Primatologist and activist brings story to the Lensic
Primatologist tells crowd of 800 she has hope for planet’s future despite challenges
Environmental and animal activist Jane Goodall said despite the many challenges facing the planet, she maintains hope that people can still save it.
“We do have intelligence, but even better, we have a heart,” the London-born anthropologist and primatologist told a capacity crowd of some 800 people during a Sunday afternoon presentation at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe.
And, she said, social media can help.
“For the first time in human nature, we can bring human voices [from around the world] together in a collective shout … and the politicians will just have to listen.”
Goodall, who will turn 84 in April, used her talent as a storyteller to relate her own history of love and compassion for animals, saying it may have all started when she brought a bunch of “wriggly earthworms” into her bed one night when she was about 18 months old.
Her mother — a constant source of support and encouragement — not only did not criticize her daughter, but gently urged her to return the worms to the earth so that they would survive.
“I was born loving animals … born with a very supportive mother,” Goodall told the assembly.
The young Goodall also fostered a love of reading and recalled buying her first book — Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes — from a second-hand bookstore in London sometime during the war years.
She promptly climbed into a beech tree to read the adventure story, set in Africa, only to realize, “What does Tarzan go and do? He marries the wrong Jane.” It was a line that broke up the audience in laughter.
Her first trip to Africa took place when she was in her mid-20s, she said, after she responded to an invitation to spend a holiday with family friends in Kenya.
There, she met famed paleoanthropologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey, whose study of human origins led him to send Goodall — who had not yet even attended college — out to an area now known as Gombe National Park in Tanzania to study chimpanzees. One chimp in particular, which Goodall named David Greybeard, showed no fear and eventually introduced her to his extended chimpanzee family, sparking a lifelong respect for chimps and other animal species.
Her work also revolutionized the way scientists viewed chimpanzees. Goodall portrayed them as social animals capable of making and using tools, waging war and protecting one another. Goodall married twice and had a son, but the focus of her work was always primates. Her life story is the subject of a new documentary by filmmaker Brett Morgen, titled Jane.
Though she spoke of some of the unpleasant human actions affecting the survival of chimps and other creatures — captivity, medical experiments, animal traps set for other species and the thinning of rainforests and other natural habitats — Goodall exuded a sense of confidence about nature’s talent for perseverance and humans’ capacity for compassion.
In 1991, she founded Roots and Shoots, a youth advocacy group designed to teach young people how to respect and protect the environment. That group started with about a dozen teens; some 150,000 people from around the world now are taking part, which she sees as a strong sign of hope.
“Every single day we live we make some kind of impact on the world,” she said. “And we have some choice on what sort of impact we want to make.”