Jane Goodall, renowned primatologist and anthropologist, emphasized to a rapt, packed, fawning audience at the Tata Theatre in Bombay’s iconic National Centre for the Performing Arts yesterday the need for people to learn about and understand nature. Delivering the closing address at the Literature Live! 2024 event held over three days at the NCPA, the U.N. Messenger of Peace explained why this has become so important in the modern world where technology is taking people further away from nature. “If you don’t understand something,” she said, “you cannot love it. And if you don’t love it, you will not try to save it.”
The frail but fit nonagenarian, in Bombay for the first time as part of her global Reasons for Hope tour, credited her mother with encouraging her to follow her passion for nature and wild life. Recounting an incident from the time she was just a year and a half old, and which she was told about later, Goodall said when her mother came to her room one night to tuck her in bed, she found the toddler clutching live earthworms in both hands. Many parents might have been repulsed by the sight and scolded the child, but not her mother Margaret. She gently explained that the worms need to be in the earth to survive and so they went and released them back in their garden.
Goodall said her mother realized that the child’s act stemmed from curiosity and saw no reason to crush that spirit. Curiosity, she said, marks the beginning of any scientific endeavour.
Goodall also credited books, in particular Tarzan of the Apes, for sparking in her the desire to go to Africa and live with animals and befriend the great apes. Now who would have thought a long-forgotten book, critiqued in some quarters today as a symbol of white supremacist thought, could also inspire a life-long passion and gift the world one of its foremost primatologists? The only thing, Goodall joked, she did not like about the book was that Tarzan married “the wrong Jane”. The other fictional character that left a deep imprint on Jane’s mind was Mowgli from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
Years later, in 1957, when Goodall decided to move to Kenya on the invitation of a friend, it was her mother again who stood by her and encouraged her to follow her dream. Most of Goodall’s friends and relations were critical of her choice to move to what was then still known in Britain as the Dark Continent. Margaret, however, simply told her daughter she would need to work really hard and seize any opportunities that might come her way.
The prized opportunity arose when Goodall came in touch with renowned palæoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who was trying to trace the origins of the human race at the time. By a quirk of fate, Leakey’s secretary had just left the job and Goodall, who had taken a “boring” secretarial course back in the U.K., landed the job. And when Leakey chose her to go to Gombe National Park in Tanzania and study chimpanzees in their natural habitat, who else but Margaret arrived to accompany Goodall, because the sponsors of the project were unwilling to send a young woman alone into the wild.
While her work with the chimpanzees of Gombe is well known and documented, Goodall also spoke about the reasons for moving out in the 1980s and engaging in other lobbying efforts. She spoke of how chimpanzees, which share 98.5% of their DNA with humans, were then used in medical research and had to live in harsh conditions in 5’x5’ barred cages and endure torture and sickness, all supposedly in the interests of the human race. None of those experiments yielded much gain for the human race, Goodall said.
While chimpanzees are no longer used in medical research today, other simians, such as the long-tailed macaques and rhesus macaques, are now prime candidates for torture and mistreatment at the hands of medical and pharmaceutical researchers. The reason cited is similar to that which used to be cited for using chimpanzees as laboratory rats: that these monkeys share more than 93% of their DNA with humans.
Worryingly, the area where Goodall did her pioneering work with chimpanzees, and which was part of a jungle that extended along Tanzania’s western border back in the 1960s, is today Africa’s second smallest national park. She mentioned how, when she flew over the park in a helicopter, she was shocked to see the jungle had become an island, with expanding human habitation hemming it in from all sides.
Later, asked by a student from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences how to deal with opposition to environmental work and get the message across, Goodall said it is important to listen to one’s opponents first and not just try to argue one’s case. “The way to reach people is through stories,” she suggested.
She also said it is important for every single individual to take responsibility for whatever he or she can do and not leave everything to governments. Saying that even an individual makes a difference, she told the audience that it must imbibe the idea that “my life matters, what I do is important”.
Sandy Pawpaw
Sandy Pawpaw is a fierce advocate of unleashing the animal in, and with, you.
