Dr. Jane Goodall - Wild At Heart

Full transcript: Dr Jane Goodall on London Real

0:00 Jane Goodall: Everybody laughed at me. How would I get to Africa? You know, the war was raging, we didn’t have any money, and I was just a girl. But my mother would say, “If you really want to do this thing, you’re going to have to work really hard, take advantage of opportunity and never give up.”

The professors told me I’d done the study wrong. The chimps should have had numbers, not names, and they didn’t have personalities, minds capable of thought, or emotions, because those were unique to us. That’s what I was told, and I knew they were wrong.

Science is wonderful when it’s done right. It’s about knowledge, it’s finding out facts. But to get your facts through inhumane behaviour, I think, is awful.

Brian Rose: What happens when you’re hugging the chimpanzee like that, and it seems like something deep is being communicated between you two? Are you thinking?

Jane Goodall: Not really thinking much. Just love, I suppose.

We need money to live, but it goes wrong when we live for money, and that’s what leads to corruption. That’s what’s destroying the planet very, very fast.

Well, a lot of people think having hope is craziness. Let’s face it, we don’t have a big window of time. Every single day you live, you have a choice as to what kind of difference you’re going to make. Your little choices: what you buy, what you eat, what you wear. If you just think about those little things, and millions and billions of people think the same, the world will change.

2:18 Brian Rose: I am here at beautiful Windsor Castle, the home of the Queen, and I’ve just spent the last hour speaking with the anthropologist Jane Goodall. She is the OG of scientists. In 1960 she learned that chimpanzees used tools and had lots of other emotions and behaviours that really say a lot about us human beings. In her 80s she’s still sharp as a tack, and she’s talking about bigger issues these days. She’s talking about the fact that we’re probably consuming too many things as a species, we’re overpopulated, we’re not thinking about animals and the fact that we’re eating them, our carbon footprints. She travels the world 300 days a year working with her Roots and Shoots organisation to teach young people to start thinking about the bigger picture. I was really honoured to sit down with Jane. She’s such a special human. She gave me a big hug at the end and grunted in my ear like a female chimpanzee would do when greeting a male one. She spent time talking to us afterwards, and she’s really a special spirit and a special human being, with a lot of really important things to say. She works tirelessly. She really is a London Realer: she’s got the spirit, and she’s thinking about the bigger picture, things past her own life. So I think you’re really going to enjoy this time with Jane very much. We were just so excited to finally sit down and talk to her.

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5:27 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jane Goodall, the primatologist, ethologist and anthropologist who revolutionised the way we understand the animal kingdom by observing wild chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. In 1957, at the age of 23, you sailed to Kenya and later travelled to Tanzania to live in the wild with a community of chimpanzees. There you made groundbreaking discoveries regarding the use of tools, hunting behaviour, leadership, emotions and language. You are a United Nations Messenger of Peace and one of the most respected members of the world’s scientific community. Your Roots and Shoots programme inspires young people in over 130 countries, and your institute now protects over one and a half million acres of natural habitat. Jane, welcome to London Real.

Jane Goodall: Thank you.

Brian Rose: It’s a pleasure having you here. We’re actually in St George’s House today, inside Windsor Castle, the Queen’s main residence, where leaders of government, industry, commerce and charity come to discuss matters of national interest. I’m always curious: did you always know, when you grew up in Bournemouth, that you were destined to do big things and be in places like this?

Jane Goodall: Of course not. I was very shy, very retiring, and all I wanted to do was go and live with animals and write books about them. That was what I wanted to do, but it didn’t go beyond that.

Brian Rose: Talk to me about Doctor Dolittle. I was a big fan growing up. What was it about Dolittle that caught your imagination?

Jane Goodall: Well, right from the beginning I loved animals. When I was tiny, I took worms to bed when I was one and a half. I had an amazing mother, who just said, “Well, they need the earth or they’ll die,” rather than get mad at me because my bed was full of earth. So when I read Doctor Dolittle, it was everything I’d wanted: talking to animals. I wanted a parrot to teach me. I was eight years old when I read The Story of Doctor Dolittle, and it came from a library, because we couldn’t afford books when I was growing up. We had virtually no money in the war. So I read it twice, under the bedclothes with my flashlight when I wasn’t allowed to read at night, because I had to read it again before it went back to the library. It was the first book I ever owned: my grandmother got me a copy the next Christmas. I still have that book.

Brian Rose: Is it true you used to tell the children you could talk to the squirrels?

Jane Goodall: Oh, I told them I could understand the squirrels, the birds, the dogs, the cats. I told them what they said, and they all believed me.

Brian Rose: Was that to be cruel?

Jane Goodall: No. Why not? I was pretty sure I understood them myself.

Brian Rose: I think you said once that it was your dog who really got you to understand that animals had emotion, had empathy.

Jane Goodall: Well, of course. Rusty.

8:19 Brian Rose: And what was Britain like in the 40s? I think a lot of us just don’t understand the war years and then the kind of poverty after. Is there any way you can describe that to me?

Jane Goodall: Well, I was very young, so what I remember most vividly is stories of people we knew who were killed. And until right at the end of the war we didn’t know about the concentration camps. It was a time when, although we lived by the sea, we couldn’t actually get into the sea, because there was barbed wire along the coast. We knew about the bombs falling in London. Some bombs fell near us. They were mostly from German pilots who hadn’t managed to drop their bombs on their target, so they wanted to drop them somewhere, so that they’d be less likely to be blown up going back to Germany over the sea.

Brian Rose: Did that affect you as a young girl, or did you just get on with it?

Jane Goodall: Not really. It didn’t really affect me. What did affect me was at the end of the war, when I read about the Holocaust. That affected me very much.

Brian Rose: I’m guessing that was a shock to everybody in Britain, and the world, when they found out about that.

Jane Goodall: Yes.

Brian Rose: And did that make you think you had to do bigger things in the world?

Jane Goodall: No, I didn’t think so. It just helped me to understand human nature a little better.

