Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall
Dame Jane Morris Goodall, DBE, formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is a British primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace. Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 55-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots program, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. She has...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth3 April 1934
CityLondon, England
The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.
It's not Africa that is destroying the African rainforest, it's selling concessions to timber companies that are not African, they are from the developed world - Japan, America, Germany, Britain.
You're thinking about putting scientists into small cages and doing research on them. I wish it could happen sometimes.
I think we must cling to the hope that we can see in the great heroism, the bravery of the firemen and policemen, and the outpouring of caring and concern that has come pouring in from around the world.
To me, trees are living beings and they have their own sort of personalities.
If we allow the destruction of the environment, we can see the terrorists have utterly won, and are destroying the future of our children and grandchildren. We must not let that happen.
I was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites which I mean that would have been such a brilliant coup.
Even chimps understand the concept - if a troop of chimps enters a fruit tree, they will only pick the fruits that are ripe and leave the others growing. That is sustainability.
The chimpanzees taught me a lot about nonverbal communication. The big difference between them and us is that they don't have spoken language. Everything else is almost the same: Kissing, embracing, swaggering, shaking the fist.
Of course animals have a personality and emotions.
Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.
Without the heart to ground it and open it to who we really can be as human beings, the brain is a very dangerous machine. A machine that is saying: we've got to have economic growth; we've got to have unending economic growth, otherwise societies will collapse. And yet there should be something saying: wait a minute, this isn't going to work.
It may sound trite, but young people really are the future.
We find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was "just human".