David: Andy Borowitz is one of our great humorous. He writes the Borowitz report for The New Yorker, which is a satirical news column, but Andy wasn't kidding at all when he said he wanted to interview Jane Goodall at The New Yorker festival. He calls Goodall one of his real childhood heroes and she's certainly a revered figure in modern science. Goodall began her study of chimpanzees in 1960, working with the scientist Louis Leakey. What he observed in the field completely changed our understanding of how primates behave, including humans. Goodall has just published The Book of Hope, a Survival Guide for Trying Times. Goodall used to travel as much as 300 days of the year but since the pandemic she's been at her home in England in the house where she grew up. Her conversation with Andy Borowitz was recorded for this year's edition of The New Yorker festival.

Andy Borowitz: Welcome Dr. Jane Goodall to The New Yorker festival. It is my honor.

Dr. Jane Goodall: Well, thanks very much. I think it's going to be great talking with you, I can tell. Even though we're separated and Zooming, I can still feel people's personalities.

Andy Borowitz: Well, I know that you have pretty good instincts when it comes to primates, which I am. I'm going to have to go with that. I have to believe that. So much to cover. We're just going to jump right in. Tell us a little bit about the stuffed animal that you received when you were around one year old?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Well, that was Jubilee. It was to commemorate the first chimpanzee born in London Zoo, named Jubilee because it was the Jubilee of the king and queen at that time. Jubilee has been with me ever since but unfortunately he is now in this exhibition called Becoming Jane. Jubilee, he's like 80. What is he? 84 or 85? He's in a bulletproof glass case. That was the only way I'd let him leave me.

Andy Borowitz: The house he grew up in is in Bournemouth, which is the south coast of England. It's called The Birches. I understand you spent a lot of your childhood up a tree. Is that the case?

Dr. Jane Goodall: That's correct. It's a Beech tree and Beech, I called him Beech. He's still out there in the garden and I love Beech so much. I used to take my homework up there. I used to read Dr Doolittle, Tarzan up there. I think I was 10 years old when I wrote out what I thought a last will and testament would look like and I got my grandmother to sign Beech to me after she died.

Andy Borowitz: Well, you went to school, you graduated at the age of 18 and there was no money to send you to university. What was your next move?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Well, I had to get some money. We had very little money. Mum scraped up enough for a secretarial course in London. I got a job in London, but of course that was just always marking time. Then came the opportunity I'd been waiting for, invitation to have a holiday in Kenya issued by a school friend of mine. I had to come home to save up enough money for the fare, you couldn't save in London, and finally had enough money to buy a return ticket to Kenya.

Andy Borowitz: Now you were brought up, it seems, by two very, very strong and loving women, your mother and your grandmother. Can you tell me something about them and what gifts that they gave you?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Well, I was really lucky. I was born loving animals. Just people, "Way what triggered your love?" I don't know. I was born that way and I was lucky enough to have a really supportive mother. She didn't get mad when she found earthworms in bed with me. "Jane you were looking so intently as though you were wondering how do they walk without legs." I was one and a half. I don't remember that. If I'd had a different kind of mother, that scientific curiosity might have been crushed and I might not have done what I've done.

Andy Borowitz: What about your grandmother?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Well, my grandmother was Danny. She was one of those women who was one of the first to actually get a job as a young woman. She got a job teaching physical training to young ladies at a school. She was just, I don't know what that was about Danny. She was quite stern but she had a heart of gold and her husband died. I never met my grandfather, which I'm very sad about. When she died she had all his letters tied up with red ribbon on her chest when mum went in in the morning, and she said, "Please send these with me on my long journey." It was very moving.

Andy Borowitz: We've taken you to your first voyage to Africa. There you meet the person who would really send your life in a whole new direction, Louis Leakey. Can you tell us about your first meeting with him and your first impressions of him?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Somebody said, "Well if you're interested in animals you should make Louis." Well, first of all, I called and Leakey hated the telephone. A very grumpy voice said, "I'm leaky, what do you want?" Which was a bit off-putting as I was very shy. Anyway, I was so keen to go and see somebody who might tell me something about animals that I went, I could answer the questions he was asking me and I think that impressed him. That boring old secretarial work, the course that I'd done, two days before I met Leakey, his secretary had suddenly unexpectedly quit and he needed a secretary and there I was. It was magical.