Brian Rose: OK. And then after the war, Britain was really rebuilding. I hear stories that there just wasn’t much of anything, food-wise, commodities, that kind of thing. Do you remember?

Jane Goodall: Yeah. We had ration cards, we had clothing coupons. All through the war and immediately afterwards, it was something like one egg a week. But we used to get packages of food sent over from Australia, from the colonies, to families with children. It was things like dried milk powder and dried eggs, and then there were the delicacies, like the odd tin of peaches. If there was an air raid warning, which happened quite often, because there were children in the family we’d been given one of these Anderson shelters. It was not much higher than that, with a steel top, so that if a bomb fell you’d be safe inside it under the rubble of the house. My sister was younger than me, and as soon as the siren went she was out of bed like this, rushing to get down into the shelter. I meanwhile clung on to all my bedclothes. I did not want to leave my bed and had to be carried down. And if we were there more than an hour, as a treat we could open a tin of peaches. That’s what I remember. And also growing up on dried egg powder: the thought of a runny egg still makes me feel sick.

Brian Rose: Sick?

Jane Goodall: Absolutely sick, to see the slimy yolk.

Brian Rose: So you don’t crave it, because you didn’t grow up on it.

Jane Goodall: That’s right. Boiled hard eggs are fine, although with eggs today, from intensive farms, I try not to eat them. We have rescued hens at home in Bournemouth. My sister looks after these hens rescued from the battery farms, and they lay eggs for us.

12:01 Brian Rose: Can you tell me about your mother?

Jane Goodall: My mother was one of the most amazing people. I attribute everything to her, because everybody laughed at this idea: go to Africa, live with animals, write books about them. It began when I was ten and I found a little book in a secondhand bookshop. With no money to buy new books, I would save up any little penny I had for secondhand books, and I found this little book, which again I still have, called Tarzan of the Apes. So of course I fell passionately in love with this glorious Lord of the Jungle, and he went and married the wrong Jane. So this is where my dream began, and everybody laughed at me. How would I get to Africa? The war was raging, Africa was “the dark continent”, very far away, nobody knew much about it. We didn’t have any money, and I was just a girl. Why was I dreaming such nonsense? But my mother would say, “If you really want to do this thing, you’re going to have to work really hard, take advantage of opportunity and never give up.” I don’t know that she said it quite like that, but that was the message, the whole way through. I was not laughed at for having a dream like that.

Brian Rose: Where did she get her strength? Was your grandmother very strong?

Jane Goodall: Very strong. My grandmother was immensely strong. And my mother’s older sister was one of the very first women to qualify as a physiotherapist.

Brian Rose: I was thinking about you at ten years old, and female role models, and I realised there wasn’t even a Queen at that point. Did you have anyone to look up to?

Jane Goodall: Well, there was Florence Nightingale. I remember stories about her. And Madame Curie. Those were two women we had stories read to us about.

Brian Rose: So that’s something too. And books really spurred you, it seems. Books were the internet of your time.

Jane Goodall: There was radio and books. That was it. No TV.

Brian Rose: Right. And so you fell in love with books, and you thought, “I’m going to go to Africa and write books.” That was the plan, since ten?

Jane Goodall: Go to Africa and live with animals. Live with wild animals. It wasn’t Africa, it was the animals. I had brief times thinking about going to Canada, with the wolves and the bears, and then the jungles of South America. I read a book called The Green Hell and I was fascinated by the anacondas and things. So it was the wilderness that attracted me, but Africa especially, and I think that was Tarzan.

Brian Rose: So during the war you’re dreaming of this, when you can’t even leave the country.

Jane Goodall: We didn’t even know if we were going to survive. We didn’t know if the Germans were going to land on our doorstep. Very trying times. And we had Churchill.

Brian Rose: You had Churchill.

Jane Goodall: We had Churchill. I think we’d have been invaded but for him.

Brian Rose: Do you remember him on the radio?

Jane Goodall: Oh, I remember him vividly. I remember that voice. His voice was amazing. It really got us through.

Brian Rose: I’m sure it did. It got everyone through.

Jane Goodall: Yes, I think it did.

Brian Rose: I’ve listened to many of his speeches. They were just incredible. For people who don’t understand, when you think of Churchill in those years, did he make or break the survival of the country?

Jane Goodall: I think so. And it’s interesting, people say that Hitler also had the power of oratory, and they said that if there’d been television, Hitler would never have risen to power the way he did, because he wasn’t very attractive. But his voice, I’m told, was really powerful.

16:03 Brian Rose: Right. I didn’t think about that. And so after the war, not a lot of money, very hard times, and yet you still have this dream: “I’m going to go to Africa.” You’re a young woman now, in your teens. What are people telling you?

Jane Goodall: Telling me the same. And I had to get some money, so I did a secretarial course. There was no money for university. But then came a letter from a school friend inviting me to Kenya. That was it. That was the opportunity. So I worked as a waitress for about five months, really hard work, in an old-fashioned hotel. It was just after the war, and people were coming down from up north for a holiday by the sea, and they didn’t have much money, not much brass, you know. So you had to work really hard for a week to get even a little tip, because I made sure they all knew I was saving up to go to Africa.

Brian Rose: Crowdfunding.

Jane Goodall: Well, it didn’t work terribly well, because they didn’t have much money. And I was the only non-professional in that hotel. The others were all professional waiters and waitresses, and they resented me hugely to start with: “Who does she think she is, coming in? She’ll be invited out and she’ll just leave us in the lurch.” When they found that I was every bit as conscientious as them, or more, I was welcomed in. They were mostly Irish Catholic, so it was a whole new learning experience.

Brian Rose: And if you hadn’t received that letter inviting you to Africa, would that have slowed your progress getting down there, or would you have found a way?

Jane Goodall: I don’t know. How can I tell? I don’t know.

17:51 Brian Rose: So you save the money, you get the ticket on the boat. Three weeks. What’s that like?

