Jane Goodall offers reasons for hope for imperiled planet

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Human beings are poisoning the planet and threatening animals with extinction, famed scientist Jane Goodall told a large Bozeman audience Monday, but there is reason to hope we are smart enough and compassionate enough to turn things around.

“We haven’t inherited this world from our parents n we’ve borrowed it from our children,” Goodall, 74, said at Montana State University’s Brick Breeden Fieldhouse to a packed crowd estimated at 3,300. “We’ve been stealing, stealing, stealing.”

However, she said there is real reason to hope because of the energy of young people, the power of the human brain, the amazing resiliency of nature, and “the indomitable human spirit.”

Speaking with an English accent in a voice both gentle and insistent, Goodall cited people like Nelson Mandela, who emerged from a South African prison to lead and heal his country, and Bozeman’s own Greg Mortenson, who single-handedly started building schools in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as examples of that spirit.

“How can we lose hope when we are surrounded by people like that?” she asked.

Goodall told stories from her own improbable life n of a poor English girl who followed her passion for animals and overcame enormous obstacles to make dramatic discoveries about chimpanzees n that illustrated the power of one person to make a difference.

She credited her mother as the only person who didn’t laugh but encouraged her dream of going to Africa to study animals. She also credited archeologist Louis Leakey, who gave her a secretarial job and her first chance to study chimpanzees in the wild.

Goodall’s discovery that chimps make tools by stripping leaves from branches shook up the scientific world’s definition of humans and what differentiated us from apes.

Her discovery that chimpanzees can engage in brutal warfare disturbed many people, who feared it meant the human tendency to war is hard-wired and inevitable. But she said she also sees an inherent capacity for compassion, love and altruism. Chimpanzees have strong family bonds that can last a lifetime, she said.

“There is no sharp line dividing us human animals from the rest of the animal kingdom,” she said. Once we admit we aren’t the only creatures to feel joy and other emotions, “this leads us to a new responsibility.”

The rapid disappearance of chimpanzee habitat and plummeting wild populations took her work in a new direction starting in the 1980s. She looked for ways to save the chimps’ forests, and developed a program to improve the lives of African villagers.

Goodall touched on many ways people could help the environment, from planting trees to reducing meat consumption, which she said produces tons of methane gas and contributes to global warming.

In answer to questions about Montana’s environmental debates, she favored giving bison more land and freedom to roam, and called the removal of wolves from the endangered species list a tragedy.

Goodall stressed her current work to encourage young people to take up environmental projects through her Roots and Shoots program, which has spread to 100 countries. She met privately Monday with about 80 children, from Bozeman, Livingston, the Wyoming Indian Elementary School and the Wind River Reservation.

Phyllis Gardner, 9, of Wyoming, a member of the Arapaho tribe, said the neatest thing she learned was that “everybody said she couldn’t do it when she wanted to study animals, but her mom encouraged her.”

“It really inspired me n you can do anything if you set your mind to it and work hard,” said Barbie Still, 14, an eighth-grader at Bozeman’s Chief Joseph Middle School.

MSU President Geoff Gamble presented Goodall the university’s second Presidential Medal for Global and Visionary Leadership. It joins a long list of honors she has received, including Frances’ Legion of Honor and England’s highest honor, Dame of the British Empire.

Goodall’s talk was sponsored by the MSU Leadership Institute, ASMSU student government, president’s and provost’s offices, MSU history and philosophy department, Wallace Stegner chair David Quammen, and the Tributary Fund.

Quammen told of first meeting Goodall six years ago, when they hiked into a pristine area of the Congo to find a small population of chimpanzees that had no experience or fear of humans. Though she was 68 then, Goodall hiked nine hours through jungle and swamps to get there, spent five days hiking the forest on blistered feet, and then used her pull to preserve that area as part of a national forest.

“She is one extraordinary dame,” Quammen said.

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