Long Read: “Jane Goodall Is Still Wild at Heart”

I think we deserve something that is not disgusting / disheartening, for a change. Paul Tullis, in the NYTimes:

… In July 1960, Goodall boarded a boat… and after a few hours motoring over the warm, deep waters of Lake Tanganyika, she stepped onto the pebbly beach at Gombe.

Last summer, almost exactly 54 years later, Jane Goodall was standing on the same beach. The vast lake was still warm, the beach beneath her clear plastic sandals still pebbly. But nearly everything else in sight was different. The jungle had reclaimed the clearing where she pitched her first tent. A ranger station and a small lodge stood nearby. Just out of sight, carved into the vegetation, were more cinder-block buildings that housed staff, researchers and their labs. Jutting into the lake was now a dock, where a boat was pulling up with a load of day-trippers from Kigoma, a small city to the south. All of this bustle was, of course, a result of the work Goodall began that day in 1960, which continues as one of the longest and most rigorously conducted inquiries into animal behavior.

For a good while in the beginning, Goodall had little human company. “Aloneness was a way of life,” she would write. Today, as a globe-trotting conservationist, Goodall can neither avoid nor refuse human contact. She radiates approachability; she typically dresses in khakis and an untucked oxford shirt. She can’t spend two minutes in a hotel lobby in Bujumbura or in an airplane seat waiting to depart for London without someone angling up to say how amazing she is. She can find relief from the crush of humanity only in hotel suites, in her childhood home of Bournemouth and here, on a remote shore of Lake Tanganyika, at the edge of a jungle few humans would set foot in had she not begun exploring it half a century ago…

Today the social lives of animals from whales to ants have been abundantly cataloged using Goodall’s methodology, which has helped to set the basic ground rules for contemporary field biology. Goodall herself became the first exemplar — before Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson — of the pop-culture scientist-communicator. She has inspired countless scientists, from the leader of Save the Elephants to the director of the Orangutan Project, at the same time as she has thrown open the door to other pioneering women in the sciences. And she did so by being as demanding as the Leakeys were of her, nightly grilling the graduate students who started coming to Gombe in the late 1960s…

Then in the early 1990s, Goodall flew in a small plane directly over Gombe. It offered a new perspective on her tiny sliver of virgin forest, which was now surrounded on three sides by 52 rapidly expanding villages full of desperately poor people. In her comings and goings along the lake over the years, she noted some deforestation along the park’s borders, but that had not prepared her for the mile after mile of bare hills she could see from above. Gombe’s chimps needed to cross into suitable habitat outside the park to connect with other chimpanzee populations and maintain genetic diversity, but there would be no such habitat if poverty continued to force a growing human population to chop down trees for farmland and firewood. The flight convinced her that the chimps’ lot could not improve until that of the people living near them did. Goodall now spends about 300 days a year on the road advocating for forest conservation and sustainable development. “It never ceases to amaze me that there’s this person who travels around and does all these things,” she told me one day in Burundi. “And it’s me. It doesn’t seem like me at all.”…

Goodall… says she hasn’t slept in the same bed for three consecutive weeks in more than 20 years. She has lobbied the U.S. Senate and State Department, negotiated with the World Bank and pressured trade groups and chief executives. She told me that she had recently persuaded a group of timber-company executives to adopt a code of conduct that would protect wildlife. Her work on behalf of having wild chimpanzees declared endangered eventually led the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to recommend that captive chimpanzees receive the same status. And after finding herself seated beside the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Francis S. Collins, at a dinner one night, she explained to him why she thought the N.I.H. should stop conducting medical trials on chimpanzees. (This has been a cause of hers at least since she wrote about it in this magazine in 1987.) Goodall didn’t get a ban, but Collins looked into the issue and, after consulting other institutions, determined there was little to be gained on behalf of human health by keeping 360 or so chimps in captivity. He announced in 2013 that the N.I.H. would reduce its population of captive chimps to 50. (The agency has retired 66 chimpanzees so far.)

Coaxing the head of a federal agency over a fancy dinner to change policy would, you might think, require a rather different set of character traits than sitting quietly alone in the jungle, observing and categorizing primate behaviors. Field biology, says Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford primatologist and the author of “A Primate’s Memoir,” “requires a huge amount of patience — and this will sound very unromantic — but a capacity for repetition and boredom.”…

But if her interactions with government officials from the United States, France, Tanzania and Burundi, as well as executives from Silicon Valley, are any indication, the skill sets are not so different: patience, purpose, perception. It took her only a few months of observing chimps before Goodall noticed that some of their behaviors were remarkably similar to those of humans. Now, perhaps, it has come full circle: Her understanding of people has been informed by her time spent with chimps, giving her an intuitive power of persuasion that even she does not seem to consciously grasp…