Planet of the Apes – The Goodall Formula
(Published in the September 2007 issue of The Newspaper, U of T's Independent Weekly)
By Ramya Jegatheesan
She’s Tarzan meets Dr. Doolittle, but with yogic pose and grace, a sort of frontier feminist who hauled it off to Africa when the popular imagination still painted it as a “sinister” place full of poison arrows and “missionaries being cooked in cooking pots.” Dubbed one of Leakey’s Angels (Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas are the others in the distinguished trio), Dr. Jane Goodall, a celebrated primatologist, U.N Messenger of Peace, and the public face of chimpanzee conservation (not to mention the darling of National Geographic) dropped by U of T this past Saturday to speak to a packed and enamored house at Convocation Hall.
The lecture, co-hosted by U of T’s Centre for Environment and the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada, is just one stop on her grueling lecture circuit, which has had her on the road 300 days a year, every year, since 1986 when it was made clear to her that the plight of the chimpanzees had reached a critical point. Now she flies from country to country, the de facto ambassador of chimps, raising awareness and rallying support for the cause, which covers everything from habitat conservation and the bushmeat trade to revealing the intimate links between our jungle living evolutionary cousins and ourselves.
The young Jane was a precocious child who even as an infant carted grubby earthworms into bed with her. When she was four she holed herself up in the family hen house for hours because she couldn’t work out in her head “where the egg in the hen came out”. Indeed, she was gone for so long that her family reported her missing. But instead of receiving a sound scolding Jane’s mother listened to the tale her wide eyed child brought back for her, a precedent that later led to her mother coming to Africa as her companion so that Jane could continue her research there (the government wasn’t willing to take responsibility for a girl alone in the African Bush). Unable to afford a university education, Goodall went to secretarial school and eventually earned enough to pay for a ticket to Kenya where the now famous meeting with Louis Leakey occurred.
Long story short, he recruited her as his personal assistant, and later enlisted her to study the Gombe chimps so that they might discover traits common to the mutual ancestor of chimpanzees and humans. But what Goodall ended up discovering was enough to turn the scientific world upside down. After months of patient waiting (and fearing that both time and money would run out) she witnessed a chimpanzee making a tool and dunking it into a mound as he fished for termites. Upon hearing this Louis Leakey said, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or call chimpanzees human.”
More discoveries were to follow. Goodall found that chimpanzees had keen intelligence with personalities to match, demonstrated altruism (such as adopting unrelated orphans), and contrary to popular belief had quite the carnivorous appetite, which they satiated by hunting, employing clever strategies that no human would scoff at. They also formed powerful lifelong bonds with their mothers, and as with humans there were good mothers and bad mothers. The ones who were supportive, protective and loving raised children who grew to be powerful assertive adults with social pluck, but the ones who were punitive and less nurturing raised children who grew to be timid and were banished to the lower rungs of the social ladder.
But they also had a dark side, one that some scientists urged her to downplay – they waged war. The fear was that this discovery would make it appear as if warfare and violence were our inescapable biological fate. To that Jane Goodall pointed out that while we have violent inclinations, we also have a brain capable of managing them, and that it is not only aggression but also altruism, compassion and other positive traits that we have inherited from our common ancestor and these are traits chimpanzees also display.
Alarmingly, our wild cousins are quickly vanishing. Their habitats are disappearing; the adults are sought as exotic cuisine for the “urban elite” in Africa and abroad (bushmeat from which the original strains of HIV are thought to have come); and the infants dragged off as pets until they are no longer cute playthings, but potentially dangerous adults. The Jane Goodall Institute seeks to counter this by working with the locals – local populations, NGOs, and governments – and they are making progress.
Nevertheless, you can’t engage in conservation efforts without the cooperation of locals, and the human population around Gombe is far from affluent. Many of them are refugees fleeing from the nearby civil war, and have to swallow their own daily dose of human misery. This prompted Jane Goodall to start TACARE (the “Take Care” program) in her efforts to create a “greater Gombe ecosystem” “How can you even try to save the chimpanzees when these people have nothing?” she asked.
