Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE. and UN Messenger of Peace, shared her story with over 60 young changemakers in the US from her childhood home in England during the Our Planet, Our Purpose Changemaker Summit. Here’s what she had to say.
Most people ask “When did you love of nature begin?” I say I don’t know, somehow in the womb I think — or maybe before that. I was always out watching animals, making birds lose their fear of me so that I could watch them feed their babies. I had a wonderful mother who supported me, and I had books and I had nature.
Books started my love of Africa. When I was 10 years old, I announced that I would grow up, go to Africa, live with wild animals and write books about them. Here comes the need for change: At that time, girls didn’t go into scientific careers. And no one was going out into the wild and studying animals. Everybody laughed at me. It was far away; we didn’t have money; it was possibly dangerous. And anyway, I was just a girl.
But my mother told me:
“Jane, if you really want something like this, you’re going to have to work extraordinarily hard, take advantage of every opportunity and if you don’t give up maybe you’ll find a way.”
I kept that with me. I did well in school, but there was no money for university, so I got a boring old job in London and took a secretarial course. Then came an opportunity: a letter from a school friend inviting me to Kenya. I worked as a waitress at a hotel and saved up the money to go.
The adventure that became a lifetime
Today it’s more normal for young women to go off to other countries and have adventures, but back then it didn’t happen. It was amazing that I was just 23 and my mother let me go off on my own on a boat.
Staying with my friend, I heard about Dr. Louis Leakey, a famous paleontologist. Two days before I went to meet him, his secretary had suddenly quit and he needed a new one. You never know when something you may not feel is particularly wonderful —like a boring old secretarial course—will be useful.
I was ready. I had spent every minute reading everything I could find about African animals (which wasn’t that much) and I think Dr. Leakey was very impressed. He gave me a job. Then he gave me the opportunity to go and study and live with and learn from not any animal, but the chimpanzee — the one most like us. Of course, yes! I had to go back to England while he searched for money, which took a year.
I tried to learn as much as I could about chimpanzees but there was very little to learn. Nobody studied them in the wild. There were a few studies in captivity, a few sad individuals in zoos.
The British authorities wouldn’t allow me go into the forest alone. And so my mum volunteered to come for four of the six months. I don’t think many mothers would have done that. At the time, Gombe National Park in Tanzania was very remote. Yet she came and was a huge support.
In the early days, the chimps ran away as soon as they saw me. I was getting depressed and time was running out. Fortunately, after four months, one chimpanzee—David Graybeard—began to lose his fear.
Dr. Goodall shows a photo of David Graybeard
I saw him using grass stems to use and make tools by picking leafy twigs and picking off the leaves. At that time Western science thought only humans used and made tools. That’s what enabled Dr. Leakey to bring in the National Geographic Society and they sent the photographer-filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, whom I subsequently married, to record the chimps’ behavior.
Thanks to David, the other chimps began to lose their fear. I began to know them as individuals and I was amazed at how close their behavior was to ours. Kissing, embracing, holding hands, swaggering, males competing for dominance. Good mothers and bad mothers. They’re capable of violence and brutality, but also love and altruism.
After two years, Dr. Leakey said he’d got me a place in Cambridge University to do a PhD in Ecology. I didn’t even know what ecology meant! I was very nervous. And it was at Cambridge that my first real task of making change happened.
Changing the status quo in science
To my horror and dismay, scientists in Cambridge told me I’d done everything wrong. I shouldn’t have given the chimpanzees names; they should have had numbers. I couldn’t talk about their personalities or minds or emotions because those were unique to us. But growing up, I’d been taught by my dog, Rusty, that animals had personalities, minds and emotions.
My mother taught me if you think differently than someone, first listen because maybe they know things you don’t. If you still believe you are righter than they are, have the courage of your convictions.
I stood up for my belief that animals had personalities, minds and emotions. And because of the evidence that chimpanzees are so like us biologically — we share 98.6% of their DNA — and the material I wrote about their behavior and Hugo’s film, the scientists simply had to move away from the reductionist way of thinking that we humans are the only sentient beings.
