Jane Goodall: ‘The sad thing about this pandemic is that we have brought it on ourselves’

It’s not lost on Jane Goodall, the primatologist who first observed that chimpanzees displayed human-like traits such as emotions, intelligence and social relationships back in 1960 Tanzania, that we’re still struggling to communicate within our own species, even during global pandemic 2020.

Few were as pioneering in bridging the distances between species as Goodall, whose early discovery in Tanzania that chimps used tools — specifically, twigs to remove ants from an anthill — meant we had to “redefine what we mean by tools, what it is to be an ape — or human.”

Since then, she’s used her voice to help preserve primate populations, champion responsible forestry, reduce global warming and stop wet markets (like the ones in Wuhan, China), as well as unethical private zoos (like the ones in Tiger King), and she’s been an inspiration for a new generation with her Roots & Shoots training program, where kids around the globe learn to tackle the planet’s biggest crises for the future.

To celebrate the 50th Earth Day, National Geographic Channel set up a group phone interview to discuss The Hope, their documentary on Jane’s life, but also because this “Mother Teresa for the environment” — even at age 86 — still loves to get her message across. Currently in lockdown with family in her native Bournemouth, England, Dr. Jane, who’s a vegetarian, talks about her past, her conservation efforts, and the difficulty of not traveling or being able to walk her dog.

Philippine STAR: Where are you now? Are you self-isolating?

I’m in my family home with my sister, her daughter and her daughter’s fiancé and two grown grandsons. I’m not exactly isolated, but I’m at home. I’m not going out shopping or anything. I walk my dog once a day, very short distances. But he’s old and he doesn’t like to walk. So, I don’t go very far, which is sad for me. I mean, I could let somebody else take him, but somehow going out to walk without the dog seems wrong to me.

If there’s a key message in The Hope, it’s that “time is running out” for the planet. From your perspective, how has this global pandemic made that message even more urgent?

The sad thing about this pandemic is that we have brought it on ourselves. It’s been predicted for years and years and years. Other epidemics started from viruses crossing the species barrier from an animal to us, and we haven’t learned from that, and the reason is that we’re destroying the habitats, and animals are getting crowded together because there’s less space for them — some of them coming into greater contact with people, because they’re moving out to try and find food, like monkeys and apes and so forth, and we’re hunting them in large quantities in Africa, eating their meat, trafficking them, selling them around the world either as pets or in the wet markets — the meat markets of Asia.

This pandemic started in the wet markets in China, possibly from bats, but nobody’s quite sure yet; we’ve also had epidemics coming from the factory farms in the western world, where animals are kept in cruel and confined conditions. So it’s our fault; we haven’t learned from previous epidemics.

You must get a lot of people asking you whether we’re facing extinction as a species, in light of the pandemic. Is there anything reassuring you can tell them?

We are actually in the midst of the sixth great extinction of life on the planet (EDITOR’S NOTE: The ongoing Holocene extinction, in which many animal species are disappearing from the planet due to human activity), and if we carry on with business as usual — if we carry on with this materialistic, greedy worshipping of money and power — then there isn’t much hope for us.

However, the silver lining of this pandemic is that many people have woken up, many people have breathed clean air for the first time in their lives, many have looked up at the stars at night. And I’ve seen it again and again, in Britain: it’s a wakeup call. And perhaps it will help us realize what we need to do — and what I’ve been begging people to do for years and years. Respect the natural world. Don’t always put economic development ahead of protection of the environment. Think about future generations. Make ethical decisions in our choices. If we all get together — not soon, but now — and start making the changes in the way that we think about things, we can turn it around. But this window of time is closing, there’s no question about that.

What lessons should we learn from the pandemic?

I hope this will teach us to start treating nature more respectfully. And stop eating animals and stop treating them as medicine and start thinking of them as sentient, intelligent, emotional creatures who feel pain and fear and distress and despair, just like us. You’ve only got to go into a factory farm and look at the pigs and the cows — pigs are as intelligent as dogs. Cows, given a chance, form really strong bonds with their calves. Go into one of the wet markets or meat markets, or see the markets with live animals; see the blood, feel the fear.

We need to start treating animals differently. I hope that with this scare, this pandemic — which more and more people realize has come from this contact with animals — will teach us to respect them more and realize we’re not alone in having these emotions: they feel just like we do, maybe not quite the same, but very similar. In fact, research in the brain has shown that exactly the same parts of the brain are motivated by fear in people, as in rats.

What was it like to first work with chimps in Tanzania, and to first realize they had traits similar to ours?

When I first began studying chimpanzees in 1960, I hadn’t been to college. Louis Leakey, my professor, wanted somebody whose mind was uncluttered with reductionist thinking of people studying animals. I was told at Cambridge that I couldn’t talk about chimpanzees as having personalities, minds or emotions, because those qualities were unique to humans. And I’d already learned from my dog as a child that that wasn’t true. So, because chimpanzees are so like us biologically — 98.6 percent the same DNA — and I was reporting all this similarity in behavior, science has gradually come to realize that we are not alone as beings with personalities, minds and emotions.

I also learned a lot about mothering from chimpanzee mothers — the importance of supporting your child. So looking back over 60 years, we see that the supportive mothers, the good mothers, their offspring males get a higher rank in society than others. And of course, that’s true for us as well.

You might have heard of a TV series in the US called Tiger King, about Americans who have private zoos. What do you say about wild animals kept in captivity, even if it’s for the best intentions, to preserve them or rescue them?

What I’ve heard about this series I find very disturbing, because large, wild animals should not be treated this way. I haven’t actually seen it, but I know there are chimpanzees, tigers, lions. They’re wild animals; they shouldn’t be handled (by the public).

We have two rescue centers in Africa, often chimps whose mothers have been killed, mostly for bush meat, and they come to us as frightened babies, so we have to handle them and try and treat them as a chimp mother would, then gradually they move out into chimp groups and into very large, safe areas, and the same is being done with gorillas, orangutans and elephants, and all sorts of wild animals. People rescue them.

But to keep them as pets is wrong. And usually the end is bad. Many people have been mauled and hurt severely by their pets, especially chimpanzees. So usually the animal, at a certain age, is sent away into the wild.

I just want to clarify: I am not against the really good zoos, because they help educate people, they raise money to help the animals and preserve them in their natural habitat.

Do you have more faith in this coming generation the Greta Thunbergs of the world to make these necessary global changes stick?

Yes. They’re my greatest reasons for hope, actually. Because Roots & Shoots started in Tanzania with 12 high school students in 1991 (it now has 150,000 students worldwide), and the main message is that every single individual matters, has a role to play and makes a difference every single day. And we can make ethical choices in what we buy, eat and wear. Unless we’re in extreme poverty, in which case we have to do whatever it takes to try and survive.

Each group of Roots & Shoots chooses three projects to make the world better for people, animals, and the environment. And what they choose will depend on how old they are, whether they’re at home or university, depending on the country, the culture and the religion. But as I travel — or used to travel 300 days a year around the world, right now I’m grounded, of course — that’s what gives me hope. They’re so enthusiastic, so passionate, and so dedicated. I’m most keen on growing Roots & Shoots further and further: it’s in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore — I’m not sure about the Philippines, somebody was starting it, but I don’t know if they did.

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Tonight, for Earth Day, National Geographic Channel airs Photo Ark: Rarest Creatures, tracking National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore’s project to catalogue all the world’s animals, at 8 p.m.; followed by the documentary Jane Goodall: The Hope, at 9 p.m.