The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jane Goodall Talks with Andy Borowitz

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Jane Goodall is as revered a figure as modern science has to offer, though she prefers to call herself a naturalist rather than a scientist. Goodall learned a great deal about being human by studying our close relatives among the primates. When she began working, some of her research habits, such as naming her subjects and describing their personalities, caused consternation among other primatologists, who insisted that intelligence and emotion were the exclusive province of human intellect; Goodall persevered, and shifted how we conceive of the relationship between humans and other creatures. She’s the author of more than thirty books for adults and children, including a new volume called “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.”    In her work as a conservationist and a United Nations “Messenger of Peace,” the eighty-seven-year-old Goodall used to travel as many as three hundred days per year. Since the pandemic began, she’s been at her home in England, in the house where she grew up. In a conversation for the New Yorker Festival, The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz (known primarily as a humorist) asked Goodall about the secrets to her success as both a researcher and an advocate. “I’m very passionate,” she told him. “Secondly, I’m probably obstinate and I’m pretty resilient. So knock me over and I’m going to bounce back up. Because I will not be defeated.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Andy Borowitz is one of our great humorists. He writes the Borowitz report for The New Yorker, which is a satirical news column. But Andy wasn't kidding at all when he said he wanted to interview Jane Goodall at the New Yorker Festival. He calls Goodall one of his real childhood heroes, and she's certainly a revered figure in modern science. Goodall began her study of chimpanzees in 1960, working with the scientist Louis Leakey. And what she observed in the field completely changed our understanding of how primates behave, including humans.

Goodall has just published The Book of Hope, a survival guide for trying times. Goodall used to travel as much as 300 days of the year, but since the pandemic, she's been at her home in England, in the house where she grew up. And her conversation with Andy Borowitz was recorded for this year. year's edition of the New Yorker Festival. Welcome, Dr. Jane Goodall, to the New Yorker Festival. It is my honor. Well, thanks very much.

And I think it's going to be great talking with you. I can tell. Even though we're separated and zooming, I can still feel people's personalities. Well, I know that you have pretty good instincts when it comes to primates, which I am. So I'm going to have to go with that. I have to believe that.

So so much to cover, we're just going to jump right in. Tell us a little bit about the stuffed animal that you received when you were around one year old. Well, that was Jubilee. It was to commemorate the first chimpanzee born in London Zoo, named Jubilee because it was the Jubilee of the King and Queen at that time. And Jubilee's been with me ever since, but unfortunately, he's now in this exhibition called Becoming Jane. And Jubilee, you know, he's like 80, what is he, 84, 5. He's in a bulletproof glass case. That was the only way I'd let him leave me.

The house you grew up in is in Bournemouth, which is the south coast of England. It's called the birches. I understand you spent a lot of your childhood up a tree. Is that the case? That's correct. It's a beach tree. and Beach, I called him Beach.

He's still out there in the garden. And I love Beach so much. I used to take my homework up there. I used to read Dr. Doolittle Tarzan up there. And so I think I was 10 years old when I wrote out what I thought a last Will and Testament would look like. And I got my grandmother to sign Beach to me after she died.

Well, you went to school. You graduated at the age of 18, and there was no money to send you to university. So what was your next move? Well, I had to get some money. We had very little money. And so mom scraped up enough for a secretarial course in London. And I got a job in London. But of course, that was just always marking time. Then came the the opportunity I'd been waiting for invitation, just have a holiday in Kenya, issued by a school friend of mine. And I had to come home who save up enough money for the fair. You couldn't save in London. And finally had enough money to buy a return ticket to Kenya.

Now, you were brought up, it seems, by two very, very strong and loving women, your mother and your grandmother. Can you tell me something about, about them and what they, the gifts that they gave you? Well, I was really lucky. I mean, I was born loving animals. Just people say, what triggered your love?

I don't know. I mean, I was born that way. And I was lucky enough to have a really supportive mother. So she didn't get mad when she found earthworms in bed with me. Jane, you were looking so intently as though you were wondering, how do they walk without legs? I was one and a half. I don't remember that.

But if I'd had a different kind of mother, that scientific curiosity, might have been crushed, and I might not have done what I've done. What about your grandmother? Well, my grandmother was Danny. She was one of those women who was one of the first to actually get a job as a young woman. She got a job teaching physical training to young ladies at a school. and she was just, I don't know what there was about Danny, but she was quite stern, but she had a heart of gold, and her husband died. I never met my grandfather, which I'm very sad about.

But when she died, she had all his letters tied up with red ribbon on her chest when mum went in in the morning, and she said, please send these with me. on my long journey. It was very moving. Yes. So we've taken you to your first voyage to Africa, and there you meet the person

who would really send your life in a whole new direction, Lewis Leakey. Can you tell us about your first meeting with him and your first impressions of him? Somebody said, well, if you're interested in animals, you should meet Lewis. Well, first of all, I called, and Leakey hated the telephone.

