Dr. Jane Goodall's Hope for the Future of the Planet

Wherever you are in the world, we really, really appreciate you being here. And Jane, we have a tremendous debt of gratitude to you for your lifetime of incredible work and for joining us today. Thank you so much for being here. Well, I'm very, very happy that you invited me, and thank you.

And where are we reaching you today? Where are you today? I'm in the south of England. I'm in Bournemouth. I'm actually in the house where I grew up, so some of the books behind me are the books I read as a child. And it's where my roots are. So I've been here for the whole duration of the pandemic. And my sister's here with her family, her two grown grandchildren and her daughter, and me. So that's been it.

And is this the same house? Like, this is where your favorite tree is? This is the home where you discovered your love for animals and for nature? Well, I discovered my love for animals even before, but yes, that special tree just out there. I can see him, Beech. And he's just about to burst into leaf, so the buds have swollen, ready to clothe those bare branches with their summer beauty.

Wonderful. There's all these wonderful stories about your initial connections with animals and with nature, and I want, we wanted to know: what was really the first time that you felt that deep personal connection to either another being or nature in general? You know, honestly, Jeff, I think I was born with it. I mean, my mother said I seemed to pop out of the womb fascinated by animals of all sorts. And when I was just one and a half years old, I'd taken all these earthworms to bed with me. She said, "Jane, I think you were wondering how on earth do they walk without legs." And it just went on from there.

I spent time outside. There was no TV when I was growing up, none of these little gadgets that children have today, so I was out in nature and I was watching the squirrels and the birds and wishing I could talk animal language like Doctor Dolittle and pretending to my friends that I could. And then, you know, as I grew older, when I was 10, I read Tarzan of the Apes and I said, "Okay, I'm going to grow up, go to Africa, live with wild animals and write books about them." Because girls weren't scientists in those days, not like that anyway.

And everybody laughed at me except my amazing mother, who said a message that I take to young people all around the world, especially in disadvantaged communities: "If you really want this thing, you're going to have to work awfully hard, take advantage of every opportunity, and if you don't give up, surely you'll find a way."

And at what point did you start to specialize, to be a primatologist versus another discipline in the scientific fields? Well, you know, when I began, I wasn't in a scientific field. I hadn't been to college. The opportunity that Mama had said would come was when I had a letter from a school friend inviting me to stay for a holiday on her parents' farm in Kenya. So to get the money, I had a job in London at the time, a boring secretarial job. I came home, lived here, worked in a hotel just around the corner over there as a waitress, finally got enough money to get out to Africa. And what an amazing — I mean, I'll never forget that journey.

But anyhow, that's how I got to Kenya. And I would have studied any animal. I just wanted to be out in the bush with animals, wild animals. And it was Louis Leakey, that amazing paleontologist, who gave me the opportunity to fulfill my dream — not with any animal, but with the one most like us, the chimpanzee.

How amazing is that. Incredible. And that seems like getting in touch with Louis was such a pivotal starting point in your career. Can you tell us how that came about? Well, I was staying with my friend, and somebody said to me — I'd been there about two months, I think — somebody said, "Well, if you're interested in animals, you should meet Louis Leakey." And at the time, he was curator of the Natural History Museum in Nairobi. So I went to see him. Interesting, because I was very, very shy, but if that's going to get me towards my goal, then I'm going to go and meet Louis Leakey.

And he was a very brusque man. And he agreed to see me, and he took me all around. He asked me all these questions about all these animals, stuffed of course, that were exhibited in the museum. And the extraordinary thing was, two days before I arrived, his secretary had suddenly quit. He needed a secretary. So that boring thing that I'd learned, shorthand and typing — I was there. He employed me. I was more of a research assistant, but anyway, there I was, surrounded by people in that Natural History Museum who could answer all my questions about the animals, you know, the mammals, the birds, the reptiles, the insects, the plants. And it was just magic.

Incredible. And, you know, of course your seminal work in Gombe National Park in Tanzania observing chimpanzees was, I imagine, the first exponential moment in the journey. Can you take us back there to when you arrived and when you settled in, the headspace you were in when you first got into the park?

Well, fascinating. When I first arrived, I was with my mother. And people said, "Oh, Jane had to have her mummy with her." Well, it wasn't like that. It was that Tanganyika — once Tanzania, today — was one of the last outposts of the crumbling British Empire, and they said they would not take responsibility for a young girl to go out alone into a rainforest. It just wasn't heard of. Nobody — I mean, men weren't doing it. So in the end, they said, "Oh, all right, she can come, but she's got to have a female companion." So my mother volunteered.

