Jo Menell:
When you have animals living in a wild natural habitat and you have increasing human population growing up around there, there is inevitably a terrible conflict. How do we give the animals enough room to roam and let the humans chop down enough trees if that's what they have to do to supply carbon for wood?
Jane Goodall:
Well, there's a mix of things that one can do trying to work closely with the people. First of all, there's a need for understanding so that anything you suggest can be perceived as their initiative. Then they will buy into the program and develop it. Agro forestry is one. You can grow trees for firewood and you can grow trees for shade and building poles and things like this. And secondly, there is are imaginative rural development programs, particularly those giving women better education and a better understanding of the problems. There's a need for voluntary population stabilization. Without the support of local people, you might as well give up because you can make all the noise you like, you can demarcate a national park, but if the people outside want to go creeping into a forest you really can't stop them. They've got to get a benefit. Eco-tourism is one of they ways that we're trying to develop.
Jo Menell:
Awfully hard getting to somebody who might get a few bucks from that but knows that if he kills a crocodile and sells the skin or gets a rhino horn he can make much more money.
Jane Goodall:
You have to look at both sides of the market. On the one hand, we have the wants and needs and concerns of the people living there. On the other hand, we have the middleman and the consumers who are buying the products. 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. Roots and Shoots is developing in different parts of the world because we do know today that we're all linked together.
All the problems inter-mesh and kids understand this very well. The Internet and modern forms of electronic communication are helping, but there are rural areas in Africa and other parts of the developing world where they don't even have electricity, let alone the Internet. So we develop communication by the good old method of writing and sharing thoughts, sharing photographs, sharing videos. Wealthy schools in the West raise money to send over cameras so the people in Africa can share their culture. It's a give/give situation.
Jo Menell:
Selling the timber to that Japanese company for cash helps the the GNP of that country. Until those kids are old enough to vote out that government and create a new consciousness, what can you do now?
Jane Goodall:
We have to stop the consumer buying and get moratoriums on importing tropical hardwood. We can try to make the politicians understand that something like eco-tourism, developed properly, can actually bring in more money and it will still be there in five years. Sometimes that's impossible and they don't want to understand because they want to put money in their Swiss bank accounts. In many parts of Africa it's terribly corrupt. It is going to be far more appealing to the young people because the politician won't be there in five years if he wants to feather his nest. It works in some places and it doesn't work in others. It depends on the people.
Jo Menell:
How can you tell the cocaine farmer growing coke on the slopes of Bolivia not to do that when the demand is in the United States?
Jane Goodall:
I don't have the answers to all these things. I've been doing what I can do as one person. Our organization, the Jane Goodall Institute has very little resources. All I can do is tackle the various projects that I come up against. Strife and political unrest bring some of our programs to an end, but yet we've planted seeds in the kids and some of the programs still go on even though we're not there. You find a little piece of the problem that you can get your hands around where you know the people involved. Your solution is going to depend on the situation locally, the personalities of the people.
Jo Menell:
Is there an example of a micro-solution you can tell me?
Jane Goodall:
Our most exciting project is funded by the European Community. The entire team is Tanzanian and they speak all the local languages. This is a very ambitious project. It's taking an area along the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Gombi National Park, where I was with the chimps for 35 years. When I arrived in that place in 1960 you could go for 300 miles along Lake Tanganyika and it was forest coming down to the crystal clear water from the peaks of the mountains, miles upon miles with a few little clearings for fishing villages. If you go back today, the ten-mile shoreline of Gombi National Park looks the same but to the north and to the south, the trees have gone. It's not just some trees, virtually all trees except where it's really steep. A few shade trees have been planted, but it's so bad that in some areas where the slopes are very steep and they're trying to grow crops, soil erosion is dreadful. You fly over it in the wet season and way out into the lake, the water is red from the washed down soil. We've got barren rocky deserts on some of those hillsides. The women have to dig for roots to get firewood to cook their food.
So our program is re-forestation, agro-forestry, women's projects, and very strong conservation education working with children. This is working because all of the local villages were brought into it. They were shown videos of what happens with soil erosion. The elders said, "We don't need to plant trees, we've never planted trees." Then gradually they all start nodding. There are bits of humor in the film and we take some drummers along to make them happy.
By the end they're saying, "We want to plant trees, will you give us some trees?"
"No."
"You won't give us any trees? Why do you come?"
"We'll give you some seeds and you're going to grow the trees and we'll show you how to grow them."
Now there are 16 villages along the lakeshore with nurseries. The institute's program is sending a little team into the villages and it's in all of the primary schools. That's an area which was almost without hope and suddenly there's hope just from working in a small way with a few village leaders and local politicians.
Jo Menell:
That's a great tale. Looking at primates, the chimpanzees, and looking at man, what happened to us? Where did our greed, our violence, and our senseless killing come from? Why did we drift so far from our primate ancestry?
Jane Goodall:
Actually, I don't think that we have departed very much. We find behavior in chimpanzees that is clearly a precursor of violence, a precursor of cruelty, a precursor of war. We equally find behavior that is a precursor of love, compassion and altruism. The chimps can be nasty and mean like us but we've developed a sophisticated spoken language and a much more developed intellect. Only humans are capable of deliberate cruelty because we are capable of truly understanding the effect of our deed on the victim. Whether it's physical abuse and torture or whether it's mental abuse, we understand what we're doing in a way that a chimpanzee can't grasp. So to answer your question, how have we departed? What makes us so different is language and the sophisticated development of the intellect.
Jo Menell:
Are chimps greedy? Do they steal from each other or invade each others territory to get more stuff than they need?
Jane Goodall:
They certainly will take armfuls of food that are larger than they can actually consume. They have eyes that are greedier than their stomachs. They are very territorial and groups of males go out into a neighboring territory where there are fewer males and try to steal females and take over any food patches they come to. So we actually do see all the roots of our own violence, but we don't have to follow our biological greedy selfish instincts. We usually do, but I truly believe we have the ability, if only we will use it right, to leave those things behind--which is what the State of the World Forum is all about. How can we do that? Nobody knows, of course.
Jo Menell:
Which brings us to consumerism. We are, beyond any other species, consumers to the point of self-destruction. You can't stop people from shopping. Do you think there is such a thing as sustainable consumerism?
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