Jane Goodall: We should have gone through the Suez Canal, but there was that little war with Egypt, and the Suez Canal was closed. So the boat had to go all the way around the Cape. They said they were really sorry, they’d have to charge a bit extra, they’d make it as little as possible. So I had to do two extra weeks of waitressing to make up the money to go around. But it was lovely to have that long voyage, with the sea changing from grey and dark and gradually getting bluer, and the first flying fish, that was amazing, and then a dolphin jumping. But then, coming to Cape Town and Durban and meeting apartheid was awful. It was horrible. We landed briefly on shore, and you could tell right away. Everywhere you looked it was “Whites only”, “Whites only”, on every seat, on every door. It was awful.

Brian Rose: Wow. And that was only in South Africa? As soon as you continued, that was gone?

Jane Goodall: Well, no. There were the remains of it in what they called the White Highlands in Kenya. The servants were still referred to as “boys”, and you still heard racial slurs occasionally, because these were the old colonial types in Kenya. Of course it became independent, but it took a while for some of the old habits to die. And Tanzania was still a colony when I arrived: Tanganyika.

Brian Rose: Were you a pretty tough woman at that point? Did you feel like you could handle things? Did people size you up when you were abroad and try to intimidate you at all?

Jane Goodall: No. I think I was always quite feminine, which was to my advantage, I think, definitely. If I’d been a really ugly person, I’m not sure that Louis Leakey would have welcomed me as his secretary, which is how it all began.

Brian Rose: You said on 60 Minutes that you were a terrible flirt.

Jane Goodall: I was a flirt. I enjoyed being young and flirtatious, and being invited out to dinners and things.

20:26 Brian Rose: How long were you in Tanzania before you met Louis Leakey, and how did that come about?

Jane Goodall: Well, I went to Kenya first, which is where he was. I think I’d been out there maybe three weeks, maybe a month, something like that, staying with my friend. Then I got a job in Nairobi, because you don’t sponge on your friends, you know. And that’s when I heard about Leakey, and I went to see him. I just went to talk about animals, because somebody said I should, and I came away with a job. His secretary had just left. It must have been meant.

Brian Rose: What do you remember about Louis the first time you met him?

Jane Goodall: Oh, I was completely in awe, because he knew everything about animals. He was just that sort of person, with an amazing knowledge of Africa and animals. He was brought up as a Kikuyu, so he knew the local people.

Brian Rose: Is that a local tribe?

Jane Goodall: It’s the dominant tribe, the Kikuyu, and the Maasai.

Brian Rose: OK. And he was impressed with your knowledge of animals?

Jane Goodall: Yes. He took me around and asked me hundreds of questions at the museum, the natural history museum. He was very impressed.

Brian Rose: So it was like an interview, or a quiz.

Jane Goodall: Yeah, but I didn’t know it was, because I hadn’t gone to get a job.

Brian Rose: And you had got all that knowledge from reading books about animals?

Jane Goodall: Yes, and spending hours in the Natural History Museum in London as well.

22:06 Brian Rose: Wow. OK. So you meet him, he agrees to hire you, you go out.

Jane Goodall: Then he takes me to Olduvai, digging for fossils. In those days Olduvai was totally remote. There wasn’t a road, there wasn’t a track. It was in the middle of nowhere. In the three weeks that I was there with one other young girl, we saw maybe four Maasai warriors, and that was it. It was just us. It was magic.

Brian Rose: You’ve said you really feel at peace when you’re alone in nature. Was that probably one of the first times you were really that far out?

Jane Goodall: It was the first time I was that far out. I didn’t wander about on my own on the plains, but I went with Gillian, the other girl. And we met a rhino once. All the animals were there then. We met a rhino about twice the length of this room away. Luckily the wind was blowing from him to us. He knew there was something there, but they don’t see very well, so he trotted back and forth a few times, and then luckily he trotted off in the other direction with his tail up. And then there was the young male lion who followed us quite a way. That was a bit scary, but very exciting.

Brian Rose: Were you scared?

Jane Goodall: Well, funnily enough, not really. Afterwards it was a bit more scary than at the time. There was one scary moment. Gillian and I had to take these two dogs out with us, Leakey’s wife’s dogs, two Dalmatians, one of whom was the champion of all breeds in Kenya. Mary said, “Take the dogs with you when you go walking.” So we took the dogs, and on this occasion we were down in the gorge, Olduvai Gorge, which is just thorn bushes and things, and a mouse ran across the trail ahead of us, under the low branches of a tree. The two dogs took off after the mouse, and that’s when the lion appeared. And of course with dogs it could be dangerous, because dogs are more likely to be attacked by a lion. Humans weren’t, in those days, I think. But anyway, there was the lion, and we couldn’t leave the dogs, and the dogs wanted to chase the mouse. How do you get the dogs out? We can’t yell. We finally got the dogs. I think I put my belt around one of them, the male. Gillian got the champion of all breeds of Kenya, and I don’t know what she used, but anyway we got the dogs, and we climbed up the side of the gorge to where it was open, because I thought that would be safest. And then Gillian let go of the champion of all breeds of Kenya, who immediately went back down to the mouse. That was the scary moment, because I thought I’d have to go and get her. I couldn’t just leave Mary Leakey’s beloved dog.

Brian Rose: You were scared of Mary. You might get sacked.

And this whole time, are you thinking you’re going to stay in Africa the rest of your life? Are you thinking you’ll go back to England at some point? Where was your head at?

Jane Goodall: I didn’t really think. I was at the museum then, and Leakey asked me if I’d like to go and study the chimps. Of course I said yes, but then it took a year to get the money.

Brian Rose: And he was impressed with your coolness in the lion incident?

Jane Goodall: Yes, he was. I think that was the turning point.

Brian Rose: Did he come with you?

Jane Goodall: No, he never came to Gombe. He sent me. And I wasn’t allowed to be there on my own. The authorities wouldn’t have it, so that’s when Mum volunteered.

Brian Rose: The local authorities wouldn’t have it?

Jane Goodall: The British.

Brian Rose: OK. And so your mum took the boat right out to join you?

Jane Goodall: Well, she actually flew.