So I arrived and it was magic, and my dream was coming true. But chimpanzees are very conservative, and they would take one look at this weird white ape — because we are the fifth great ape — and they would take one look at me and vanish into the undergrowth. So my dream's coming true, but at the same time, there was only money for six months. And I kept thinking, "Well, I know if I have time, I can get these chimpanzees to trust me the way I did with the squirrels and birds in the garden. But do I have time?" It was a wonderful but a very scary time, to be honest.

And was this a presupposition? Was this something that you already thought? Because, you know, one of the great legacies that I think you have is that, more than anyone that I know or can think of, you had a great effect on our realization that we are of nature, not separate from nature. And me being 36, I grew up with the benefit of standing on the shoulders of your work. I never had to relearn that. But when you were growing up in your field, the concept that we were of nature — that was certainly not the prevalent view. I'm curious, when you arrived in Gombe, did you already think of us as the fifth great ape, or is that something you learned through your exposure to these animals?

Well, I hadn't learned about it in those terms. It didn't surprise me. You know, as I say, I hadn't been to college, so I didn't have any of the theoretical background. But the whole connectedness that we have with the animal kingdom, that was something I'd known all my life, and that was what I brought with me into the field. And I think that's what enabled me to develop this wonderful relationship eventually with the chimpanzees.

Do you remember the first time you had a meaningful connection with one of the chimpanzees that you were observing? Yeah, there's one I'll briefly mention because it's not the pivotal one, but the first time I got close to a group of chimpanzees — I got much closer to them than I meant. I was climbing up a thickly forested slope and I had not meant to get so close. And I thought they'd run away as usual, and they didn't. They looked at me and they carried on grooming. So that was a magic moment.

But then the real magic was the first chimpanzee to lose his fear of me, and that was David Greybeard, a very handsome chimpanzee. He's always with me, and he's called David Greybeard — he had that beautiful gray beard. And he was the first chimpanzee to begin to lose his fear of me, and he actually was allowing me to follow him.

And I thought I'd lost him. He went through a great tangle of vegetation, and when I finally crawled through thinking, "Oh well, I've lost him, but never mind, I'll find him another day," he was sitting, looking back. I mean, it honestly looked as though he was waiting for me. I don't know — maybe he was. And so I sat down near him, and on the ground between us was a ripe red oil palm nut, which chimps love. And so I picked it up, it looked okay to me, and I held it out to him on my hand. And he turned his face away. So I put my hand closer, and he turned, he looked directly into my eyes, he reached out, he took that nut, and with one single movement dropped it. But then, very gently, squeezed my fingers.

And that is how chimpanzees reassure each other. So in that moment, I made this connection. I knew that we were communicating in a way that surely predates human spoken language, and I knew that he knew that my motive in giving him this was good, even though he didn't want it. And I understood that he knew. So I think that was the moment that I honestly knew that I would have to give my life to learning about these amazing relatives of ours, because we share 98.6 percent of our DNA with them, actually.

Well, you gave a portion of your life to learning about them, and then you gave the rest of your life to protecting them and being their steward and helping them live alongside human beings as best as you could. And I want to move on to that part of this conversation. But before we do, if I was walking up to David Greybeard at that moment in time right now, what would be the best way to say hello? What would be the appropriate close-range chimp "hi"?

Well, the close-range chimp "hi" is [vocalization] — and that is only given by a subordinate to a dominant. But if I was greeting you, as I would like to greet everybody listening, this is the distance greeting, because you're all distant, right — would be [vocalization]. And that simply means, "This is me, this is Jane." And every chimp has his or her own individual voice. So if you heard that sound, if you were a chimp, you would know exactly who was calling. That would help you keep contact with the members of a community which doesn't travel around as a group, but you can have lone individuals, family groups, sometimes groups of males patrolling the territory.

And what would you say your biggest takeaway about human nature is from your interactions with chimpanzees? I think the most important lesson I've learned is they're so like us in so many ways. I mean, kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting one another. Males competing for dominance, swaggering, trying to look aggressive and intimidating. The fact that they show altruistic behavior, and also that they have a kind of primitive warfare, because they're very territorial.

But, you know, so like us in so many ways, and yet clearly we're different. There wouldn't be chimpanzees sitting talking to each other from different parts of the world the way we are. And it's our explosive development of the intellect that sets us apart, not only from chimpanzees but all the other amazing beings who we now know we are part of — that animal kingdom we're not separated from, as I was told.

But the fact that we are this most intellectual creature that's ever walked the planet — I mean, chimpanzees can learn more than 400 of the signs used by deaf people, American Sign Language. They can do amazing problems on computers. Lots of animals are way more intelligent than we used to think. But, I mean, come on — we've designed a rocket that went up to Mars, from which a little robot crawled out and took photographs, and we've seen planet Earth from space.

