare and everything in between. Hope, hundreds and thousands of roots and shoots, hundreds and thousands of young people together around the world can break through. And we have Roots & Shoots programs, in some cases, with preschool kids. Mostly it's middle school and high school and a brand new group has formed itself at the university level. They, of course, are linked by email around the world. What do they do? They do hands-on projects to show that they care about the environment, about people, and about animals; three types of projects. And what they do will depend on where they are so that in rural Tanzania, for example, they plant a lot of trees, at least in the arid areas and overpopulated areas. In inner city Los Angeles, where I spent last week with the LAPD, they're sponsoring several Roots & Shoots programs. They're trying to get rid of graffiti, they're clearing out trash, they're doing the best they can. It's a tough world there, of course, as you know. Those are the kind of projects that can be done for the environment. For animals, well, learning about them, sharing what you know, and even walking a neighbor's dog or volunteering at a shelter - there's somebody here from Wildlife Rescue - these kind of things.
Finally, for people; your typical community projects. These groups of Roots & Shoots are now in 30 different countries and there are more than 600 groups in North America. This is one of my real positive hopes for the future, this energy of young people who are empowered by being given hope.
My last reason for hope lies in the fact that as I travel around the world, and I'm doing it now all the time, the longest I've been anywhere in the last 11 years is three weeks. I meet such amazing people. People who tackle tasks that everybody says are impossible and yet they succeed or they blaze a trail along which others can follow. People who overcome horrific physical disabilities and live lives that are shining examples to those around them. I spent a morning about three weeks ago with an extraordinary person, Henri Landwirth. Maybe some of you have heard of Give Kids the World. He's built a village near Disneyland in Orlando, Florida for children who have terminal illnesses. They go there for a week, a week where they can meet Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. A week, when they can smile and, perhaps for a little while, forget their pain or their fear. A week, when their parents can spend time together knowing that the children are looked after by the best healthcare professionals. And a week, where their brothers and sisters, who felt guilty or neglected, are treated with just as much love and affection by the volunteers that pour into this place. To watch Henri interacting and the mothers hugging him and crying and to see him playing with the children...He says, "I'm living the life that I never had," because he was a survivor of Auschwitz. What to me is so amazing about Henri is that all the bitterness and hatred that he brought with him when he came to the United States as a young man, has been transformed into compassion and love. It was a very moving experience to be there.
All around the world are people like that. I think one of the problems is that on our television screens and in our newspapers we see human violence. We read about rape and crime and murder. We read about the dreadful things that people do, it's newsworthy. We read about the war and the refugees and the fighting and the gang violence. And yes, that's all there, but if we just think about our own circle, if we think about most of the people we know, aren't we basically reasonably decent human beings? It's the same all around the world, but somehow it gets blown out of proportion. In this room how many wonderful people are there? Many. I guarantee you, very many. You can look in the mirror in the morning, look back, I hope, at one of these wonderful people. My real hope lies in the fact that it's up to you and I, and we have the power if we have the hope. I believe that as a result of the efforts of you and me, that we can expect our great, great grandchildren to open their eyes and see blue skies and hear the birds singing...that there will be greenery and that some of the chimps and some of the African forests will still be swinging through the trees. Thank you.
Generously funded by:
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers