Jane Goodall Talks To John Seigenthaler

She's best known for her pioneering work with chimpanzees, but Goodall is also a keen conservationist

John Seigenthaler: Your latest project is a book about plants. Can you draw the line for us between plants and chimpanzees?

Jane Goodall: Without plants, none of us would be here, chimpanzees, people or anything else, because everything either lives on plant food or lives on creatures that live on plant food.

One of the things you also discuss in this book is the challenges facing forests around the world. What do you think are the biggest challenges?

Human greed and human need. I mean, on the one hand, you've got desperately poor people, and they've got to try and feed their family. They don't have money to buy food, so they're cutting down trees to grow crops or to make charcoal so that they can get a bit of money and buy a bit of food. Then on the other hand, you've got the big timber companies coming in, some of them still clear-cutting and paying lots of money for a forest concession to the government. Then the people living in the forest suffer, as well as everything else.

In fact, in your book — I just want to read a couple of lines that you write — you say, "The truth is that when corporate greed and public demand for a better and better lifestyle are pitted against the health of the environment and the health of people, for that matter, it is the bottom line that wins …" You sound like an environmental activist, an angry environmental activist here.

Well, I do get angry when I think of the unsustainable lifestyle of so many about this materialistic, Western-based culture. How many of us have so much more than we need? I mean, we need money to live, and what goes wrong is when we live for money. That's happening more and more often. And as a result, I think, it's a very empty kind of society, and people, when you live and money is your goal and your god, then I think people lose a lot of sensitivity and human values and love and compassion.

You have great hope for nature, and hope is a theme through much of your writing. I was touched by the stories at the end of the book that talk about a couple of trees — Survivor, in particular. Could you tell that story?

Yes, Survivor is very dear to me because I was in New York at 9/11, and they found the one piece of tree that was still alive out of all the trees that were around those Twin Towers. It looked like a dead stump, blackened with fire and everything. But some people took it and nurtured it. This tree now is back at Ground Zero, and it's a beautiful pear. I've seen it in blossom. But that tree somehow epitomizes the resilience of nature and the passion of people because so many people said, "Oh, throw it away. You'll never get this tree to grow." But they didn't give up.

I do get angry when I think of the unsustainable lifestyle of so many about this materialistic, Western-based culture. How many of us have so much more than we need?

It was also damaged by a storm, wasn't it?

Yes, it had just begun to recover, and I think it was Hurricane Sandy that tore it down, and they rushed out and desperately propped it up. It's had a very dramatic life.

You speak of another tree, a cherry tree at Fukushima, another example of a tree surviving. But, you know, in that example, I really wonder about our world and where we're headed and whether or not there is hope when you see a disaster like that. Fukushima?

Fukushima. Yes. As I said, it's a hope based on the fact that we can do it, but in order to change the world and make it start moving in a better direction — instead of heading downhill, just start leveling it off, and then eventually coming up. We have to change attitudes. That's the thing. When people lose hope, as many people do — because many biologists point out that there isn't any hope — if everybody loses hope, what happens? You fall into apathy. There's no point doing anything. It doesn't matter. But how can we be bringing our children into a world and telling them there's no hope? That's cruel.

There's a saying about inheriting the earth from our parents. But you say in some ways, we've stolen …

We have. We have stolen their future. I began the youth program because I met so many young people who had lost hope, who said, "Well, you compromised our future, and there's nothing we can do about it." We have, but there is something we can do about it. At least I shall die fighting for that.

What's the most interesting thing you've learned about chimpanzees over the years?

How like us they are or how like them we are. I think the most shocking but very fascinating thing is when I realized that, like us, they have a dark side. That made them sadly seem more like us than I had thought before. But they are capable of violence, brutality and a kind of primitive war.

Can you take me back to the beginning? You were a secretary for anthropologist Louis Leakey. That's where you got your start, right?

That's where I got my start.

How did that happen?

When I was a tiny little girl, I wanted to go and study animals in Africa because I fell in love with Tarzan. And silly man married the wrong Jane, didn't he? But anyway, I was very jealous of her. But I decided I wanted to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them. Everybody laughed except my amazing mother, who just said, "Well, if you really want something, you'll just have to work hard and take advantage of opportunity, and you'll get there in the end." I got invited by school friends, saved up my money working as a waitress, got out to Africa, heard about Louis Leakey, went to see him at the museum. I wasn't asking for a job. But he took me around. He asked me hundreds of questions, and because I had gone on learning about Africa and animals and spent hours in the Natural History Museum in London, I could answer many of his questions, and he just offered me a job as his secretary.

