Recently the world lost one of its absolute legends, Jane Goodall. Meeting her remains one of the highlights of my career and one short evening listening to her talk changed my outlook on conservation forever. As an animal-lover, scientist, researcher, activist and people-person, she says that in order to save our animals we have to start with the people.
One day upon returning to the Gombe area, in which she worked for so many years with the chimpanzees, Jane flew over barren fills. No forests could be seen, not even farmlands, just over-worked, over-cultivated land that now held no life. Her words, “No way we can even try to save the chimps when the people are living in such dire situations.”
“Unless we can alleviate the sufferings of the people, we cannot conserve the chimpanzees,” she realised. She also said that, “There is conflict between us and wild animals everywhere as we take over more and more of their habitat”, but what she found was that in working with the people, and providing opportunities for them, the locals began to understand the importance of the forests and ultimately it was their decision to set aside parts of their land to act as buffers so that today the chimps have three times more forest than they did 20 years ago.
It doesn’t end with simply helping people, her work was all about actually empowering people to make a difference through their own choices. Jane’s famous quote says, “Every single one of us makes a difference every single day and it’s up to us what kind of difference we make”. She also said that “The key thing is for people to feel like their lives do make a difference.”
But through working with young people from around the world, Jane began to feel like she had let them down, “I meet so many young people that have no hope for the future because we have compromised their future… How we have harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age. I felt angry, I felt ashamed. How is it possible that this most intelligent species is destroying its only home?” It is because of this, our responsibility as the people of this world, that Jane spent most of her time dedicated to the future, not just of chimpanzees but the future of the world’s people.
When I chatted to her, she explained that three steps are needed in order to succeed: “Help people, help animals, help the environment,” and what she has found is that the young people engaged in making a difference are “Not only changing things in the world around them, it’s changing them.”
She dismisses the apathy shown by so many and has no time for the excuse: “There is nothing I can do… so I do nothing.” Goodall believed, “There has been a disconnect between this clever brain and the human heart.” She explained that the protection of the world’s wildlife is as simple as every person working on one piece of the puzzle until all the pieces join to form a complete picture. When I asked what was on her bucket-list all those years ago, she gave a simple, yet powerful, response: ”Making the world a better place – that will do.” And there’s certainly no doubt she achieved exactly that.