Jane Goodall: The Next Generation
Conservationist talks of need to inspire kids at screening of Disney’s Monkey Kingdom
When Jane Goodall was a child, her mother took her to see one of the many Tarzan movies, starring loincloth-clad Johnny Weissmuller with his famous yodelling call as the infant raised to adulthood by fictional great apes.
“I burst into tears and she had to take me out,” the primatologist and arguably the world’s leading expert on wild chimpanzees recalls. “That wasn’t Tarzan . . . my Tarzan was my own imagination from reading the (Edgar Rice Burroughs) books.”
At 81, Goodall is determined to continue igniting the imagination of youngsters, nurturing new generations of conservationists.
Goodall talked to the Star at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Sunday prior to introducing the latest Disneynature animal film, Monkey Kingdom, at a TIFF Kids screening. The movie opens Friday.
Although Goodall took no part in making Monkey Kingdom, she is a Disneynature Ambassador, making occasional appearances when films in the series screen.
She may have done countless interviews and photo shoots during her lengthy career as a researcher and activist, but having her picture taken is clearly the least favourite part of Goodall’s work. “I’d rather go to the dentist,” she said with a slight smile of resignation.
She’s constantly travelling, making public appearances and speeches, encouraging kids to get involved with her Roots & Shoots global conservation program and making twice yearly working visits to Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park and the research institute that bears her name.
It’s where Goodall began her research 55 years ago.
“I felt I was so lucky to have the forest and the chimps to myself all those years. It was amazing,” Goodall recalled of the first decades following her arrival in 1960.
Today, Gombe is popular with tourists and “the chimpanzees know all people,” unlike in the early days, when they only knew her and scattered from other humans.
And Goodall certainly knows, or has known, them — five generations of chimpanzees, including the offspring of the original animals she studied.
Goodall still wears her hair pulled back in a simple ponytail, echoing the familiar images of her as the 26year-old untrained researcher who captivated the world with groundbreaking research published in Na- tional Geographic and seen later in televised documentaries.
Among Goodall’s findings gleaned from observing chimpanzees was that they made and used tools to extract termites from a forest mound.
Goodall also described their interactions and society for the first time. “I was from the beginning fascinated by family relations and similarities (with) our behaviour, like kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting on the back, that sort of thing.”
But when she began work on her PhD, Goodall came under fire from conservative academics who looked down on her practice of naming the chimpanzees she studied (Greybeard, Goliath and Flo among them), along with cataloguing their personalities and social behaviours.
“I was able to stand up to the professors when I went to Cambridge who told me I should have given the chimpanzees numbers; that was scientific and I couldn’t talk about personality, mind or feeling because that was unique to us,” said Goodall. “But my dog had taught me as a child that was wrong.”
Narrated by Tina Fey, Monkey Kingdom follows a troupe of macaque monkeys in Sri Lanka, focusing on a young mother called Maya. Goodall said the hierarchical society and social climbing that weaves through Monkey Kingdom is not common to chimpanzees but it is similar to baboons, which are also studied at Gombe.
She isn’t concerned with Disney’s fondness for anthropomorphizing animals onscreen.
“When people start describing certain things in animals, people say ‘you’ve given them human traits.’ The point is, they have them anyway, you just describe it and OK, some of the Disney nature films, the commentary may go a little bit . . . but then it’s for children you need to get the child’s attention and help them to understand what it’s like to be an animal.”
Goodall speaks passionately about ethical consumerism, against genetically modified foods (her Toronto stop included a press conference for lawyer Steven Druker’s book Altered Genes, Twisted Truth for which she wrote the foreword) and protecting the environment.
She returns to her family home in England after each tour and has no plans to slow down.
“I can’t,” Goodall said, “because I know that wherever I go it makes an impact, wherever I go people say: ‘You’ve given me hope. I’ll do my bit.’ Wherever I go we start new groups of people in our Roots & Shoots program. As you get older you’re closer to the end, whatever the end is, and so I have to speed up because I’ve got a lot of work to do.”