Glass steals time with the legendary primatologist-turned-activist Dr Jane Goodall

How to Change the World – Glass steals time with the legendary primatologist-turned-activist Dr Jane Goodall

LAKE Tanganyika’s crystalline water laps against the shore of Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, creating a rhythmic and hypnotic soundtrack. The deserted shore, a thin ribbon of beach, wends this way and that alongside a thick, wild canopy of vegetation from which comes a rustle in the treetops and a chorus of screaming crescendo: Oooh ooooh ooooh oooh. This pant-hoot call is a bonding ritual – a “Hello, how are you doing?” – between the park’s resident chimpanzees, the stars of the life work of primatologist, anthropologist, writer and UN Messenger of Peace Dr Jane Goodall.

Jane Goodall with Motambo, an orphan at the JGI Tchimpounga.
Photo credit: the Jane Goodall Institute / by Fernando Turmo

Now 82, Jane first moved to this region of Tanzania as a 26-year-old in the summer of 1960, when Gombe Stream was a game reserve and chimpanzees, humans’ closest relatives, were largely unobserved. Jane was one of the “trimates” chosen by archaeologist and anthropologist Dr Louis Leakey to observe the behaviour of hominids in their natural environments; the other two were the late Dian Fossey, who studied gorillas in Rwanda and on whom the 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist is based, and Birutė Galdikas who studied the orangutans of Indonesian Borneo.

“It was long, long hours,” Dr Goodall says of her first few months watching chimpanzees at Gombe. “I was getting really worried because I only had money for six months and I knew that if I didn’t see something exciting then that was the end.” Then in the fifth month, she saw the chimpanzee she’d named David Greybeard using a stick to catch termites and then to spoon them into his mouth. Until that point it was widely accepted that only humans used tools. Her observation led to Leakey famously declaring, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Young researcher Jane Goodall with baby chimpanzee Flint at Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania.
Photo credit: the Jane Goodall Institute / by Hugo van Lawick

She says she was shy, determined and a flirt, and documentaries of her then show a willowy woman, fuss free in a baggy safari suit, barefoot and on her haunches, hair pulled back into a low ponytail, camera, notebook or binoculars in hand. It’s a look that is synonymous with Jane’s chimpanzee ethology, so hip and new at the time. Her work caught the attention of the National Geographic Society (“Me seeing David Greybeard using a tool is what brought the National Geographic Society into the picture”) who sent Dutch photographer and filmmaker Hugo van Lawick (whom Jane married in 1964) to document Jane’s experience at Gombe.

An August 1963 issue of the magazine features her first article, My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees and her relationship with the National Geographic Society has been an important one throughout her life, whether through its providing of funding or as a channel for exposure. 53 years on and Dr Goodall’s story is still one worth telling, and the National Geographic Society is still intent on broadcasting it. They recently commissioned documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen (Cobain: Montage of Heck, The Rolling Stones: Crossfire Hurricane, The Kid Stays in the Picture) to write, direct and produce a project (as yet untitled) using recently rediscovered film from Dr Goodall’s early research.

Dr Jane Goodall with orphan chimpanzee Uruhara at the Sweetwaters Sanctuary in Kenya.
Photo credit: Michael Neugebauer

In the early days, from her home in Tanzania, Jane would sit at her typewriter pinging out up to 30 letters a day encouraging people in what they could do to make a difference in Gombe. All these years later, she hasn’t lost that tenacity and verve. It’s just that now the medium is different.

Dr Goodall spends 300 days a year on the road, attending conferences and giving talks, lectures and keynote addresses – and she’s followed this relentless schedule for the past 30 years, give or take, with the goal that her work becomes the world’s work. In 1977 she established the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in order to help chimpanzees the world over – whether from threat of poaching or the destruction of the forests they inhabit. “I try to raise awareness of the plight of chimpanzees,” she says, “as well as raising awareness of what we are doing to the planet.”

Dr Jane Goodall with Roots and Shoots members in Salzburg Austria. Photo credit: Robert Ratzer

The JGI is now an international charity across 134 countries, and its programmes include creating sustainable livelihoods through community development, forestry and agriculture; supporting education so that communities gain knowledge about the importance of preserving biodiversity and living in harmony with the environment; and creating healthy families, covering HIV/Aids and family planning counselling and services. Dr Goodall, with the help of her team at the JGI, devotes a great deal of time to coordinating these activities.

“I feel that I was put onto this world to do that work,” she says of her time at Gombe. “The work I did with the chimpanzees led me into this much broader field of improving the lives of people in Africa and waking people up to what’s happening to others on the planet.”

Dr Jane Goodall speaking at a Peace Day celebration. Photo credit: Jeff Orlowski

When we talk to Dr Goodall, she’s having some downtime in Bournemouth at the quintessentially English red-brick house she has called home since 1939, but that doesn’t mean the activism is on pause; she’s still doing interviews with journalists and writing open letters. In the days after our phone call, Harambe, an endangered silverback gorilla at Cincinnati Zoo, was shot and killed by zookeepers after a three-year-old boy climbed through a barrier and fell into the animal’s enclosure.

