In March 1998, I had the privilege of sitting down with Jane Goodall, whose pioneering work transformed how we understand chimpanzees and our shared planet. This week, as we mark her passing at 91, we revisit that conversation. 

The recording has survived nearly three decades — the audio may not be perfect, but her wisdom and spirit shine through.

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:10] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to this special edition Who What Why podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In a week when we lost Jane Goodall at 93, it feels right to go back to a voice that shaped how we see the natural world. Long before climate change and biodiversity became the common vocabulary, Goodall was already teaching us about connection between humans, animals, and the fragile planet we share. Back in March of 1998, when Goodall was only 66 years old, I had the rare privilege of sitting down with her here in the Napa Valley. The tape you’re about to hear has survived those years. The audio may not be perfect, but the ideas and the spirit certainly are. So without any further introduction, here is my conversation from March of 1998 with Jane Goodall.

[00:00:57] Jeff Schechtman: It is my very special privilege to have as a guest in this portion of the program, a woman whose pioneering work in Africa has contributed significantly to our understanding of chimpanzee behavior and their endangered status in the world. Throughout 38 years of research, she has come to understand the link between the fate of the chimpanzee and all endangered species and the people who live on this planet. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education, and Conservation in 1977 to provide ongoing support for field research on wild chimpanzees and to help arrest the rapid decline of the chimpanzee population in the wild. Jane Goodall, good morning.

[00:01:33] Jane Goodall: Good morning, and thank you for inviting me.

[00:01:35] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it’s a pleasure to have you here. First of all, reading up prior to our interview today and looking at the wonderful research that you’ve done over the past 38 years, one of the things that came to mind is that so much has happened in terms of the sciences over these past 38 years, in terms of studying genetics and DNA. How has that had an impact on much of the research that you’ve done?

[00:01:58] Jane Goodall: It had quite a major impact, and I think what’s quite remarkable is that the great Louis Leakey thought about studying our close and living relatives, hoping that this would give him some insight into how our own earliest ancestors may have behaved. And he didn’t realize how close to us chimpanzees actually are biologically. All that emerged from so many, many factors, including just a few weeks ago, an area in the chimpanzee brain never thought to be there before, which in us is responsible for language and cognition skills.

[00:02:35] Jeff Schechtman: Now, it’s interesting because many of the similarities between human and chimpanzee behavior, things that scientific research has borne out in terms of similarities, and the similarity in the DNA and other scientific aspects, were really things that you were beginning to identify just from observing them some 35 years ago.

[00:02:55] Jane Goodall: Yeah, I think what’s fascinating there is that when I began, I had not yet got any university degree, that came later. And so when I began out there in the field, and I identified the chimpanzees as vivid and unique personalities, and I saw how they used their mind to solve problems, and I saw how they shared emotions with us similar to those, perhaps identical, that we call happiness and sadness and despair and hope. I didn’t realize that none of that was supposed to be. It was only human who had minds and rational thought, only humans who had emotions, only humans who could be described as having personalities. But you see, the fortunate thing was I didn’t have the scientific education so I went ahead and described the obvious. And I really think that our understanding of chimpanzee behavior, the fact they can be altruistic, they care for each other, but having a brutal side, unfortunately like us, really has more than anything else helped to blur the line we once thought of as so sharp between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.

[00:04:02] Jeff Schechtman: What would you say is the major thing that you’ve learned, not any one thing necessarily, but overall in studying the chimpanzees and how we can learn as a society from what we found in the research studying chimpanzees in the wild?

[00:04:20] Jane Goodall: I think two things really. I think for one thing, a rather general following on from what I said before, it has humbled us and it has taught us a new respect. I believe not only for chimpanzee, but also for so many other amazing animals with whom we share the planet. And it raises a lot of ethical issues. Once you believe that we’re not the only sentient sapient being, how we use and abuse them in our daily lives, that’s a kind of general shift of attitude. But the other is the tremendous importance in chimpanzee society of early experience. What kind of mother do you have? What sort of family are you born into? What are your early experiences? And those things have a profound effect on the behavior of the chimpanzee as an adult. And it behooves us to look a little more carefully at the effect on our own children of some of the ways we bring them up today.

