December 21, 2021 • 68 mins
Although she’s known for being the most famous expert on chimpanzees, Jane Goodall is so much more than a primatologist. She’s also an author, podcast host, and a powerhouse in climate change activism and conservation. Jane joins Sophia on the podcast today to talk about how to focus your skills to see where you can help the most in the world, how similar chimps are to humans, and how she joined the global initiative to plant 1 trillion trees by 2030.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, it's Sophia and welcome back to Work in Progress.
When you think Jane Goodall, your mind probably jumps immediately
to chimpanzees, and with good reason. Her landmark study of
(00:23):
chimps in the wild fundamentally changed our understanding of humans,
relationship to other primates, and the capability of animals. But
Jane Goodall is so much more than her research in primatology,
and today she is our guests on Work in Progress.
Dr Goodall is also a powerhouse in climate change activism
and conservation that Jane Goodall institutes Trees for Jane campaign
(00:48):
is creating a cross generational initiative to preserve, replenish, and
promote our planets forests. She is an author whose newest book,
The Book of Hope, is coming out this month. Her
Ted talk have millions of views, her podcast hundreds of
thousands of downloads. But Jane Goodall has always used her platform,
her many platforms, in fact, for one thing, the betterment
(01:10):
of our planet and human interaction with the environment. I
am so excited to talk with Jane Goodall and learn
more about her as a person, as well as dive
deeper into her extensive career and the roles that she
has taken on as an advocate for nature. I hope
you're excited to let's get started. Good morning, Jane, It's
(01:41):
so lovely to see you again. Good to see you too.
How have you been since the Templeton Prize? Busier than
I've ever been in my whole life with publishing books
and with all the Cup twenty six coming up, and
all the pre Cup twenty six and all the U stuff,
and it just doesn't stop. I mean there's a there's
(02:03):
a minimum of two zooms to day, that's a minimum
and two hours this morning. Very busy all over the world.
I mean, in one day, I can be in China, India,
tens Ina, North America. You know, it's incredible. I imagine
(02:24):
that it must be surreal, you know, all of these
years into your work and career and your public advocacy
to be, as you said, busier than ever. Does it
feel like we're at a moment where everyone is really
really listening to what you've been saying for so long. Well,
it does seem like it's strangely enough, it really does,
(02:48):
you know, because some of these issues are rising up
to the top of government agendas, and that does seem
to be more awareness, and COVID has woken people up.
And you know also the fact that the effects of
climate change are no longer just being thought of as
o something happening in the third world far away. Now
(03:08):
it's harming people all over the US and Europe. And
I think that's made a big difference. Yes, it is
so interesting. I it seems that many of us were
cultured for a long time to think, oh, well, it
couldn't happen here. Terrible things don't happen here. We read
about them in the history books, and and they happen
far away, and oh, isn't it sad? But people don't
(03:31):
often feel truly touched. And to see the ways that
that false idea, that not to be crass but ridiculous
idea of separatism or safety as has really begun to
go away for a lot of folks. It seems that
people are understanding what you've been saying for so long.
(03:55):
You know, our our liberation is bound together. What happens
there happy is here. What affects the environment far away
affects our own. And now when you see, you know,
the subways of New York flooding like in a disaster
movie and and northern zones in this country being read
designated as subtropical. Everyone's going, oh, this is what the
(04:18):
scientists have been talking about. So on the one one
coast you got flooding and destruction from hurricanes. On the
other side, the environment is burning. And Europe of course
was subjected to these terrible floods earlier in the year,
and fires too, And for the very first time in
(04:39):
history as far as we know, the Arctic forests were
on fire in the Arctic Circle. And since I first
went to Greenland, the ice cap has dropped. I mean,
you know, like when I first went to Tanzania Mount Kilimanjaro,
the famous snows of Kilimanjaro, snows came halfway down the mountain.
(05:04):
Now they've gone. Wow. I'm curious about all of what
you've seen, and and when you talk about where you
find yourself in your career now, zooming all over the
world and being able to be in so many places
at once, I think back to our first interaction, which
(05:24):
I got to tell you about recently, when I was
in the eighth grade and you came and spoke at
my school in Pasadena, my little all girls school called Westbridge,
and I was so touched when I shared that with you,
because you said, what it's been like, as miss Jane
Goodall to meet so many people who say, you came
to my school in this city, You visited my school
(05:46):
in this town. You You've really dedicated so much of
your life, not only to showing up in the places
that require study, but then taking your learned knowledge to
other places to inspire the rest of us. And I'm
very curious. I found myself thinking a lot about this
(06:07):
after we got off of our last zoom. I thought, well, well,
who was Jane as a schoolgirl? You know, what what
school did you grow up in? Because I I know
my experience as a schoolgirl meeting you, But but who
were you when you were that age, when you were
in you know, seventh or eighth grade. Were you always
(06:27):
really curious about the world. Did you love animals as
a child or did that come later? I was actually
born loving animals. My mother tells me that when I
was just eighteen months old, she found I had taken
a whole lot of earthworms to bed, and she said, Jane,
you were watching them so intently. I think you were
wondering how do they walk without legs. And you know,
(06:51):
because I was so curious as to where a hen's
egg came out of the hen, I couldn't see a
hole like that. And we'd gone to stay on a
farm in the country. And so I hid in a
hen house for four hours, aged four, four year old,
hiding for four hours. My mother didn't know where I was.
She even called the police. But I was very lucky
(07:13):
in having a supportive mother and this love of animals
she supported. And when I was growing up, it was
during World War two, so I don't think they even
made children's books anyway. We didn't have any money so
to speak of, so books came from libraries. But Mom
found books for me about animals. She said, well, Jane'll
(07:35):
learn to read more quickly. So the great thing, the
reason I'm saying this is that the most important thing
for a parent is to support the interests of the
child and not try and push them into some career
path that isn't important for the child. That so many
parents do that you know, you've got to go to
(07:57):
business school, you've got to get you've got to make money.
You weren't you wouldn't you wouldn't succeed unless you make money,
make money, make money, make money. And I've had young
people come up in tears. I'm saying, I don't want
to go to business school. I don't want to do business.
I want to help the environment. Mm hmm. It's interesting,
you know, for me, my dad immigrated to the US
(08:20):
in the seventies and became a citizen when I was
twelve or thirteen, right right around that sort of crossover age,
and my mom's family came in my grandmother's generation, you know,
on a boat from Italy into the US, the sort
of nostalgic, famed stories of coming in through Ellis Island
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and you know, signing your name in the book. And
even though my dad is an artist, there was definitely
that kind of a culture for me of you know,
you'll be a doctor or a lawyer, or you could
be a lawyer or a doctor. It was very specific
and and it was interesting, I think when I finally
got to tell my parents what I really wanted to do,
(09:06):
and I understood their fear. I think lots of parents
want their kids to have the most secure, if not
the most creative job. But you know, I got to
point up my dad and say, well, you turned your
hobby into your work. Both my parents thought, God, damn it.
She has a point, um. But I do think it's
so cool to realize that if, as you say, if
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a parent can release a little bit of that, you know,
grip on fear and lean into what their kids are
passionate about. You know, look at look at what can happen.
Even as you say, you know you grew up during
the war, I imagine there were periods of austerity and struggle.
(09:49):
What part of England were you in as a child?
Where where were you at that time? Right where I
am now, south of England, Bournemouth, and all that stood
between us and the might of the Germans Nazi Germany
was a little bit of scaffolding and Zimbabwe, because Britain
wasn't prepared for war, and quite honestly, it seemed hopeless
(10:13):
because the rest of Europe had capitulated, they'd either been
defeated or surrendered, and it was just for a while,
it was just Britain standing up against the might of
Nazi Germany, and it was our air force and the
armed forces from the colonies. Otherwise the whole of Europe
(10:34):
would have been overrun by Nazi fascism, and so you know,
I was ten years old when the pictures from the
Holocaust were released and it taught me a lot. I mean,
I was very young when I learned about evil and
what true evil is. And seeing those first pictures of
(10:55):
the survivors of the Holocaust, these walking skeletons, I mean,
it was it made such a deep impression on me.
And I think the fact that having lived through that
time is with wrightening, austerity and all the rest of it,
taught me to take nothing for granted food or life.
And it also helped me to understand that however dark
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the situation seems today, which it does, we're living in
dark times politically, socially, especially environmentally, But if Britain came
through that dark time, then we can again. We've got
that indomitable spirit. What I love about your what you're saying,
(11:41):
is it it feels like a real merger between a
practical realism and hope. And I think we need that.
I think we need to be very frank about where
we are and remember the resiliency not just of the
human spirit but the planet. I wonder when you tell
(12:05):
that story, that kind of experience for a young child
is so sobering, and I imagine for so many of
you traumatic you know, to to learn evil at the
age of ten is is no small experience. Did that
real kind of reality check for a lack of a
(12:26):
of a better term in this moment of aha? For me? Uh?
Did did that experience influence the way that you advocate
the seriousness with which you talk about the way the
world treats itself? How can I tell? I don't know.
(12:48):
I had an amazing mother, had an amazing family. And
one of the things my mother did which was extraordinary, well, actually,
first of all, when I was ten, I dreamed of
going to f kind of living with wild animals and
writing books about them, and everybody laughed. Girls didn't that
sort of thing? Yeah? Ten, Yes, after reading the books
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Mom found for me, and everybody laughed except Mom, and
she said, if you really want to do something like this,
you're going to have to work really hard, take advantage
of every opportunity, and if you don't give up, maybe
you find a way. That's the message I've taken to
young people all over the world, particularly in disadvantage communities,
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and I wish Mom was around to know. How many
people have written to me or said to me, thank
you because you've taught me. Because you did it, I
can do it too. And that is a wonderful message
to take around. But the other thing that she did,
you know, I credit a lot of who I am
and what I've done to the way that she raised
(13:52):
me was that after the war, I mean, during the war,
you can imagine when London's being armed, when your relatives
are dying being shot down by the Germans, when there's
the Blitz, people in London bodies destroyed, houses destroyed, huge areas.
My uncle was a doctor in London and he was
(14:16):
working desperately on the Blitz victims, and and so we
hated the Germans. You can imagine we hated them, and
you would hear the sound of a German voice and
it would make you feel cold inside. But after the war,
about five years after the war, there was a German
family that wanted someone to come and speak English so
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that their children would learn to speak good English. And
Mom's friend said, you can't let Jane go to Germany.
But she let me go because she wanted me to
understand that Nazi Germany was not the same as Germany,
and that Germans were like us, and it was this
(15:00):
fanaticism that now we're seeing in different parts of the world.
That's such a beautiful thing that she did in that time.
You have this dream at ten, your mother says, lean
into it. The war ends, and and in your early
teen years you get this next incredible lesson that people
(15:25):
are not always their government's ideology. And then I know,
at twenty three you left for Kenya for your first
study in Africa. What what happened in between those years?
What happened in in Jane's life from you know, your
mid teens until you set off on that voyage. Well,
(15:48):
I did well at school. I didn't like school. It
was a day school. I didn't like it because I
wanted to be out in nature. I wanted to be
with my dog. I did not want to be in school.
But I was good at the lessons um I did well.
I was always up in the top three in exams,
for example. So when I left school, I couldn't afford
(16:11):
university because in those days you couldn't get scholarships unless
you were good in a foreign language, and I wasn't.