Dr Goodall’s letter to Thane Maynard, director of the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens, is telling of her compassion and insight: “I feel so sorry for you having to try to defend something which you may well disapprove of,” she writes. “It is a devastating loss to the zoo and to the gorillas. How did the others react? Are they allowed to see and express grief, which seems to be so important?

Jane Goodall and Rebeca Atencia release orphan chimpanzee Wounda on Tchindzoulou Island,
part of the JGI Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre.
Photo credit: the Jane Goodall Institute / by Fernando Turmo

“Animals have personalities and emotions like us,” Goodall says. “If animals could talk, I think we would be so utterly shattered and shocked about how we treat them and the amount of cruelty and suffering we inflict on them.”

Dr Goodall’s empathy for animals is so strikingly heartfelt and her concern for the planet so sincere that she has garnered a legion of fans from the very young to the very old, who travel to hear her lectures – many of which the ethnologist starts with a hearty, crowd-pleasing pant-hoot, her mouth pulling into an O-shape and then relaxing into her well-known smile.

Roots and shoots member in Tanzania. Photo credit: the Jane Goodall Institute / by Chase Pickering

The past few months and the next few ahead see Dr Goodall leaving Tanzania to attend the International Congress of Psychology (Diversity in Harmony: Insights from Psychology) in Yokohama, Japan, followed by a large primate conference in Chicago and then the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Hawaii. It’s all go, go, go, but Dr Goodall has a strong, driving determination and an inextinguishable feeling of hope.

So much so, that hope is a running theme throughout her work. It pops up regularly in her book titles, and you’d be hard-pressed to read an interview with the visionary where she doesn’t speak of it, or at least allude to it. Yet it’s still surprising – since she is human, after all – that when asked when she feels devoid of optimism she says, “I never feel hopeless. If we all get involved then it isn’t hopeless. So I’m busy trying to help people understand the role they can play and the absurdity of thinking we can have unlimited economic development on a planet with finite natural resources. The best case for hope is the hard work of young people, the resilience of nature, the amazing human brain and the indomitable human spirit.”

Jane Goodall plants a tree seedling in Gombe National Park. With her son Grub (right).
Photo credit: GANT/ Morten Bjarnhof

Goodall doesn’t allow negativity to affect her. Even when “hard science” scientists criticised her method of anthropomorphising the chimpanzees she encountered, and even when told, “Jane, forget about this nonsense with Africa. Dream about things you can achieve.” But the best advice came from her mother. “When I was ten years old and everybody was laughing at my dreams, she said, ‘If you really want something you must be prepared to work for it, take advantage of opportunities and never give up.’”

This is a message she passes on to the youth she comes into contact with at Roots & Shoots, a grassroots initiative that started in Dar es Salaam in 1991 with just 14 Tanzanian teenagers, encouraging them to implement positive change for people, animals and the environment. A total of 25 years later, it’s a ‘mission possible’ with a global network of tens of thousands of young people in 110 countries over four continents, and famous supporters ranging from actors Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan to Bizarro cartoonist Dan Piraro. “I repeat what my mother said to me to the children I work with and they think, ‘If you’re talking to me and you did this then I can do this too.’”

Migrant school students learn about plants in JGI Root and Shoots environmental class in Beijing.
Photo credit: MA Xiaogang

Goodall is without doubt a great source of inspiration, influencing others by doing, but don’t call her a feminist. It’s a term she didn’t fancy identifying with more than 40 years ago when journalist Gloria Steinem was the movement’s cover girl. “I hated being branded a feminist in the ‘70s,” she says. “At that time, feminists, at least the ones in the news, seemed to have more masculine qualities than men in a way. I don’t feel that’s the case now; feminism has calmed down and is more rational. I prefer the way it is now.” Even so, it’s still a label she doesn’t readily claim for herself today. “I’m a humanist,” she says simply, honestly.

It’s us humans that she endeavours to reach out to for the benefit of ourselves and, as a result, the animals she set out to protect. If there’s one thing we can do today to make a difference, Dr Goodall says, it’s for us to look at our choices. “We as individuals can chose what we buy,” she says as an example. “We should ask ourselves, ‘How was it made, do we really need it, is it made in a way that harms animals or uses slave labour and could we buy something made closer to home?’ Those of us living in consumerist society don’t think about what we purchase. I truly believe that each one of us can make a difference every day with the little decisions we make by thinking about how we affect the future rather than thinking about our own instant gratification.”

A villager sets up her biomass cooker, donated as part of a Gombe Masito Ugalla Ecosystem (GMU) pilot project. Photo Credit: photography by Nick Riley.

So how does an eco-warrior treat herself in a world that’s consumed with consumerist frenzy? “The luxuries of my life are that I do all this travelling and have friends all over the world,” says Goodall. “We get to sit down with some wine, whiskey or coffee and talk. And I know that these people are my companions – that’s a luxury that a lot of people don’t have.”

by Natalie Egling