When was your first attempt to observe the chimpanzees?

It was 1960 he finally got the money for me to go, and the biggest problem to start with was that they all ran away. You know, they're very conservative. Never seen a white ape before. So they ran away. But eventually one of them, whom I named David Greybeard, with his nice, white beard, began to lose his fear, and that really opened a door for me.

How did you gain their trust?

Patience, wearing the same colored clothes all the time, pretending I wasn't interested in them.

How did your family see the work that you did? What did they have to say about it when you first started going into the jungle and hanging out with chimps?

My mother came. I wasn't allowed to be alone by the British authorities. It was Tanganyika then. And they said, "No, no, no," and they said, "Oh, but she must come with a companion." So my amazing mother volunteered for four months. I mean, how many mothers would? You know, we had this old, secondhand army tent, no sewn-in ground sheet — so, piece of canvas on the ground, roll up the sides to let in the air, and you let in the spiders and the snakes and the scorpions as well, which I didn't mind, but poor Mum.

You just turned 80 years old.

People are making a big deal of it, but, you know, well ...

Well, in some ways, you're a timeless figure in the study of nature and chimpanzees. Tell me what your life is like now at 80.

Well, it's ridiculous, really, because it's literally going from one continent to another. It's airplanes and hotels and interviews and lectures.

You said you're on the road some 300 days a year.

Yes. It's absurd, isn't it?

And you like it?

I hate the travel.

You do?

I hate it. Who could like going through airports today? I mean, it's really horrible. Then of course it's a carbon footprint, all this flying, but nobody's given me a magic carpet yet. And we do have, I would say, millions of young people planting trees now, so I hope it makes up.

Who could like going through airports today? I mean, it’s really horrible. Then of course it’s a carbon footprint, all this flying, but nobody’s given me a magic carpet yet.

Well, you've started this organization called Roots & Shoots. Tell us about it.

It began with 12 high school students, and it was about, actually, empowering young people to roll up their sleeves and make a difference. So once they understand the problems, they get to choose. We don't tell them what to do. But between them, they must choose a project to help people, a project to help animals, a project to help the environment. And woven in it is, "Let's learn to live in peace and harmony between religions and cultures." We have so far to go between us and the natural world.

You've spent your life protecting animals, but recently you've been involved in trying to help save elephants. Can you talk a little bit about that effort?

The poaching of elephants and rhinos and some other animals, too, have increased so dramatically. And it's become such a money earner. So you get criminal cartels coming in, and the money from slaughtering elephants and selling the ivory is actually supporting some of these terrorist groups. And of course it's the demand in Asia. And so we're using our Roots & Shoots groups in China — I would say we're using them because they want to do it. The slogan is, "If the buying stops, the killing stops." And a lot of the Chinese honestly believe that elephants shed their tusks, like deer. So they don't understand the horrible slaughter and suffering of individual animals, whether it's elephants, rhino, tigers, apes being shot for bush meat. You know, the slaughter is going on, and it's going on very fast. But once people understand and get a feeling for these animals, then they're more prepared to go out and do something about it.

You've also fought to protect animals from experimentation for medicine. Where does that stand today?

I first began talking to NIH [the National Institutes of Health] in 1986, and just last year the new director, Francis Collins, had — well, actually three years ago he had a committee put together to investigate what tests were being done on the over 300 NIH chimpanzees, and found none of them, nothing, was beneficial to humans. So he said, "Fine, they can go into sanctuary, into retirement." We have to raise the money now to get them all — but a lot of them are already in Chimp Haven Sanctuary. More and more chimps are coming out of medical research. There's very few left.

What do you think of zoos?

Zoos and zoos and zoos. Some zoos shouldn't be. The change in zoos over my life has been just incredible. Yes, there's an idea that wild animals and freedom — it's the best thing, but in so many cases they're under threat, their habitats being destroyed. There's hunters out there. Then you look at a group in a really good zoo, which has the right kind of environment. Then you think, "Well, let me be a chimp. Where would I rather be?" In the really well-protected places, obviously you want wild animals.

How has technology changed the study of animals and plants over your life?

