Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Armageddon laid!
When booty calls ... Affleck scores, Stern bores and Snoop Dogg rolls tape?
By Amy Reiter
[10/27/99]

Column
Feinstein for president! Buchanan for emperor!
Dianne's no flibbertigibbet; Hillary's a galumpher; Rush has tremendous intellectual influence; Anne Heche is a pancake brain and Italian-American women Rock it like they talk it!
By Camille Paglia
[10/27/99]

People Feature
Jane Goodall: The hopeful messenger
Like Hawking, Goodall has been elevated to the status of sage, but does knowledge of the wild beast really imply knowledge of the human heart and soul?
By Susan McCarthy
[10/27/99]

Nothing Personal
What we talk about when we talk about breasts
Jennifer Love Hewitt talks titties with Maxim; Roald Dahl's widow has the golden ticket. Plus: Howahd! The Sterns split up.
By Amy Reiter
[10/26/99]

Brilliant Careers
George Jones
His voice weathered and mellowed, this country legend still sings about living -- and he's got plenty of it under his belt.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[10/26/99]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

"On my last USA lecture tour I rarely spent two nights in one place," Goodall writes in an essay on her Web site. "There are lectures, new people to meet, receptions, press conferences. My grandmother's favorite text was always, 'As thy days, so shall thy strength be,' which has got me through everything terrible that's ever happened to me. A day's not too much to get through."

Also Today Jane Goodall: The hopeful messenger Like Hawking, Goodall has been elevated to the status of sage, but does knowledge of the wild beast really imply knowledge of the human heart and soul?

Perhaps that text was what got her through last Friday in Manhattan, Kan. Before our late afternoon telephone conversation, Goodall, 65, had been "at the zoo with hundreds of kids, [then] there was a press conference, a talk to volunteers, a talk to zoo keepers and there's a donor dinner," which she would attend that night. Nevertheless, she was unhurried, soft-spoken and enthusiastic, as always, in discussing her work, the natural world and the prospects for its future.

Your life has changed so much since those early days at Gombe, and your travel and speaking schedule sounds hectic. Do you miss that time, which I imagine was much more contemplative?

Those days were idyllic. It was paradise, actually. It was magic. But you know one has to pay back. I feel very strongly that I was so amazingly lucky to have that incredible opportunity. My job now is to save what I love. I seem to have a fairly strong voice and an ability to communicate with most people. And we have to get people's hearts involved.

In those early days of your field study, when you'd sit for weeks and months trying to make contact with the chimpanzees, what kept you going and believing that what you were doing would, in fact, lead to something valuable and important?

It wasn't so much that it would be valuable and important. My goal was to habituate the chimps and learn what they did. The first time I saw them using tools, I actually couldn't believe it. It was just so amazing. So, it wasn't that I hoped to make significant findings. It was that I had a job to do and the job was to get the chimps to stop being frightened of me so I could learn how they lived.

What is the political situation in Tanzania now? Does it prevent you from spending as much time as you'd like at Gombe?

The political situation in Tanzania has always been wonderful for us. The political situation, however, in Congo-Brazzaville, where we have our biggest chimpanzee sanctuary, is horrendous -- it's a civil war. There have been times when our amazingly brave project manager there has said it would be better that no one else comes [to the sanctuary] as it would draw attention to what's going on there. And it would be an extra burden of worry for her.

What's known as the "bush meat" trade -- the killing and butchering for sale of Africa's wild animals, some of which are rare and endangered –- is perceived by many people as being a result of human desperation for food.

That's completely and utterly wrong. The bush meat trade is commercial hunting -- hunters going from the city to the end of the logging trails, shooting everything, loading it on trucks and taking it to the city, where it fetches more money than domestic animal meat. Bush meat is a cultural preference, a delicacy. It's not used to feed starving people -- absolutely not.

What's the likelihood of being able to bring an end to the bush meat business?

The only hope is if we can mount a very high-powered government effort to end it, on the one hand, and then, on the ground [among the people], pursue a grass-roots education program. But we don't now have the money to do that very well and we haven't yet succeeded at getting high enough political support.

What about in the United States? I'd think you would be able to gain access to fairly high-level political figures here.

I can, and I feel really badly about this. If only all the conservation groups could somehow get together and work out very, very clearly, step by step, what this initiative would actually be, what it would look like, then I could approach these people. But as yet there is no clear understanding of what to ask them to do.

You see, it's an incredibly complex situation. It isn't just the hunters going out and shooting. Even the presidents of some of these countries actually send soldiers into national parks to shoot wild animals for their feasts. There's a lot of corruption and huge sums of money are involved -- I didn't realize that until quite recently. People are making enormous amounts of money from the bush meat trade. And there's even chimpanzee meat being sold as a delicacy at Congolese restaurants in Europe.

Next page | Are the lives of animals more important than the suffering of humanity?