26:16 Brian Rose: And the chimpanzees. Do you remember when you first saw them, and the feelings?

Jane Goodall: They ran away. They’d take one look and run away.

Brian Rose: You said at first they were scared, then they were belligerent, and then they were tolerant of you. How long did the fear last with the chimpanzees?

Jane Goodall: Oh, for many of them the fear lasted for about, I don’t know, five months. It went on and on. So I was still watching them with my binoculars from this peak. I was learning things, but from a distance, until David Greybeard showed me termiting. I wasn’t that close, but through my binoculars I could see him fishing for termites. That was the breakthrough. That’s what brought money and brought the Geographic in.

Brian Rose: Right. And that was after five months of observing?

Jane Goodall: Something like that. I think I saw it a bit before, because it was between four and five months that the termite season begins.

Brian Rose: And did you know right away that this was something pretty incredible? When you’re looking through the binoculars, were you thinking, “Wait a second, this is something people won’t believe”?

Jane Goodall: I did think that. In fact I didn’t send a telegram to Leakey until I’d seen it twice again, because I thought perhaps I’d imagined it.

Brian Rose: Patience. Would you argue that’s probably one of your greatest virtues?

Jane Goodall: When I was four and a half I hid for four hours in the hen house to see a hen lay an egg. So I was born with patience, I think.

Brian Rose: And not many people would have waited and watched for so long.

Jane Goodall: No, I don’t think they would.

28:06 Brian Rose: And so you see the use of tools, you wire back to Leakey, and then?

Jane Goodall: Then it all comes. The Geographic said they would send money, and they sent a photographer and filmmaker, who became my first husband. The pictures went around America and then around the world, and that’s when it all began.

Brian Rose: And when you look back at that and try to figure out how it became so big, because it really was a global sensation. If it was today, you would have broken the internet, I think.

Jane Goodall: Yes, totally. It would have gone more than viral.

Brian Rose: What was it about you, the chimpanzees, Africa, that made everyone so fascinated?

Jane Goodall: Well, first of all, nobody was doing it. Secondly, they said it was Beauty and the Beast: the black chimps and the fair-haired young English girl. That was attractive to people. And it was all new. People had no idea how chimps behaved in the wild. So, what with me being out in the forest, and the chimps, and Africa being kind of romantic, you know.

Brian Rose: How did you like being a celebrity?

Jane Goodall: Hated it. I hid. I hid from the press. I was really shy.

Brian Rose: In Africa, or here?

Jane Goodall: Not in Africa, there was no press there. But when I came back here, and going over to the Geographic.

Brian Rose: And people called you the Geographic cover girl. How did that feel?

Jane Goodall: I came to resent it deeply and bitterly. But at the beginning I didn’t really care.

Brian Rose: And later?

Jane Goodall: Yeah, because I was at Cambridge by that time.

30:02 Brian Rose: Just to finish with that: Cambridge. You go there in 62 to get your PhD. What was the reception? I can just imagine the first couple of months at Cambridge must have been very difficult.

Jane Goodall: It was horrible.

Brian Rose: Because they’re looking at you as, I don’t know, a pseudo-scientist, and then you’re also the cover girl, and you’re probably one of the few women there.

Jane Goodall: Yeah. Well, one, I felt the students resented me: “Who does she think she is, just because she went off to Africa?” And I’m sure some of them did think that. But secondly, it was the professors, who told me I’d done the study wrong. The chimps should have had numbers, not names, and they didn’t have personalities, minds capable of thought, or emotions, because those were unique to us. That’s what I was told, and I knew they were wrong, because my dog Rusty taught me, and the other animals I had too. So I knew they were wrong. And the only reason I wanted the PhD was for Louis Leakey. I didn’t want to let him down. I didn’t want to be a scientist. So I didn’t think I minded these cover girl things, but later on, when I did get the PhD, that was when I began to resent all these remarks: that just because I didn’t write in the accepted scientific way, and just because my ideas weren’t accepted in science, that would make me non-scientific.

31:32 And it is still a bone of contention: can you feel empathy with the animals you’re observing and be objective? Of course you can. But it’s still maintained by many scientists that it’s not possible. It’s not true.

Brian Rose: Because the scientific method is always extremely objective, double-blind, and cold.

Jane Goodall: So my feeling is that science which is head and no heart is what’s led to some really terrible inventions, and I think empathy in science is tremendously important. They did that experiment where they got students in and told them they were giving mild electric shocks to a man on the other side of the glass. Of course they weren’t really shocking him, but the students didn’t know that; they thought they were. And they were told to continue and give bigger and bigger shocks, and some of them actually went on until the shock would have killed the person, and they knew it, but they were told to do it as part of the experiment, and they did it. Which was a wicked thing to do, because how would the student feel afterwards? It’s terrible to do that.

Brian Rose: And what does that say about human nature?

Jane Goodall: Exactly. And about science. Because science is wonderful when it’s done right. It’s about knowledge, it’s finding out facts. But to get your facts through inhumane behaviour, I think, is awful.

Brian Rose: And your empathy was critical in the discoveries you made, the relationships you built, the things you learned about the chimpanzees. I would argue your feminine energy was maybe necessary in that situation.

Jane Goodall: It’s not necessarily feminine. The good men out there in the field have the same sort of empathy and wanting to know. Because, OK, you watch behaviour, you don’t really know what it means, but you have empathy, so you think you know what it means. And that’s desperately important, because once you think you know what it means, you can start finding out if that’s true. You can ask the right questions. But if you never get to that point through empathy, you can never ask the right questions. So it’s actually a critical part of the scientific method, to me. There must be empathy, there must be passion, there must be interest.

34:17 Brian Rose: OK. What were the other important observations you made about the chimpanzees? You started with the tools. What were some of the other big ones, now that you look back?

