Women's Crossroads

This week I've been reading Jane Goodall's autobiography, Reason for Hope, and finding it very compelling. She looks squarely at all the problems confronting the world, and yet continues to find, as her title suggests, reasons for hope.

Most people know Goodall as "the chimp lady," the young woman who fortuitously landed an internship in Tanzania with Louis Leakey, and accepted his offer to go out into the Gombe forest and observe the chimpanzees living there. She started this work without any more than an undergraduate degree and her own wits and good sense, and says in her autobiography that she believes her lack of formal education in primatology was what enabled her to observe the chimps with an open mind, and think outside the box. It was Goodall who first observed what would be a field-roiling breakthrough in primate studies: chimps using tools! She was also the first to document the extent to which chimps (and presumably other primates) have emotions and relationships that closely mirror humans.

What is most inspiring to me about Jane Goodall, as revealed in her autobiography, is that even though tempermentally she was most suited to a life of quiet field work in the forest, she did not hesitate to take a different route in order to do what she felt must be done. When it was clear that the chimps of Gombe were in danger, from human conflict in the surrounding countries, and from human pressures on the forest, she left her beloved field station and began her much longer career of public speaking, public education, and fundraising on the chimps' behalf. She has been as successful at this as at her field work, founding the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, and later its worldwide educational program Roots and Shoots which has affiliations with schools and universities in 90 countries.

Among the many good works of the Jane Goodall Institute are the founding of chimp orphanages in Africa for baby chimps whose mothers have been killed and chimp sanctuaries in many countries for chimps who have been retired from service in labs or zoos. Goodall has been a passionate advocate for all the unfortunate primates locked up in laboratories, demonstrating the inhumanity of keeping them locked up in cages the same way a rabbit or mouse would be caged.

Thanks to DNA testing, we now know that chimps differ from humans genetically by only 1% of their DNA, and thanks to the work of Goodall and her field staff in Africa, we know that being locked up in isolation in an empty cage for years on end would "feel" the same to a chimp as it would feel to a human being. The problem of primate labs is far from solved, but Jane Goodall has singlehandedly made a big difference, and has vastly raised public awareness on the issue with her tireless public speaking.

Goodall is unabashedly spiritual in her autobiography, telling the reader that she feels she is "an old soul," who has been around before. She cares passionately and spiritually for the health of the earth and its inhabitants, seeing the planet as an interconnected web of life in which every strand is precious.

Goodall ends her autobiography with four specific "reasons for hope," which are: human intelligence for solving problems once we recognize them; the determination of young people to improve the world they've inherited; the unquenchable human spirit and its visions of a better future; and the resilience of nature, the planet's ability to restore itself.

"I have visited Nagasaki," Goodall says, where after the dropping of the atomic bomb scientists believed nothing would grow for at least 30 years. "But amazingly, greenery grew very quickly. One sapling actually managed to survive the bombing, and today it is a large tree, with great cracks and fissures, all black inside; but that tree still produces leaves. I carry one of those leaves with me as a powerful symbol of hope. "

Goodall herself gives me hope. She has dedicated her life to a cause, and she has accomplished more than many people do in several lifetimes. She is truly an inspiration.