Perreault Magazine - 22 -
With tropical forests disappearing and some 20,000 species on the brink of extinction, it would be easy to give in to despair. But Jane Goodall, who has dedicated her life to studying chimpanzees in the wild and advocating on their behalf, offers a surprisingly different message: one of hope.
Clear-eyed about human failings – from greed and genocide to environmental devastation – she nevertheless finds hope in the resilience of nature and the energy of the world’s youth. She also believes in our intelligence and capacity to make good decisions. “Our intellect has grown mightily in complexity” since we evolved some 2 million years ago, she writes in Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. “This highly developed intellect means, surely, that we have responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own species.”
Goodall's groundbreaking research challenged our fundamental assumptions about chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Today we know that we share more than 98 percent of our genetic makeup with chimps. Fifty years ago, when Goodall began her now more than five and a half decades-long study of chimpanzees, that would have been a heretical thought.
Her careful observations revealed that chimps have close family relationships that can last up to 50 years. She discovered they have individual personalities and experience emotions such as joy and grief. As her research revealed how similar chimpanzees are to humans, we were forced to rethink how we treat them. That knowledge sparked the first efforts to protect chimpanzees in the wild and improvements in conditions in zoos.
A GIRL FROM THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE
It was an unexpected life trajectory for a girl from the English countryside.
animal magnetism:
jane goodall
BY ELAINE ROBBINS