It's one thing I couldn't do, and so I had
to have a job. You know, I said, we have
very little money, and I we had just enough money
for a secretarial course. So I did a boring old
(16:32):
secretarial course. I was in London. I had fun. I
was you know. I enjoyed going out and having going
to the odd dance and meeting young men and this
certain the other. But the dream of Africa was always there.
And so when I was invited by a school friend
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to go for a holiday in Kenya, that was the opportunity.
And I came home because you couldn't save money in London,
and I worked in a hotel around the corner, just
around there, as a waitress. And it was one of
those old fashioned hotels. It wasn't a fancy unlike today.
So you went in and the rest of the staff
(17:14):
were all professional. Me just coming in, and they resented me.
They sat, well, Jane'll get invited out and she'll leave
us in their lature. Of course, I'm not like that.
I wouldn't do that. I took it very seriously. In fact,
Mom and I sometimes giggled over it. And it was
interesting because I got to know these Irish Catholics, that
(17:36):
the whole waiting staff was Irish Catholics except for one Italian,
and that the one man other than the wine waiter
was Italian. And so I found my way around in
this strange world. And of course in the end they
accepted me, totally, invited me to their weddings and things
like that, and finally I saved up enough money went
(18:00):
out to Africa when I was twenty three on a
boat because planes weren't going back and forth in those days,
that's how long ago it was. And the first place
we landed was Cape Town because instead of going through
the Suez Canal, if you know your geography, there was
a war between Britain and Egypt, silly war, but the
(18:21):
Suez Canal was closed, so we had to go all
the way around Africa and landed in Cape Town for
the first time, and it was so excited. Africa was
in Africa, was on African soil. I'm on my way.
But then on the benches in the parks and on
the doors to the restaurants will be stopped for two
days while the ship refueled or whatever they do. And
(18:45):
it was all this writing in Africa and slix blanc,
slex blocks, slex block. So I said to their friends
who were taking me round? What does this mean? White
people only? And suddenly I couldn't leave fast enough because
I wasn't brought up that way. Wow. Yeah, as a
young woman too. To have been healing one war and
(19:09):
then to enter into the horrors of apartheid must have
been quite a shock. It was horrible. So you begin
to understand what's happening then in South Africa. But only
two days in Cape Town, I mean, it's not long
too necessarily meet people ask questions about what's happening. You
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said you couldn't get out of there fast enough, which
I feel like I understand. Were you able to glean
any kind of information about who was doing the work
there or was it so brief that you just got
back on the ship and continued on to get to Kenya.
I had an introduction to a person who had been
(19:51):
in the church in Bournemouth Congregational and he told me
some terrible stories, and the one that stuck with me.
He was walking along the street and there was a
bus coming and there was this African woman, old lady,
and she had carrying a heavy basket and one of
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the handles broke and everything scattered over the road and
so he rushed to help her, and he said her
face turned gray under the black skin, and she said,
I'll get terribly punished if a white person is seen
helping me. That's how bad it was. How do you
begin to process that, you know, as a young woman,
(20:33):
because it's not lost on me that I would struggle
deeply if I witnessed something like that today and we're
talking about what sixty years ago maybe more. How do
you make sense of, oh, this is what injustice is
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happening in this part of the world, and know that
you're not going to be able to stay there to
do anything about it. I mean, I couldn't do anything
about the Holocaust, could I was ten when I got
to Kenya. It was better. It was on the on
the brink of becoming independent from British colonialism, but realizing
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that British colonial rule was crumbling in Kenya and then
subsequently in Tanzania, which was Tanganika when I arrived. You know,
I mean, you can't fix everything. One person can only
do the things that one person can do. And so
I've never spent a lot of time agonizing over things
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I can't do. I mean, yes, do I get upset
am I upset about what's happening in Iran, that the
women years I am with the Taliban taking over. I
can't do anything about it, and of course I hate it,
but I can only support people who write and say,
you know, I can't do anyth So there's no point
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wasting all your energy on something you actually can do
something about when there are so many things you can
try and do something about. M M. That's hard. It's
a hard pill to swallow, but I think it can
be a very helpful advice to say you should always
ask questions, try to understand what's happening to people you know,
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use your voice, be compassionate, and be clear about focusing
your skill set on that which you can help the most.
I think sometimes and I hear this, you know, when
I Jane speak to young people in schools, they say, well,
I just don't know how to help. I don't know
what to work on. They feel so overwhelmed because they
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do have so much information about all of these things
happening around the world. And I think that that is
a really excellent and again, um, it reminds me of
that since you gave me earlier of practical hope, you
have to really want to change the world for the
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better and be practical about how much you as one
person can do yes. And you know, fortunately I've lived
long enough that I have a network of friends in
different fields. So one thing I can do is link
people together. Link the people who ask for help to
somebody who can help. Because right now, just about any
(23:25):
problem that the world is facing, there's a group of
people or several groups who are working on that particular problem.
So as I know many of them now, just linking
them is something that one can do. Oh that makes
me so happy to hear you say that, because that's
something I really take great pleasure in. As well. There's
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the there's the whole world of each of our versions
of you know, public activism. And one of the things
that actually feels most fulfilling to me is the stuff
nobody knows about. When I am able to make an introduction,
can three people on an email or a text message
and and and make sure that we I think about
it almost as like um, you know, the nets under
(24:09):
the trapeze artists at the circus. It feels like that
to me, weaving these nets of support and that that's
a good reminder for anyone listening at home as well.
Sometimes the greatest gift you can give a cause is
connection to another. So we we now back to our steamship.
We now are arriving in Kenya and you're having this
(24:31):
first experience. You talk about always having had an interest
in animals and in primates. You've told the story many times,
so I won't ask you to repeat it. Of you know,
your stuffed chimpanzee that that you had is little Jane.
How did all of these things, this this series of coincidences,
the holiday and your interests, and your wonderfully supportive mom
(24:54):
who encouraged you to lean into animal study and science.
Did all all those things just perfectly line up when
you met Louis Leakey? Because I'm thinking about this transition,
as as you mentioned, from secretarial work to winding up
in the gone By Stream National Park. How did that
(25:15):
shift happen? It followed perfectly because that boring old secretarial training.
When I met Louis Leakey, because I heard, Jane, if
you're interested in animals, you should meet Louis Leakey. So
I went to see him at the Natural History Museum.
He was curator and he took me around and asked
(25:35):
me many questions. I think he was impressed I knew
so much, even though I had just come out from England,
because I'd read every book I could. I spent hours
in the Natural History Museum in London, and guess what,
two days before he met me, his secretary had left.
He needed a secretary. So there I was, and I
(25:56):
was suddenly, I'm surrounded by all these people who could
answer my questions about the mammals and the birds and
the reptiles, the amphibians, the insects of plants of Africa.
And he let me go on an expedition onto the
Serengetti planes, old of my gorge when all the animals
were there, and he was very impressed that I knew
(26:18):
how to behave instinctively when I met a lion, and
when I met a rhino, he said I'd done exactly
the right thing. And so that's when he decided to
ask if I'd go and study chimps. I'd never dreamt
of chimpanzees. I mean, they were exotic, nobody knew, nobody
had studied them at all. And he wanted a woman
(26:43):
because he felt women might be more patient. He was
delighted I hadn't been to university because he said, you know,
your mind is uncluttered by the then very reductionist attitude
to animals that the ethologists had, and so it all
seemed to be leading in the same direction. And everything
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I did, whether I wanted to do it or not,
prepared me for the next step. Incredible. And how old
are you at this point? I was twenty three in
those days. Twenty three year old today is quite sophisticated.
But after the war, you know, we were very sheltered.
There were no young people going out for overseas holidays.
(27:28):
Just they'd go as far as Switzerland for skiing if
they could afford it, which we couldn't. But you know,
there weren't the sort of adventures that students go on today.
Absolutely there weren't. There was the World Tour for young
men who went around, usually with a tutor, but girls
(27:49):
were supposed to, you know, do some job. Maybe you
could be a flight attendant, or you'll be a nurse,
or you could be a secretary, and you waited to
get married that sit It's so interesting to think about
the the restraints placed on women at the time, and
yet here's your mentor, and he says you should go.
(28:13):
It makes me think about how even today we're discussing
the gender disparities in STEM fields in you know, for
the folks listening at home science and technology, and we
hear stories about how difficult those avenues can be for
women to get into. And I'm amazed and so not
(28:35):
only glad for you, but for us who've benefited from
your work that Louis Leakey said, I think you should
do this. While you had him encouraging and advocating for you,
were you faced with other obstacles as a woman entering
the fields of anthropology and primatology, or or did his
(28:58):
blessing make other people take you seriously as well? No, Well,
you see, I was so lucky because basically there wasn't
anybody out in the field. It wasn't that I broke
into a male dominated I broke into a completely new
area of research. There was George Sella out studying gorillas,
(29:18):
which he managed to do for a year, and there
were two Americans in South Africa studying baboons. That was it.
There wasn't a feel primatology didn't exist. So the authologists
were studying birds and insects, and that was it, and that,
you know, at least at Cambridge when I finally got there,
(29:39):
my supervisor had a group of but captive monkeys. So
the most of the animal research when I began, if
there was any, was done on captive animals. There wasn't.
I wasn't competing with men. That's incredible when I think
about all of your study. You've served chimpanzees and primates
(30:01):
for such a long time, and you've really contributed so
much towards our understanding of our closest relatives on this earth.
Can you tell us a little bit about the behaviors
you've witnessed in them that have made you perhaps better
understand human nature. Yes, well, chimpanzees are so like us
(30:27):
in so many ways. We know now how like us
they are biologically like. We differ in the structure of
DNA by only just over one that's all. Yeah, that's
all Genetically the DNA where ninety eight point six or
seven percent the same of the composition. The difference comes
(30:50):
in the expression of the genes and environment plays a
major role, but in their behavior, which is why Leaky
Leaky believed that about six million years ago there was
an ape like human like creature, because he spent his
life searching for the fossilized remains of early humans. So
(31:11):
he thought, because behavior doesn't fossilize, so you can tell
a lot about the creature from its skeleton. But he thought, well,
if James's behavior similar to humans in chimps today, then
maybe their behavior was in the common ancestor, and maybe
we've brought it with us through our long evolutionary separate pathways,
(31:35):
which I believe to be true. So you know, seeing
how they communicate with kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting one another,
seeing how the males compete for dominance, swaggering, looking as
big as they can, just like human male politicians, especially
some which you probably know even better than me. Um.
(31:58):
And then the strong ones between mothers and offspring, family
relationships that go on through a life of up to
sixty five years, and different kinds of mothers and the
offspring of the supportive mothers who risk everything to go
and rescue their child from a difficult situation, those offspring
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do better, they're more self assured. Males reach a higher
position in the hierarchy and probably sign more kids, and
the females are better mothers. So because of all these similarities,
I mean, they have a kind of primitive war. They
can be brutal and violent, which was a shock. They
(32:39):
kill kill each other from neighboring communities. But they also
can show altruism. An unrelated male may adopt a motherless
infant and save its life. But because they're so like us,
you can stand back and say, yes, but but we're different.