So a very grumpy boy said, I'm Leakey, what you want, which was a bit of putting as I was very shy. But anyway, I was so keen to go and see somebody who might tell me something about animals that I went, I could answer the questions he was asking me. And I think that impressed him. And so, you know, that boring old secretarial work, you know, the course that I'd done, two days before I met Leakey, his secretary had suddenly unexpected. quit and he needed a secretary.

And so there I was. It was magical. He obviously saw your potential and he was not only willing to overlook the fact that you didn't have university training. He saw that as something of an asset, didn't he? Yes, he did. He didn't tell me at the time. But he, you know, the very early animal behavior people were very reductionist in their thinking. I mean, they thought there was a difference between us and all other animals, a difference of kind.

We were absolutely unique up on this pedestal, and there was an unbridgeable chasm between us and other animals. And I shouldn't talk about animals having personalities, minds capable of solving problems, and certainly not emotions, because those were unique to us. But I didn't know that at the time. I hadn't been to college. but Leakey sort of knew a bit about that. And so he was very happy to have somebody who hadn't been brainwashed. My childhood companion, my teacher, my dog, had taught me that what the professors were saying when I got to Cambridge was rubbish.

But anyway, so that was an advantage in Leakey's eyes. Also, the fact that I was a woman. He felt women might be more patient in the field. You like to talk about yourself as a natural. as opposed to a scientist. What's the difference? Well, the difference to me is that science is very factual oriented. And that's good.

I'm not saying there's anything against that. But what's missing in so many ethological scientists is this sense of wonder and awe and not wanting everything to be explained because some things never can be explained. I'm pretty sure about that. So what was Leakey's specific goal for you? He got a few months of funding to send you out to Gombe to look at these chimps, which hadn't really been observed before. When he sent you off with your provisions and your African cook Dominic,

what was your mission statement? Okay, well, he never really told me too much at the time. But in fact, you know, he was a paleoanthropo. and he'd spent his life searching for the fossils of Stone Age people in Africa. And of course, from a fossil, you can tell an awful lot from the muscle attachment, did the creature, how did it walk, and from toothwear, what sort of food did it eat, but behavior doesn't fossilize. So because chimps are our closest relative, and back then we didn't even know how close they

were. We didn't know that the DNA of humans and chimps differs by only just over 1%. So he postulated, now accepted, but then it was a bit far out. About six million years ago, there was an ape-like, human-like creature, a common ancestor. And so he reasoned, if Jane sees behavior and chimpanzees today that's the same or similar to human behavior today, maybe that behavior was already in the common ancestor, and we've brought it with us on our separate evolutionary pathways, things like kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting one another, swaggering, males competing for dominance.

And he felt this would give him a better feeling for how early humans might have behaved. Well, to accomplish that mission, you first had to get a chimp to not run away from you, which was a problem in the early months. Yeah, it was the early observations were all through binoculars and, you know, from a reasonable distance. And I was getting really worried because it was money for six months. And I knew if I didn't see sort of exciting things before the money ran out, that would be the end of the dream. and worse in a way I would have let Leaky down because he really stuck his neck out. Jane Goodall, the primate scientist and UN Messenger of Peace

in conversation with Andy Borowitz at the New Yorker Festival. They'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick and we're listening today to an interview with Jane Goodall recorded as part of this year's New Yorker Festival. After so many years of studying primate behavior, Goodall became a major figure in conservation through the Jane Goodall Institute.

Goodall has written many books. Some are about her fieldwork with chimps, while others concern us, human beings, and our role on the earth. Her latest is called The Book of Hope, a survival guide for trying times. Goodall spoke with Andy Borowitz for the New Yorker Festival, and they went back to her first fieldwork with chimpanzees more than 60 years ago in Gombay Stream National Park. I think you know that right at the beginning, what's Tanzania today was back then Tanganyika. It was part of the crumbling British colonial empire. And the authorities just weren't prepared to take responsibility for this young girl going into potential danger. In the end, they said, oh, well, all right, she can come, but she has to have a companion. So it was my amazing mother who volunteered to come for the first four months.

And it was amazing because I'd get back in the evening, depressed, had chimps had run away again. And she was boosting my morale telling me, well, you know, you're seeing more than you think you found this peak and with your binoculars. You know how the chimps move around in different sized groups, sometimes alone. You know about their calls they make. You know about the kind of foods they're eating and how they make nests at night in the trees, bending over the branches.