And so isn't it bizarre that this most intellectual of all creatures, probably, that have ever walked on planet Earth, are destroying our only home? And it's not everybody. I mean, I think the indigenous people, the guardians of nature — they've had the wisdom. But modern humans in the Western world, we're losing it. And I honestly believe only when head and heart work in harmony can we attain our true human potential, which is huge.

And these are such — I mean, you're jumping to the most complicated, paradoxical components of our humanism. The fact that we're capable of landing men and women on the moon and yet we also seem to be out of control in our consumption and our degradation of our own environment. And the fact that by 2050, we're projected to have 10 billion people on this planet.

And you had that moment with David Greybeard, where he grabbed your hand and looked at you in the eye and you had the thought, "I'm going to spend my life studying these animals." And over time, as you became celebrated and your work became celebrated and started to change the world around you, people started to understand our connection to nature. I imagine you got exposed to things like clear-cutting, or animal testing, and these other things that were having more existential threats to the environments of both the chimpanzees and all animals.

What was that like for you? How did you go through that transition from being a scientist first, primarily, to really being an activist?

Well, it didn't happen gradually, actually. So I started off as a naturalist, then I was made to get my PhD by Louis Leakey, and had to confront the scientists who said that there was a difference of kind between us and the rest of the animal kingdom — which I knew wasn't true because I was taught as a child by my dog.

So then, you know, eventually I got the PhD in spite of the scientists not liking the fact that I was naming the chimps and describing their personalities, their minds, and their emotions. But then, in 1986, I helped organize a conference. And by that time, there were seven other study sites across Africa where people were studying chimps. When I began, it was just me — there was nobody else. But by then, we brought these scientists together in Chicago, actually, and we had a conference at which there was a session on conservation and a session on conditions in some captive situations.

And it was shocking for me. I mean, it was shocking to see right across Africa chimp numbers were dropping, forests were disappearing. And in medical research labs — it was the worst — where our closest relatives were in five-foot-by-five-foot cages, these very social, intelligent beings by themselves, maybe for 30 or 40 years. And so I went to that conference as a scientist. I left as an activist. And so from 1986, that's when I've been traveling the world, talking about all the problems that we have inflicted on this beautiful planet.

I also admire your intuition for storytelling. The science component of this is what you were supposed to focus on, whether it's the hard science, what you can put into a scientific journal. And yet it seems, from learning about the work that you've done and your ability to really convince people who might have thought counter to your beliefs — whether it's the reality of the chimpanzee's social life and their personalities, or their culture, or thinking about whether or not we should be doing animal testing — it was often through storytelling.

I heard an interview that you gave, and it really does predate the rest of the world realizing that we have these different levels of consciousness. If you just approach me with facts, it's unlikely that I'll agree with you or that it'll change my opinion. But you really helped create that emotional connection with people. So I'm curious: for you now, it feels so in vogue to be an environmentalist, but you've spent a career introducing people to this concept. Do you have any reflections? Like, if we're trying to not just preach to the converted but truly gain ground and speak to people who might not be as enlightened on these topics, what's worked for you? What comes to mind?

Well, first of all, when I was still at Cambridge working for this PhD, I was being funded at that time by the National Geographic Society, and one of the conditions was I would write a book for them. So I wrote the book, and it came out. I was still at Cambridge, and my supervisor, who was one of the three top ethologists in Europe, he came to see me. He was absolutely furious. How dared I write a book? A scientist did not write popular books. Of course, that's changed totally.

But I was shocked. I said, "Robert, everything I've written in this book is true. I want people to know about these amazing animals, and they won't know if I just publish scientific papers." I made a vow right at the beginning that whatever I'm doing, even if it's a scientific paper, I will not resort to jargon.

And storytelling, I think, is in my blood. You know, I have Welsh ancestors. And if you meet somebody who doesn't agree with you, there's no point confronting them, arguing with them, pointing fingers, telling them they're bad or stupid or whatever. Tell them stories. I feel it's important to reach the heart, to let people feel, because if you want change, people must change from within. That's real change. Otherwise, you may argue with them and they may kind of concede, but they'll be angry and they won't really have changed. They'll be thinking inside themselves, "I'm going to prove her wrong. I don't care what she says." So storytelling, for me, writing and then lecturing — that's been my way of waking people up and reaching into the heart.

And you've been tireless in it. The fact that you've traveled 300 days a year. How long do you think you've kept that schedule, like being on the road like that? From 1986 until the beginning of this lockdown. It's a long time.