I mean, you know, chimps are a more intelligent than
(33:01):
anyone used to think, as are other animals, including right
down to the octopus and even insects. But I mean,
you know, we're talking to each other from different continents,
and we could if we wanted, we could have twenty
other people from twenty other conferences on our countries on
a zoom we've sent. You know, last week there was
(33:26):
a beautiful full moon, and when I look at it,
I mean I remember, you don't, but I remember the
first landing on the Moon and the orb science fiction
when I was a child, And every time I look
at that full moon, I think, wow, we put people
up there. And I tell people in my lectures, don't
take it for granted. Look at that moon and think
(33:48):
we put people up there, and now we've sent rockets
to Mars. So this biggest difference between chimps us and
other animals explosive to development of the intellect. So is
it not bizarre that this most intellectual creature it's destroying
its only home. We don't want to go and live
(34:09):
on Mars. We can't live on the Moon. We cannot
in our lifetimes get too far away planets that might
support similar life to that which we know. So we've
just got this one beautiful, blue and green planet and
we're destroying it as you and I speak. We're destroying
(34:31):
the forests, We're polluting the oceans. Are stupid. Industrial agriculture
is killing the soil, spraying poison, losing biodiversity. We're trafficking animals,
which is why we have this pandemic, because we've created
conditions where diseases can jump from an animal to a
person where they may start a new so called zoootic disease.
(34:55):
We're burning fossil fuel, We're polluting the atmosphere. I mean,
we're stupid, stupid, stupid, And I think clever brain and
human heart have disconnected. Yeah, I think about how sometimes
this this distance, this is you know, the longest twelve
(35:17):
inches and the universe. It really can be a struggle
for us to connect exactly what you're saying, the head
to the heart. Why do you think it is that
humans believe? Again, in studying our closest relatives, where it's
really simply a difference of one percent of DNA and
(35:39):
genetic expression. Why do we think we're so special because
the Bible and other religions have told us so. M h.
I think that's really at the at the core of
it when you think how what an important part some
kind of religion has played throughout human history. And you know,
(36:04):
there was a word mistranslated in the Bible in Genesis
where it says God gave dominion, gave man dominion over
the birds and the fish and everything. But actually the
proper translation of that Hebrew word is stewardship. That's very different,
(36:26):
and I think it's led to an enormous amount of
abuse of animals. And all these animals I just mentioned
the ones being trafficked around the world that have led
to zoonotic diseases, but the animals in our factory farms,
crowded in these cruel, horrible situations. The puppy mills of
sports hunting. I mean, you can go around and add
(36:49):
on and on and on, cock fighting, dog fighting, you
name it. And you know, now we know every one
of those animals is an individual with a personality capable
of feeling fear, terror, despair, and pain. And think of
the almost unimaginable scale of suffering. It's a cognitive dissonance.
(37:17):
It's it is truly so strange to me that, as
you say, dominion, what a word, that we think we
are the rulers of a planet when really we're just guests.
We're destroyers of the planet. Mm hmm, like some rulers today.
That's the problem some governments are and presidents are so autocratic.
(37:42):
Mm hmm. That's a big problem, which I suppose all
boils down to a desire for control and a thirst
for power. And and that makes me curious about something
you mentioned earlier, and you you right, you know, your
first two books, Shadow of Man and Through a Window,
(38:02):
you chronicle what is said to potentially be the first
ever recorded instance of chimpanzee warfare, and war as we've
spoken about a variety of them already today again feels
to me like a you know, a battle over dominance
and a thirst for power. What was it like to
(38:23):
see that kind of warfare in chimpanzees? I mean the
first time you talk so much about the tenderness and
the intricacies of their society and then to see this,
what what was that like as an experience for you?
It was totally totally horrible. The thing is a chimps.
Male chimps are territorial, and they have a territory. And
(38:47):
when I began studying these chimps, I think I arrived
at a point when a rather big community was dividing.
That's what I think. And probably because we fed bananas,
they stayed together a long good than they might have otherwise.
But anyway, this process of one group of males moving
further south was sort of ongoing from the beginning, and
(39:12):
it was more males in the in the in the north,
and a small group went south. But the problem was
that the smaller group settled in part of what had
been the range of the whole community when it was
before it split, and for four years there was not
much going on. But then gradually the larger group began
(39:34):
doing these patrols and just awful to watch because they
would climb into a tree, overlooking what you can think
of as the hostile territory of this new community that
had separated off and silent, and then seeing an individual
by itself and running and attacking and killing, not outright killing,
(39:57):
leaving the individual to die of the wounds. The awful
thing was these were chimps. It was a civil war.
These were chimps who had fed together, nest together, groom together,
played together. I knew them all and it was horrible.
That was That was the worst part. Okay, they're always territorial.
They will attack individuals of a neighboring community, but they
(40:20):
don't know them, so there's a kind of reason for it.
You know, you're protecting your territory. But this was different.
This was and they were treating these individuals not like
inn a normal quick chimp attack. They are quite aggressive,
but they were treating them like animals that they kill
for food, using behavior that we never saw in attacks
(40:45):
between individuals in the same community. Twisting the limbs, drinking blood.
I mean, you don't do that or somebody in your group.
So it was horrible. I mean, they do have a
dark side. That that's what makes them so like us.
That kind of cruelty expressed, you know, to your neighbor
or for former family member, feels almost personal. Yeah, it
(41:08):
feels vengeful, which you wouldn't expect in in an animal.
I suppose I think of them more like people and animals.
People say, oh, chimps, after chimps, what's your favorite animal?
I say, chimps are not my favorite animal. They're much
to like people, and I don't even think of them
as animals. That my favorite animal, of course, it's a dog,
(41:30):
you and me both. What was your life like living
and studying them for so long? How did you build
a life that you loved so far from home? Was
it that you were just so deeply inspired by what
you saw every day? Did you feel more at home
in Africa than you did in London? Did you bring
(41:52):
books with you, have a routine? What? What was your
what was your world there? Well? First, when I first
went out, Mom was with me because they wouldn't allow
me to go alone, and they said I had to
have a companion, and Ma'm volunteered, so I had money
for six months and she came for four and she
boosted my morale because for four months they ran away.
(42:13):
They had never seen a white ape before. And she
also set up a clinic for the local fishermen, just
simple aspirends and band aids and you know, those sort
of simple things because she wasn't a doctor or nurse,
and so established from the very beginning a really good
relationship with the local people. They came for miles because
(42:36):
she cured them with her simple cures. She spent hours
with each one, and then she left, and there was
a cook and a boatman, and so every morning, every morning,
it's like nowadays, I don't have weekends. Then I didn't
have weekends. Every morning, up before dawn, up into the
(43:00):
mountains looking for the chimps sitting on this peak I
found using my binoculars, staying up there, getting back to
camp just before it was dark, and I knew those
mountains like it was my home. I mean, I loved it.
This was what I dreamed of. And once the chimps
(43:20):
stopped running away, it was like magic. And then after
I saw David Graybeard using tools to fish for termites,
something humans were supposed to be the only tool using
making creatures. And that's where I got the pushback from
male scientists saying, why why should we believe this young
(43:41):
girl and she's only getting money because she's got nice
legs and she's not a geographic cover blah blah blah.
But anyway, this was when the geographic to support the
research and center photographer and filmmaker and so um being
out in the mountains on my own, there's something special
(44:05):
that if you're on your own. And I always feel
this connection to a great spiritual power when I'm out
in the forest, other wild places too, but specially the forest.
And if you're alone, you forget your humanity. I can't
explain it well, but you're just part of nature, Whereas
(44:26):
if you're with anybody, even somebody you love, it's two
people in nature. Whereas if it's just you, you you are
not there. You're just living as a part of the
natural world. And that's why I know how terrible it
is that young people today are being increasingly separated from
(44:48):
the natural world, either because they're in the middle of
cities or because they're more interested in Facebook and video
games and so on. It's a tragedy. If you don't
get children out into nature so they learned to understand
and love it, how do we expect them to protect it?
(45:11):
And if we don't protect it. You know, we're part
of the natural world. We're not separated from it. Even
in a city. We depend on it. But clean air,
for clean water, for food, childer everything, and we depend
on healthy ecosystems. So the forest ecosystem to me, was
like a beautiful tapestry of interrelated strands of the different species.
(45:38):
And as species get extinct, so threads are pulled from
the tapestry until it hangs in tatters and the ecosystem collapses.
And we depend on healthy ecosystems, so we'd better start
doing something about it. We'd better start getting together to
heal some of the wounds we've inflicted. Feels like a
(46:02):
you know, daunting but clearly very necessary coming together. Is
that what inspired you to write your most recent book,
The Book of Hope, to to light that fire? Yes,
because if we lose hope, and many people are, but
if you lose hope, you you you become apathetics. You know,
(46:24):
you feel helpless and hopeless and you don't do anything.
And as more and more people lose hope, more and
more people stop taking action. So for me, hope isn't
just wishful thinking. It's not sitting and thinking, oh, well,
I'm sure it will be all right because blah blah blah.
It's and I thought the other day of that it's
(46:47):
rather like where in the middle of a very very
dark tunnel filled with obstacles, and at the far end
it's a pinprick of light and that hope And to
get there you don't just sit and hope you'll get that.
You have to work and fight to get that, overcome
(47:08):
the obstacles. And so we need the rallying cry is
there is hope, but only if we take action, all
of us. It has to be an active hope. That's
what hope is to me. It's not just wishful thinking.
Mm hmm. Is it that kind of commitment to taking
(47:29):
the action that really lead you two more directly take
on conservation efforts because you spent so long observing and
being a scientist and then forming and creating the mission
around the Jane Goodall Institute. Your approach is about conservation
(47:52):
and putting the focus and the power in local communities
so that each place can, in their own way, do
that work for their community. What what led you to
that approach when you were building out the institute, Because
after I went to this conference in eight six I thought, well,
(48:14):
I hear that chimps are vanishing and forest to being destroyed.
A bit ago and travel around Africa and see what's
happening with my own eyes. I think you have to
see with your own eyes. And got together a bit
of money and went to six range countries and learned
a lot about the problems facing the chimps, that lots
(48:37):
of habitat, the bush meat trade, people moving deeper and
deeper into the forest with their diseases. But I learned
about the plight of so many of the people, the
crippling poverty, the lack of good health and education, the
degradation of the land, the growth of the human population.
When I flew over Gombi, which had been part of
(48:59):
a great forest ist in the sixties and the seventies,
But when when I flew over in the late eighties,
it was just a little island of forests as National Park,
where the chimps were surrounded by bear hills. And that's
when it hit me, if we don't help these people
find ways of living without destroying the environment, then we
(49:20):
can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And so that
led to our Takari program, which is very holistic and
you know, includes restoring fertility to the overused land, scholarships
to keep girls in school after puberty. As women's education improves,
family sized tends to drop. We provide family planning information
(49:46):
and we've now taught the people. They volunteer and they
come to workshops to learn about monitoring the health of
their village forest reserves with smartphones. They're very proud of it.
It's all upload did into a platform in the clouds,
and we're now in a hundred and four villages throughout
(50:06):
all the Chimp range in Tanzania and in six other
African countries, and the people are now our partners in conservation.
