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ane Goodall, almost 85 years old, travels tirelessly, explaining the importance of respecting our planet and all living beings with whom we share it. "Doesn't it seem strange to you that the most intellectual creature that has ever walked this planet is destroying its only home?" she asks us. This petite woman makes her audience cry with emotion.
On December 13, Jane Goodall visited CosmoCaixa again and told us about her 58 years of chimpanzee research in Africa. Children and adults alike had their eyes fixed on her, as she recounted her life as a string of adventures, discoveries, love, and luck.
Goodall is the closest thing to a rock star that science has. She says her voice gets tired, that at her age she had to lose something, and she also reminds us that it is a kind of desperation that doesn't allow her to stop traveling the world with her activism, always accompanied by Mister H, her stuffed chimpanzee. Dr. Goodall is clear that she cannot retire until the world is safe.
When she was little, the Londoner filled her room with dirt when she invited garden worms to spend time with her. Her dog Rusty was the first to teach her that animals have emotions and once, at four years old, she hid in a chicken coop, armed with patience and stealth, until she saw a hen lay an egg. Goodall was fascinated by cows, horses, and piglets. She came into the world with this love for animals and her curiosity did the rest. A scientist was being born. And she never stopped devouring books about animals and Tarzan, and strolling through the Natural History Museum in London.
Once in Africa, her determination and practical knowledge along with her gift with animals convinced the Kenyan paleontologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey that that 26-year-old woman who had never set foot in a university and who didn't know what ethology —the study of animal behavior— was, was the right person to investigate the behavior of chimpanzees in Africa and discover if we came from a common ancestor. And, although the first months were very frustrating, because the primates fled when they saw her, little by little they lost their fear, and she began to give them names (David Greybeard, Goliath, Gigi, Flo) instead of assigning them a number in her studies.
Goodall proved to the incredulous scientific community of her time, thanks to Hugo Van Lawick's recordings, that chimpanzees, like humans, create tools to obtain food. She discovered that they also have personality and are capable of rational thought and emotions such as joy, sadness, or anger. She observed hugs, kisses, pats on the back, and tickles, as evidence of affective relationships between members of the same family or community. She suggested, in short, that we are not so different. "Those were the coolest days of my life. I could spend hours alone in the jungle. That's when I started to learn that all life in the jungle is interconnected," Goodall recounts.
In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute. "The time had come to do something for the animals and for nature, which had done so much for me." Later, in 1986, she helped organize a conference in the United States that discussed poaching, chimpanzees brutally mistreated by the entertainment and circus industry, as well as deforestation and the commercialization of bushmeat for human consumption. Goodall understood that she had to help the populations living in those places. "If we didn't do anything to help people find alternative ways to survive that didn't destroy the environment, we couldn't save the chimpanzees either."
It was in 1991 when a group of 12 young Tanzanians approached her, concerned about what was happening in their environment, and thus Roots & Shoots was born. Now more than 80 countries have projects carried out by young people and based on the protection of animals, the environment, and people. The key message is that "each of us, every day, leaves a footprint on our planet, and we have to choose what kind of footprint we want to leave."
Jane Goodall concluded her conference at CosmoCaixa by giving us four reasons not to lose hope: young people, our brain, the resilience of nature, and the indomitable human spirit. At the end, the queue for photos and book signings stretched for more than an hour. She kept smiling, sitting on a table, swinging her legs and her black loafers. As Mia, an 8-year-old cheerful admirer, told us: "Jane discovered a lot of things. She has done a lot for all humans."
Text: Laura Calçada Photography: Laia Sabaté
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