Interview: Jane Goodall

  • Renowned primatologist Jane Goodall. (Photo courtesy of The Jane Goodall Institute)

It’s been 50 years since Jane Goodall first began her research of the behaviors of chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Tanzania. These days, Goodall spends most of her time traveling, meeting with young people to encourage them to think about how their actions affect the people, animals and the environment of this planet. We caught up with her in Chicago this past weekend. She says people see the problems of the world as just too big to tackle.

Transcript

Jane Goodall: You know people are always asking me ‘what can I do?’, and I think one of the main problems is that people just feel so helpless when they look at what’s happening. And so I always say to people, if we could just spend a few minutes each day thinking about the consequences of the that choices we make… they can be small choices like What do we buy? What do we eat? What do we wear? And we ask questions like where did it come from? How was it made? Did it damage the environment? Did it involve child labor in some distant place? Did it involve cruelty to animals? If we start thinking in those terms, we do start making behavior changes, and they may seem small, but multiplied by a couple of billion, you start to see the major kind of change that we desperately need if we’re going to see a planet that’s reasonably hospitable to our great-grandchildren.

Graham: You’ve been working with young people, tell me a little bit about your project ‘Root’s and Shoots’…what’s the goal there?

Goodall: Roots and Shoots began with twelve high school students in 1991, and it’s now in 120 countries and growing, and we’ve got about 15,000 active groups. The main message: every single one of us makes a difference every single day. and every group is choosing three different kinds of projects to make the world a better place for people, for animals, for the environment. And now we span all ages from pre-school and kindergarten right the way through college and university, and actually more and more adults are forming groups because they, too, want to help to make this a better world.

Graham: I know you have a home in London, but I also assume that Tanzania is much your home. How often do you get to go back there?

Goodall: I get to Gombe itself in Tanzania, where the Chimpanzees are, twice a year, but only briefly. Just time to immerse myself in the forest and sort of get a recharge of my spiritual batteries, so to speak.

Graham: I’m wondering if any of the chimpanzee community still recognizes you when you visit Gombe?

Goodall:The older ones do, the offspring of those whom I knew so, so well in the early days.

Graham: And they recognize you when you go back?

Goodall: Yes, absolutely, they certainly do, I’m appearing twice a year.

Graham: How does that make you feel?

Goodall: Well I have that emotional feeling with Fifi, and to some extent with Goblin, Frodo is just such a horrible, and objectionable bully that I can’t really feel anything but a slight dislike for Frodo. His older brother Freud, I always enjoy meeting him out in the forest, and it takes me back a bit to those early days when I lived among them, more or less, and you know, that was the time when I had these close relationships, and it was just such a very special time in my life.

Graham: Thank you very much, I’m sure you are aware of how much people appreciate the work you’ve done, and what you’ve done to raise awareness among us in the West and around the world about the plight of great apes and chimpanzees. I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

Goodall: thanks very much, Lester, and it was nice talking to you.

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Looking Back on the “Slick of ’76”

  • Officials placed containment booms around the barge. Most of them failed to prevent the oil from floating downriver, contaminating dozens of miles of pristine shoreline. (Courtesy of the NY State Dept. of Conservation)

30 years ago, an oil barge ran aground in the St. Lawrence River. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of thick crude oil coated the shoreline of northern New York state. The accident remains one of the largest inland oil spills in the United States. It’s a reminder that freighters haul millions of gallons of toxic liquids across the Great Lakes. And many people worry about another spill. The GLRC’s David Sommerstein talked to witnesses of the 1976 spill:

Transcript

30 years ago, an oil barge ran aground in the St. Lawrence River. Hundreds
of thousands of gallons of thick crude oil coated the shoreline of northern New
York State. The accident remains one of the largest inland oil spills in the
United States. It’s a reminder that freighters haul millions of gallons of toxic
liquids across the Great Lakes. And many people worry about another spill.
The GLRC’s David Sommerstein talked to witnesses of the 1976 spill:


It was really foggy that morning. Bob Smith awoke to two sounds:


“You could hear the anchor chains going down, and next thing we know
there was a young Coast Guard guy knocking on the front door.”