All of these villages. We have our youth program Roots
and Choots in the schools. In all the schools, so
all the children from kindergarten through university in sixty five
(50:29):
countries plus are choosing projects to make the world a
better place. A project to help people, a project help animals,
a project help the environment. HM. I love it and
I think it's so important, especially as we take stock
of what's happening around the world, you realize that so
(50:50):
many of these places, you know, chimp territories that you're
talking about, and other regions around the world that are
rich in resource are often cannibal by larger foreign capitalist
corporate systems. And to create as you have a platform
for people to understand the value of their spaces is profound.
(51:16):
I mean it. It was profound for me to be
parts of part of Roots and Shoots as a little kid.
And I know we spoke about this before, but for
the listeners at home, I've touched on this a little
bit um over the last year. But the silver lining
for me of this slow down, shutdown, you know, experience
of working from home in the pandemic was really being
(51:39):
able to cultivate my little bit of land in the
city I live in and plant an abundance of trees
and and I'm I'm keeping bees. I have two huge
beehives in a garden. And to see the way that
even in this yard that I didn't think I could
do anything with, I've been able to create a little ecosystem.
(52:02):
It's it's really inspired me that there's no project too
big or too small if we lean into fostering healthy land. Yeah. Well,
that's the main message of Roots and Shoots, which is
for everybody that every individual matters has a role to play.
And every day we live, we make a difference on
(52:24):
the planet, and we can choose what sort of difference
we make. What we buy, Where did it come from,
did it all on the environment, was it ruled to animals?
Is it cheap because of unfair wages or forced labor?
And But until that, part of what we need to
do to make a better world is to think how
(52:46):
we live on the sort of ecological footprint we make.
But that can't work until we alleviate poverty, because if
you're really poor, you can't make those choices. You have
to buy the cheapest. Um. We can't ask how it
was made, you can't talk about the ethics of it.
You just have to buy the cheapest to survive. So,
(53:08):
you know, there's an awful lot we have to do.
We have to alleviate poverty. We have to do something
about the unsustainable lifestyle of the rest of us. We
have to make sure that environmental and humanitarian education is
in all the schools. We have to think about our
(53:31):
population because right now there's seven point I think it's
seven now some point seven billion of us and it's
estimated by twenty fifties will be closer to ten billion.
And already we're using up natural resources in some place
as faster than nature can replenish them. So what's going
to happen. We cannot go on with business as usual,
(53:54):
and hopefully this pandemic has woken people up. We must
find a new relationship with the natural world and animals.
We must because otherwise our species will become extinct. It's
not just the rest of the animals with climate change
and biodiversity loss, it's us. Yes, So if we care
(54:16):
about our children, we need to change the way. We
need to change mindsets. And you touched on that when
you talked about as we encroach into more wild spaces,
we are responsible for creating the rise in zoonotic diseases.
We see viruses like the Avian flu and this year
(54:41):
COVID nineteen. These are caused by environmental stress and destruction
done by humans. Can can you explain for people who
are less familiar with that science than you are as
an expert, how human activity contributes to epidemics. Well, one thing,
we penetrate deeper and deeper into animal habitats and force
(55:06):
some species closer to humans and occasionally, that creates an
environment where it's relatively easy for a pathogen like a
virus to jump from an animal to a person where
it may form a new disease. And in addition, we
hunt them, we sell them in wildlife markets, we traffick
(55:28):
them around the world, We cram them into tiny factory
farms in cruel conditions, and all these stressed, distressed animals
um it apparently makes it easier for a pathogen to
jump over to a human. And so these so called
zoonotic diseases, you know, this pandemic is one, and then
(55:51):
there was stars, and then there was Mars and HIV aids.
All were zoonotic diseases. They say seventy of all newly
emerging diseases in humans is from animals. M hm. So
we need all have a different relationship with animals and
(56:14):
treat them as they are sentient beings with feelings and personalities.
And that's why the talks going on now at fairly
high levels to ban the wildlife trade so important. But
it's not going to be easy because it's a multi
billion dollar um industry, this illegal wildlife trade. When I
(56:36):
see those photos of people out sport hunting I just can't.
I truly can't understand it. I can't understand how someone
feels tough killing an animal for fun. I genuinely it
feels um. It feels like a rip in the matrix.
(56:57):
To me, I just go, what are you doing? It's
horrible and and I think about ways to combat that culture,
but also to your point, create new relationships to the
way that we live and interact with animals. And I
do think that we need policy to change bands on
(57:18):
the wildlife trade, bands on sport hunting, all of those things.
And I think again, bringing it back to the advocacy
that you do and the empowerment uh the potential that
we find when we empower communities, when we think about
protecting wildlife zones, protecting wetlands, which you know, speaking of
(57:43):
climate change, can help save humans from the effects of
things like hurricanes. When you support through the Institute the
Trillion Trees Initiative, for example, I think about reforesting the
earth and and tactic for us and keeping us farther
(58:03):
from these wildlife habitats. That to me feels like something
I want to lean into, and I imagine a lot
of listeners will as well. Can you describe trillion trees
and tell people how they might get involved. Well, the
trillion Tree campaign was launched at DeVos two years ago.
(58:23):
Only two years ago. Wow, yeah, I was launched by
UM Salesforce. I helped to launch it. UM. It's not
that the trillion trees I mean doesn't really mean much
to me. What's important to me is that we need
to protect the protecting is far more important. Protect the
(58:45):
forests we have left with their rich biodiversity. And you know, yes,
we should also plant trees, but it's going to take
a while for trees, especially in temperate zones, to grow
big enough to absorb the necessary amount of c O two.
But the Chinese have a wonderful proverb. The best time
(59:07):
to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second
best time is now and so. But you know what's
important planting a tree isn't just sticking a tree in
the ground. It's got to be the right species, the
right time of year, and the right soil, and it's
got to be looked after. So sometimes these huge government
(59:28):
initiatives where they say we're going to try to plant
a million trees in a week or something, how many
of those trees live and very often when it's investigated,
not many do. So the Trees for Jane has very
tough standards and the price to plant a tree in
(59:49):
our project is more than many others because it includes
after care of the tree. And so we Trees for
Jane is in support of this large, trilliant tree which
is more dealing with big corporations and governments and were
grassroots and that that was a piece that was missing
(01:00:12):
from the Trillion Trees. So they're very happy about it.
I love that. So how can how can the average
listener then assistant advocating for the kind of reforestation that
you're talking about? Firstly and most importantly protecting habitats that exist,
and then secondly, when trees are being planted in initiatives
(01:00:36):
like this, to make sure that they're cared for and
fostered to survive, so that you know, by the time
we're all grandparents, those trees will still be living. How
how best can we use our voices for that? Well,
we've picked Trees for Jane has picked I think it's
(01:00:57):
five partners. Remember it's very new. When we haven't we
haven't got there yet. But there is a website and
you can click on a button which says that you
want to help protect forests, and that means with our
six partners who who haven't trusted track record mum money
(01:01:18):
goes to to the projects that are protecting forests, and
it will go to things like forest monitors and rangers
and all the people who are protecting these forests and woodlands.
And you can also just press a button and pay
a certain amount of money to plant it if you
plant a tree, or pay for the tree to be
(01:01:40):
planted by people planting trees. But these are all going
to projects that have got a good track record, and
there are three scientists who are monitoring where the money goes. Wonderful,
So that's you know, that's how that's how you can
end as well as we possibly can that the tree
(01:02:03):
will survive. Mm hmm. And what about for listeners who
want to help to protect endangered species? How can they
get more involved in your work? Well, there are a
lot of organizations protecting endangered species and you can find
it all on the website. You know, people want to
well our roots and shoots groups. We have groups protecting coala's,
(01:02:26):
protecting pangolins, protecting rhinos, protecting chimps, protecting guerrillas. We all
around the world are young people because they can choose
their projects, so you know they all have different You
knows a lot protecting turtles. There's a big push now
across the US to protect the migration route of the
(01:02:48):
monarch butterfly. And you can do such a lot by
plant allowing milkweed to grow in your in your yard.
So there's all kinds of different ways. And if you
just browse around in the internet about protecting endangered species,
you'll find hundreds of ways you can help. And if
somebody wants to help something different, you can't help them all,
(01:03:11):
but but we can all lean into something and that
feels exciting. I I'm curious, Jane, because it seems to
me that you are constantly leaning into more more books,
and more advocacy and more speaking engagements or more zooms,
and and you're even leaning into a podcast. And I
love that you've called it the Jane Got All Hope
(01:03:32):
Cast because you always come back to Hope. I'm curious
how you would describe your show to someone who might
be a potentially new listener. Well, the hope cost is
choosing people from different different spheres with different expertise um
(01:03:52):
and talking to them, and always it's about yes, what's
gone wrong, but positive ways, so people who have solutions
to some of the problems. So it's not just the
kind of doom and gloom we get from so much
of the media, but it's yes, there are these terrible problems.
(01:04:13):
It's like that dark tunnel, but there are solutions. We know.
We've got these amazing brains. We know how to restore
health to damage soil damaged by our stupid agriculture or
that we've built over it or something. There are ways
and we know that we know what they are. We
(01:04:33):
just have to get more governments to subsidize these projects,
and we can use renewable energy. And again, governments prefer
very often to to subsidize oil and gas. It's sort
of sort of old cronies network, and so it's changing attitude,
(01:04:55):
changing mindset, which I try to do through telling stories.
So in the Hope Cost we tell a lot of
stories and they're about very different like we've done one
on under the Sea with Craig Foster, who did My
Octopus Teacher. We've talked with the environmental head of Apple,
(01:05:18):
We've talked with I can't remember now, I mean, I've
done so many other things as well as Hope cost
so many other people's podcasts and hope you know, I mean,
my mind is so choker block, I can't remember what
I've done. You've done a lot, Jane, You've done a lot,
(01:05:39):
and you've inspired so many of us, and I'm so
grateful you've taken the time today to come on this podcast.
And as the theme of it goes, I'm very curious
to ask you this question. Given all you've done, you know,
the accolades, the awards. Again, most recently we saw each
other for the Templeton Prize. You You've you've shown up
(01:06:02):
in such immense ways for the planet, for people, for animals.
What as you look at everything you're doing now, what
in your life feels like a work in progress? To you?
Which is at work in progress? I mean, I've always
said that you know, when you when you think ahead
(01:06:22):
to where you want to go, you better aim for
the stars. You might get to the moon. If you're
any aim for the moon, you might get to the
top of Everest. So I like aiming for the stars.
So goal is to get roots and chootes into as
many schools as possible, and it is kindergarten through university
and and beyond and create a critical mass of people
(01:06:47):
who understand that. Of course we need money to live,
most of us, but it goes wrong when we live
for money unless we live to make money to help
make the world a better place, which is a good
thing to do, especially if the money goes to the
Jane Goodle Institute for all our projects, which I know
(01:07:08):
a good they're changing. You know, you can't imagine the
number of Roots and Shoots people who who write to
me and say, well, it's changed my life. I never
used to think like this. Now now I know that
there is a way forward and I'm going to do
my bid. You know, when I go to China we
started there in nine, adults come up to me and say, well,
(01:07:32):
of course I care about animals in the environment. I
was in Roots and Shoots in primary school, so it
has literally and also young people are changing their parents
and their grandparents all the time. It's wonderful. That's really wonderful.
