In November 2010 Doctor Jane Goodall, world-renowned primatologist, conservationist and UN Messenger of Peace, came to Spain in order to present the film which documents her work over the last 50 years in Gombe. Traveling from Seville to Madrid on the train, the IE University researcher Leticia Ortega had the opportunity to interview Doctor Jane Goodall. First of all, Doctor Jane Goodall, I want to thank you very much indeed for this interview. On behalf of IE University, it is an honor for me to share this time with you. I know that you have a great busy schedule. Most of your time you re on the road, more than 300 days per year, giving conferences, meeting governments with the aim of making people aware of the importance of living in harmony with nature. In short, the importance of investing in our future. - How do you have so much energy and strength to travel all around the world? What is the driving force that motivates you to act and live as you do? The motivating force is the fact that I have grandchildren and all the people working for the Jane Goodall Institute and Roots and Shoots. These small children are being born into the world and there is a saying which goes we haven t inherited this planet from our parents, we ve borrowed it from our children. But actually we ve not been borrowing we ve been stealing and stealing because we haven t been planning to pay back and now the payback time has come. It s really important to pay it back because the point can come when it s too late to start healing many of the wounds inflicted on Mother Earth. It s not too late yet but the window is closing all the time and so I m highly motivated particularly to grow the youth program Roots and Shoots and get young people motivated to make a difference. Think about how they can make a difference and influence their parents from a wide range from doctors, lawyers, politicians, legislators and teachers. Through the youth network, which is now 120 countries or more, we re beginning to make quite a difference in the way people think so that s what motivates me. What I m doing is actually showing the positive and that gives me energy. I have to live day to day, live in the moment so if I start thinking now of what s ahead of me next month I might get very tired so I just think well today I m traveling through Spain looking out at the country and the sun is shining and it s a nice day. I need so many inspirational people to give me inspiration and that increases my energy. - Why is Biodiversity Conservation essential for the future of Humanity? I think we need to get away from the word biodiversity which is really just jargon and lots of people don t understand it and go back to the term web of life. Let s take a whole area like a wetland or a prairie. Within that ecosystem, the life forms that make it up are interconnected with each other like a spider web. It s three-dimensional and so if you imagine a spider web as the shape of the globe, it s been showed again and again that by just removing one small insect which doesn t seem to matter, lo and behold, that small insect is providing food for some other creature that may be a bird. That bird species will suffer and in turn that can affect some kind of mammal. So we just don t know what s going to happen when one species is exterminated from any given ecosystem. There have been places where there has been what they call ecosystem collapse just because one by one species disappeared. So for our future we need healthy ecosystems and habitats.
- How would you explain to IE University students the meaning of Sustainability? And how would you motivate them to focus the performance of their future professions towards Sustainability? First of all, if we think of sustainability: we are on a planet with finite natural resources, there is only so much oil, there is only so much water, there is only so many forests and we are at the current time using them faster than they are replenished and a lot of them aren t replenishable, except in thousands and thousands of years. I think that the way to convince students of the importance of living a sustainable life is probably a series of stories and a series of documentaries which show what happens when you overuse the natural resources of an area and how it s so damaging, not only to all the different animals and plants living there but the people too. So sustainability is exemplified by how indigenous people used to live and in some cases still do. Now we ve moved away from that and we will never abandon the kind of lifestyle which was thrown all over the world by the western society, people like their comforts. I think students will begin to ask themselves the question What would be the consequences of the little choices I make today? What do I buy? Where did it come from? How was it made? Did it involve child slave labor? Was it very polluting to the environment? How many miles has it traveled to get to the shop? What do we eat? Society itself needs to be sustained and it s sustained by good relationships and the people within it, so I think I ve always managed to get people interested through stories. When I went to Greenland and watched those huge slabs of ice crash down and saw this water pour out where water had never poured before. More and more ice is breaking off and I learnt that if all the arctic ice melted, the levels of the ocean around the world would rise by 7 meters approximately. Then I went directly from there by chance to Panama, where I met some indigenous people who for hundreds of years have lived on offshore islands, and now the elders have made a plan to remove the islanders from one island to the other onto the mainland. Why? Because one after the other the islands are becoming uninhabitable, not only during storms but just at high tide. I think once students begin to understand that this isn t some eco-terrorist trying to make people frightened, if they go out and keep their eyes open, they will see it happening. There are rivers shrinking in size and getting more and more polluted and fish dying, affecting livelihoods. So you see it s all interconnected: ecosystems and the people. - What do you think is the greatest measure that states should take to make a reality the creation of a Sustainable Economy? We should just have to get away from this ridiculous notion that it s possible to live on a planet with non-renewable natural resources, finite natural resources, and impose on that system unlimited economic development, because it can t happen. It was an American scientist, Edward O. Wilson, about 6 years ago who said if everybody on the planet had the same standard of living as the average European or the average American, we d need three new planets. This has now been recalculated because of population growth and shows that we would need five or six new planets, when we don t even have one new planet. We ve got poor, old, battered Mother Earth. Part of the reason why this dire situation has happened and is getting worse is because of economic interests. So the fight going on all the time is conservation against an economy that wants a new dam, that wants to chop off the top of a mountain to get coal or that wants to destroy huge areas of Alberta to get oil. So again and