It's completely changed. I started with a notebook and a pencil and a pair of secondhand binoculars, which was all we could afford. Now, we have a GIS, GPS satellite imagery mapping, and we have ways of measuring stress levels by collecting fecal samples. We hope to do a lot of conservation with working with Google Earth, Esri, DigitalGlobe, and getting software that enable us to, you know, get much more accurate pictures of where the trees are. But the most key thing is that we've actually trained the local people to use these Android tablets. So they're restoring the forest now, letting it regenerate. It's because in early '91, I flew over the whole area around Gombe, and I was so shocked because I knew there was deforestation — I hadn't realized it was total. It was pretty clear that we can't even try and save the chimps if the people are just struggling to survive because they're going to come into this last, lush, tiny island forest. We began improving their lives. As a result, they're now our partners in protecting the chimp habitat, but also restoring the habitat around their own villages. All those bales are now sprinkled with green, and the chimps have three times more forest than they had 10 years ago.

I think some people might be surprised to learn that the chimpanzee is not your favorite animal. Is that right?

Well, I just love dogs. I mean, I just love dogs. You know, when I got to Cambridge and was told I shouldn't have given the chimps names, they should have been numbered, and, you know, I couldn't talk about them having a personality, mind or emotion, I knew from the childhood teacher, my dog Rusty, that that couldn't be true. Animals — of course they have personality. Of course they can feel happy and sad and afraid, just like us.

Clearly, at 80 years old, you have no intention of slowing down.

Well, I suppose my body will slow me down at some point, but, you know, I'm lucky, and I got my father's genes. In fact, all my family lived long. So as long as I can, I shall go on doing this.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

ORIGINAL: Al Jazeera

April 17, 2014

Q&A: On Her 80th Birthday, Jane Goodall Discusses Her Legacy—and What's Next

As field biologist and activist, she has spent her life understanding and protecting our chimp cousins.

On April 3, Jane Goodall turned 80. Her work in behavioral primatology, for which the world first came to know her, focused on the chimpanzees of Gombe, a small forest reserve (now a national park) on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, in Tanzania.

She began her chimp studies there in July 1960 and continued until 1986. By then she had become acutely aware of the threats facing wild chimpanzees and of the sufferings of chimps held in captivity for medical research. (See "Being Jane Goodall")

So she left the satisfactions of doing field biology and became an activist. For almost three decades now she has spent most of her time on the road, lecturing, speaking with schoolchildren, testifying in public, using her gentle but forceful suasion on government officials, world leaders, other scientists, and anyone else she might meet.

Much of her effort is channeled through the Jane Goodall Institute and its programs, such as Roots & Shoots (involving young people especially in efforts to mitigate the human impact on the natural world) and TACARE (promoting conservation-related development in villages surrounding Gombe and elsewhere). She also continues to write—her new book is Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants. (Related: "Happy 80th Birthday and Thanks Jane Goodall!")

But sometimes even a dinner conversation with a key decision-maker (as she explains below) can yield important results. National Geographic spoke with Jane shortly before her birthday.

Q: Eighty years old. It seems a good time for looking forward.
A: [Laughs.] Somebody asked me the other day at a lecture—they said, "Your life has gone into these neat phases. What do you think the next phase is?"

What do you think the next phase is?
I said, "Well, I suspect it's death."

No, no, the next phase is something . . . else. What are the things you most hope still to get done?
Well, growing Roots & Shoots. I'm really passionate about that. It's in 136 countries. As far as we can estimate, it's approximately 160,000 active groups. We got a commitment yesterday to form an adult group among the staff of the World Bank.

And the TACARE program?
All around Gombe the villagers put land aside to be a buffer. The chimps apparently have three times more forest now than ten years ago. Some of the trees are 30 feet high. Other villagers have put land aside to make a corridor toward this other group [of chimps] in the south.

This is how it was originally conceived. Taken a long time, but you mustn't give up. Now the villagers are our partners instead of our competitors, and they're realizing the value of the forest to them. Better water supply and no more erosion. No more silting of the valleys, no more mudslides—which killed a few people a while back.

And now coffee? Some of the villagers are growing forest-friendly coffee?
Coffee is going super well. Over 2,000 individual farms, and they've got this cooperative. It's amazing.

So Gombe National Park is less isolated now, and the chimps aren't necessarily doomed to isolation effects, such as inbreeding?
Yes. Getting towards that. We're still not sure if it's going to work. But it's all we can do. We've tried, and it looks as though it might be working.

