Jane Goodall, famous for studying chimpanzees in Africa and later her evolution into an advocate for the environment, will speak at the Mondavi Center in Davis on Wednesday. The lecture is sold out, with more than 200 on a waiting list.
Goodall's other appearances during a two-day swing through Sacramento are either private fundraisers or semiprivate youth outreach events.
Here are excerpts from The Bee's conversation with Goodall, 74, earlier this week:
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Q: What do you hope to achieve on your Sacramento visit?
A: The same as when I go anywhere. I hope to raise awareness about environmental problems, raise awareness about what people can do to help solve them and hopefully get some more members for our Jane Goodall Institute and for Roots & Shoots.
Q: In your years of studying chimpanzees, what surprised you the most?
A: The fact that they were capable of violence and a kind of primitive war was an unpleasant surprise. They were more like us than I thought. I was very sad, and shocked, because in some cases there were chimpanzees killing others who they had previously been quite close associates with. It was brutal and shocking.
Q: Since your initial work in the 1960s, how has our understanding of chimpanzee behavior changed?
A: We know a whole lot more about paternity because you can do genetic profiling from fecal samples, so we know who some of the fathers are. Since chimpanzees can live to be over 60, we really are building up case histories, finding out more about personality, how skills of the mother can affect the child over time, different techniques by which males get to be No. 1. It's a very long-term study.
Q: Of the criticisms sometimes leveled at your work – not enough emotional distance, research designs that might have distorted animal behavior, and so on – which do you feel had the most substance?
A: Basically by offering bananas we brought together individuals who might have only seen each other occasionally. Chimpanzees wander around in small, constantly changing groups. Possibly we created friendships which wouldn't otherwise have happened, or we created some hostilities that might not have happened. But by and large, a recent study (at her center in Africa) found that very little had changed.
Q: What is the most important thing you would like everyone to know about chimpanzees?
A: They're far more like us than everybody ever used to think. There isn't a sharp line dividing us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Once you realize that we're not the only beings with personalities, minds and, above all, emotions, then you start getting ethical concerns about the way we're using so many beings, in medical research or intensive farming, which is worse, because it's involving millions and millions of sentient beings and keeping them in absolutely horrendous conditions.
Q: What prompted you to move away from extensive field work in Africa in the 1980s?
A: Realizing that chimpanzees were becoming extinct – the forests were going – and realizing that the environmental and social problems of Africa could often be laid at the door of the elite communities around the world.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: We are trying to conserve chimpanzees across Africa basically by working with the local people, improving their lives and creating partners instead of potential poachers. Our youth program, Roots & Shoots, is now in nearly 100 countries. The youth program is encouraging groups of young people from preschool to university and beyond to take action to make the world a better place for people, for animals and for the environment, with a theme of learning to live in peace and harmony with each other and between nations, between cultures, between religions and between us and the natural world.
Q: You're just coming from a conference on fundraising – what can you share with us about the nitty-gritty of raising money?
A: It's very hard work. It's really important for some aspects of what we're doing to raise an endowment so it will go on in perpetuity after I'm gone. I have to do lectures that pay a lot rather than go and lecture to the people who might need it more. I try to do both, but there's a limit to what one person can do, even if you are on the road 300 days a year.
Q: If you could encourage everyone you encounter to do just one thing, what would it be?
A: Start to think about the effect on the environment and society of the small choices you make each day. What we eat, what we wear, where it has come from, how it's prepared, was it ethically made. Once you start thinking about that, then you make little changes, and in fact, a lot of people start gradually making bigger changes. That is the most important thing.
Call The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg, (916) 321-1086.
