A worldwide speaking tour brings famed primatologist Jane Goodall to Houston on April 7. Prior to her visit, CEC reporter Erika McDonald spoke with Goodall about her recent travels, the depletion of global natural resources and why she believes people can save the planet.

I know that you periodically return to Gombe, the site of your original work. What strikes you most about how human activity has impacted chimpanzees there over the years?

Well the huge change that has happened since the early days is that, outside the (Gombe) national park, the forests have now gone. They've been clear cut and there are more people living on the land than the land can support. There are refugees coming in, as well as the typical population growth we've seen around the world since the '60s. So the Gombe chimpanzees are now effectively cut off from others of their kind. Also, there are fewer of them because, for one reason, there has been some poaching as a result of refugees from the Congo who eat chimpanzee meat. Secondly, humans have impinged on their habitat right up to the boundaries of the park, so we are losing chimpanzees because they catch all known human diseases. There are only about 100 left and that is not a very big population. It's a very small gene pool. So we have to try to create some corridors and buffer zones, and the corridors hopefully will enable the chimps to move out of the park and meet up with other remnant groups around the park.

You recently visited the Goualougo Triangle where scientists are studying a chimp population that has had virtually no human contact. They have, in fact, been described as the last wild chimps on the planet. What differences did you notice between these chimps and the Gombe chimps that might indicate something about how the stress of habitat loss distorts animal behavior and ultimately impacts a species.

The major difference was the feeling of being in that untouched forest and seeing animals who have never been hunted—it's sort of a utopian forest, in a way. There are very few places like that left on the earth. So it makes you feel very determined to save other huge areas of forests and protect the animals there so that they, too, can live without fear. In Gombe, what we are seeing in the south, it seems as a result of recent disease, the entire community may have gone. It’s a horrible thing to say and think, but I am afraid it may be true —which is a real call to action to save what's left. In the North, what we've seen there is that the community gradually gets smaller and as you get fewer individuals they become quieter. They don't call as much because they would attract the attention of our main study group and chimps are territorially aggressive. We noticed the same thing when we were working in Burundi. As the chimps got more and more pressure from humans, they became increasingly quiet. You don't hear that beautiful pant-hoot distance call. They just learn to be quiet because they are afraid.

Some scientists have described human activity and its effect on the natural environment as a virus exploiting resources and devastating what’s left. Do you see things being as bleak as that? And, what policies or ideas in Western culture, in your mind, are posing the biggest threats to biodiversity?

I do see it as bleak as that, if we continue to exploit the natural world as we are. First, in the developing world, where people are so poor that they have to cut down trees to grow land to feed increasing numbers of people, you have a vicious cycle of population growth and disease, famine, desertification, increased droughts, and floods. That's one scenario. Then if you come to the developed world and the affluent societies everywhere, you find these unsustainable lifestyles. So even though population growth isn't as marked as in the developing world, even though there may be fewer numbers, (affluent) people have a vastly larger impact on the natural world than poor people. So there are these seemly unanswerable problems if one is to curb human population growth, to reduce the expectations of wealthy people around the world, and to change lifestyles so that people don't always want more than they need. We also have to try to persuade the poor that, while their lifestyles definitely need to be improved, they shouldn't yearn for the standard of living that we have in the West because it's not sustainable. These are really tough problems all of them and, yes, I believe we are at a point where, if we continue in this way much longer, there will be a point of no return.

You talked about how Western culture has impacted the global environment, but what about the flip side? What does it mean to us in the West when areas rich in biodiversity disappear?

It's a very complex picture and if people don't understand they probably aren't interested in understanding. I think you have to try to make it simple. So you pick out a little piece of this huge picture, a particular piece of the puzzle, to explain how life is all interconnected, and if you destroy one piece of the puzzle, then you destroy another and then another.
I heard a wonderful example of this the other day. In Southeast Asia, a virus was threatening the rice crops. So scientists desperately looked through all the seeds in the gene pool of rice that were gathered up in some botanical institution there. They finally found one plant that was resistant to the virus and somehow were able to use it to prevent the virus from spreading. This plant was growing only in one valley, I believe it was in India. Getting hold of that particular plant, they were able to avert massive hunger because without it rice crops would have failed. But what they said, which was so chilling, was that three months after they found that plant, that entire valley was flooded by a dam and now (the plant) is gone. Those are the kinds of things that help people understand that global warming, for example, actually is happening, why it's happening, and how damaging it's going to be—not just to the far away places but to them personally.

