Jane Goodall, famous the world over for her work with the chimpanzees of Africa, is an altogether extraordinary woman. Now 65 years old, she continues her career of passionate interest in and concern for animals. She also cares deeply about the world of nature and constantly recruits others to help rescue that world from the injuries inflicted upon it by human beings.
I had the opportunity to watch Dr. Goodall speak last week to a wildly enthusiastic audience that filled a large auditorium at the Harvard School of Education. Some three hundred others, disappointed at the door, listened in another building. The size of the crowd suggests that many people know about the speaker’s magnetic personality and compelling message.
Jane Goodall began by greeting us with loud and prolonged “woohs,” echoing the sounds made by chimps when they hail one another. This made a unique start in a lecture filled with fascinating anecdotes and heartfelt accounts of a life loaded with adventure. She gives more detailed segments of that life in her just-published autobiography entitled Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.
In the lecture she spoke of her childhood, of falling in love with Tarzan when she was nine years old. The other Jane, Tarzan’s companion, she dismissed as “wimpy.” When, as a twenty-three-year-old she went off to live in Africa for the first time, everyone laughed at her, except her mother Vanne. In fact, her mother came with her, “two crazy Englishwomen,” as they were regarded forty years ago.
It was the beginning of “an amazing adventure that hasn’t ended yet.” Jane’s purpose was to learn about the closest animal relatives of human beings so as better to understand us humans. Many of her practices were sternly disapproved by scientists of the time. Not only did she befriend animals and give them names but she also ascribed personalities to them. What she calls her “worst anthropomorphic sin” was attributing to them both mind and emotions. By now, scientific attitudes have changed: Jane thanks the chimps for helping blur the formerly hard line drawn between animals and us.
Partly as a result of her work, people now recognize how “we are, after all, part of the natural world, much closer to the animals than we used to think.” However, many human beings, she says, still “are terrified to acknowledge our likeness to animals.”
Like us, chimpanzees have a long childhood needed for them to learn adult behavior. They also value close long-lasting relationships with one another. In captivity, they can live up to 64 years of age, while in the wild they tend not to last beyond 50. Studies show them capable of abstract thought; their emotional life, however, has proven more difficult to fathom.
Even their champion, Jane Goodall, admits that chimps have a dark side. She has seen evidence of aggression toward neighboring chimps marked by extraordinarily brutal behavior. But they also show that compassion and love are deeply rooted within them.
Goodall decries the human violence, the waste, and the pollution that are endangering the survival of chimps and other animals throughout the world. The crime and violence worked by humans on one another also troubles her deeply. And the rise in the numbers of humans and their need for food present other serious problems.
In keeping with her book title, however, Jane Goodall still finds hope in the face of huge challenges to the world’s survival. She places this hope in the following realities:
- the human brain that is powerful and inventive enough to reverse the negative factors at work in the world;
- the resilience of nature that with human help, as in the instance of the Thames River in her native London, can come back from the brink of extinction;
- the energy and commitment of young people; and
- the indomitable human spirit as shown, for instance, in the recovery of South Africa from apartheid.
Dr. Goodall believes that human beings working together can make a decisive difference. To judge by the long lines of her listeners who waited to buy her book and to sign up for her “Roots and Shoots” environmental and humanitarian program, many others agree.
I talked briefly to a young Reading public school teacher, Samantha Genier, who told me, “She made me want to be something and to get involved; she made it seem real, you’re like in the jungle with her.”
Then I buttonholed an older woman, Mary Tonougar, who was also much impressed with Jane Goodall. “I’ve been following her since she was a young woman, on the PBS specials and things like that.”
“Do you share her hope for the world?,” I asked. “I would like to say yes, but I don’t know, the way things are going now,” Mary replied regretfully. “There’s nothing wrong with her reasons for hope but there’s something wrong with our society today.”
Richard Griffin