What Jane. Thank you. Thank you for your work and
your activism, the programs that you've made so accessible to
(01:07:55):
so many of us, and for joining us today
Hi everyone, it's Sophia and welcome back to Work in Progress.
When you think Jane Goodall, your mind probably jumps immediately
to chimpanzees, and with good reason. Her landmark study of
(00:23):
chimps in the wild fundamentally changed our understanding of humans,
relationship to other primates, and the capability of animals. But
Jane Goodall is so much more than her research in primatology,
and today she is our guests on Work in Progress.
Dr Goodall is also a powerhouse in climate change activism
and conservation that Jane Goodall institutes Trees for Jane campaign
(00:48):
is creating a cross generational initiative to preserve, replenish, and
promote our planets forests. She is an author whose newest book,
The Book of Hope, is coming out this month. Her
Ted talk have millions of views, her podcast hundreds of
thousands of downloads. But Jane Goodall has always used her platform,
her many platforms, in fact, for one thing, the betterment
(01:10):
of our planet and human interaction with the environment. I
am so excited to talk with Jane Goodall and learn
more about her as a person, as well as dive
deeper into her extensive career and the roles that she
has taken on as an advocate for nature. I hope
you're excited to let's get started. Good morning, Jane, It's
(01:41):
so lovely to see you again. Good to see you too.
How have you been since the Templeton Prize? Busier than
I've ever been in my whole life with publishing books
and with all the Cup twenty six coming up, and
all the pre Cup twenty six and all the U stuff,
and it just doesn't stop. I mean there's a there's
(02:03):
a minimum of two zooms to day, that's a minimum
and two hours this morning. Very busy all over the world.
I mean, in one day, I can be in China, India,
tens Ina, North America. You know, it's incredible. I imagine
(02:24):
that it must be surreal, you know, all of these
years into your work and career and your public advocacy
to be, as you said, busier than ever. Does it
feel like we're at a moment where everyone is really
really listening to what you've been saying for so long. Well,
it does seem like it's strangely enough, it really does,
(02:48):
you know, because some of these issues are rising up
to the top of government agendas, and that does seem
to be more awareness, and COVID has woken people up.
And you know also the fact that the effects of
climate change are no longer just being thought of as
o something happening in the third world far away. Now
(03:08):
it's harming people all over the US and Europe. And
I think that's made a big difference. Yes, it is
so interesting. I it seems that many of us were
cultured for a long time to think, oh, well, it
couldn't happen here. Terrible things don't happen here. We read
about them in the history books, and and they happen
far away, and oh, isn't it sad? But people don't
(03:31):
often feel truly touched. And to see the ways that
that false idea, that not to be crass but ridiculous
idea of separatism or safety as has really begun to
go away for a lot of folks. It seems that
people are understanding what you've been saying for so long.
(03:55):
You know, our our liberation is bound together. What happens
there happy is here. What affects the environment far away
affects our own. And now when you see, you know,
the subways of New York flooding like in a disaster
movie and and northern zones in this country being read
designated as subtropical. Everyone's going, oh, this is what the
(04:18):
scientists have been talking about. So on the one one
coast you got flooding and destruction from hurricanes. On the
other side, the environment is burning. And Europe of course
was subjected to these terrible floods earlier in the year,
and fires too, And for the very first time in
(04:39):
history as far as we know, the Arctic forests were
on fire in the Arctic Circle. And since I first
went to Greenland, the ice cap has dropped. I mean,
you know, like when I first went to Tanzania Mount Kilimanjaro,
the famous snows of Kilimanjaro, snows came halfway down the mountain.
(05:04):
Now they've gone. Wow. I'm curious about all of what
you've seen, and and when you talk about where you
find yourself in your career now, zooming all over the
world and being able to be in so many places
at once, I think back to our first interaction, which
(05:24):
I got to tell you about recently, when I was
in the eighth grade and you came and spoke at
my school in Pasadena, my little all girls school called Westbridge,
and I was so touched when I shared that with you,
because you said, what it's been like, as miss Jane
Goodall to meet so many people who say, you came
to my school in this city, You visited my school
(05:46):
in this town. You You've really dedicated so much of
your life, not only to showing up in the places
that require study, but then taking your learned knowledge to
other places to inspire the rest of us. And I'm
very curious. I found myself thinking a lot about this
(06:07):
after we got off of our last zoom. I thought, well, well,
who was Jane as a schoolgirl? You know, what what
school did you grow up in? Because I I know
my experience as a schoolgirl meeting you, But but who
were you when you were that age, when you were
in you know, seventh or eighth grade. Were you always
(06:27):
really curious about the world. Did you love animals as
a child or did that come later? I was actually
born loving animals. My mother tells me that when I
was just eighteen months old, she found I had taken
a whole lot of earthworms to bed, and she said, Jane,
you were watching them so intently. I think you were
wondering how do they walk without legs. And you know,
(06:51):
because I was so curious as to where a hen's
egg came out of the hen, I couldn't see a
hole like that. And we'd gone to stay on a
farm in the country. And so I hid in a
hen house for four hours, aged four, four year old,
hiding for four hours. My mother didn't know where I was.
She even called the police. But I was very lucky
(07:13):
in having a supportive mother and this love of animals
she supported. And when I was growing up, it was
during World War two, so I don't think they even
made children's books anyway. We didn't have any money so
to speak of, so books came from libraries. But Mom
found books for me about animals. She said, well, Jane'll
(07:35):
learn to read more quickly. So the great thing, the
reason I'm saying this is that the most important thing
for a parent is to support the interests of the
child and not try and push them into some career
path that isn't important for the child. That so many
parents do that you know, you've got to go to
(07:57):
business school, you've got to get you've got to make money.
You weren't you wouldn't you wouldn't succeed unless you make money,
make money, make money, make money. And I've had young
people come up in tears. I'm saying, I don't want
to go to business school. I don't want to do business.
I want to help the environment. Mm hmm. It's interesting,
you know, for me, my dad immigrated to the US
(08:20):
in the seventies and became a citizen when I was
twelve or thirteen, right right around that sort of crossover age,
and my mom's family came in my grandmother's generation, you know,
on a boat from Italy into the US, the sort
of nostalgic, famed stories of coming in through Ellis Island
(08:42):
and you know, signing your name in the book. And
even though my dad is an artist, there was definitely
that kind of a culture for me of you know,
you'll be a doctor or a lawyer, or you could
be a lawyer or a doctor. It was very specific
and and it was interesting, I think when I finally
got to tell my parents what I really wanted to do,
(09:06):
and I understood their fear. I think lots of parents
want their kids to have the most secure, if not
the most creative job. But you know, I got to
point up my dad and say, well, you turned your
hobby into your work. Both my parents thought, God, damn it.
She has a point, um. But I do think it's
so cool to realize that if, as you say, if
(09:28):
a parent can release a little bit of that, you know,
grip on fear and lean into what their kids are
passionate about. You know, look at look at what can happen.
Even as you say, you know you grew up during
the war, I imagine there were periods of austerity and struggle.
(09:49):
What part of England were you in as a child?
Where where were you at that time? Right where I
am now, south of England, Bournemouth, and all that stood
between us and the might of the Germans Nazi Germany
was a little bit of scaffolding and Zimbabwe, because Britain
wasn't prepared for war, and quite honestly, it seemed hopeless
(10:13):
because the rest of Europe had capitulated, they'd either been
defeated or surrendered, and it was just for a while,
it was just Britain standing up against the might of
Nazi Germany, and it was our air force and the
armed forces from the colonies. Otherwise the whole of Europe
(10:34):
would have been overrun by Nazi fascism, and so you know,
I was ten years old when the pictures from the
Holocaust were released and it taught me a lot. I mean,
I was very young when I learned about evil and
what true evil is. And seeing those first pictures of
(10:55):
the survivors of the Holocaust, these walking skeletons, I mean,
it was it made such a deep impression on me.
And I think the fact that having lived through that
time is with wrightening, austerity and all the rest of it,
taught me to take nothing for granted food or life.
And it also helped me to understand that however dark
(11:21):
the situation seems today, which it does, we're living in
dark times politically, socially, especially environmentally, But if Britain came
through that dark time, then we can again. We've got
that indomitable spirit. What I love about your what you're saying,
(11:41):
is it it feels like a real merger between a
practical realism and hope. And I think we need that.
I think we need to be very frank about where
we are and remember the resiliency not just of the
human spirit but the planet. I wonder when you tell
(12:05):
that story, that kind of experience for a young child
is so sobering, and I imagine for so many of
you traumatic you know, to to learn evil at the
age of ten is is no small experience. Did that
real kind of reality check for a lack of a
(12:26):
of a better term in this moment of aha? For me? Uh?
Did did that experience influence the way that you advocate
the seriousness with which you talk about the way the
world treats itself? How can I tell? I don't know.
(12:48):
I had an amazing mother, had an amazing family. And
one of the things my mother did which was extraordinary, well, actually,
first of all, when I was ten, I dreamed of
going to f kind of living with wild animals and
writing books about them, and everybody laughed. Girls didn't that
sort of thing? Yeah? Ten, Yes, after reading the books
(13:09):
Mom found for me, and everybody laughed except Mom, and
she said, if you really want to do something like this,
you're going to have to work really hard, take advantage
of every opportunity, and if you don't give up, maybe
you find a way. That's the message I've taken to
young people all over the world, particularly in disadvantage communities,
(13:30):
and I wish Mom was around to know. How many
people have written to me or said to me, thank
you because you've taught me. Because you did it, I
can do it too. And that is a wonderful message
to take around. But the other thing that she did,
you know, I credit a lot of who I am
and what I've done to the way that she raised
(13:52):
me was that after the war, I mean, during the war,
you can imagine when London's being armed, when your relatives
are dying being shot down by the Germans, when there's
the Blitz, people in London bodies destroyed, houses destroyed, huge areas.
My uncle was a doctor in London and he was
(14:16):
working desperately on the Blitz victims, and and so we
hated the Germans. You can imagine we hated them, and
you would hear the sound of a German voice and
it would make you feel cold inside. But after the war,
about five years after the war, there was a German
family that wanted someone to come and speak English so
(14:40):
that their children would learn to speak good English. And
Mom's friend said, you can't let Jane go to Germany.
But she let me go because she wanted me to
understand that Nazi Germany was not the same as Germany,
and that Germans were like us, and it was this
(15:00):
fanaticism that now we're seeing in different parts of the world.
That's such a beautiful thing that she did in that time.
You have this dream at ten, your mother says, lean
into it. The war ends, and and in your early
teen years you get this next incredible lesson that people
(15:25):
are not always their government's ideology. And then I know,
at twenty three you left for Kenya for your first
study in Africa. What what happened in between those years?
What happened in in Jane's life from you know, your
mid teens until you set off on that voyage. Well,
(15:48):
I did well at school. I didn't like school. It
was a day school. I didn't like it because I
wanted to be out in nature. I wanted to be
with my dog. I did not want to be in school.
But I was good at the lessons um I did well.
I was always up in the top three in exams,
for example. So when I left school, I couldn't afford
(16:11):
university because in those days you couldn't get scholarships unless
you were good in a foreign language, and I wasn't.
It's one thing I couldn't do, and so I had
to have a job. You know, I said, we have
very little money, and I we had just enough money
for a secretarial course. So I did a boring old
(16:32):
secretarial course. I was in London. I had fun. I
was you know. I enjoyed going out and having going
to the odd dance and meeting young men and this
certain the other. But the dream of Africa was always there.