So you, in your new book, you make a dedication to a primate named David Greybeard, who I guess, along with Lewis Leakey, was one of the most important primates in your life. Well, David contributed in many ways, first of all, by letting me get close to him. But the real breakthrough was seeing David using and making tools, grass stems to fish termites from their underground burrows, nests, and picking leafy twigs and to use them as tools, carefully picking off the leaves and side twigs. So, you know, at the time it was thought humans and only humans used and made tools. and that was what enabled Leakey to go to the geographic. They agreed that they fund the research when that six months money ran out. And they sent a filmmaker, Hugo Van Laowick, who was able to document the behavior that I was gradually learning more and more about as the other chimps came to accept me as well.

Could you talk about a couple of the mother chimps and what you learned from them? Specifically, Flo seemed like a very important character as you were studying the parenting behavior of chimp moms. Flo was amazing. She was the matriarch. She was the highest-ranking female. She already had two offspring when I first knew her. There were three.

And so I was able to watch when she had the next baby. And the key thing we now know, we can look back through 60 years of observations. A good mother is supportive, just like my mother. The good mothers who are willing to run in and risk being attacked to protect their child. And it now seems quite clear that the offspring of these supportive mothers do best. The males get to a higher position in the hierarchy, probably sire more kids, and the females are better mothers. So we can contrast Flo with passion, who was a rather cold mother. She seldom supported her offspring.

She wasn't really a very nice female at all. She was also high-ranking. But her children never did anything much compared to Flo, whose sons, one after the other, became alpha male. When you had your son, how much were you looking? to a chimp like flow for mothering tips? Well, you know, I had my own mother as well. And also at that time, the popular book for people was Dr. Spock. So it was a kind of mixture of flow mom and Dr. Spock.

But what I really got from the chimps were two important things. One, they had fun with their infants. They played with them. They laughed. And I thought, I'm going to have fun with my baby too. And the other thing was the tremendous importance of support in the first couple of years, which is really important for our children too. So to have a little group, two or three, supportive adults who are always there,

continuity for the child, who give that child confidence. And the final thing, if a chimp infant is irritating, like a mother's termite fishing, and the infant is grabbing onto her grass tools, and she's very irritated, but she doesn't punish the child, not till he's learned that he mustn't do it. She will distract. So with one hand, she's tool-using.

With the other hand, she's tickling her infant. So I thought, well, that's important for me, too. So you return to Cambridge to get your PhD in ethology. What kind of culture clash was that? I mean, you had been in Africa up close with the chimps, but you went back to Cambridge and had to deal with this whole other group of people, academics. How did they greet your findings?

They did not like the fact that I'd named the chimps and that I talked about all these different personalities. And so I dealt with it in the way I deal with these things. I knew they were wrong. I just quietly went on writing the way I thought I should write. And of course, it wasn't nice being mixed up with lots of people. I love being alone and being out in the rainforest. So I had a lovely tutor, and she helped me.

And together we explained, well, you know, Jane's been on her own in the forest and it really makes her tense and kind of, you know, psychologically upset if she's with a lot of people, which wasn't true, but we got permission for me to go outside into the country. Well, that brings me to the book of hope. And now I like the way you define hope in the book because as you define hope,

it's not just blind faith or optimism. It's tied to action. So you say to your co-author in the book, you have a wonderful line where you say, I hope that this book is good, but it won't be unless we work really hard at it. And that's kind of the template for your approach to life. Yeah, it's good to be optimistic, but let's actually get down and get to work. Yep.

Because if you don't have hope, then why bother to do anything? If you don't think that what you do is going to make a difference, why bother to do it? Why not just sit back, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die? and if we don't get together and take action, then, oh, I think our species is doomed. The window of time isn't that big. And when we started on this book, Doug said, well, you're talking too much about the doom and the gloom. This is meant to be hope. I said, yes, but if you don't acknowledge the terrible things that we're doing to the planet and to each other,

then people will say, oh, well, she's just looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles. That's not true. I know as much as anyone about all the harm we've inflicted, but there is still a window of time. And if we get together and realize that each one of us makes an impact every day, it's not too late. I'd like to do a quick rundown of your four main reasons for hope in the book, if you're game for that.

Sure. The first reason I love, which is you say, you cite as reason number one, the amazing human intellect. Tell us what do you think our intellect can do to get us out of this mess. Okay, well, the reason I use intellect rather than intelligence, the thing that makes us more different from chimps and everything else is the explosive development of our intellect. I mean, you know, animals are way, way, way more intelligent than people used to think. But, you know, we've designed a rocket that went up to Mars and took photos. It's still there.