Jane Goodall: Oh, maternal behaviour is one of the really important ones: good mothers and bad mothers. Infant development, and how they develop differently. And then, as time went on, realising that the females learn not only by having their own children, but the sisters learn if they have baby brothers and sisters. A female who’s the last born in her family doesn’t know how to be a good mother, because she hasn’t been able to practise with a baby brother or baby sister. All of those were fascinating. The fact that they all have such different personalities. The fact that some males are really motivated to get to the top, and even if they get big setbacks and they’re attacked as they’re making this effort, they still come back when their wounds heal and try again. Others just give up and seem content to remain low-ranking. And the different techniques males use to get to the top: some use just brute strength, others use their heads.

Brian Rose: You noticed some alpha males that had long tenures at the top were more coalition builders, or brains. Mike didn’t really have a partner?

Jane Goodall: No, he didn’t, but he used these empty tin cans. He would charge with up to three of them, four-gallon cans, making a hell of a din, towards other males who all ranked higher than him, and of course they rushed out of the way. And then they would gather and groom Mike. So he got to the top in four months, and he had to defeat eleven who ranked higher than him, and as far as we know there was no serious fight. There were no wounds, no handfuls of hair torn out. And when we took the cans away, because it was dangerous for us too, he seemed to think, “Well, this is desperate.” So whereas a male would normally drag one branch in one of his dominance displays, Mike would drag three. When a male would throw one rock, or maybe two, Mike would throw twenty, because he didn’t have his cans any more. Then he relaxed and realised he’d made it.

Brian Rose: So the cans were another use of tools.

Jane Goodall: Yes, it definitely was.

Brian Rose: Wow. And what did some of this behaviour start teaching you about humans?

Jane Goodall: Well, for a long time I thought chimps were like us, but nicer. And then I realised they too have a dark, brutal, aggressive side. I think Louis wanted me to study the chimps because he felt it would help him better understand how early humans might have behaved. So you start seeing so many human characteristics in the chimps: the gentle maternal behaviour, the family bonds, the relations between older brothers and sisters, the long-term bond with the mother, this desire for dominance in some of the males. All these very human characteristics. The empathy, the grief shown by a mother when she loses her child, or a child when he loses his mother. The fact that they have altruism: a young male will adopt an orphan even if it’s not related to him. And then finding they have this warlike, brutal, aggressive behaviour. It helps us to understand more about some of the behaviours that we’ve brought with us from our ancient primate past, when there were ape-like, human-like creatures, and we went one way and they went the other.

38:13 Brian Rose: Before you found out about the dark side, do you think you romanticised their behaviour a little bit?

Jane Goodall: I thought they were much nicer than us.

Brian Rose: Which is a natural tendency. I’ve seen footage of you out there with them. These are big animals, potentially scary animals. Did you get over fear, or did you just not have fear?

Jane Goodall: Oh, I had fears sometimes. Luckily the fear has never come at the point of the interaction, whatever it is. It comes afterwards. When they first began to lose their fear of me, they would do these displays. They’d be charging all around me, swaying branches, hitting my head with them, and it was very scary. But at the time I thought, well, the best thing I can do is pretend to dig holes in the ground. I wouldn’t look at them. I pretended to eat leaves, and they eventually went away. After they’d gone, that was when I was afraid. My legs were trembling. It was very scary, really. But at the time, something comes in, and it wasn’t fear. It was more that I was fed up with them: “Why are they behaving like this, horrible creatures?”

Brian Rose: But you can’t react. That’s the last thing you can do.

Jane Goodall: No.

Brian Rose: I saw some video of you where there was a plexiglass screen separating you and some chimpanzees, and one was jumping at the plexiglass, and you said, “He’s just trying to get a reaction. He’s trying to control his environment,” which I guess is what any of us are trying to do. He’s slamming into the glass and you’re not even batting an eyelid. Poor chimp. I guess as an observer, and someone who lived with the chimps, you have to be one of the best actresses in the world as well.

Jane Goodall: Probably.

Brian Rose: There’s also some footage of you hugging a lot of chimps, and there was one that I think had been released into the wild, and she gave you a hug.

Jane Goodall: Oh, that was Wounda, a female. That was the most amazing thing that’s ever happened. I only met her that day. She was fully adult. She’d been nursed back from near death by the veterinarian who runs the sanctuary, and she was going to go onto this island. It’s not completely the wild, but it’s a beautiful forest; they just have to have a food supplement, that’s all. So Wounda was going to go and join the others. I was with her on the boat, and I thought, she’s with people she knows, but she must wonder what on earth is happening: going into a cage, being sedated, going on the boat. I was trying to reassure her that it was going to be wonderful. And when she got out of that cage, she suddenly, deliberately, stops when she gets to me and comes and gives me a hug. I think that went viral. It was amazing. We were all in tears, because it wasn’t just a little hug. She kept her arms around me.

Brian Rose: It felt like you were talking to her with your heart. There was something there.

Jane Goodall: It was really absolutely extraordinary.

Brian Rose: What happens when you’re hugging a chimpanzee like that, and it seems like something deep is being communicated between you two? Are you thinking?

Jane Goodall: Not really thinking much. Just sort of love, I suppose.

41:37 Brian Rose: Do you miss being with the chimpanzees all the time? Is it strange coming back to humans sometimes?

Jane Goodall: Well, since 1986 it’s been my life: 300 days a year on the road. I have a task which somehow I was given the gifts to do, which is to go and talk about the chimps, but also to try to find ways to save the forests, to save the wild places.

Brian Rose: You travel 300 days a year. You just flew in from one country, you’re about to go out to another one, and you’ve been known to say there’s so much left to do. So there’s this feeling of desperation. Can you explain?