And so when I was invited by a school friend
(16:53):
to go for a holiday in Kenya, that was the opportunity.
And I came home because you couldn't save money in London,
and I worked in a hotel around the corner, just
around there, as a waitress. And it was one of
those old fashioned hotels. It wasn't a fancy unlike today.
So you went in and the rest of the staff
(17:14):
were all professional. Me just coming in, and they resented me.
They sat, well, Jane'll get invited out and she'll leave
us in their lature. Of course, I'm not like that.
I wouldn't do that. I took it very seriously. In fact,
Mom and I sometimes giggled over it. And it was
interesting because I got to know these Irish Catholics, that
(17:36):
the whole waiting staff was Irish Catholics except for one Italian,
and that the one man other than the wine waiter
was Italian. And so I found my way around in
this strange world. And of course in the end they
accepted me, totally, invited me to their weddings and things
like that, and finally I saved up enough money went
(18:00):
out to Africa when I was twenty three on a
boat because planes weren't going back and forth in those days,
that's how long ago it was. And the first place
we landed was Cape Town because instead of going through
the Suez Canal, if you know your geography, there was
a war between Britain and Egypt, silly war, but the
(18:21):
Suez Canal was closed, so we had to go all
the way around Africa and landed in Cape Town for
the first time, and it was so excited. Africa was
in Africa, was on African soil. I'm on my way.
But then on the benches in the parks and on
the doors to the restaurants will be stopped for two
days while the ship refueled or whatever they do. And
(18:45):
it was all this writing in Africa and slix blanc,
slex blocks, slex block. So I said to their friends
who were taking me round? What does this mean? White
people only? And suddenly I couldn't leave fast enough because
I wasn't brought up that way. Wow. Yeah, as a
young woman too. To have been healing one war and
(19:09):
then to enter into the horrors of apartheid must have
been quite a shock. It was horrible. So you begin
to understand what's happening then in South Africa. But only
two days in Cape Town, I mean, it's not long
too necessarily meet people ask questions about what's happening. You
(19:30):
said you couldn't get out of there fast enough, which
I feel like I understand. Were you able to glean
any kind of information about who was doing the work
there or was it so brief that you just got
back on the ship and continued on to get to Kenya.
I had an introduction to a person who had been
(19:51):
in the church in Bournemouth Congregational and he told me
some terrible stories, and the one that stuck with me.
He was walking along the street and there was a
bus coming and there was this African woman, old lady,
and she had carrying a heavy basket and one of
(20:11):
the handles broke and everything scattered over the road and
so he rushed to help her, and he said her
face turned gray under the black skin, and she said,
I'll get terribly punished if a white person is seen
helping me. That's how bad it was. How do you
begin to process that, you know, as a young woman,
(20:33):
because it's not lost on me that I would struggle
deeply if I witnessed something like that today and we're
talking about what sixty years ago maybe more. How do
you make sense of, oh, this is what injustice is
(20:54):
happening in this part of the world, and know that
you're not going to be able to stay there to
do anything about it. I mean, I couldn't do anything
about the Holocaust, could I was ten when I got
to Kenya. It was better. It was on the on
the brink of becoming independent from British colonialism, but realizing
(21:15):
that British colonial rule was crumbling in Kenya and then
subsequently in Tanzania, which was Tanganika when I arrived. You know,
I mean, you can't fix everything. One person can only
do the things that one person can do. And so
I've never spent a lot of time agonizing over things
(21:36):
I can't do. I mean, yes, do I get upset
am I upset about what's happening in Iran, that the
women years I am with the Taliban taking over. I
can't do anything about it, and of course I hate it,
but I can only support people who write and say,
you know, I can't do anyth So there's no point
(21:57):
wasting all your energy on something you actually can do
something about when there are so many things you can
try and do something about. M M. That's hard. It's
a hard pill to swallow, but I think it can
be a very helpful advice to say you should always
ask questions, try to understand what's happening to people you know,
(22:21):
use your voice, be compassionate, and be clear about focusing
your skill set on that which you can help the most.
I think sometimes and I hear this, you know, when
I Jane speak to young people in schools, they say, well,
I just don't know how to help. I don't know
what to work on. They feel so overwhelmed because they
(22:42):
do have so much information about all of these things
happening around the world. And I think that that is
a really excellent and again, um, it reminds me of
that since you gave me earlier of practical hope, you
have to really want to change the world for the
(23:03):
better and be practical about how much you as one
person can do yes. And you know, fortunately I've lived
long enough that I have a network of friends in
different fields. So one thing I can do is link
people together. Link the people who ask for help to
somebody who can help. Because right now, just about any
(23:25):
problem that the world is facing, there's a group of
people or several groups who are working on that particular problem.
So as I know many of them now, just linking
them is something that one can do. Oh that makes
me so happy to hear you say that, because that's
something I really take great pleasure in. As well. There's
(23:46):
the there's the whole world of each of our versions
of you know, public activism. And one of the things
that actually feels most fulfilling to me is the stuff
nobody knows about. When I am able to make an introduction,
can three people on an email or a text message
and and and make sure that we I think about
it almost as like um, you know, the nets under
(24:09):
the trapeze artists at the circus. It feels like that
to me, weaving these nets of support and that that's
a good reminder for anyone listening at home as well.
Sometimes the greatest gift you can give a cause is
connection to another. So we we now back to our steamship.
We now are arriving in Kenya and you're having this
(24:31):
first experience. You talk about always having had an interest
in animals and in primates. You've told the story many times,
so I won't ask you to repeat it. Of you know,
your stuffed chimpanzee that that you had is little Jane.
How did all of these things, this this series of coincidences,
the holiday and your interests, and your wonderfully supportive mom
(24:54):
who encouraged you to lean into animal study and science.
Did all all those things just perfectly line up when
you met Louis Leakey? Because I'm thinking about this transition,
as as you mentioned, from secretarial work to winding up
in the gone By Stream National Park. How did that
(25:15):
shift happen? It followed perfectly because that boring old secretarial training.
When I met Louis Leakey, because I heard, Jane, if
you're interested in animals, you should meet Louis Leakey. So
I went to see him at the Natural History Museum.
He was curator and he took me around and asked
(25:35):
me many questions. I think he was impressed I knew
so much, even though I had just come out from England,
because I'd read every book I could. I spent hours
in the Natural History Museum in London, and guess what,
two days before he met me, his secretary had left.
He needed a secretary. So there I was, and I
(25:56):
was suddenly, I'm surrounded by all these people who could
answer my questions about the mammals and the birds and
the reptiles, the amphibians, the insects of plants of Africa.
And he let me go on an expedition onto the
Serengetti planes, old of my gorge when all the animals
were there, and he was very impressed that I knew
(26:18):
how to behave instinctively when I met a lion, and
when I met a rhino, he said I'd done exactly
the right thing. And so that's when he decided to
ask if I'd go and study chimps. I'd never dreamt
of chimpanzees. I mean, they were exotic, nobody knew, nobody
had studied them at all. And he wanted a woman
(26:43):
because he felt women might be more patient. He was
delighted I hadn't been to university because he said, you know,
your mind is uncluttered by the then very reductionist attitude
to animals that the ethologists had, and so it all
seemed to be leading in the same direction. And everything
(27:05):
I did, whether I wanted to do it or not,
prepared me for the next step. Incredible. And how old
are you at this point? I was twenty three in
those days. Twenty three year old today is quite sophisticated.
But after the war, you know, we were very sheltered.
There were no young people going out for overseas holidays.
(27:28):
Just they'd go as far as Switzerland for skiing if
they could afford it, which we couldn't. But you know,
there weren't the sort of adventures that students go on today.
Absolutely there weren't. There was the World Tour for young
men who went around, usually with a tutor, but girls
(27:49):
were supposed to, you know, do some job. Maybe you
could be a flight attendant, or you'll be a nurse,
or you could be a secretary, and you waited to
get married that sit It's so interesting to think about
the the restraints placed on women at the time, and
yet here's your mentor, and he says you should go.
(28:13):
It makes me think about how even today we're discussing
the gender disparities in STEM fields in you know, for
the folks listening at home science and technology, and we
hear stories about how difficult those avenues can be for
women to get into. And I'm amazed and so not
(28:35):
only glad for you, but for us who've benefited from
your work that Louis Leakey said, I think you should
do this. While you had him encouraging and advocating for you,
were you faced with other obstacles as a woman entering
the fields of anthropology and primatology, or or did his
(28:58):
blessing make other people take you seriously as well? No, Well,
you see, I was so lucky because basically there wasn't
anybody out in the field. It wasn't that I broke
into a male dominated I broke into a completely new
area of research. There was George Sella out studying gorillas,
(29:18):
which he managed to do for a year, and there
were two Americans in South Africa studying baboons. That was it.
There wasn't a feel primatology didn't exist. So the authologists
were studying birds and insects, and that was it, and that,
you know, at least at Cambridge when I finally got there,
(29:39):
my supervisor had a group of but captive monkeys. So
the most of the animal research when I began, if
there was any, was done on captive animals. There wasn't.
I wasn't competing with men. That's incredible when I think
about all of your study. You've served chimpanzees and primates
(30:01):
for such a long time, and you've really contributed so
much towards our understanding of our closest relatives on this earth.
Can you tell us a little bit about the behaviors
you've witnessed in them that have made you perhaps better
understand human nature. Yes, well, chimpanzees are so like us
(30:27):
in so many ways. We know now how like us
they are biologically like. We differ in the structure of
DNA by only just over one that's all. Yeah, that's
all Genetically the DNA where ninety eight point six or
seven percent the same of the composition. The difference comes
(30:50):
in the expression of the genes and environment plays a
major role, but in their behavior, which is why Leaky
Leaky believed that about six million years ago there was
an ape like human like creature, because he spent his
life searching for the fossilized remains of early humans. So
(31:11):
he thought, because behavior doesn't fossilize, so you can tell
a lot about the creature from its skeleton. But he thought, well,
if James's behavior similar to humans in chimps today, then
maybe their behavior was in the common ancestor, and maybe
we've brought it with us through our long evolutionary separate pathways,
(31:35):
which I believe to be true. So you know, seeing
how they communicate with kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting one another,
seeing how the males compete for dominance, swaggering, looking as
big as they can, just like human male politicians, especially
some which you probably know even better than me. Um.
(31:58):
And then the strong ones between mothers and offspring, family
relationships that go on through a life of up to
sixty five years, and different kinds of mothers and the
offspring of the supportive mothers who risk everything to go
and rescue their child from a difficult situation, those offspring
(32:18):
do better, they're more self assured. Males reach a higher
position in the hierarchy and probably sign more kids, and
the females are better mothers. So because of all these similarities,
I mean, they have a kind of primitive war. They
can be brutal and violent, which was a shock. They
(32:39):
kill kill each other from neighboring communities. But they also
can show altruism. An unrelated male may adopt a motherless
infant and save its life. But because they're so like us,
you can stand back and say, yes, but but we're different.
