It is not easy working for animals and their habitat restoration. An expert in animal work and one who is aware of the enormous challenges that go with it is Dr. Jane Goodall. Here is an excerpted article of her current perspective of the earth and what we need to do by Victoria Gill, Presenter, BBC Radio 4 Inside Science.
“I am a little bit exhausted,” Goodall admits. “I’ve come here from Paris. And after here I go to Berlin, then Geneva. I’m on this tour talking about the danger to the environment and some of the remedies,” she says.
One of the remedies she wants to talk about today is a tree-planting and habitat restoration mission that her eponymous foundation and non-profit technology company, Ecosia, are carrying out in Uganda. Over the past five years, with the help of local communities and smallholder farmers, the organisations have planted nearly two million trees.
“We’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction,” Dr Goodall tells me during our interview for BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science. “The more we can do to restore nature and protect existing forests, the better.”
The primary aim of this project is to restore the threatened habitat of Uganda’s 5,000 chimpanzees. Dr Goodall has studied and campaigned to protect the primates for decades. But the activist also wants to highlight the threat that deforestation poses to our climate.
“Trees have to grow to a certain size before they can really do their work,” she says. “But all this [tree-planting] is helping to absorb carbon dioxide.”
This week, world leaders have gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, for COP29 – the latest round of UN climate talks.
And Dr Goodall says taking action to slow down the warming of our planet is more urgent than ever.
“We still have a window of time to start slowing down climate change and loss of biodiversity,” Dr Goodall says. “But it’s a window that’s closing.”
Destruction of forests, and other wild places, she points out, is intrinsically linked to the climate crisis.
“So much has changed in my lifetime,” she says, recalling that in the forests of Tanzania where she began studying chimps more than 60 years ago, “you used to be able to set your calendar by the timing of the two rainy seasons”.
“Now, sometimes it rains in the dry season, and sometimes it’s dry in the wet season. It means the trees are fruiting at the wrong time, which upsets the chimpanzees, and also the insects and the birds.”
Over the decades that she has studied and campaigned to protect the habitat of wild chimpanzees, she says she has seen the destruction of forests across Africa: “And I’ve seen the decrease in chimpanzee numbers.
“If we don’t get together and impose tough regulations on what people are able to do to the environment – if we don’t rapidly move away from fossil fuel, if we don’t put a stop to industrial farming, that’s destroying the environment and killing the soil, having a devastating effect on biodiversity – the future ultimately is doomed.”
Hearing her speak in this way gives me a glimpse of a toughness that belies her well-spoken, gentle demeanour. When Jane Goodall began observing and studying chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, she was a trailblazer. Her research, now considered groundbreaking, was controversial.
She was the first person to witness and document chimpanzees making and using tools – the primates prepared sticks to fish for termites. Prior to her observations, that was a trait that was thought to be uniquely human.
She revealed that the animals form strong family bonds – and even that they engage in warfare over territory.
But her approach – associating so closely with the animals she studied, naming them and even referring to them as “my friends” was scoffed at by some (mostly male) scientists.
Her supervisor and mentor, Professor Louis Leakey, though, saw the value in her technique: “He wanted somebody whose mind wasn’t messed up by the reductionist attitude of science to animals,” Dr Goodall explains.
“You don’t have a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a horse and not give them a name. It’s the same as when I studied squirrels in my garden as a little girl – they all had names.”
Her methods – and her sense of closeness to the primates she has dedicated her life to – have given her a unique perspective.
She tells me about a “wonderful moment” with a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard, the male chimp who she first witnessed making and using tools to catch termites. “He was the first to lose his fear of me,” she recalls.
“I sat down near him and, lying on the ground, was the ripe red fruit of an oil palm. I held it out towards him and he turned his head away. Then I put my hand closer and he turned and looked into my eyes, reached out and very gently squeezed my fingers.
“That is how chimpanzees reassure each other. We understood each other perfectly – with a gestural language that obviously predates human speech.”
So what keeps Dr Goodall going? On this she is emphatic – charmingly affronted by the question: “Surely people want a future for their children. If they do, we have to get tougher about [environmental] legislation.
“We don’t have much time left to start helping the environment. We’ve done so much to destroy it.”
As Dr Goodall said in Los Angeles, “Vote For Nature!” Choose candidates who are aware of global warming and willing to fight for the earth, wildlife and all on it!
Stay strong, be informed and work harder.
For the animals.
Photo © Mary Holmes/Synergy Dogs Media
Dr. Jane Goodall speaking during the United Nations Day of Peace event in Los Angeles. September 21, 2024.
I have spoken with many who work with animals and the environment the past week and they all are of the same realization that those of us involved in this work have a longer road ahead of us than even before due to the election results in the United States. The track record first time around of the incoming administration was troubling and grossly irresponsible. Here are some important articles. Know your facts!
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-environment-rollbacks-list.html
https://defenders.org/blog/2020/02/top-10-reasons-why-trump-administration-worst-ever-wildlife
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54797743
I have two different healing workshops for your emotional restoration. Take a look at the workshops with the link below.