So how bizarre that this most intellectual creature is destroying its only home. But now scientists are beginning to come with all sorts of innovative technology to help heal some of the harm that we've inflicted, like moving towards. renewable energy as one example. And people in their individual lives are beginning to think about, you know, how you behave and what you buy and did it harm the environment. Was it cruel to animals? Is it cheap because of unfair wages or forced labor?

And if so, don't buy it. So, you know, we're really beginning to use our brains to leave lighter ecological footprints. Another reason out of the four reasons for hope that you state. Another reason is the resilience of nature, which is something we don't think about very often. But tell me what you mean by that. How does nature show its resilience despite all our depredations? Well, these are the stories that more people in the media should tell to give people hope. Like at one time around Gombe, the trees had virtually gone to what was once forest was bare hills with more people than the land could support.

And that's when it hit me. If we don't help these people living in poverty to find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we haven't a hope of saving chimps, forests or anything else. And so we began our program, Take Care or Takari, it's known as. So it's, you know, restoring fertility to the overused land. and so on. The trees have come back, and this is operating throughout Chimp Range in Tanzania and in six other African countries. You have this great program called Roots and Shoots.

What is it about young people that gives you a reason for hope? It was in the late 80s when I was traveling around the world that I kept meeting young people who seemed to have lost hope. And mostly they were just apathetic, didn't seem to care, Some were really depressed, some were angry. So I talked to them. Well, you've compromised our future and there's nothing we can do about it. Well, we have compromised their future.

We've been stealing it for years and years and years. And so I started Roots & Shoots, which I think the reason it's growing so fast, it's in more than 65 countries. But we don't dictate to the young people. They choose between them as a group. A project to help people, a project help animals, a project to help the environment, because everything's interrelated. And the main message is every single one of us makes an impact on the planet every single day.

And we can choose what sort of impact we make, which leads into the fact that we've got to alleviate poverty. Because if you're really poor, you're going to destroy the environment to get land to grow food, to feed your family. or buy cheap junk food, you can't afford to ask, did it harm the environment? But, you know, these young people, once you listen to them, educate them, and empower them, they talk about what they care about. They roll up their sleeves, and they get out there, and they take action.

Okay, reason number four is what you call the indomitable human spirit. You are certainly an embodiment of that. You are indomitable. Just out of curiosity, where does your energy come from? What pushes you forward? Well, first of all, I care. I'm very passionate. Secondly, I'm probably obstinate and pretty resilient,

so knock me over and I'm going to bounce back up because I will not be defeated. And so, you know, as I get older, I'm nearly 88 now. I've got less time left. So I have to do more and more and more because there's so much to do. Well, we only have a few minutes left.

So would you indulge me and let me ask you a few questions that my readers posted on Facebook? Yep. Okay, question number one. What are a couple of things that the average person can do to stop climate change? Well, one really important thing is moving towards a plant-based diet because these factory farms, not only horribly cruel with billions of animals, but they all have to be fed. So huge areas of environment are destroyed to grow the grain.

Masses of fossil fuel to get the grain to the animals, to the abattoir meat of the table. Water uses lots of water to change vegetable to animal protein. And water is getting increasingly scarce in many parts of the world. Well, I have a question. This is sort of a personal question, but a kind of minor but significant character in the book of hope,

is whiskey. How did your acquaintanceship with whiskey begin? And what is your favorite whiskey? I don't like the very expensive, multi-Petee whiskeys. I don't like them. But it began because my mother, she couldn't drink wine. She couldn't drink gin. She could drink whiskey. And so every evening, when I was here, we used to have a little tot at seven o'clock before supper. And so when I was traveling, we kept this up at seven o'clock in the time where we were, we raised a glass to each other of whiskey. Third question came up from a lot of people. They want to know what you think about bonobos. Well, they are equally closely related to us as chimps. I'm very glad Leakey didn't choose bonobos for me to study because the females are permanently sexually

receptive and they have big pink swillings on their backside and the geographic would never at that time had won't photographs. There's no question. You know, one of the early pictures that Hugo took came back and it was four, a beautiful picture, four males sitting and they were all a bit excited. So they all had penile erections and the graphic came back with a circle round each one saying blend into fur. Jane, I want to personally thank you so much. This is actually a conversation I've waited my entire life to have. So I just want to send you my gratitude and my love. Well, thank you too.

And, you know, it's been really lovely talking to you. And I hope that when I'm next over your side of the Atlantic, we can meet in person and share a whiskey. Thanks, Jane. I will hold you to that. Jane Goodall and Andy Borowitz. Goodall's new work is called The Bulls, Book of Hope. We'll be bringing you more highlights from this year's New Yorker Festival throughout the fall.

I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Corby, Calalea, David Krasnow, Gophane in Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help this week from Harrison Keithline, Joe Ploord, Amy Pearl, and Allison McGatta. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Truina Endowment Fund.