Andy Borowitz: He obviously saw your potential, and he was not only willing to overlook the fact that you didn't have University training, he saw that as something of an asset, didn't he?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Yes, he did. He didn't tell me at the time but the very early animal behavior people were very reductionist in their thinking. They thought there was a difference between us and all other animals, a difference of kind. We were absolutely unique up on this pedestal, and there was an unbridgeable chasm between us and other animals. I shouldn't talk about animals having personalities, minds capable of solving problems, and certainly not emotions because those were unique to us, but I didn't know that at the time. I hadn't been to college but Leakey, he knew a bit about that. He was very happy to have somebody who hadn't been brainwashed.

My childhood companion, my teacher, my dog, had taught me that what the professors were saying when I got to Cambridge was rubbish. Anyway, so that was an advantage in Leakey's eyes. Also, the fact that I was a woman. He felt women might be more patient in the field.

Andy Borowitz: You like to talk about yourself as a naturalist as opposed to a scientist. What's the difference?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Well, the difference to me is that science is very factual-oriented and that's good. I'm not saying anything against that. What's missing in so many ethological scientists is this sense of wonder and awe and not wanting everything to be explained, because some things never can be explained. I'm pretty sure about that.

Andy Borowitz: What was Leakey's specific goal for you? He got a few months of funding to send you out to Gambi to look at these chimps, which hadn't really been observed before. When he sent you off with your provisions and your African cook, Dominic, what was your mission statement?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Well, he never really told me too much at the time but, in fact, he was a paleoanthropologist and he spent his life searching for the fossils of stone age people in Africa. Of course, from a fossil you can tell an awful lot from the muscle attachment. Did the creature, how did it walk, from tooth wear, what food did it eat, but behavior doesn't fossilize. Because chimps are our closest relative, and back then we didn't even know how close they were. We didn't know that the DNA of humans and chimps differs by only just over 1%.

He postulated, now accepted, but then it was a bit far out, that about 6 million years ago, there was an ape-like human-like creature, a common ancestor. He reasoned, "If Jane sees behavior and chimpanzees today that's the same or similar to human behavior today, maybe that behavior was already in the common ancestor, and we brought it with us on our separate evolutionary pathways. Things like kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting one another, swaggering males competing for dominance. He felt this would give him a better feeling for how early humans might have behaved.

Andy Borowitz: To accomplish that mission you first had to get a chimp to not run away from you, which was a problem in the early months.

Dr. Jane Goodall: The early observations were all through binoculars and from a reasonable distance. I was getting really worried because there was money for six months. I knew if I didn't see exciting things before the money ran out that would be the end of the dream and, worse in a way, I would've let Leakey down because he really stuck his neck out. I think you know that right at the beginning what's Tanzania today was back then Tanganyika. It was part of the crumbling British colonial empire. The authorities just weren't prepared to take responsibility for this young girl going into potential danger, but in the end they said, ,"She can come, but she has to have a companion."

It was my amazing mother who volunteered to come for the first four months. It was amazing because I'd get back in the evening depressed, had chimps had run away. She was boosting my morale telling me, "You are seeing more than you think. You've found this peak and, with your binoculars, you know how the Chimps move around in different size groups, sometimes alone. You know about their calls they make. You know about the foods they're eating and how they make nests at night in the trees bending over the branches."

Andy Borowitz: In your new book you make a dedicated to a primate named David Greybeard who I guess, along with Louis Leakey, was one of the most important primates in your life.

Dr. Jane Goodall: David contributed in many ways, first of all by letting me get close to him. The real breakthrough was seeing David using and making tools, grass stems to fish termites from their underground burrows, nests and picking leafy twigs and to use them as tools, carefully picking off the leaves and side twigs. At the time it was sort humans and only humans used and made tools. That was what enabled Leakey to go to the Geographic. They agreed that they'd fund the research when that six months' money ran out and they sent a filmmaker, Hugo van Lawick, who was able to document the behavior that I was gradually learning more and more about as the other Chimps came to accept me as well.

Andy Borowitz: Could you talk about a couple of the mother chimps and what you learned from them. Specifically Flow seemed like a very important character as you were studying the parenting behavior of Chimp moms.