again conservation is moving in the right direction, then BAM!... it comes up against economics. It s just happened in Tanzania where it has been decided by the government to build a road across the famous Serengeti, which will completely disrupt the migration. Money comes in and the businesses on the two ends of the road develop more quickly, which means more roads and more resources taken out of the earth. It s terrible. The only road that we can hope to make change is to get more and more young people involved all over the world. They will be influencing their parents and we can get a critical mass, a tipping point of young people who share values and who understand that we need money to live but we shouldn t live for money. Then that is going to perhaps lead to the kind of world which will be sustainable. Some people, way more than others, have far more stuff than they need. Who needs three cars, three houses, a boat, a private plane and all these other things? - How could the private sector help for a better and sustainable world? One way they can help -and they are giving more and more to- is social responsibility and that s because more businesses and corporations are beginning to feel some guilt. They are beginning to try to pay back and many of them are actually trying to reduce their carbon emissions. They are trying to do things in a greener way, sometimes by law and very often not by law, to save energy and do things in a way which is more in harmony with nature tied in with new technologies. That enables us to do things in a different way with a less heavy environmental footprint. Tie that in with people having changing attitudes and you can begin moving in the right direction. The private sector is providing much needed funds to enable NGO s to do what they are doing, which is what governments aren t doing. In the US the government is increasingly relying on NGO s to do all the stuff that really a government should be doing for its people, but they make cuts in this and cuts in that, and all these aspects of public spending. NGO s jump in because they care, they care about the abandoned elderly whose pensions have been reduced and don t have health care. So the government knows that always there will be someone who cares enough to jump in and help. The private sectors are supporting NGOs and also helping us to develop our Roots and Shoots program, which I always come back to because that is the future. We ve got about sixteen thousands active groups and if we can find the right person to coordinate all this activity and to share what s going on, it s going to be huge. In the US they ve calculated the number of volunteer hours given to community service and the government has come up with a rate of over two million dollars just in volunteer hours contributed by Roots and Shoots students in one year. Also the name Roots and Shoots is very symbolic. My favorite tree is a beech because when I was a child I had this beech tree and I used to climb it and feel close to the birds, I used to spend hours up in my beech tree. I made my grandmother give it to me as a gift for my birthday. When my beech tree -which is now a big tree- began to grow, it was a tiny little seed and it put out little tiny roots and a little tiny shoot. At that point you could pick it up with your thumb and fingers, so tiny, so weak, seemingly so weak but there s a magic, the life force in that seed is so powerful that those little roots to reach the water can work through rocks and eventually push them aside. That little shoot to reach the sunlight can work through cracks in a brick wall and eventually knock it down. So if we think of the rocks and walls as all the bad things we humans have inflicted on the planet, not just environmentally but socially as well, for example unequal distribution of wealth: poverty on the one hand and incredible wealth on the other, then, it s hope. If hundreds and thousands of young people around the
world get together, they can break through and make this a better world. If our young people lose hope, we may as well all give up. I could kill myself trying to save chimpanzees and forests but there wouldn t be any point if the new generations aren t going to do a better job of looking after what we ve saved and what we ve done, so that s why I come back again and again to Roots and Shoots because it s the future, it s the real legacy, I think. - Genetic engineering is changing the food we eat, what do you think the risks of the production of transgenic foods are? Do we have to consider it as an option in a sustainable world? Personally I m very very concerned about the effect of genetically modified foods on the environment and on ourselves. There are medical examples of some genetically modified food that over the long term is potentially damaging to human health, and we certainly know that it s damaging the environment. It s superseding the seeds which are growing in a certain region and which can withstand the conditions of that region, producing plants where the seeds will grow as a second year terminator (producing seeds that cannot reproduce in the second generation). The toxins that are built into these genetically modified plants to protect them from pests, I fail to see how it can t be affecting the soil when those plants die. And then there are genetically modified animals. I was in Austria where this man Michael rescues hundreds and hundreds of farm animals. The last time I was there I met six pigs their truck had overturned, and when something like that happens, he is always quickly there. He bought these six sows and they were absolutely huge and they couldn t really walk for more than a few minutes. They d been genetically modified to have two extra ribs to produce more pork chops, genetically modified to produce much extra muscle mass on the thighs to get bigger hams and it was so shocking. And yet these creatures would be better if we genetically modified their brains and made them into creatures without feelings. When they are out in the field, they are so happy and they start grunting, but they have to be down on their knees and they lie most of the time because their legs are so weak. It s just so grotesque and we have no right to do that. That s the whole thing about vegetarianism, when we re thinking about sustainability. Firstly, it s causing vast areas of forest to be cut down to produce grazing for livestock or to grow corn to feed them. Secondly they are being fed unnatural diets. Lots of herbivores are being given chopped up meat from other animals, which by the way is how mad cow disease began from chopping up sheep and feeding them to cows. They are also getting corn where they should be eating grass. So they are producing huge amounts of methane gas and that s contributing hugely to green house gases. It is not just CO2, it is methane as well. Then of course to keep the animals alive in these horrendous conditions you have to feed them antibiotics. That means they are getting out into the environment and that means the bacteria are building up resistance and that means that already people have died from a scratch on a finger. This is over and above the use of growth hormones, which is causing all kind of problems in ourselves, and again it s ignoring the horrible cruelty. - Finally it would be a pleasure if you could finish this interview with some final words for the whole IE Community. Just before that, I want to thank you very much again for this time we ve shared and to tell you that IE University is and will be at your complete disposal.
The final words should be for everybody to really believe that every single day that we live, we make an impact on the planet and we have a choice as to what kind of impact we re going to make. That s coming back to what I said about thinking about the consequences of the choices we make each day. If IE University joins the Roots & Shoots mission, then indeed it would be a wonderful thing. Thank you.