Jane Goodall Asks Audience to Get Involved

On her 70th birthday, famed chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall delivered a message of both despair and hope for the world’s environment Saturday afternoon at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

“Only if each and every one of us rolls up our sleeves and does our best to make the world a better place” will things improve, Goodall told more than 1,000 people gathered on one of the Huntington’s lawns.

She decried the wastefulness of modern society and pointed out that unless dramatic changes are made in Africa, the chimps she has spent 44 years studying will become extinct.

Goodall became famous in the 1960s for her pioneering research in Tanzania’s Gombe forest, where she discovered that chimps used tools, ate meat, were sometimes violent toward other chimps and exhibited complex social behavior.

In recent years, she has given up most of her field work to travel the world and promote issues of human rights and environmental sustainability through her group the Jane Goodall Institute. Last year, she spent about 300 days on the road.

The institute’s Roots and Shoots programs for children -- with chapters across the world -- anchored an environmental fair at the Huntington. Its goal was to persuade more young people to become involved in environmental and human rights issues.

When Goodall arrived to peruse the fair’s booths, she was mobbed by adults and children -- many of whom weren’t alive when she first traveled to Africa to work as a secretary to anthropologist Louis Leakey. She posed for hundreds of photographs in the next hour.

“I told [my students] that she was one of the big science icons of the day,” said Wendy Rodriguez, a science teacher at the Heritage School in Phelan, located in the high desert. “I said, ‘You’re meeting a living Albert Einstein.’ ”

Goodall, speaking to the media, criticized the environmental and energy policies of the Bush administration, which she views as wasteful and bad for imperiled species. She worried that using the war on terrorism to justify the destruction of natural resources would mean that “when the terrorists are finally gone, there will be nothing left.”

She touched on many of the same topics in her speech to the crowd, which endured an occasional drizzle.

Her Roots and Shoots groups circled the field, holding giant peace doves made of blankets and paper and propped up on sticks.

Goodall said she’s hopeful about the future because of the environmental ethic of today’s children.

She told of the first time the chimp she named David Greybeard squeezed her hand in an attempt to communicate. But she also reminded the audience that they can do something that chimps cannot -- and that’s tell stories and exchange ideas.

“Isn’t it tragic we’ve used this vast intellect to develop weapons of mass destruction, to build machines to destroy the natural world?” she asked.

“Isn’t it tragic that we’ve gone this route? I wonder what happened.”