[00:05:17] Jeff Schechtman: It really brings into bold relief, I suppose, much of the nature versus nurture argument.

[00:05:22] Jane Goodall: It absolutely does. And of course, with chimps, humans and everything, it’s a mixture, part of the genetic package we bring into the world. And then the things that we learn and we go through life as individuals. And the more complex the brain, the greater the role that learning plays in an individual’s life cycle. And chimps are so like us, that learning plays as great a role for them.

[00:05:46] Jeff Schechtman: One of the other things that came to mind when I was thinking about this last night, one of the things that we sort of deal with in our society today is the fact that technology, that the world in general seems to be moving at a pace faster than our evolutionary and biological ability to cope with it. That science and technology is advancing faster than human evolution. And it’s having negative consequences on the human race. How are all the scientific advances and similar kinds of things affecting the chimpanzees?

[00:06:19] Jane Goodall: I think it’s a combination of what you say, the advance of technology, along with the tremendous rise in human population numbers. And these two things together are enabling us to conquer ever more of the natural world and tame it in a way so that we can live there or that we can conduct whatever it is that we wish to gain from going to some of these places. And that is reducing the natural habitat for chimpanzees and other amazing creatures. And I think as I spend a lot of time now traveling around the world, particularly working with young people, that you realize increasingly how interconnected all these problems are. You might say, well, it’s an overpopulation in certain African forests and cutting down the trees for firewood and so forth that is the biggest threat. But then we find that so many of the problems faced by the people there are initially caused by the greed and materialistic societies of the world.

[00:07:22] Jeff Schechtman: And that really is growing as opposed to shrinking. You know, we have the president in Africa now, which really calls into issue the fact that the African nations are trying to progress further. They do want to engage in international trade. And all of that commerce and to a certain extent, greed, as you say, will become a larger part in the environment in Africa right now.

[00:07:46] Jane Goodall: It absolutely will. Just as it is happening in China. Very, very terrifying. And we might sit back in our Western luxury and we think, oh, how dreadful it will be if every Chinese person has a car and every African person has a car. And somehow we have to come to term with the numberless people on the planet. And somehow we have to work out a more equitable way of sharing the resources of the planet. I mean, we take so much if we take a typical city in the Western world, we are, the numbers in that city are far in excess of what we could produce from the land of the city hit on and around that city. We’re taking it. We’re taking it from the land of other countries[.

[00:08:34] Jeff Schechtman: Assuming the worst case scenario, I suppose, or that the population continues to grow, that commerce continues to advance. What is the future for the chimpanzees and some of the other creatures in their natural habitat in Africa?

[00:08:49] Jane Goodall: We’re working very hard with the local people, the people surrounding the area that foreign [unintelligible] and other creatures live. We’re trying to introduce conservation education programs, growing of trees as an agriculture, the reforestation, the prevention of erosion, working with women to improve their standards of education in the hope that, as in other parts of the world, it will reduce the family size that’s being shown to happen everywhere, to have the microcredit lending program. And the people are then beginning to understand that we’re all in it together. It’s the last of the forest goes, lost as a desert. And it’s not just the animals that will suffer, and this is being shown again and again and again. These programs are working. These programs have meaning that the people understand why it’s necessary to conserve the forest for the chimpanzee.

[00:09:47] Jeff Schechtman: You know, I mentioned at the beginning that you were going to be here in the Napa Valley. You’re giving a lecture. You spend a lot of time speaking out on these issues. And the work of the Jane Goodall Foundation is dedicated to many of the issues that you’re talking about. How much time do you get to spend these days in Africa still and studying these animals?

[00:10:05] Jane Goodall: Well, I’m actually not studying them. My job there is to maintain a research team that’s doing my thing the right way. And I visit as often as I can. So much of my time in Africa now is spent visiting the very sanctuary where we’re caring for chimpanzee orphans whose mothers have been shot, either for the live animal trade, rather more frighteningly enough, for food. Meat trade is decimating not only the chimpanzee, but so many of the other animals of the last of the African forest.

