Long before you entertained daily panicked thoughts about the climate apocalypse and the decimation of the planet, Jane Goodall was deep in the jungle and learning about this stuff early and firsthand. After capturing the public imagination in the ’60s for her work studying chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, she left in the ’80s to focus on activism and conservation, turning countless people onto the wonders of the natural world.
Now 87, Goodall is as busy as ever. Her most recent initiative, which launched this week, is a campaign called Trees for Jane. It aims to get one trillion trees planted by 2030 to restore lost forestation and mitigate the effects of climate change. “As you know, I spent time in the forest studying chimpanzees,” she says. “I realized the tremendous importance of forests with their interconnected ecosystems, where every little species has a role to play.”
Goodall speaks to me from her childhood home in Bournemouth, England, where her favorite tree happens to be located. “The tree I spent hours and hours up in when I was a child is just out there,” she says, pointing out of the video frame. “It’s a beech tree and I called him Beech and I took my homework up there, I read books up there.”
GQ: I want to go back to the beginning of your career for a second. You weren’t formally trained as a scientist when you arrived at the Gombe. Did your lack of scientific background give you any advantages?
Jane Goodall: Absolutely. That was one of the reasons [paleoanthropologist] Louis Leakey chose me, because he wanted somebody whose mind wasn’t brainwashed by the very reductionist thinking of the animal behavior people back then. And later on when I got to university to do a PhD, I was told that I couldn’t talk about chimpanzees having personality, mind, or emotion. I had been taught by my childhood friend, my dog Rusty, that that was rubbish. Of course I gave them names. Of course I described their vivid personalities. Of course I described their intelligent behavior and of course I recorded their emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, despair, and so on.
Do you think it’s still possible today for someone to go into the field completely untrained and just start working?
Well, I hope so. Not if you want a university degree, though, and getting the money is difficult, but I can imagine like a young Jane wanting to go and study a previously unstudied creature that maybe could get somebody to fund that research. But we know so much more now. When I went out, was nobody studying wild animals. So it would be harder now.
Jane Goodall in the ’60s.
CBS / Getty ImagesWhat’s been a recent discovery about animal behavior that you’ve been especially surprised by?
Well, I have loved learning about the intelligence of the octopus. You’ve seen My Octopus Teacher, I’m sure.
Oh yes.
I have become great, great friends with [director] Craig Foster and we communicate almost weekly about some of the wonders that he discovers down in the ocean. There’s new things cropping up all the time in the world of animals, insects, birds, and more sophisticated ways of studying them. It’s just a magic time for any student who wants to go into that field.
When you left Gombe, you became a hugely famous public figure. I imagine that must have been jarring after spending years in the wilderness. What is your relationship with your celebrity?
First of all, I’m very bewildered as to how it happened. I’m just Jane, a very shy little girl who grew up loving animals, only wanting to go and live with them in the wild and write books about them. But the rest of it, I suppose it began when the National Geographic agreed to come in and support the work and sent a photographer and filmmaker and the pictures of “Jane and the chimps” hit the news and it was a bit romantic and unusual.
But when people began to think of me as like this icon for conservation, I was horrified and tried to hide. I would go through airports with dark glasses and my hair down. Didn’t seem to matter, people still recognized me. So after a while I decided, “Well, this has happened. So I better make use of it.” But basically there are two Janes. There’s this one sitting here under my beech tree for half an hour every midday with a robin and a black bird, taking the old dog for a little toddle around the block. And then there’s the one out that’s being demanded.
I came across a 2002 interview in which you just said that the war on terror was overshadowing environmental concerns—which we now know, 20 years later, was extremely prescient. But back then, what sort of reactions would you get when you would say that?
Well, it depends how you say something, doesn’t it? It’s like population growth. If I talk about it, and it’s very important, I say there’s seven point something billion of us now. We are already using up natural resources in some places faster than nature can replenish them. That is said to be closer to 10 billion in 2050. So if we carry on with business as usual, what will happen? It’s a question, rather than any attack on anybody. While the war on terror was obviously, well, that was a mistake in the first place, people were going to be concerned and there was this huge growth of security in airports and concern in schools and things.
And then of course the next thing to deflect attention from climate change and biodiversity loss was the pandemic. And obviously people are getting sick, their friends are dying and it was horrible. But the pandemic will get pushed away. But climate change and loss of biodiversity, they are existential threats. And if we don’t tackle them, we are doomed.
When animal rights issues and conservation issues come up, there’s often pushback because of the idea that it’s somehow frivolous and we should focus on humans first. How do you reach past that and get people to care?