The Coast Guard guy had driven up, asking around for a missing barge.
Smith remembered the anchor chains echoing across the water that woke
him up. He went outside to look.


(Sound of walking outside)


Thirty years later, Smith lives amidst cozy cottages on manicured lawns in
the heart of the touristy Thousand Islands.


“Just right about straight out there. See where that boat’s coming up there
now?”


That’s where a barge carrying oil from Venezuela had dropped anchor after
running aground. That morning Smith watched crude as thick as mud drift
out of sight downriver:


“If you’re born and raised here on the river, you don’t like to see anything go
in the river that doesn’t belong there.”


The Coast Guard placed booms in the water, but the oil quickly spilled over.
It carried 50 miles downstream. It oozed as far as 15 feet into the river’s
marshes. Tom Brown was the point man for New York’s Department of
Environmental Conservation. He says the spill couldn’t have come at a
worse time for wildlife:


“All the young fish, waterfowl, shorebirds, furbearers, were coming off the
nests and were being born.”


Thousands of birds and fish suffocated in black goo. As images of
devastation flashed on national TV, the spill killed the tourism season, too.
It was a summer with no swimming, no fishing, no dipping your feet in the
water at sunset. Really, it was a summer with no river.


(Sound of river at Chalk’s dock)


30 years later, everyone still remembers the acrid smell:


“When I woke up in the middle of the night and I could smell oil, I was
afraid I had an oil leak in my house.”


Dwayne Chalk’s family has owned a marina on the St. Lawrence for
generations. Chalk points to a black stripe of oil on his docks, still there
three decades later, and he’s still bitter:


“The Seaway has done this area, well, I shouldn’t say that, it hasn’t done any
good. To me it hasn’t.”


The St. Lawrence Seaway opened the ports of the Great Lakes to Atlantic
Ocean freighters carrying cargoes of steel, ore, and liquid chemicals. It
generates billions of dollars a year in commerce, but it’s also brought
pollution and invasive species.


Anthropologist John Omohundro studied the social effects of the 1976 oil
spill. He says it helped awaken environmentalism in the Great Lakes:


“The spill actually raised people’s consciousness that the river could be a
problem in a number of areas, not just oil.”


Groups like Save the River and Great Lakes United began lobbying for
cleaner water and safer navigation in the years after the spill:


“If a vessel carrying oil or oil products were in that same type of ship today,
it would not be allowed in.”


Albert Jacquez is the outgoing administrator for the US side of the St. Lawrence
Seaway. The 1976 barge had one hull and gushed oil when it hit the rocks.
Today’s barges are mostly double-hulled and use computerized navigation.
Jacquez says a lot has changed to prevent spills:


“The ships themselves are different, the regulations that they have to follow are
different, and the inspections are different. Now does that guarantee? Well,
there are no guarantees, period.”


So if there is a spill, the government requires response plans for every part of
the Great Lakes. Ralph Kring leads training simulations of those plans for
the Coast Guard in Buffalo. Still, he says the real thing is different:


“You really can’t control the weather and the currents and all that. It’s definitely going to be a
challenge, especially when you’re dealing with a real live incident where
everyone’s trying to move as fast as they can and also as efficient as they
can.”


Critics question the ability to get responders to remote areas in time. They
also worry about spills in icy conditions and chemical spills that oil booms
wouldn’t contain.


(Sound of river water)


Back on the St. Lawrence River, Dwayne Chalk says the oil spill of 1976
has taught him it’s not if, it’s when, the next big spill occurs:


“You think about it all the time. Everytime a ship comes up through here,
you think what’s going to happen if that ship hits something.”


Chalk and everyone else who relies on the Great Lakes hope they’ll never
have to find out.


For the GLRC, I’m David Sommerstein.

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