Wall Street Journal - Jane Goodall Hopes the Coronavirus Pandemic Will Wake People Up

Jane Goodall Hopes the Coronavirus Pandemic Will Wake People Up

60 years after the start of her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in the wild, the legendary primatologist is reminded of the importance of listening to science.

By Emily Bobrow

July 10, 2020

Chimpanzees have no shortage of deadly foes. Logging, mining, deforestation, human population growth, the bush-meat trade, the exotic pet trade, medical research, bad zoos: All have helped shrink the global chimp population from more than a million in 1900 to less than 300,000 today, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Now, add Covid-19.

“The pandemic is a nightmare,” says Jane Goodall over the phone from her family home in Bournemouth, U.K., where she has been sheltering in place since March. Because chimps share nearly 99% of human DNA, they are vulnerable to human-borne diseases. Human respiratory viruses are already the leading cause of death in some chimp communities, and while there have been no reports of Covid-19 outbreaks yet, all great apes are believed to be susceptible to the coronavirus that causes it. To pre-empt transmission, scientists have suspended great-ape research across Africa, including at the center Dr. Goodall founded in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. The prospect of a deadly virus wiping out yet more of this endangered species is “terrifying,” she says.

This was supposed to be a festive time for Dr. Goodall, 86. Galas around the world were meant to celebrate the anniversary of her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in the wild, which began 60 years ago on July 14, 1960. Instead, Dr. Goodall, who usually spends 300 days a year trotting the globe to give talks and meet leaders as an environmental activist, has been putting in long hours trying to secure masks for local Tanzanians, raise funds for conservation projects run by the Jane Goodall Institute and cheer up staffers over Skype and Zoom.

But the news isn’t all bad, she hastily adds. Befitting someone who used the word “hope” in the titles of three of her past four books, Dr. Goodall isn’t above squinting to find a silver lining. “I think people are seeing that we brought this pandemic upon ourselves by disregarding the warnings of scientists,” she says. She hopes that policy makers recognize that raising animals in unhygienic factory farms or trafficking and selling them in crowded markets makes it easier for viruses to jump from animals to humans. (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three out of four new or emerging diseases in humans come from animals.) People in cities who are breathing cleaner air and glimpsing more stars may also be more inclined to fight pollution. “I think this is waking people up,” she says.

Dr. Goodall, it seems, still can’t believe that her childhood dreams of writing books about wild animals in Africa came true. “Everything fell into place in my life, didn’t it? It’s amazing,” she says.

As a girl, she was fascinated with the natural world. She studied chickens, named snails, cuddled worms and spent years devoted to her dog, Rusty. Because she never heard of anyone who actually lived among wild creatures, her heroes were fantastical: Dr. Doolittle, Tarzan and Mowgli from “The Jungle Book.” Many people laughed when she announced her plan to move to Africa. A career counselor tried to steer her toward photographing cats and dogs. But growing up in a mostly female household in Bournemouth, with her mother (her parents divorced during World War II), grandmother, aunts and sister, she never felt dismissed for her supposedly unladylike ambitions.

“I had an amazing mother,” Dr. Goodall says. “She told me if you don’t give up, maybe you can find a way. I wish Mum had been alive to know just how many people have said to me, ‘Jane, I have to thank you because you taught me that because you did it, I can do it too.’”

Dr. Goodall’s big break came when a friend invited her to visit in Kenya, where she met Louis Leakey, an eminent paleontologist. At 23, Dr. Goodall impressed him with her knowledge of African wildlife and her patience with seemingly dull, repetitive tasks. Leakey had been looking for someone to study wild chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), which he hoped would shed light on the behavior of a shared Stone Age ancestor. He liked that Dr. Goodall’s mind hadn’t been corrupted by “reductionist thinking” at university (she couldn’t afford to go).

Once Leakey had raised money for the research, she returned to Africa in July 1960, aged 26. Because British authorities didn’t like the idea of a young woman alone in the bush (Tanganyika was a last outpost of the crumbling empire), Dr. Goodall was initially joined by her mother. Her company proved invaluable during the dispiriting first few months, when the chimps kept running away. “She’d be there with a little fire, and she would say, ‘You know, Jane, you’re learning more than you think,’” Dr. Goodall recalls.

In fact, no one knew much at all about chimpanzees in the wild, including how to study them, so almost everything Dr. Goodall tried and learned was new. She named and befriended her subjects, noted their varied personalities and plied them with bananas—practices that earned the ire of critics. Notably, she also observed a chimp using a blade of grass to fish out termites from a mound. This revelation—that humans aren’t alone in making and using tools—inspired the National Geographic Society to fund her research and send a swashbuckling Dutch filmmaker, Hugo van Lawick, to document her findings, which yielded a 1965 film narrated by Orson Welles. (Dr. Goodall and van Lawick also married in 1964, had a son together and divorced 10 years later.)

Other discoveries followed. Dr. Goodall found that chimpanzees eat meat, cooperate in hunts, engage in tribal warfare and lead deeply social lives. But some scientists dismissed these findings with questions about her methods and expertise. Others laughed her off as a winsome National Geographic cover girl. Sensing that his mentee needed a degree to be taken seriously, Leakey wrangled for Cambridge University in the U.K. to allow her to pursue a Ph.D. in ethology without getting a bachelor’s degree first.

Was being a woman a liability in this male-dominated field? “Exactly the opposite,” Dr. Goodall says. Given Tanganyika’s colonial history, she thinks it helped that she was “just a girl” rather than a white man. As for the widely publicized films and photographs that made her and her work famous, she is pragmatic: “If it was my legs that helped me get money for what I wanted to do, then thank you, legs.”

Dr. Goodall planned to spend the rest of her life at Gombe, but changed course in the mid-1980s after a conference where she learned about all of the ways chimpanzees are under threat. “I left as an activist,” she recalls. Under the umbrella of the Jane Goodall Institute, she now runs a slate of projects that promote sustainability, including sanctuaries for orphaned chimps, poverty alleviation schemes in Tanzania and the “Roots & Shoots” program for young people, which is active in 65 countries around the world.

Dr. Goodall is busier than ever during the pandemic. Now that everything is virtual, she can deliver inspirational talks to audiences in Europe, India and the Middle East within hours of each other. “It’s exhausting,” she admits. But her knack for infusing an urgent message about the fate of the natural world with an empowering sense of hope ensures that she is in high demand. “I’ve seen so many incredible people doing amazing things,” she says. “Animals rescued from the brink of extinction. Areas that we’ve totally destroyed that can once again support nature.”

Still, there are far too many problems left to solve for her to consider slowing down. “I was put in this world to do what I’m doing,” she says. “I just have to give it my best shot.”