Jane Goodall: Well, as I say, I was given a gift, and one of the gifts is communication. When I talk, people listen, and it affects them. That’s a gift. Because I know that, and because I feel it’s desperately important to work with young people, we have our youth programme now in about 100 countries. We thought it was more, but it’s actually about 100 countries, which is a lot. We have young people from kindergarten through university, about 100,000 active groups, and then all the young people who have grown up through it and whose attitude to the environment and animals has changed. They all say so, because of having this programme, which is about making things better for people, for animals, for the environment. My going around triggers more and more people to join, and it affects their parents, and then they become parents. We’re fighting for a critical mass of youth that understands we need money to live, but it goes wrong when we live for money, and that’s what leads to corruption. That’s what’s destroying the planet very, very fast. We don’t have a big window of time. Some people think it’s too late already, but I have great faith in the power of our brain and what we are doing with our brains to find ways to live in greater harmony with nature; in the resilience of nature, which is unbelievable; and in the indomitable human spirit that won’t give up in spite of setbacks. I was part of the climate march in New York last year. The organisers expected about 80,000 people, and it was actually more like 400,000. I was there, so I saw what was happening. People were on their cell phones. I heard someone say, “You should really come, the weather’s great and it’s fun here.” Somebody else said, “There’s a whole bunch of film stars. I don’t know who they are yet, but I’m going to find out.” Somebody said, “I saw Leonardo DiCaprio.” Somebody actually said, “Jane Goodall’s here,” which I thought was great. But anyway, that was happening in major cities around the world, and they said it was the biggest gathering of people around a single issue in the history of mankind. So that shows you what we can do with our intellect and this indomitable spirit. And then, when you’ve got the youth: the Roots and Shoots programme is not just about thinking of things to do to make the world better. It’s about rolling up your sleeves and getting out there and doing it. That’s why it’s working.

Brian Rose: And you’re surrounded by these young people this week. They’re staying here at Windsor Castle, they came from all over the world. What are the conversations like in those rooms back there, and what do they make of Jane Goodall, this woman who did all these things 50 years ago and is still doing them? What do they ask?

Jane Goodall: Well, I’m their role model, I’m their hero. They all tell me that.

Brian Rose: And what do they talk about?

Jane Goodall: Well, I wasn’t part of their discussions, because I was in Japan, but I’ve heard. They had one morning when they were discussing what they are going to do on International Peace Day: how will we lead up to it, how will we make what we do on that day spread out. There was a lot of talk about the refugee crisis and what we do about Muslims, and how we break down some of these cultural barriers. What will we do when we go back to our own countries? Then there was one long discussion about the ocean: how are we going to clean up the ocean? It’s so polluted, and it’s so important. There was a discussion on forests and how we protect not only the big rainforests, because they felt they weren’t quite ready for that yet, but forests around their own homes, which are also absorbing CO2 and providing habitat for wildlife.

Brian Rose: Big ideas.

Jane Goodall: Big ideas, but they’re doing something about it. They are working with refugees. It’s not just talk.

47:03 Brian Rose: You quoted Gandhi before, where you say this planet can provide for human need but not for human greed. That’s a pretty powerful statement. What do you mean by that?

Jane Goodall: Well, what I mean is that we could all live much more simple lives. Who needs all this? These young people who buy all these clothes, who wear a different outfit for each different event: that’s ridiculous. You don’t need that. It’s absolutely, totally unnecessary. Food that’s bought and wasted without thought: let’s just buy it, put it in our shopping basket. There’s so much waste and so much thoughtlessness. And look at the intensive farming that’s going on. Forget the cruelty for a moment, which is horrendous, but think of the forest cut down to grow the grain. Think of the fossil fuel used to take the grain to the animals, the animals to the abattoir, the meat from the abattoir to the table. Look at the methane gas that’s released, which is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. And the fact that it’s bad for our health. And waste: you do all this terrible damage, and then you waste half the meat on your plate, because you took more than you needed, or it was put on your plate and you didn’t want it. So there’s this terrible waste, and on the other side there are people living with almost nothing, in desperate struggle. So the big problems in the world: there’s the poverty, because in abject poverty you cut down the last trees, you’re desperate to grow food, or sell them for charcoal or something. Then you’ve got the unsustainable lifestyles of all the rest of us, including me. I do my best, but I know that my footprint is much too heavy. And then you’ve got human population growth. If you put those three together, that’s the nightmare. And on top of all that, you’ve got the corruption: people living for money.

49:24 Brian Rose: How do we reduce the population?

Jane Goodall: Well, family planning, which I think is really important. Until recently none of the big conservation groups would mention it, because it was politically incorrect, but I’ve been mentioning it from the beginning.

Brian Rose: You don’t seem very politically correct.

Jane Goodall: No, I’m not, and nobody’s attacked me yet. They probably will. But actually, if you go above politics, it’s desperately correct. So we’ve introduced family planning. We work with all the people around the little Gombe National Park to improve their lives, because otherwise how can we expect them to try to save the last forest? We went in with a team of Tanzanians and asked people what they thought we could do to make their lives better. Well, more food. So how do we get more food? We restore fertility to the overused land, because they’d cut down all the trees, so there was terrible soil erosion and the streams were getting silted up. So they wanted more food and water management. They wanted better education and health, which we did by working with the Tanzanians. And then we were able to introduce our family planning, and try to get scholarships to keep girls in school, because all around the world, as women’s education improves, family size has tended to drop. That programme started with 12 villages around Gombe, and it was so successful it’s now in 54. We’ve managed to get trees growing again around Gombe as a buffer, land the villagers put aside for conservation between the chimps and the villagers. And most of Tanzania’s chimps are not protected; they’re in village forest reserves. So by doing this programme, working with the people and getting our youth programme everywhere, they’re now protecting the forests. They’re using tablets, donated with help from Google Earth. These are people who can’t necessarily read or write, but they go into the forest and they’ve chosen to mark when a tree is illegally cut, when there’s a trap, when they find a cartridge, when they find a chimp nest or a leopard paw print. All of this goes up to a platform in the cloud. I mean, I think clouds are things that rain comes out of, but apparently it’s different today. So it goes up onto this platform called Global Forest Watch, and anybody involved around the world can download it, but also the village heads in the village councils can see it. They have no excuse any more. They can see what’s going on in their forest reserve. And so we’ve now got a corridor, so that the isolated Gombe chimps can once again have exchange with other communities. That programme is now in six African countries. That’s why I’ve got hope: because it’s working.