I mean, you know, chimps are a more intelligent than
(33:01):
anyone used to think, as are other animals, including right
down to the octopus and even insects. But I mean,
you know, we're talking to each other from different continents,
and we could if we wanted, we could have twenty
other people from twenty other conferences on our countries on
a zoom we've sent. You know, last week there was
(33:26):
a beautiful full moon, and when I look at it,
I mean I remember, you don't, but I remember the
first landing on the Moon and the orb science fiction
when I was a child, And every time I look
at that full moon, I think, wow, we put people
up there. And I tell people in my lectures, don't
take it for granted. Look at that moon and think
(33:48):
we put people up there, and now we've sent rockets
to Mars. So this biggest difference between chimps us and
other animals explosive to development of the intellect. So is
it not bizarre that this most intellectual creature it's destroying
its only home. We don't want to go and live
(34:09):
on Mars. We can't live on the Moon. We cannot
in our lifetimes get too far away planets that might
support similar life to that which we know. So we've
just got this one beautiful, blue and green planet and
we're destroying it as you and I speak. We're destroying
(34:31):
the forests, We're polluting the oceans. Are stupid. Industrial agriculture
is killing the soil, spraying poison, losing biodiversity. We're trafficking animals,
which is why we have this pandemic, because we've created
conditions where diseases can jump from an animal to a
person where they may start a new so called zoootic disease.
(34:55):
We're burning fossil fuel, We're polluting the atmosphere. I mean,
we're stupid, stupid, stupid, And I think clever brain and
human heart have disconnected. Yeah, I think about how sometimes
this this distance, this is you know, the longest twelve
(35:17):
inches and the universe. It really can be a struggle
for us to connect exactly what you're saying, the head
to the heart. Why do you think it is that
humans believe? Again, in studying our closest relatives, where it's
really simply a difference of one percent of DNA and
(35:39):
genetic expression. Why do we think we're so special because
the Bible and other religions have told us so. M h.
I think that's really at the at the core of
it when you think how what an important part some
kind of religion has played throughout human history. And you know,
(36:04):
there was a word mistranslated in the Bible in Genesis
where it says God gave dominion, gave man dominion over
the birds and the fish and everything. But actually the
proper translation of that Hebrew word is stewardship. That's very different,
(36:26):
and I think it's led to an enormous amount of
abuse of animals. And all these animals I just mentioned
the ones being trafficked around the world that have led
to zoonotic diseases, but the animals in our factory farms,
crowded in these cruel, horrible situations. The puppy mills of
sports hunting. I mean, you can go around and add
(36:49):
on and on and on, cock fighting, dog fighting, you
name it. And you know, now we know every one
of those animals is an individual with a personality capable
of feeling fear, terror, despair, and pain. And think of
the almost unimaginable scale of suffering. It's a cognitive dissonance.
(37:17):
It's it is truly so strange to me that, as
you say, dominion, what a word, that we think we
are the rulers of a planet when really we're just guests.
We're destroyers of the planet. Mm hmm, like some rulers today.
That's the problem some governments are and presidents are so autocratic.
(37:42):
Mm hmm. That's a big problem, which I suppose all
boils down to a desire for control and a thirst
for power. And and that makes me curious about something
you mentioned earlier, and you you right, you know, your
first two books, Shadow of Man and Through a Window,
(38:02):
you chronicle what is said to potentially be the first
ever recorded instance of chimpanzee warfare, and war as we've
spoken about a variety of them already today again feels
to me like a you know, a battle over dominance
and a thirst for power. What was it like to
(38:23):
see that kind of warfare in chimpanzees? I mean the
first time you talk so much about the tenderness and
the intricacies of their society and then to see this,
what what was that like as an experience for you?
It was totally totally horrible. The thing is a chimps.
Male chimps are territorial, and they have a territory. And
(38:47):
when I began studying these chimps, I think I arrived
at a point when a rather big community was dividing.
That's what I think. And probably because we fed bananas,
they stayed together a long good than they might have otherwise.
But anyway, this process of one group of males moving
further south was sort of ongoing from the beginning, and
(39:12):
it was more males in the in the in the north,
and a small group went south. But the problem was
that the smaller group settled in part of what had
been the range of the whole community when it was
before it split, and for four years there was not
much going on. But then gradually the larger group began
(39:34):
doing these patrols and just awful to watch because they
would climb into a tree, overlooking what you can think
of as the hostile territory of this new community that
had separated off and silent, and then seeing an individual
by itself and running and attacking and killing, not outright killing,
(39:57):
leaving the individual to die of the wounds. The awful
thing was these were chimps. It was a civil war.
These were chimps who had fed together, nest together, groom together,
played together. I knew them all and it was horrible.
That was That was the worst part. Okay, they're always territorial.
They will attack individuals of a neighboring community, but they
(40:20):
don't know them, so there's a kind of reason for it.
You know, you're protecting your territory. But this was different.
This was and they were treating these individuals not like
inn a normal quick chimp attack. They are quite aggressive,
but they were treating them like animals that they kill
for food, using behavior that we never saw in attacks
(40:45):
between individuals in the same community. Twisting the limbs, drinking blood.
I mean, you don't do that or somebody in your group.
So it was horrible. I mean, they do have a
dark side. That that's what makes them so like us.
That kind of cruelty expressed, you know, to your neighbor
or for former family member, feels almost personal. Yeah, it
(41:08):
feels vengeful, which you wouldn't expect in in an animal.
I suppose I think of them more like people and animals.
People say, oh, chimps, after chimps, what's your favorite animal?
I say, chimps are not my favorite animal. They're much
to like people, and I don't even think of them
as animals. That my favorite animal, of course, it's a dog,
(41:30):
you and me both. What was your life like living
and studying them for so long? How did you build
a life that you loved so far from home? Was
it that you were just so deeply inspired by what
you saw every day? Did you feel more at home
in Africa than you did in London? Did you bring
(41:52):
books with you, have a routine? What? What was your
what was your world there? Well? First, when I first
went out, Mom was with me because they wouldn't allow
me to go alone, and they said I had to
have a companion, and Ma'm volunteered, so I had money
for six months and she came for four and she
boosted my morale because for four months they ran away.
(42:13):
They had never seen a white ape before. And she
also set up a clinic for the local fishermen, just
simple aspirends and band aids and you know, those sort
of simple things because she wasn't a doctor or nurse,
and so established from the very beginning a really good
relationship with the local people. They came for miles because
(42:36):
she cured them with her simple cures. She spent hours
with each one, and then she left, and there was
a cook and a boatman, and so every morning, every morning,
it's like nowadays, I don't have weekends. Then I didn't
have weekends. Every morning, up before dawn, up into the
(43:00):
mountains looking for the chimps sitting on this peak I
found using my binoculars, staying up there, getting back to
camp just before it was dark, and I knew those
mountains like it was my home. I mean, I loved it.
This was what I dreamed of. And once the chimps
(43:20):
stopped running away, it was like magic. And then after
I saw David Graybeard using tools to fish for termites,
something humans were supposed to be the only tool using
making creatures. And that's where I got the pushback from
male scientists saying, why why should we believe this young
(43:41):
girl and she's only getting money because she's got nice
legs and she's not a geographic cover blah blah blah.
But anyway, this was when the geographic to support the
research and center photographer and filmmaker and so um being
out in the mountains on my own, there's something special
(44:05):
that if you're on your own. And I always feel
this connection to a great spiritual power when I'm out
in the forest, other wild places too, but specially the forest.
And if you're alone, you forget your humanity. I can't
explain it well, but you're just part of nature, Whereas
(44:26):
if you're with anybody, even somebody you love, it's two
people in nature. Whereas if it's just you, you you are
not there. You're just living as a part of the
natural world. And that's why I know how terrible it
is that young people today are being increasingly separated from
(44:48):
the natural world, either because they're in the middle of
cities or because they're more interested in Facebook and video
games and so on. It's a tragedy. If you don't
get children out into nature so they learned to understand
and love it, how do we expect them to protect it?
(45:11):
And if we don't protect it. You know, we're part
of the natural world. We're not separated from it. Even
in a city. We depend on it. But clean air,
for clean water, for food, childer everything, and we depend
on healthy ecosystems. So the forest ecosystem to me, was
like a beautiful tapestry of interrelated strands of the different species.
(45:38):
And as species get extinct, so threads are pulled from
the tapestry until it hangs in tatters and the ecosystem collapses.
And we depend on healthy ecosystems, so we'd better start
doing something about it. We'd better start getting together to
heal some of the wounds we've inflicted. Feels like a
(46:02):
you know, daunting but clearly very necessary coming together. Is
that what inspired you to write your most recent book,
The Book of Hope, to to light that fire? Yes,
because if we lose hope, and many people are, but
if you lose hope, you you you become apathetics. You know,
(46:24):
you feel helpless and hopeless and you don't do anything.
And as more and more people lose hope, more and
more people stop taking action. So for me, hope isn't
just wishful thinking. It's not sitting and thinking, oh, well,
I'm sure it will be all right because blah blah blah.
It's and I thought the other day of that it's
(46:47):
rather like where in the middle of a very very
dark tunnel filled with obstacles, and at the far end
it's a pinprick of light and that hope And to
get there you don't just sit and hope you'll get that.
You have to work and fight to get that, overcome
(47:08):
the obstacles. And so we need the rallying cry is
there is hope, but only if we take action, all
of us. It has to be an active hope. That's
what hope is to me. It's not just wishful thinking.
Mm hmm. Is it that kind of commitment to taking
(47:29):
the action that really lead you two more directly take
on conservation efforts because you spent so long observing and
being a scientist and then forming and creating the mission
around the Jane Goodall Institute. Your approach is about conservation
(47:52):
and putting the focus and the power in local communities
so that each place can, in their own way, do
that work for their community. What what led you to
that approach when you were building out the institute, Because
after I went to this conference in eight six I thought, well,
(48:14):
I hear that chimps are vanishing and forest to being destroyed.
A bit ago and travel around Africa and see what's
happening with my own eyes. I think you have to
see with your own eyes. And got together a bit
of money and went to six range countries and learned
a lot about the problems facing the chimps, that lots
(48:37):
of habitat, the bush meat trade, people moving deeper and
deeper into the forest with their diseases. But I learned
about the plight of so many of the people, the
crippling poverty, the lack of good health and education, the
degradation of the land, the growth of the human population.
When I flew over Gombi, which had been part of
(48:59):
a great forest ist in the sixties and the seventies,
But when when I flew over in the late eighties,
it was just a little island of forests as National Park,
where the chimps were surrounded by bear hills. And that's
when it hit me, if we don't help these people
find ways of living without destroying the environment, then we
(49:20):
can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And so that
led to our Takari program, which is very holistic and
you know, includes restoring fertility to the overused land, scholarships
to keep girls in school after puberty. As women's education improves,
family sized tends to drop. We provide family planning information
(49:46):
and we've now taught the people. They volunteer and they
come to workshops to learn about monitoring the health of
their village forest reserves with smartphones. They're very proud of it.
It's all upload did into a platform in the clouds,
and we're now in a hundred and four villages throughout
(50:06):
all the Chimp range in Tanzania and in six other
African countries, and the people are now our partners in conservation.