And I thought I worked very hard, but I tell you, being here stuck, grounded in this one little space — if you could see it, you'd laugh; it's my bedroom, my office, my studio is a little, well, never mind — but it's such a tiny, weeny space. And the work has been like more than twice as hard as traveling because there's no break. There's no letup. It's every day. And I'm available for the world, whereas before, I was there for this country and then that country. And there was a limit to what I did each day. But now it's everywhere, all the time, nonstop — Saturdays, Sundays, everything.

You're like the giving tree. And sticking with the tree metaphor, you said you're where your roots are. So I couldn't think of a more appropriate place for us to be speaking to you from. I'm happy that that's where you landed, and you weren't stranded somewhere else in the world when borders closed and it wasn't familiar.

And, you know, one of the organizations, one of the many organizations that carry your name and legacy that do great work in conservation and working with young people around the world, is Roots and Shoots. And I was curious if you could break down the name for us a little bit, because I know it's highly intentional.

Yes. Well, Roots and Shoots began because in the late '80s, I was traveling around meeting so many young people who seemed not to have hope, who said that we'd compromised their future and there was nothing they could do about it. Well, we have compromised the future of young people. I mean, this saying, "We haven't inherited it from our ancestors, we've borrowed it from our children" — we've borrowed nothing from them. We've stolen, and we're still stealing today.

But when they said there was nothing they could do about it, I thought, "No, that's not right." I know there's doom and gloom. I know there are scientists who say it's too late, we're on a downward trajectory, we can't do anything about climate change anymore. But I firmly believe — and luckily it's not just me — that there's a window of time where we can at least start to heal some of the terrible scars we've inflicted on Mother Earth, and at least slow down climate change and loss of biodiversity.

And so I gathered up these young people. It was in Dar es Salaam, who were so concerned about different things that were going wrong in their world. And we talked, and we formed this Roots and Shoots group with the main message: every single one of us makes an impact every single day. And most of us, everybody listening, can choose what sort of impact we make.

However, if you're living in deep poverty, you can't have the luxury of choice. You just have to do whatever enables you to stay alive, whether it's cutting down trees to make charcoal or to make new land to grow your food because your own farmland was overused and infertile, fishing the last fish because you're so desperate, buying the cheapest junk food in the city. You can't afford the luxury of asking, "Did it harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals, like factory farms? Is it cheap because of inequitable wages?"

And so the main message of Roots and Shoots: every individual makes a difference every day. And we decided — because I learned in the rainforest that everything is interconnected — each group would choose three projects: one to help people, one to help animals, one to help the environment, because it's all interconnected.

And it began with 12 high school students. Now it's in around 60 countries around the world. We have members in kindergarten, even a few in preschool, and university, and more and more big corporations are beginning to say, "Let's get our staff involved." And that's very exciting.

So Roots and Shoots has changed — I can't begin to tell you how many lives it's changed and impacted. It began in '91, and somehow, I think because the kids get the opportunity to choose what they do, they go into it, roll up their sleeves, they take action with passion and in projects that they care deeply about, and they somehow retain those values. So we have what I call the alumni, and many of them are now in decision-making positions, and they keep those values. And yeah, it's really, really made a difference.

And one of the other things I'd be remiss not to credit you for is that, you know, this is that human paradox again: the difficulty of seeing the simplest answers. But you've always made it a point to include the human in the conservation efforts — the idea that we can't just focus on the plant or the tree or the animal we want to preserve. We have to look at the communities in which these less-than-optimal scenarios are arising, and typically it's because of crippling poverty. It's not that people start consuming their natural resources out of any other need; it's from an outside actor.

And I'd be remiss also if I didn't credit the woman who really stewarded Summit in our partnership along our impact journey. She's on the Zoom as well, a woman named Ann Veneman, who is the Secretary General of UNICEF and the Secretary of Agriculture under President Bush, and she literally stopped us in our tracks. She was like, "Don't raise any more money. Don't support any more of these nonprofits until you really start thinking deeply about the sustainable impact that you're going to achieve. Like, does it feel good for now, or is it something that really will last? And how are people involved? How does it affect the local communities? And are they actually at the table?" This idea of "nothing about us without us." And unfortunately, here we are in 2021. I'd still say the vast majority of impact organizations don't really heed that.

Well, it all happened for me after that same conference in 1986, where I realized chimp numbers were dropping fast. And so I thought, you know, I always believe that if you're going to talk about something, you need to have some first-hand experience. So I got together a bit of money, and I managed to get to seven different study sites across Africa to learn more about the problems faced by the chimps, which I did. But I also learned about what you're talking about: the poverty of so many of the African people living in and around chimp habitat, which is forest.