TACARE involved a team of Tanzanians who went to the people of Gombe and sat with them “in the African way” to hear their needs. This dialogue led to the implementation of a variety of programs designed to improve the lives of Gombe’s human denizens in a sustainable manner while still advancing conservation and reforestation efforts. Some of the programs include scholarships for girls to attend school, the digging of wells, the teaching of effective farming techniques and ways of preventing soil erosion as well as a micro-credit scheme.
But Jane Goodall’s vision doesn’t stop there. The Jane Goodall Institute also has a youth wing (for youths anywhere from preschool to university) aptly named Roots and Shoots for its ability to break through even the most stubborn and difficult of obstacles (while roots lay the unshakeable foundation, shoots will break brick walls in their thirst for the sun) and that collectively it’s possible to tackle obstacles that individually seem insurmountable. Each team tackles three projects: a community improvement project, an animal (wild or domestic) welfare project, and an environmental improvement project. Roots and Shoots is already cracking through brick walls all over the world (there are over 8000 groups in nearly 100 countries) in their bid to reclaim their planet and their futures. Their Canadian members alone number over 10, 500.
Jane Goodall believes that “we need to get back to the wisdom of the indigenous people” who made decisions based on how it will affect humanity seven generations into the future instead of the “shareholder” mentality we have so blindly adopted. Indeed, our consumption has become larger than life, larger even than our planet can sustain. At this rate, we would need four or five earth-like planets to continue living the way we do. But what we need to accept is that we only have the one planet, not two, not three, but one. Despite all this, Goodall still has hope and it is a hope that stems from four things: “the incredible resilience of nature, the human brain, the indomitable human spirit, and the determination of the young.”
In one of her popular children’s books Jane Goodall retells the story of the eagle and the wren. In it, the birds hold a contest to see who can fly the highest of them all. At first it is the eagle who manages to soar higher than the rest, but he too reaches the upper limits of his ability, and at that point the tiny wren, who has stowed away on his back, takes off soaring higher than all the others possibly could on their own. It’s a lesson we could all learn and relearn and a story we could all hear again and again.
(Published in the September 2007 issue of The Newspaper, U of T's Independent Weekly)
By Ramya Jegatheesan
She’s Tarzan meets Dr. Doolittle, but with yogic pose and grace, a sort of frontier feminist who hauled it off to Africa when the popular imagination still painted it as a “sinister” place full of poison arrows and “missionaries being cooked in cooking pots.” Dubbed one of Leakey’s Angels (Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas are the others in the distinguished trio), Dr. Jane Goodall, a celebrated primatologist, U.N Messenger of Peace, and the public face of chimpanzee conservation (not to mention the darling of National Geographic) dropped by U of T this past Saturday to speak to a packed and enamored house at Convocation Hall.
The lecture, co-hosted by U of T’s Centre for Environment and the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada, is just one stop on her grueling lecture circuit, which has had her on the road 300 days a year, every year, since 1986 when it was made clear to her that the plight of the chimpanzees had reached a critical point. Now she flies from country to country, the de facto ambassador of chimps, raising awareness and rallying support for the cause, which covers everything from habitat conservation and the bushmeat trade to revealing the intimate links between our jungle living evolutionary cousins and ourselves.
The young Jane was a precocious child who even as an infant carted grubby earthworms into bed with her. When she was four she holed herself up in the family hen house for hours because she couldn’t work out in her head “where the egg in the hen came out”. Indeed, she was gone for so long that her family reported her missing. But instead of receiving a sound scolding Jane’s mother listened to the tale her wide eyed child brought back for her, a precedent that later led to her mother coming to Africa as her companion so that Jane could continue her research there (the government wasn’t willing to take responsibility for a girl alone in the African Bush). Unable to afford a university education, Goodall went to secretarial school and eventually earned enough to pay for a ticket to Kenya where the now famous meeting with Louis Leakey occurred.