About chimps in captivity, and their use in medical experiments: You began working against that years ago, yes? As it was then practiced within agencies such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health?
1986, '87, I suppose, was the first interaction with the National Institutes of Health about the conditions they were keeping their chimps in. We had the first conference, funded actually by HSUS [Humane Society of the United States] and NIH. It was the first time that lab people and veterinarians had sat down with [animal] welfare people and field people. Ever. I got a lot of flak for that. Sitting down with the enemy. You don't talk to the enemy, nothing can change.

And that sort of dialogue, that engagement with "the enemy" toward better treatment of chimps, has continued? Have you pressed it with them recently?
Just last year, maybe the year before. Francis Collins is the director of the NIH. I sat next to him at dinner, and he said he didn't know much about the chimps. Because I asked him. So of course I spent the rest of dinner telling him all about it. Bless him, he got together a committee. And at first it was very biased toward the lab people, but he let me look at it. So we added in some field people, and there was a hearing on the Hill, and I testified at it. And this committee, their finding—do you know what it was? Not one single [research] protocol involving chimps being done today is useful to human health. And so Francis Collins said that they would retire almost all the NIH chimps to sanctuary. He has been wonderful! It's taken all that time, but we got there.

ORIGINAL: NatGeo
David Quammen for National Geographic
April 2, 2014

Horrific blaze kills conservationist and three baboons at South African animal rescue centre

ORIGINAL: Daily Mail
By Daily Mail Reporter
29 July 2012 

Rita Miljo, 81, dies after fire rips through Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education in the bush of Limpopo province 

Tragic: The fire at the animal rescue centre killed conservationist Rita Miljo as well as three baboons

An horrific blaze has destroyed a baboon rescue centre killing a renowned conservationist as well as three animals.

Rita Miljo, who reintroduced packs of baboons into the wilds of South Africa, died in the fire which destroyed much of the headquarters of the sanctuary she built, an official said.

Karl Pierce, a director with the sanctuary said the 81-year-old died in the small apartment she kept above the clinic of the Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education in the bush of Limpopo province.

Also killed in the fire were three baboons including Bobby, the first chacma baboon she rescued and nursed back to health in 1980 after spiriting her away from a national park without a permit, Mr Pierce said.

The fire broke out around 8pm yesterday after volunteers and workers left the centre for the evening, he added.

No one else was injured in the blaze, which consumed the clinic, offices and a house on the property, about 250 miles north east of Johannesburg. The cause of the fire is under investigation.

While Ms Miljo no longer ran day-to-day operations of the centre, which cares for more than 400 baboons, she remained a constant presence and a figurehead for the organisation she founded in 1989.

'Everybody's still in shock about this,' Mr Pierce said.

Born in Germany in 1931, Ms Miljo arrived in South Africa in the 1950s. In a 2008 article about her in the Washington Post Magazine, she said helping baboons taught her 'why people behave the way they do'.

'Chimpanzees can be deceitful, just like humans, whereas baboons haven't learned that yet,' she said. 'So what you learn from the baboons is the truth about yourself.

Rita Miljo was renowned for helping to reintroduced packs of baboons into the wilds of South Africa

Chimpanzees have already learned to find beautiful little excuses for their behaviour.'

In South Africa, baboons have a troublesome reputation.

In Cape Town, they are known for raiding cars and frightening tourists. Baboons are a protected species under South African legislation but their aggressive pursuits of food have led to conflicts with residents.

Ms Miljo nursed orphaned and injured baboons back to health, then pioneered ways of reintroducing whole troops of cared-for baboons back into the wild, her centre said.

In 1994, the centre released 10 hand-reared baboons back into the wild.

Rita Miljo nursed orphaned and injured baboons back to health, then pioneered ways of reintroducing whole troops of cared-for baboons back into the wild

A year later, seven had survived and integrated back into the wild population, the centre said, a success as many thought the cared-for baboons would not be able to adjust.

Ms Miljo is survived by a brother who lives in Botswana, Mr Pierce said. Her first husband, Lothar Simon, and her 17-year-old daughter died in 1972 in a plane crash.

Despite personal tragedies in her own life, she remained focused on her work to help sick and injured baboons.

When asked in 2008 where the body of one of the baboons she sheltered would be buried, she offered a quick answer: 'I remember where each one is and that's where I'm going to be buried too.'

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