And it came to a head when I flew over the tiny Gombe National Park — it's only 35 square kilometers. And when I began in 1960, it was part of that great equatorial forest belt that stretched right across to the west coast. By the late 1980s, when I flew over, I was shocked. I looked down on a tiny island of forest surrounded by completely bare hills. More people living there than the land could support, too poor to buy their own food, cutting down the trees to get some fertile soil to grow food because their own farmland was overused and infertile. So they were struggling to survive. No good sanitation, no good health clinics, no good education. Nothing.

And that's when it hit me: if we don't find ways that these people can make a living without destroying their environment, we can't save chimps, forests, or anything else. And so that was in 1990, and it took four years before we got the funding together to actually start what we call TACARE, which is the Jane Goodall Institute's method of community-based conservation — totally holistic and starting with local people, going in and asking the villagers around Gombe what they thought we could do to help them. And that's how it began.

And as the people came to trust us, and we began working on what they wanted — which was growing more food, restoring fertility to the land without chemicals, by the way — and working with local Tanzanian authorities to improve the schools and clinics, as they came to trust us, we could introduce water management. One of my heroes is Muhammad Yunus, and we introduced microcredit programs so as to enable particularly the women to start their own small sustainable businesses. And also provided family planning, scholarships to keep girls in school — shown all around the world, as women's education improves, family size tends to drop. And you mentioned our growing human population at the beginning, Jeff.

And so that program is now in 104 villages throughout chimp range in Tanzania. The villagers from each of these villages are being trained to use smartphones. They monitor the health of their village forest reserves. They're very proud. This gets uploaded into a platform in the cloud. We use up-to-date GIS, GPS, satellite imagery, which helps with the chimp research, helps the villagers do their land-use management plans. And that program is now in six other African countries. They've become our partners. They understand protecting the environment isn't just for wildlife — it's for them, for their future. They need the forest. They need clean air and clean water and something to regulate the temperature and the rainfall.

We see ourselves one way — "Oh, I'm an environmentalist, of course" — and then it's like, "Well, do you have a cell phone? Where does the coltan come from? Do you buy..." You know, like Foxconn dealt with its suicide issues by building nets around the building, not by figuring out what's creating the mental health issues. But like all of us on this call consume products that have a negative effect on other things that we love and care about. And I think everybody's out here trying to do their best.

To that end, I want to open this up to a couple of people that have asked some questions and a few of the Summit Fellows. I just want to end by saying again, thank you for everything you've done, for taking your time today. And what I want to ask you about is really legacy. I think everybody is here because we want to be good stewards of your values. We want to understand, through this brief moment in time, how we can do best by you and really help carry the torch further into the future. What do you find to be the most effective means of impact? How can we really do best on your behalf?

Well, involving all your children in Roots and Shoots, because it really is changing lives. I've had so many, many, many letters from people, often crying, saying, "You changed my life." Joining the Jane Goodall Institute, you know, because we really are trying to change the world in the best possible way. I believe it's the best possible way, I really do.

Then there's a legacy foundation that I began, because I need to build up an endowment and to be absolutely sure before I die that this work can carry on. So when I tell people that, they say, "Well, I'm not giving you any money for that legacy foundation because I don't want you to die." So you can't die until you have your endowment. "I'm not going to put money into the endowment." [laughter] But anyway, joking aside, it's about to be launched in a big way.

So there are around 30 Jane Goodall Institutes in different parts of the world, very strong in China especially, Roots and Shoots. But we just started one in India, it's growing fast. In Israel, in Turkey, and it's all over Europe. It's North and South America. It's more and more parts of Asia. It's many parts of Africa, beginning to spread slowly in the Middle East. So we are all over the place.

And I think, I honestly do believe that we are doing as much as any other organization. If you put all of this together, it's massive. And it is very much working with people, for people, with people, for animals, for animals, and for the planet. I mean, the loss of biodiversity — it's not just that, "sounds so scientific" — I think of the tapestry of life. And every time an animal species becomes extinct, even if it's locally extinct, it's like pulling a thread from that tapestry of life. And they're all interrelated. So as you pull more and more threads, then eventually it becomes so tattered that you get ecosystem collapse.

And we depend on Mother Nature. We're part of it. We depend on her for food and water and clothing and clean air. You know, we've got to get together. There is still time. We must get together now and start to heal the harm we've inflicted and slow down climate change and slow down biodiversity loss. And think about all the amazing, incredible, wonderful people and projects that are doing just that. I meet them, and that's the hope — because, you know, regenerative agriculture and permaculture and animals rescued from the brink of extinction and all of these other amazing programs. And people — couldn't do it without them.