Long story short, he recruited her as his personal assistant, and later enlisted her to study the Gombe chimps so that they might discover traits common to the mutual ancestor of chimpanzees and humans. But what Goodall ended up discovering was enough to turn the scientific world upside down. After months of patient waiting (and fearing that both time and money would run out) she witnessed a chimpanzee making a tool and dunking it into a mound as he fished for termites. Upon hearing this Louis Leakey said, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or call chimpanzees human.”
More discoveries were to follow. Goodall found that chimpanzees had keen intelligence with personalities to match, demonstrated altruism (such as adopting unrelated orphans), and contrary to popular belief had quite the carnivorous appetite, which they satiated by hunting, employing clever strategies that no human would scoff at. They also formed powerful lifelong bonds with their mothers, and as with humans there were good mothers and bad mothers. The ones who were supportive, protective and loving raised children who grew to be powerful assertive adults with social pluck, but the ones who were punitive and less nurturing raised children who grew to be timid and were banished to the lower rungs of the social ladder.
But they also had a dark side, one that some scientists urged her to downplay – they waged war. The fear was that this discovery would make it appear as if warfare and violence were our inescapable biological fate. To that Jane Goodall pointed out that while we have violent inclinations, we also have a brain capable of managing them, and that it is not only aggression but also altruism, compassion and other positive traits that we have inherited from our common ancestor and these are traits chimpanzees also display.
Alarmingly, our wild cousins are quickly vanishing. Their habitats are disappearing; the adults are sought as exotic cuisine for the “urban elite” in Africa and abroad (bushmeat from which the original strains of HIV are thought to have come); and the infants dragged off as pets until they are no longer cute playthings, but potentially dangerous adults. The Jane Goodall Institute seeks to counter this by working with the locals – local populations, NGOs, and governments – and they are making progress.
Nevertheless, you can’t engage in conservation efforts without the cooperation of locals, and the human population around Gombe is far from affluent. Many of them are refugees fleeing from the nearby civil war, and have to swallow their own daily dose of human misery. This prompted Jane Goodall to start TACARE (the “Take Care” program) in her efforts to create a “greater Gombe ecosystem” “How can you even try to save the chimpanzees when these people have nothing?” she asked.
TACARE involved a team of Tanzanians who went to the people of Gombe and sat with them “in the African way” to hear their needs. This dialogue led to the implementation of a variety of programs designed to improve the lives of Gombe’s human denizens in a sustainable manner while still advancing conservation and reforestation efforts. Some of the programs include scholarships for girls to attend school, the digging of wells, the teaching of effective farming techniques and ways of preventing soil erosion as well as a micro-credit scheme.
But Jane Goodall’s vision doesn’t stop there. The Jane Goodall Institute also has a youth wing (for youths anywhere from preschool to university) aptly named Roots and Shoots for its ability to break through even the most stubborn and difficult of obstacles (while roots lay the unshakeable foundation, shoots will break brick walls in their thirst for the sun) and that collectively it’s possible to tackle obstacles that individually seem insurmountable. Each team tackles three projects: a community improvement project, an animal (wild or domestic) welfare project, and an environmental improvement project. Roots and Shoots is already cracking through brick walls all over the world (there are over 8000 groups in nearly 100 countries) in their bid to reclaim their planet and their futures. Their Canadian members alone number over 10, 500.
Jane Goodall believes that “we need to get back to the wisdom of the indigenous people” who made decisions based on how it will affect humanity seven generations into the future instead of the “shareholder” mentality we have so blindly adopted. Indeed, our consumption has become larger than life, larger even than our planet can sustain. At this rate, we would need four or five earth-like planets to continue living the way we do. But what we need to accept is that we only have the one planet, not two, not three, but one. Despite all this, Goodall still has hope and it is a hope that stems from four things: “the incredible resilience of nature, the human brain, the indomitable human spirit, and the determination of the young.”
In one of her popular children’s books Jane Goodall retells the story of the eagle and the wren. In it, the birds hold a contest to see who can fly the highest of them all. At first it is the eagle who manages to soar higher than the rest, but he too reaches the upper limits of his ability, and at that point the tiny wren, who has stowed away on his back, takes off soaring higher than all the others possibly could on their own. It’s a lesson we could all learn and relearn and a story we could all hear again and again.