[00:10:38] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the distinction between the chimpanzees and the gorillas.

[00:10:43] Jane Goodall: Oh, chimpanzees biologically are closer to us than they are to gorillas. A little bit strange, but that’s biologically true, genetically true. Chimpanzees are a little bit smaller, well, quite a lot smaller. They have a very different society. They look different. They sound different. And to confuse the whole issue, there’s also what used to be called the pygmy chimp. And that now we call the bonobo.

[00:11:09] Jeff Schechtman: You know, in mentioning earlier the similarity in DNA, I think you say that there’s two percent difference in DNA between humans and the chimpanzees. One of the dangers in that, I suppose, is that it inclines science and researchers to use more chimpanzees for doing a lot of scientific research.

[00:11:28] Jane Goodall: Kind of research that really had to be phased out and actually is being phased out is the biomedical research. And of course, as you say, they’re used because they’re like us, that they can be infected with the diseases that other creatures less like us cannot be infected with. So chimps were very massively used for helping out vaccines for AIDS. It’s been found that they’re not after all useful. They don’t get the symptoms of AIDS. And they’re now being made surplus. And this is creating a very real area of concern to the animal welfare group in the United States, because the National Institute of Health is retiring 500 chimpanzees, which are kind of up for grabs. And then there’s the famous Air Force chimps, the ones that were put together in the early 60s as space research. 140 of them. And we have to bid for them by the beginning of June, or they may go off to some other medical research. That wouldn’t be fair.

[00:12:35] Jeff Schechtman: After all these years of studying the chimpanzees, are you still sometimes surprised by things that you see in their behavior?

[00:12:42] Jane Goodall: There’s always little surprises. They’re not the great big surprises. But, you know, when you’ve been studying beings who can live to be 60 years old, you find little things that you’ve never seen before. Like a mother, instead of having a five year birth interval, has a three year birth interval, which means basically she’s looking after two babies of the same kind. And then you’ve got twins born and how fascinating to see how a mother can cope with twins. It’s only happened twice in 38 years. So there are all the small surprises and the puzzle. Why do some young females at adolescence leave the community they were born into and take up residence in another community where other young females go off, they get pregnant and then come home?

[00:13:26] Jeff Schechtman: You mentioned earlier, we were talking about things that humans can learn from the way the chimpanzees raise their kids and how they develop. And we were talking about the nature versus nurture argument. What are some of the specific things that we should learn from watching the chimpanzees?

[00:13:44] Jane Goodall: One of the things that strikes me is how important it is in their society to very quickly make friends again after an aggressive incident. Particularly obvious in captive groups when they can’t just go wandering off on their own, but we see it in the wild poop. Take an adolescent male, terrified of this male, the big male has distracted him. And even though he’s terrified, that youngster will come up and make some kind of submissive in response to that, the aggressor reacts, that pats him, kisses him or hugs him. And you just see social harmony instantly restored. And I think that’s something that we can learn about. I think it comes back to the point you made about the advance of technology having in a way moved on ahead of our own evolutionary process. I think sometimes the fact that we have a sophisticated spoken language, which the chimps do not have, they can learn fine language, but they haven’t developed it for themselves. It means that we sometimes say things in the heat of the moment. And it’s harder to forget words spoken like that than it is to forget thoughts in blood.

[00:14:56] Jeff Schechtman: It’s interesting because as you talk about that and come back to this whole idea of how fast technology is advancing versus the slow pace that human evolution advances, that in many ways from an emotional point of view, from an evolutionary point of view, we’re a lot closer to the chimpanzees in spite of the fact that even with language and technology has advanced so far. And that we need to remember those roots and integrate it more into how we deal with technology and the speed the world moves at today.