All of these villages. We have our youth program Roots
and Choots in the schools. In all the schools, so
all the children from kindergarten through university in sixty five
(50:29):
countries plus are choosing projects to make the world a
better place. A project to help people, a project help animals,
a project help the environment. HM. I love it and
I think it's so important, especially as we take stock
of what's happening around the world, you realize that so
(50:50):
many of these places, you know, chimp territories that you're
talking about, and other regions around the world that are
rich in resource are often cannibal by larger foreign capitalist
corporate systems. And to create as you have a platform
for people to understand the value of their spaces is profound.
(51:16):
I mean it. It was profound for me to be
parts of part of Roots and Shoots as a little kid.
And I know we spoke about this before, but for
the listeners at home, I've touched on this a little
bit um over the last year. But the silver lining
for me of this slow down, shutdown, you know, experience
of working from home in the pandemic was really being
(51:39):
able to cultivate my little bit of land in the
city I live in and plant an abundance of trees
and and I'm I'm keeping bees. I have two huge
beehives in a garden. And to see the way that
even in this yard that I didn't think I could
do anything with, I've been able to create a little ecosystem.
(52:02):
It's it's really inspired me that there's no project too
big or too small if we lean into fostering healthy land. Yeah. Well,
that's the main message of Roots and Shoots, which is
for everybody that every individual matters has a role to play.
And every day we live, we make a difference on
(52:24):
the planet, and we can choose what sort of difference
we make. What we buy, Where did it come from,
did it all on the environment, was it ruled to animals?
Is it cheap because of unfair wages or forced labor?
And But until that, part of what we need to
do to make a better world is to think how
(52:46):
we live on the sort of ecological footprint we make.
But that can't work until we alleviate poverty, because if
you're really poor, you can't make those choices. You have
to buy the cheapest. Um. We can't ask how it
was made, you can't talk about the ethics of it.
You just have to buy the cheapest to survive. So,
(53:08):
you know, there's an awful lot we have to do.
We have to alleviate poverty. We have to do something
about the unsustainable lifestyle of the rest of us. We
have to make sure that environmental and humanitarian education is
in all the schools. We have to think about our
(53:31):
population because right now there's seven point I think it's
seven now some point seven billion of us and it's
estimated by twenty fifties will be closer to ten billion.
And already we're using up natural resources in some place
as faster than nature can replenish them. So what's going
to happen. We cannot go on with business as usual,
(53:54):
and hopefully this pandemic has woken people up. We must
find a new relationship with the natural world and animals.
We must because otherwise our species will become extinct. It's
not just the rest of the animals with climate change
and biodiversity loss, it's us. Yes, So if we care
(54:16):
about our children, we need to change the way. We
need to change mindsets. And you touched on that when
you talked about as we encroach into more wild spaces,
we are responsible for creating the rise in zoonotic diseases.
We see viruses like the Avian flu and this year
(54:41):
COVID nineteen. These are caused by environmental stress and destruction
done by humans. Can can you explain for people who
are less familiar with that science than you are as
an expert, how human activity contributes to epidemics. Well, one thing,
we penetrate deeper and deeper into animal habitats and force
(55:06):
some species closer to humans and occasionally, that creates an
environment where it's relatively easy for a pathogen like a
virus to jump from an animal to a person where
it may form a new disease. And in addition, we
hunt them, we sell them in wildlife markets, we traffick
(55:28):
them around the world, We cram them into tiny factory
farms in cruel conditions, and all these stressed, distressed animals
um it apparently makes it easier for a pathogen to
jump over to a human. And so these so called
zoonotic diseases, you know, this pandemic is one, and then
(55:51):
there was stars, and then there was Mars and HIV aids.
All were zoonotic diseases. They say seventy of all newly
emerging diseases in humans is from animals. M hm. So
we need all have a different relationship with animals and
(56:14):
treat them as they are sentient beings with feelings and personalities.
And that's why the talks going on now at fairly
high levels to ban the wildlife trade so important. But
it's not going to be easy because it's a multi
billion dollar um industry, this illegal wildlife trade. When I
(56:36):
see those photos of people out sport hunting I just can't.
I truly can't understand it. I can't understand how someone
feels tough killing an animal for fun. I genuinely it
feels um. It feels like a rip in the matrix.
(56:57):
To me, I just go, what are you doing? It's
horrible and and I think about ways to combat that culture,
but also to your point, create new relationships to the
way that we live and interact with animals. And I
do think that we need policy to change bands on
(57:18):
the wildlife trade, bands on sport hunting, all of those things.
And I think again, bringing it back to the advocacy
that you do and the empowerment uh the potential that
we find when we empower communities, when we think about
protecting wildlife zones, protecting wetlands, which you know, speaking of
(57:43):
climate change, can help save humans from the effects of
things like hurricanes. When you support through the Institute the
Trillion Trees Initiative, for example, I think about reforesting the
earth and and tactic for us and keeping us farther
(58:03):
from these wildlife habitats. That to me feels like something
I want to lean into, and I imagine a lot
of listeners will as well. Can you describe trillion trees
and tell people how they might get involved. Well, the
trillion Tree campaign was launched at DeVos two years ago.
(58:23):
Only two years ago. Wow, yeah, I was launched by
UM Salesforce. I helped to launch it. UM. It's not
that the trillion trees I mean doesn't really mean much
to me. What's important to me is that we need
to protect the protecting is far more important. Protect the
(58:45):
forests we have left with their rich biodiversity. And you know, yes,
we should also plant trees, but it's going to take
a while for trees, especially in temperate zones, to grow
big enough to absorb the necessary amount of c O two.
But the Chinese have a wonderful proverb. The best time
(59:07):
to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second
best time is now and so. But you know what's
important planting a tree isn't just sticking a tree in
the ground. It's got to be the right species, the
right time of year, and the right soil, and it's
got to be looked after. So sometimes these huge government
(59:28):
initiatives where they say we're going to try to plant
a million trees in a week or something, how many
of those trees live and very often when it's investigated,
not many do. So the Trees for Jane has very
tough standards and the price to plant a tree in
(59:49):
our project is more than many others because it includes
after care of the tree. And so we Trees for
Jane is in support of this large, trilliant tree which
is more dealing with big corporations and governments and were
grassroots and that that was a piece that was missing
(01:00:12):
from the Trillion Trees. So they're very happy about it.
I love that. So how can how can the average
listener then assistant advocating for the kind of reforestation that
you're talking about? Firstly and most importantly protecting habitats that exist,
and then secondly, when trees are being planted in initiatives
(01:00:36):
like this, to make sure that they're cared for and
fostered to survive, so that you know, by the time
we're all grandparents, those trees will still be living. How
how best can we use our voices for that? Well,
we've picked Trees for Jane has picked I think it's
(01:00:57):
five partners. Remember it's very new. When we haven't we
haven't got there yet. But there is a website and
you can click on a button which says that you
want to help protect forests, and that means with our
six partners who who haven't trusted track record mum money
(01:01:18):
goes to to the projects that are protecting forests, and
it will go to things like forest monitors and rangers
and all the people who are protecting these forests and woodlands.
And you can also just press a button and pay
a certain amount of money to plant it if you
plant a tree, or pay for the tree to be
(01:01:40):
planted by people planting trees. But these are all going
to projects that have got a good track record, and
there are three scientists who are monitoring where the money goes. Wonderful,
So that's you know, that's how that's how you can
end as well as we possibly can that the tree
(01:02:03):
will survive. Mm hmm. And what about for listeners who
want to help to protect endangered species? How can they
get more involved in your work? Well, there are a
lot of organizations protecting endangered species and you can find
it all on the website. You know, people want to
well our roots and shoots groups. We have groups protecting coala's,
(01:02:26):
protecting pangolins, protecting rhinos, protecting chimps, protecting guerrillas. We all
around the world are young people because they can choose
their projects, so you know they all have different You
knows a lot protecting turtles. There's a big push now
across the US to protect the migration route of the
(01:02:48):
monarch butterfly. And you can do such a lot by
plant allowing milkweed to grow in your in your yard.
So there's all kinds of different ways. And if you
just browse around in the internet about protecting endangered species,
you'll find hundreds of ways you can help. And if
somebody wants to help something different, you can't help them all,
(01:03:11):
but but we can all lean into something and that
feels exciting. I I'm curious, Jane, because it seems to
me that you are constantly leaning into more more books,
and more advocacy and more speaking engagements or more zooms,
and and you're even leaning into a podcast. And I
love that you've called it the Jane Got All Hope
(01:03:32):
Cast because you always come back to Hope. I'm curious
how you would describe your show to someone who might
be a potentially new listener. Well, the hope cost is
choosing people from different different spheres with different expertise um
(01:03:52):
and talking to them, and always it's about yes, what's
gone wrong, but positive ways, so people who have solutions
to some of the problems. So it's not just the
kind of doom and gloom we get from so much
of the media, but it's yes, there are these terrible problems.
(01:04:13):
It's like that dark tunnel, but there are solutions. We know.
We've got these amazing brains. We know how to restore
health to damage soil damaged by our stupid agriculture or
that we've built over it or something. There are ways
and we know that we know what they are. We
(01:04:33):
just have to get more governments to subsidize these projects,
and we can use renewable energy. And again, governments prefer
very often to to subsidize oil and gas. It's sort
of sort of old cronies network, and so it's changing attitude,
(01:04:55):
changing mindset, which I try to do through telling stories.
So in the Hope Cost we tell a lot of
stories and they're about very different like we've done one
on under the Sea with Craig Foster, who did My
Octopus Teacher. We've talked with the environmental head of Apple,
(01:05:18):
We've talked with I can't remember now, I mean, I've
done so many other things as well as Hope cost
so many other people's podcasts and hope you know, I mean,
my mind is so choker block, I can't remember what
I've done. You've done a lot, Jane, You've done a lot,
(01:05:39):
and you've inspired so many of us, and I'm so
grateful you've taken the time today to come on this podcast.
And as the theme of it goes, I'm very curious
to ask you this question. Given all you've done, you know,
the accolades, the awards. Again, most recently we saw each
other for the Templeton Prize. You You've you've shown up
(01:06:02):
in such immense ways for the planet, for people, for animals.
What as you look at everything you're doing now, what
in your life feels like a work in progress? To you?
Which is at work in progress? I mean, I've always
said that you know, when you when you think ahead
(01:06:22):
to where you want to go, you better aim for
the stars. You might get to the moon. If you're
any aim for the moon, you might get to the
top of Everest. So I like aiming for the stars.
So goal is to get roots and chootes into as
many schools as possible, and it is kindergarten through university
and and beyond and create a critical mass of people
(01:06:47):
who understand that. Of course we need money to live,
most of us, but it goes wrong when we live
for money unless we live to make money to help
make the world a better place, which is a good
thing to do, especially if the money goes to the
Jane Goodle Institute for all our projects, which I know
(01:07:08):
a good they're changing. You know, you can't imagine the
number of Roots and Shoots people who who write to
me and say, well, it's changed my life. I never
used to think like this. Now now I know that
there is a way forward and I'm going to do
my bid. You know, when I go to China we
started there in nine, adults come up to me and say, well,
(01:07:32):
of course I care about animals in the environment. I
was in Roots and Shoots in primary school, so it
has literally and also young people are changing their parents
and their grandparents all the time. It's wonderful. That's really wonderful.
What Jane. Thank you. Thank you for your work and
your activism, the programs that you've made so accessible to
(01:07:55):
so many of us, and for joining us today
Host
Sophia Bush
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