Tackling our own monkey business Jane Goodall is legendary for her pathbreaking research on chimpanzees. But her focus now is on conflict resolution, a field in which she is using her knowledge in animal behaviour She gently reminded former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that “non-violence by itself won’t help, unless we take action in non-violent ways” PRAKASH CHANDRA T HE WORLD’S foremost authority on chimpanzees, Jane Goodall closely ob served their behaviour for decades in the jungles of the Gombe Game Reserve in Tanzania. Chimp life was still a mystery in 1957, when 23-year-old Goodall first arrived in Kenya to realise her ‘dream of studying wild animals’. Anthropologist Louis Leakey hired her as a secretary, as that was her only qualification. (Leakey would later become famous for his discoveries of early human remains at the Olduvai Gorge).
The rest is history. Goodall lived in the chimps’ environment and gained their confidence, making landmark discoveries, like their omnivorous nature and ability to make and use tools. This revolutionised scientific thinking about human evolution.
The Jane Goodall Institutes she founded, today help her lecture and write tirelessly, encouraging young people to appreciate all creatures great and small. In an exclusive chat with the HT, this icon of wildlife conservation spoke of her work, her mission as a peace envoy for the UN, and her hopes for the future.
In 1985, Goodall’s twentyfive years’ anthropological and conservation research was published, which helped scientists better understand the relationship between all creatures and gain new insights into human behaviour. Goodall showed how ‘we share many things with chimpanzees, besides 98 per cent of our DNA’.
Although it’s difficult to prove if chimps possess emotions that correspond with expressions, ‘they do use facial expressions that look uncannily human, and chimps often greet each other with a kiss, hug, or gentle hand touch, and babies stay with their mothers until they reach adulthood’. The declining number of chimps in the wild saddens her: from over a million in Africa when she first began her study at Gombe, there are hardly 250,000 left now.
“Commercial hunting of wildlife animals has been disastrous in the last stronghold of chimps in the great CongoBasin“, she says. “In the old days, hunters would never shoot the mother chimp for anything – that would be stupid as she means everything to the baby chimp.
But foreign timber companies that intruded into virgin forests fuelled the bushmeat trade, shooting everything – elephants, gorillas, monkeys, birds, bats – that can be smoked, and trading them.” So Goodall set up several halfway homes for injured or orphaned chimps found in the wild. “Our biggest sanctuary in Congo, Brazzaville, right in the middle of the bushmeat trade, has 130 chimps. When local people see the infant chimps, they realise they’re too much like us and decide never to eat chimpanzee again.” That’s the Jane Goodall we all know. What’s not so well known is the work she’s doing to bring hope to a tense post-9/11 world by using her insights into animal behaviour. Conflict resolution is the last thing you’d associate with this slender conservationist as she sits in a chair, a heart-shaped metal pendant hanging around her neck and holding her personal mascot, ‘Mr. H’ – a stuffed toy monkey eating a banana.
“Mine is a message of hope,” she says in a quiet voice with the sort of oldfashioned English accent that you don’t hear much any more. “All the problems that we face on the planet – environmental and social – can be solved through messages of hope that’ll enthuse millions of young people to break through into a better world.” ‘Roots and Shoots’, the programme she started for school children to learn about wild animals and conservation, does just that, en couraging them to ‘dismantle barriers that we build between different groups’. This has worked magic among the unlikeliest of people – Palestinians and Israelis, Congolese and Ethiopian, and even Nepalese breaking into Maoist strongholds.
These issues have been on Goodall’s mind since the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001 led to calls for armed conflict. After the Iraq war began, she issued a statement that read: “Especially now when views are becoming more polarised, we must work to understand each other across political, religious, and national boundaries.’ During a recent UN conference of international police forces, she suggested a larger role for them in conflict resolution in places they are trying to police.
“It worked fabulously”, she recalls. “They put wheat and fruits in large refugee camps in Tanzania, which helped improve relations between the host community and the Congolese!” When former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan commended her on planting seeds for world peace, she gently reminded him that ‘non-violence by itself won’t help, unless we take action in non-violent ways.
‘ For marginal societies that depend on nature for their livelihoods, she advocates an incentive-based sustainable living without destroying natural resources. She would love to see her Shoots and Roots programme introduced in India, “as it’s designed to give hope to the hopeless and improve life for the locals who participate in conservation.” She asks Indian conservationists who face an uphill task not to lose hope. Her next book, Hope for Nature, tells “the success stories of conservationists who rescued animals from the brink of extinction and restored ecosystems that were totally destroyed”.
And her reasons for hope: “Children who are aware, technology-enabled human effort, and nature’s own indefatigable capacity for regeneration.” pchandra@hindustantimes.com