[00:15:27] Jane Goodall: Yeah, I think we do. And there’s another point, which is sort of copied, that so many people have been [omitted] by the violent, brutal behavior that chimpanzees can show in their interactions between neighboring social [groups], almost like war. And that’s been used to say, well, obviously, human aggressive tendencies are very deeply rooted in our primate heritage, and therefore warlike behavior is inevitable. And I think, first of all, we have to remember that the tendencies toward love and compassion are equally deeply rooted. We see many wonderful examples in chimpanzee society, nurturing orphans, even by adult males. And I believe that we have the ability to make reasoned choice. We don’t have to be aggressive. I mean, if we all went around acting out the way we feel, to be a lot more, even a lot more violent, [if we] control ourselves, most of us don’t go hitting people, even though we feel like it.

[00:16:34] Jeff Schechtman: It’s interesting. We tend to look outward for solutions whenever there’s a problem in our society, particularly if it’s one having to do with violence and aggressiveness, is that we look externally, it seems to me, for solutions, when in fact, maybe we’d learn more by looking back a little bit and looking to where we came from and studying the behavior of the chimpanzees and some of the research that you’ve done.

[00:16:57] Jane Goodall: Yeah, I think that’s right. That was, you know, Louis Leakey’s initial purpose in sending you there. But, you know, you made me think of something else. And that is, in exactly the same way, we tend to look out from the problems that we’ve created with our technology and our numbers and our selfishness and our greed. We look at the pollution, we look at the violence, we look at the, all the problems that are around the world. And we blame it on others. We blame it on technology, on industry, on government. And we forget the tremendous power of the individual. We forget that we’re the consumer, we’re the voters. We can have tremendous power if we would collectively [use] the power of the individual.

[00:17:45] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the Jane Goodall Institute and particularly the work that you’re doing in trying to educate and bring all of the things that we’re talking about to young people today.

[00:17:55] Jane Goodall: Yeah, [unintelligible] had the mission of us carrying on the research, learning more about tent in the wild and captivity in a non-invasive way, working with chimps in labs to improve that condition. And then our program for young people is Roots and Shoots. Roots that creep under the ground and make a firm foundation. Shoots that seem small but reach the light. They can break open brick walls. And I see the brick walls as all these problem that we humans have inflicted on this poor old planet. And the message is hope. Hundreds and thousands of Roots and Shoots and that’s young people from kindergarten to university, together, around the world can break through so that there are Roots and Shoots groups now in about 30 countries, very strong in North America, very strong in the Bay Area. And the groups do three types of project, one for the environment, one for animals and one for the human community in their hands-on project. And then they share the problems and the solution with other groups in different parts of the country, different parts of the world. It’s very much about breaking down the barriers between ethnic groups and culture, religions, and country as much as it has to do with the environment. It has a very strong component of welfare concern to individuals, whether they be human or animal.

[00:19:23] Jeff Schechtman: I know that you also bring a lot of reality to this, that you’re a realist. As you look out into the future and the work that the Institute is doing, particularly in terms of the conservation area and protecting the wildlife, are you optimistic about the future?

[00:19:38] Jane Goodall: Yes, I am. And for four basic reasons. One, in that we’re problem-solving creatures. Our brains have created incredible technology. Much of it has enormously improved the standards of living and unfortunately its byproducts have led to massive pollution and disruptions. Hope. Well, around the world people have begun to realize there really are environmental problems and businesses really are beginning to try and change, and in many cases quite dramatically so. That’s one area for hope. And the second is this, that nature is amazingly resilient if we give her the chance. We find that places that have been totally destroyed can be renovated and made to bloom again. Thirdly, the terrific hope that I get from working with children, because once they understand the problem, then they are very, very creative in their solution. And finally, the indomitable nature of the human spirit. I mean, I’m so amazed and encouraged and inspired by the people I meet as I travel around tackling impossible things, succeeding. You know, it’s truly amazing.

[00:20:54] Jeff Schechtman: Well, your work is truly amazing and I thank you so much for spending time with us this morning, Dr. Jane Goodall.

[00:21:00] Jane Goodall: Thank you very much.

[00:21:02] Jeff Schechtman: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.