52:46 Brian Rose: Tell me about governments. You work with them all around the world, and you also see the power of big business and the amount of money that’s involved: companies like Monsanto and countless others. OK, you’re not a big fan of Monsanto. How do we deal with that as citizens? Do most people even understand what’s really happening at the top level, and how the lobbyists really control policy?

Jane Goodall: Well, the governments are basically owned by big business, as far as I can tell. They really are. They’re absolutely corrupted by big business, making the wrong decisions about the environment. And even when they try to do the right thing, very often they just don’t get voted back in. So it’s about getting this critical mass of youth out there with the right values, and hopefully they can take over in time. And with things like crowdsourcing, or whatever you call it, getting more and more people to boycott a company, that sort of thing. We just mustn’t give up. That’s the point.

Brian Rose: What’s your single biggest challenge for the next six to 12 months?

Jane Goodall: Probably Donald Trump.

Brian Rose: You must be so proud of my country, Jane. Do you think that could potentially set back all the work you’ve done, if it was Donald Trump?

Jane Goodall: Yes, he probably could. Maybe he’s killed himself off with his remarks about that Muslim woman, the mother of the dead hero. I couldn’t believe what I heard. I think maybe he’s gone a bit too far this time.

54:27 The biggest challenge for me in the next six months? I don’t think it’s any bigger than it’s been. Probably I’d better stay healthy. When you get to 82, you have to start thinking, well, something might go at any minute. That’s why I have to speed up, before it does. There’s more and more I have to do in less and less time.

Brian Rose: Do you enjoy taking breaks, or have you always been a workaholic?

Jane Goodall: Well, I don’t think of myself as a workaholic. The worst was doing what I do and getting books finished as well. That’s why it feels like a holiday now: I’m doing the same amount, but I’m not writing a book as well. Right now it’s more like articles, and we’ve got a new section on the Jane Goodall Institute website called Jane Goodall’s Good News, stories of hope. So I’m finding and writing up those, and spending time reading about what the Roots and Shoots groups are doing. So I don’t think there’s any extra challenge now compared with the past years.

Brian Rose: What is something you believe that other people think is crazy?

Jane Goodall: Well, a lot of people think having hope is crazy, let’s face it. But I’m optimistic. Why? Because going around, I meet all these amazing people doing amazing, incredible things. And because I’m travelling all around the world, I know some of the technology that can be used for good. I think this plane has just gone all the way around the world on solar power. It’s pretty amazing. And the movement for small family farms is growing, in spite of Monsanto, and organic food is growing. I think the big companies try to squash any success, or just belittle it, but nevertheless it is growing. There are more and more people who realise the way we ought to be going.

Brian Rose: Who are some of your heroes? You quote Gandhi, but when you think of people you consider successful, in your life or even before that, who comes to mind?

Jane Goodall: Well, in my own family. My family were successful people. They led good lives, they weren’t extravagant, they had the right values, so I’m very proud of them. Right now, if you ask who’s my hero, who jumps into my mind immediately is the Pope, Pope Francis. I think he’s absolutely wonderful, really wonderful. I just can’t wait to meet him.

Brian Rose: Which you will at some point.

Jane Goodall: I sincerely hope so.

Brian Rose: And why do you feel that way?

Jane Goodall: Well, because he’s got all the right values. He still won’t live in the sumptuous papal apartments, and he still carries his own suitcase. His predecessor had his moments of glory: when he arrived in a country he bent down to kiss the earth of the country he was arriving in. My mum was so funny. She said, “All he’s doing is kissing lumps of concrete,” which is not the earth at all. I said, if he’s going to kiss the earth, he should have somebody put it in a flowerpot, and at least kiss the earth. But this one carries his own suitcase. I think he’s amazing.

Brian Rose: You like people who are grounded, don’t you?

Jane Goodall: I like people who are grounded, and people whose values are simple, and who don’t worship money. We need money to live, but it goes wrong when we live for money, unless we live for money to make the world a better place. I like people who do that.

58:30 Brian Rose: Do you miss those times being all alone in the jungle, when it was just you and the chimpanzees, and your mind could open up and just observe? Because you do a lot of stuff now.

Jane Goodall: I do get back to Gombe twice a year, for maybe three or four days, and I always have one day totally alone in the forest. Not necessarily with chimps. The chimps are sometimes high in the hills, and I’m not going climbing high in the hills any more. And the tragedy for me is that if the chimps are down low, usually there are tourists with them, and that I just can’t. My old friends are mostly gone. So just being out in the forest is very spirit-healing for me. People say, “If you had a wish, would you like to go back into the forest with the chimps?” If it’s now, I have to say no, because that’s not what I should be doing. I would feel all wrong.

Brian Rose: Because you have bigger work right now.

Jane Goodall: Yeah. To go back to how it was, yes, that would be wonderful, but obviously that can’t happen.

Brian Rose: It’s interesting that earlier you said no one’s called you politically incorrect, and I’m guessing it’s because, as the kids would say, you have so much street cred because of everything you did. You pushed the limits, you pushed the boundaries, and you opened up the world to so many great things, so I feel like people listen to you more than other people.

Jane Goodall: Maybe that’s what it is. I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, it was a gift. I was given a gift. Maybe it’s my Welsh blood: they’re all great at storytelling. That’s an important part of it. People often say, “Oh Jane, I love your stories. Why didn’t you tell that story?” I say, “Well, I’ve told it so often.” But they say, “We all look forward to that story.” So there are certain stories people hope I will tell. And it’s like taking Mr H out. People sometimes say a little boy burst into tears when I didn’t have him with me. So I think storytelling is very important.

Brian Rose: Right. And you are the master storyteller. Your story is an incredible story.

Jane Goodall: My story is a pretty amazing story. I look back on my life and think, gosh, I did these things, and I didn’t know it at the time, but what I did then was really important for what I did next. It was literally like stages, which have brought me to now. I expect this is the last stage.

Brian Rose: When you talk to women, do you talk to them any differently from men?

Jane Goodall: No.

Brian Rose: I saw a film of you in 1960, out in the jungle, and I just can’t believe this footage exists, because it’s so long ago. Did you think of yourself as a woman icon, or was it just really important work?

