‘We’ve got one planet and we can’t go on like this’

HONG KONG: Clutching a stuffed monkey doll, like an overgrown child in need of an emotional prop, Dr Jane Goodall saunters into the room. She’s a tall, slender, 70-plus-year-old woman with silver hair and gentle-yet-piercing eyes, and when she speaks, her voice breezes through the room like wind rustling through a tropical forest.

“First of all,” she says, “I’d like to greet you. But since I can’t speak your language, I’ll greet you in chimpanzee language.” She then breaks out into a succession of loud hoots, yips and chattering noises, her voice rising and falling and, finally, trailing off. “Now, that,” she explains, “means ‘hello and welcome’.”

It’s an attention-grabbing entrance, of course, but today, Goodall has a rather more dramatic message to convey. The primatologist, whose work with chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in erstwhile Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania) since the 1960s has changed the way human beings view themselves, says that rapacious lifestyles today are stripping the earth of its resources and endangering everything from animal habitats to the hopes of future generations of humans.

“Given the kind of lifestyle that the average person in Hong Kong or New York leads today, we’ll need four new planets to support,” says Goodall. “But we don’t have four planets, do we? We’ve only got this one. So we can’t go on like this.” It was the shrinking habitat of the chimpanzees in Gombe — due to population pressures and extensive deforestation — that alerted Goodall to a larger problem. But the more she addressed it, she realised that Africa’s problem was linked to the unsustainable lifestyles elsewhere — and, in more recent times, China’s and India’s quest for energy resources in that continent.

Which is why Goodall has given herself over to travelling across the world and spreading her message of sustainable development. “The more I travel, the more I realise the interconnectedness of our destinies.” Detailing how the TACARE (pronounced ‘Take Care’) project, initiated by the Jane Goodall Institute in the area in 1994, had succeeded in reversing the degradation of resources around Gombe by focussing on socio-economic development of the community and educating them on sustainable natural resource management, Goodall said this offered her hope that the future could be redeemed.

Noting that her observations of violent group behaviour among male chimps had caused disquiet among scientists — because it advanced the view that given their common ancestry, humans were genetically predisposed towards violence — Goodall emphasised that “we also have the inherited tendency for love, compassion and rational thought”. 

“What gives me hope,” she says, “is the amazing capacity of the human brain to come up with innovative solutions, the indomitable human spirit that fights back, and the resilience of nature.”

“It’s time to recreate the age of wisdom when elders would gather and ponder how any decision they would make would affect our future seven generations down the line,” says Goodall. Quoting the words of an Eskimo leader, she concluded: “Up in the north, the ice is melting. What will it take to melt the ice in the human heart?”