I got my PhD, went back to Tanzania and built up a research station, and later left for a conference where we got together scientists from six different field study sites who had been learning about chimps. We had a session on conservation. Across Africa, forests were disappearing, chimpanzee numbers decreasing. I was shocked. We also had a session on conditions in captive situations like medical research labs where our closest relatives—who can live for 60 years—were living in five-by-five foot cages.
I had gone as a scientist and I left as an activist.
The first thing I did was to force myself to go into medical research labs, because you can’t talk about something meaningfully unless you see it with your own eyes. And instead of accusing them of being cruel, I showed them film of the chimps in Gombe. I started the long fight in 1987, but gradually in the labs they began to introduce things to make the chimps’ lives better.
We started a program to enrich the lives of chimps in zoos, improving conditions, training the caregivers. Visiting 6 different countries, I learned lots about the problems going on with the chimps, but I also learned the plight of so many of the people living in and around the chimpanzee habitat—the crippling poverty, lack of health and education facilities and the degradation of the land.
It came to a head when I flew over the tiny Gombe national park. When I began in 1960 it was part of a forest belt that stretched right across Africa. When I flew over in a small plane in 1990, I was not prepared to see a little island of forest surrounded by completely bare hills.
That’s when it hit me: The people struggling to survive were more than the land could support. They were too poor to buy food from elsewhere. Unless we help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment there’s no way we can even try to save the chimpanzees.
The Jane Goodall Institute was at the forefront of what we now call community-based conservation. It started with a group of seven hand-picked local Tanzanians who listened to the people and asked what they thought we could do to make their lives better. This program became very holistic. People came to trust us.
What began with the villages around Gombe — which included programs to empower women and scholarships to keep girls in school—is now in 104 villages throughout the chimp range. Volunteers in the villages go into their community forests and monitor the health of the forests. The people are our partners in conservation. That program is now in six other African countries.
Planting seeds for the future
Now I’m giving talks, trying to raise awareness, raising funds. And I keep meeting young people who seem to have lost hope — some apathetic, some angry, some depressed. Many say “We feel this way because you’ve compromised our future and there’s nothing we can do.”
Absolutely right, we’ve compromised your future. We’ve been stealing it. But there is something that can be done.
As I had learned in the rainforest that every species has a role to play in the tapestry of life, so it is with us. Every individual has a role to play in this extraordinary thing that we call life on planet earth.
We started a global youth leadership program, Roots & Shoots. At the heart is the idea that all of us make an impact every single day and we can choose what sort of impact we make.
We have to do something about our unsustainable lifestyles. We have to alleviate poverty. Our human population about 7.2 billion — in 2050 it will be almost 10 billion. We’re running out of resources faster than nature can replenish them. Those are the tasks facing young people today.
Roots & Shoots began with 12 high school students in Tanzania in 1991. It’s now in over 65 countries. There are hundreds of thousands of groups. Kindergartens. University groups. People in prisons. Employee at big businesses. One of the core values is breaking down the barriers we build between people of different nations, languages, countries, cultures, religions. between old and young, rich and poor.
Everybody has a role to play. We need to have a different way of thinking about what makes a successful life. At the moment, people mostly think of acquiring wealth, goods, more stuff.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought this home. We brought this on ourselves by our disrespect of the natural world: crowding animals together, pushing them in contact with people, creating environments where a virus or bacteria can jump from an animal to a person, maybe then bond with a cell and make a new disease which can jump into another human and create an epidemic—in this case a pandemic.
This is our disrespect of animals. We kill them, eat them, traffic them. The same disrespect of nature has led to the climate crisis, which we shall now face anew when we emerge from the pandemic. Once you realize the interconnectedness of things, you see that you cannot just think about one problem, but you must think holistically.
I’ve lived 86 years, so I’ve had time to assimilate all these different challenges. I do my best — with the help of so many young people and people in my life who have solved them.
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Discover more about Dr. Jane Goodall at the Jane Goodall Institute, and learn about her work to empower young people through Roots & Shoots.