Jane Goodall: Certainly not. Why would I? It was just me out in the forest. And then came all this Geographic stuff and the films, and then I began to realise that the press was important and I’d better stop hiding from them, because it was really important to share this information.

1:02:01 Brian Rose: What are some of the things people watching us can practically do that will help with these bigger ideas you’re talking about?

Jane Goodall: You know, one thing is, I meet people everywhere who are feeling hopeless. Some of them are depressed, some of them are angry, but mostly it’s just apathy. Talking to all these different people around the world, it’s pretty clear that those who really think about what’s going on are overwhelmed by the scale of it. It is terrible when you think of everything that’s going wrong in the world today, from climate change to corruption. And when people feel helpless, they do nothing, because they don’t know what to do. So the important thing, our main message for Roots and Shoots, is that every single day you live, every single day I live, every single day the film crew lives, everybody watching this talk, every day you make a difference of some sort, and you have a choice as to what kind of difference you’re going to make. Think about the consequences of your little choices. What do you buy? What do you eat? What do you wear? Where did it come from? How was it made? Did it cause human misery, animal suffering? Was fuel wasted? Could you have bought something nearer? Do you need it? If you just think about those little things, and millions and billions of people think the same, the world will change.

Brian Rose: You’re a vegan. You’ve made choices about what you eat.

Jane Goodall: Well, I’m just a vegetarian. I think if I lived in one place I’d be a vegan, but travelling, sometimes it’s hard even to be a vegetarian, let alone a vegan. I’d like to be a vegan. But also it’s less intimidating to people when I say, “Well, I’m only a vegetarian.” They feel, “Oh well, then that’s all right, maybe I can do that.”

Brian Rose: Do you think in 50 years’ time we’ll look back on the way we produce and consume meat today the way we look back on strange human behaviour from hundreds of years ago? Or do you think it will take longer before we get it?

Jane Goodall: Well, if it’s going to take longer, it will probably be too late, and we’ll have destroyed the world. There’s no question. So we’d better start thinking quickly that we’re behaving like savages.

Brian Rose: And global warming is a big factor in meat production.

Jane Goodall: Huge factor. Or rather, meat is a huge factor in global warming. And our use of plastics, and the way we’re polluting the water, and just the way we waste. Consume, consume, consume. It’s the consumer culture. We’re supposed to consume. If we stop consuming, we’re told we’re destroying the economy of the country, we’re being bad citizens. So consume, consume, consume. It’s awful.

Brian Rose: We’re just taught to do this.

Jane Goodall: Yes, we’re taught to do it, not to examine why we’re doing it. So that’s why working with youth is so important, and I hope everybody listening who has anything to do with any kind of child, or is a child, or feels like a child, will find out about Roots and Shoots.

1:05:36 Brian Rose: Jane, I always ask all my guests a simple question at the end of our discussions. If you could pick up a phone and make a call to the 20-year-old Jane Goodall and give that young woman a bit of advice, and I guess she’s probably still in England and hasn’t gone on the boat yet, what would you tell her?

Jane Goodall: Well, all I could tell her is what my mother told me, because the only advice I had from her was: if you want this thing, you’re going to have to work hard, take advantage of opportunity and never give up. I think that’s the best advice I could give to the 20-year-old, to any 20-year-old who’s listening. Don’t give up. I can qualify that, because there are times when you do something wrong and you should give it up. But give it up because you know there’s a better way to do it.

Brian Rose: And on that same note, the best advice you’ve ever received, besides that? Maybe from someone not in your family, a fellow scientist? Anything else that really struck you over the years, where you thought, “OK, I’m taking that to heart as well”?

Jane Goodall: Well, not really. It’s sort of like “believe in yourself”, isn’t it? Believe in yourself, but also question yourself, and don’t take things for granted. I think that’s very important. And be prepared to realise when you’re wrong. Don’t stick your head in the sand. Listen to criticism.

1:07:31 Brian Rose: And finally, you’ve touched on it, but to the 20-year-olds out there watching us: the things they can really do today. Is it looking at their own behaviour in the mirror and asking those questions, and then going out and seeing what they can do around them? Is that the most important thing they should be doing?

Jane Goodall: I think that’s the most important. And again, I really wish they’d look into Roots and Shoots, because one of the things with Roots and Shoots is breaking down the barriers between people of different cultures and religions, and between us and the natural world. They all say the same: it’s creating new bonds between these different groups of people around the world. It may seem stupid to think we can get to a critical mass, but I don’t think it’s stupid, not with the way the internet works today, the way we can make things go viral. So it’s not stupid to think we can change the world, because the kids are changing the world. I have faith in them.

Brian Rose: I do too. And I feel as if consciousness is shifting. While the internet sometimes seems to promote consumption and materialism, it often also promotes what you’re talking about with Roots and Shoots, and the things we like to talk about: a deeper meaning to our lives, being a little more aware that there’s more than what’s happening right in front of our eyes. So I’ve been quite optimistic in the last ten years, and it sounds like you have moments of that as well, when you’re in New York City and you see the march.

Jane Goodall: Oh, I’m optimistic. I’m cautiously optimistic. Let’s put it this way: I know there’s a window of time, and that’s the optimism. But I’m also a realist, and I know that if we don’t get together and make the right change, it will be too late. We can’t go on like this forever, because it’s not going to work. There’s no question about that. But I’m still very optimistic that we are going to get together in sufficient numbers to make that change before it’s too late.

Brian Rose: I’m optimistic too. Jane, thank you so much for your time. I’ve got to know more about you in preparing for this, and you’re just one of the great originals. I can see why these kids are drawn to you. I think you’re a very unique person to say these things, and a lot of other people wouldn’t be able to do what you do. So I appreciate everything you are doing. Thank you. Your pace inspires me as well.

Jane Goodall: And the youth, I think.

Brian Rose: Thanks so much. All the best with Roots and Shoots and everything here in London. I know you’re off travelling around the world, and I hope we see you again sometime.

Jane Goodall: Thank you.

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