By talking to people as individuals, by presenting facts fairly, by not blaming, by telling the sort of stories that people remember. I was once in a taxi and it was very early in the morning. I was on my way to the U.S. and I was driving out to Heathrow and I thought, “I’ll have a nice little snooze.” The cab driver knew who I was and he went on at me, “You’re all like my sister, I haven’t got time for the likes of you. You care more about animals than people.” He went on and on. I sat and talked to him through the little window, told him stories about the chimps, told him how our programs in Africa were improving the lives of the people, helping girls to stay in school, better clinics, better education.
Oh, he was grumpy. Didn’t care. Well, when we got to the airport, neither of us had any change. So he owed me probably the equivalent of 50 pounds today. And I said, “Well, okay, make a donation to your sister for what she’s doing in the animal shelters.” I thought, Ah, well, you’ll go and drink it in the pub and tell people about this crazy woman he talked to. And I got back to a letter from the sister. She said, “I want to thank you for your donations. Secondly, what did you do to my brother? Came and helped me three times in the clinic.” It’s always worth having a go. It’s always worth not being confrontational. Just tell people stories, try and find out who they are, try and find something that links you with them.
With each successive climate change report, things are getting increasingly bleak. And yet the message you’ve chosen to project is one of hope. Is that your natural disposition or is it a muscle you have to work on?
I think I was probably born with a sort of optimistic nature, but a lot of it came from World War II. I was five when it began. I lived through it and we learned to value everything because there was rationing—including life, because our friends were being killed by the blitz in London. But the main thing was that for about a year, Britain stood alone, unprepared for war against the might of Nazi Germany when the rest of Europe had either being defeated or had capitulated. So that was a hopeless time. There wasn’t really any hope. And yet we got through and we were not overrun and we saved Europe from fascism.
So that’s when it was instilled in you?
I don’t know. But recently I’ve come to think about that more and more. I’ve lived through fighting off World War II. I’ve lived through the end of apartheid in South Africa, I’ve lived through a Cold War. I’ve lived through 9/11, I was in New York. And at least a collective will to change is growing more steadily.
At one point during your research, you realized that chimps are as capable of war and aggression as humans are. Was it disappointing for you to realize that and did it change not just the lens of your work but how you related chimps to humans and even thought of us all as part of the greater web of existence?
I was shocked and horrified. I thought they were like us, but nicer. And secondly, this observation that they’re capable of a kind of war and brutality and murder killing came at a time when in the scientific world, there was this huge controversy about “is a human baby born with a clean slate and everything is learned or is there a lot of instinct?” We’re so like chimps, biologically, we share 98.6 percent of our DNA with them. And so to me, I came out very strongly on the side of, yes, we do have aggressive instincts. I mean, you can’t look around the world and say, we haven’t. Aggression isn’t just learned. So it helped me understand chimps are even more like us than I thought before.
But it also pushes you to stand aside and say, “Yeah, but we are different. Animals are way more intelligent than we used to think, but we’re different.” We designed a technology that enables you and I to speak from different places. And this most intellectual creature to ever walk the planet, nevertheless is destroying its only home. I always say most intellectual, I don’t say intelligent because an intelligent creature doesn’t destroy its planet like we are doing. It does seem there’s been a disconnect between the clever brain and the human heart. And I truly believe that only when the head and the heart work together, can we attain our true human potential and regain wisdom.
I have a silly question, if you’ll indulge me, and I’m sure you know where this is going. You’ve said you’re not ruling out that Bigfoot exists.
For various reasons. And I’ll tell you one, my most striking one. I was in Ecuador. We’d flown for two solid hours over unbroken forest in a small plane and we visited four tiny little communities. 30 to 50 people, no roads, and they communicate with each other by means of like in the old days—it was the town crier, but these are hunters actually, and they carry the news from one village to another and letters and things like that. So I had an interpreter and I said to him, “When you next meet one of these hunters, could you ask if they’ve ever seen a monkey without a tail?” Three of the hunters came back and said, “Oh yes. We’ve seen monkeys without tails. They walk upright and they’re about six foot tall.”
Oh wow.
Now this was an interpreter from the village. He knew nothing about Bigfoot, nothing at all. Every single country has its version. Yeti, Yowie in Australia, Wild Man in China. So I don’t know if it’s perhaps a myth that stems from maybe the last of the Neanderthals. But then is the last of the Neanderthals still living in these remote forests? I don’t know. But I’m not going to say it doesn’t exist and I’m not going to say people who believe in it are stupid.
This interview has been edited and condensed.