You mentioned global warming and I’d like to go back to that. The rest of the world seems to be coming around to the concept of climate change. But in the US, the Bush administration has held back and in other areas of environmental policy as well. Pulling the US out of the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols, removing mercury from EPA’s classification as a toxic substance…

Well, everything! Endangered species, the whole lot, the destruction of the
environment by this administration is absolutely shocking. It's horrendous.

…so decisions are being made that don’t reflect what are now vast bodies of scientific evidence. In the case of global warming, we recently saw the administration downplay the dire findings of a leaked Pentagon report it had tried to keep under wraps. Can you talk about the suppression of science and how that has impacted policy decisions and public perception?

Well, there was (an English) women who had a high-up job, I think it was at the EPA, and she has just come back to the UK, saying how different it is to come back to a climate where scientists can speak even if the government may not believe them. She said that in the United States, people are afraid of losing their jobs, and you get the scenario where the people who are being paid to make certain studies are being paid by the very industry that is (interested in) proving that it doesn’t have a bad impact on the environment. Of course, the connection between government and big corporations is very, very obvious.

The degree to which the suppression of information influences peoples' actions—there are hundreds of people who simply, as you say, don't believe in global warming. They think it's all hyped up. So to suppress information deliberately about the effects of fossil fuel burning, to lie about the effects of oil in the Alaskan wilderness and these kinds of things, makes me shudder.
As far as the extent to which the suppression of information impacts the way politicians think, I don't know. I don't know any more what they think and what they believe and what they say. It's the same old thing isn't it? It has to be that they are living for the moment. It has to be that either they don't care or they don't think even two generations ahead. And I can't understand it. It's so alien to me.

As you tour around the world, your lectures consistently stress individual action as a solution to the loss of biodiversity. What can people in Houston do to minimize their own environmental footprint?

I think one of the big problems today is that thoughtful people who think about what's going on in the world around them either close their ears to it and behave like ostriches with their heads in the sand or they just feel helpless because the problems are so huge. I think the point is, if everybody did all the little things that we know we should do each day—saving energy, saving water, reusing, recycling, and using our shopping behavior to impact the course of business. That’s a very, very powerful tool that we have. We don't have to buy products made by child slave labor. We don't have to buy products from an industry that has a bad environmental or social record. In this consumer driven society, that in itself, magnified by the number of people who care, could be huge. You have to help people to understand that what they do each day truly, truly makes a difference. It’s a difficult message to get across. It's just this feeling that I'm one person and I really can't make a difference. But we have to get over that. We have to move into the future with what I call people power. We can't any longer trust our politicians to make the right decisions.

But how do we overcome that feeling of helplessness? What do you say to people who, on Earth Day 2004, can’t find much to celebrate?

My reasons for hope are really simple. One is that the human brain is incredible and there are amazing advances made in technologies that minimize environmental impact. That’s the wealthy can lead the way. The wealthy can go and buy cars with the very best kinds of engines, houses with the best kinds of solar panels and live in this way so that eventually the price will come down and more people can buy into this new technology. Secondly, is this amazing resilience that nature, given a chance, can recover from destruction of the most horrific kind and once again become beautiful. That doesn't mean the species that have gone extinct can be brought back. That's the most frightening thing. But an awful lot can be restored. It's expensive but it can be. Animal species on the very brink of extension can be given a second chance. Thirdly, is the tremendous enthusiasm, commitment, and dedication of youth, once they know what the problems are and we empower them to act. Finally, is what I call the indomitable human spirit, the people who tackle impossible tasks and won't give up and in the end they succeed. I meet these people everywhere and if the media reported more of some of the incredible things that people are capable of, then that in itself would give people hope and they would be more motivated to make a difference themselves. We need to get over this inertia. It's apathy that's destroying the planet now.