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Jane Goodall: 'There is no problem in having empathy'

by Charlotte Uhlenbroek

NewScientist, February 24, 2010

Half a century after Jane Goodall began studying chimpanzees in Tanzania, she talks to her former student Charlotte Uhlenbroek about chimpanzee fire-dancing, the peril of bushmeat and the empowerment of local people

"EVERYBODY studying animals in the wild today needs to be aware of the need for conservation and involving local people. It's rather unfair because when I began my study there were probably over a million wild chimps and the equatorial forest belt stretched across Africa - I was very lucky to be able to concentrate purely on research."

Jane Goodall is sitting in the corner of a cafe at Heathrow airport in the UK. I have managed to grab an hour of her time between a radio interview and her flight to Munich, Germany. Although Goodall became world famous through her long-term study of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania, these days she is on the road some 300 days of the year, rushing between meetings with top politicians, star-studded fund-raisers and remote African villages in a bid to save chimpanzees and their forests. "I am not doing any research at all. I can't even do any analysis, there's no time," she says with regret.

It's been years since I last saw Goodall - I studied chimpanzees with her at Gombe in the early 1990s. She's changed little: a slight woman with straight silver-grey hair pulled back in her signature ponytail, she looks remarkably well despite her punishing schedule. Her soft voice belies a steely determination: for Goodall, even at 75, there is no such thing as work-life balance - her life is her work. Neither will there be any let up. This year is even busier than usual as there is a raft of projects and celebrations afoot to mark the 50 years since Goodall first arrived in Gombe.

She was initially sent to Tanzania by the anthropologist Louis Leakey, who also enlisted Diane Fossey to study mountain gorillas in Africa and Biruté Galdikas to follow orangutans in Borneo. The trio of young women were subsequently dubbed "Leakey's Angels". It was unusual in those days for women to do field research, especially in Africa. "My family were always very supportive - my mother came out with me, after all - but others thought I was crazy, and some even thought Leakey was amoral. They thought it was dangerous and he had no business sending me," she says.

Goodall was unusual not only as a female field researcher, but also because she had no training as a scientist. "He wanted someone whose mind was uncluttered by scientific theory because back then ethology was trying to make itself into a hard science and was very reductionist - very reductionist. You were always supposed to choose the simple explanation. But then all these different field studies started coming in about complex social structures showing clear examples of intelligent behaviour that eventually forced science to rethink."

Goodall's research became one of the longest continuous field studies of any animal, producing startling revelations about wild chimpanzees' behaviour, such as meat-eating and their manufacture and use of tools. As humans had previously been defined as "tool-makers", when Goodall telegraphed Leakey to report that the chimps were modifying twigs in order to "fish" termites out of holes in rock-solid termite mounds, it provoked the now famous response: "We must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human."

However, in some circles Goodall was criticised for naming the chimps and becoming emotionally engaged with her subjects. She makes no apology for this: "There is absolutely no problem in having empathy and being objective. Empathy helps us gain an understanding at a different level that you can then test in a rigorous scientific way."

But, after all these decades, what is there left to say about chimpanzees? "One of the most exciting areas is the different culture found between chimpanzee populations." We enthusiastically discuss the discovery of chimps using wooden cleavers to split fruit in the Nimba mountains in Guinea, and using branches as spears to jab at bushbabiesMovie Camera in tree holes in Fongoli, Senegal.

Most recently there was a report of a Fongoli chimp performing a "fire dance" in response to a bush fire, similar to the slow-motion display that Gombe chimps carry out during rainstorms. This kind of cultural variation may well give us an insight into how behaviours are transmitted socially, rather than through individual learning or genetic transmission, and has implications for our understanding of early hominid evolution. In a sense, if we lose chimps we lose a part of our own history.

It was at a conference in Chicago in 1986 that the crisis was first brought to light. Researchers from field sites across Africa ended their presentations with the same worrying message - the chimps in a given area were in trouble from deforestation or poaching. It rapidly became apparent that chimps were facing a dramatic decline across their entire range. Goodall decided to hand over data-collection in Gombe to local field assistants and PhD students, including me, and devote her time to protecting chimpanzees and their habitat.

Since then the situation has become considerably worse. There are now perhaps as few as 150,000 chimps remaining in the wild. I ask her if she thinks the situation is hopeless. "I feel more determined than ever and take inspiration from how well our forestry programme is doing around Gombe," she says.

Gombe National Park is just 60 square kilometres. When I was doing my research there in the mid 1990s, the forest ended abruptly at the edge of a rift escarpment and the hills beyond were completely bare, forcing local people to come into the park to collect firewood. "Now there are trees that are about so high," says Goodall, gesturing just above the height of our table, "running for about 100 kilometres from south of Kigoma in Tanzania to Burundi. The really exciting thing is that the villagers have been trained to monitor their forest using Google Earth. Using a cellphone that takes photographs and video, information is sent straight up to a satellite and villagers can see for themselves where trees have been cut, where there's been a fire, or erosion."

Promoting the kind of initiative that empowers local people is one of Goodall's strengths. By using local people with no more than primary school education to collect the long-term data in Gombe, she has created a community that benefit from, and are proud of, the chimps. "They are their chimps," she says. Although the situation is improving at Gombe, "the real tough issue is the commercial bushmeat trade in central and west Africa. It's so terribly unsustainable."

Goodall's work has gone well beyond protecting chimps and their habitat. She has a holistic view of conservation and feels that saving the natural world has to be done on all fronts simultaneously. An organisation she founded called Roots & Shoots now operates in over 100 countries and is designed to encourage young people to roll up their sleeves and take action. Her latest book, Hope for Animals and Their World: How endangered species are being rescued from the brink, is not, as one might expect, about chimpanzees, but the efforts made to save a wide variety of animals from extinction. It reflects Goodall's current role as a spokeswoman for wildlife conservation and as a reminder that we are capable of turning things around if we put our minds to it. "We could all kill ourselves trying to conserve what's left of this planet but if new generations aren't raised to be better stewards then there's very little point."

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