Dr. Jane Goodall: Flow was amazing. She was the matriarch, she was the highest ranking female. She already had two offspring when I first knew her. No, three. I was able to watch when she had the next baby and the key thing we now know, we can look back through 60 years of observations. A good mother is supportive just like my mother. The good mothers who are willing to run in and risk being attacked to protect their child. It now seems quite clear that the offspring of these supportive mothers do best. The males get to a higher position in the hierarchy, probably sire more kids, and the females are better mothers.

We can contrast Flow with Passion, who was a rather cold mother. She seldom supported her offspring. She wasn't really a very nice female at all. She was also high ranking, but her children never did anything much compared to Flow, whose sons one after the other became alpha male.

Andy Borowitz: When you had your son how much were you looking to a chimp like Flow for mothering tips?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Well, I had my own mother as well. Also at that time the popular book for people was Dr. Spock. It was a mixture of Flow, Mum and Dr. Spock. What I really got from the chimps were two important things. One, they had fun with their infants. They played with them, they laughed. I thought, "I'm going to have fun with my baby too." The other thing was the tremendous importance of support in their first couple of years, which is really important for our children too. To have a little group, two or three supportive adults who are all is there, continuity for the child to give that child confidence.

The final thing, if a chimp infant is irritating, like a mother's termite fishing and the infant is grabbing onto her grass tools and she's very irritated, but she doesn't punish the child. Not until he's learned that he doesn't do it. She will distract her. With one hand she's tool using, with the other hand she's tickling her infant. I thought, "That's important for me too."

Andy Borowitz: You returned to Cambridge to get your PhD in Ethology. What culture clash was that? You had been in Africa up close with the chimps, but you went back to Cambridge and had to deal with this whole other group of people, academics. How did they greet your findings?

Dr. Jane Goodall: They did not like the fact that I'd named the chimps and that I talked about all these different personalities. I dealt with it in the way I deal with these things, I knew they were wrong. I just quietly went on writing the way I thought I should write. Of course it wasn't nice being mixed up with lots of people. I love being alone and being out in the rainforest. I had a lovely tutor and she helped me. Together we explained, "Jane's been on her own in the forest. It really makes her tense and psychologically upset if she's with a lot of people." Which wasn't true, but we got permission for me to go outside into the country.

Andy Borowitz: That brings me to the Book of Hope. Now I like the way you define hope in the book because as you define hope it's not just blind faith or optimism, it's tied to action. You say to your co-author in the book, you have a wonderful line where you say "I hope that this book is good, but it won't be unless we work really hard at it." That's the template for your approach to life, "It's good to be optimistic, but let's actually get down and get to work."

Dr. Jane Goodall: If you don't have hope then why bother to do anything? If you don't think that what you do is going to make a difference why bother to do it? Why not just sit back, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die? If we don't get together and take action then I think our race, our species, is doomed. The window of time isn't that big. When we started on this book, Doug said, "You're talking too much about the doom and the gloom. This is meant to be hope." I said, "Yes, but if you don't acknowledge the terrible things that we're doing to the planet and to each other then people will say, 'Well she's just looking at the world through rose tinted spectacles.'" That's not true.

I know as much as anyone about all the harm we've inflicted, but there is still a window of time and if we get together and realize that each one of us makes an impact every day it's not too late.

Andy Borowitz: I'd like to do a quick rundown of your four main reasons for hope in the book, if you're game for that?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Sure.

Andy Borowitz: The first reason I love, which is you say you cite as reason number one, the amazing human intellect. Tell us what you think our intellect can do to get us out of this mess.

Dr. Jane Goodall: The reason I use intellect rather than intelligence, the thing that makes us more different from chimps and everything else is the exclusive development of our intellect. I mean, animals are way, way, ,way more intelligent than people used to think, but we've designed a rocket that went up to Mars and took photos. It's still there. How bizarre that this most intellectual creature is destroying its only home. Now scientists are beginning to come with all innovative technology to help heal some of the harm that we've inflicted, like moving towards renewable energy as one example.

People in their individual lives are beginning to think about how you behave and what you buy and did it harm the environment, was it cruel to animals, is it cheap because of unfair wages or forced labor, and if so don't buy it. We are really beginning to use our brains to leave lighter ecological footprints.

Andy Borowitz: Another reason out of the four reasons for hope that you state. Another reason is the resilience of nature, which is something we don't think about very often but tell me what you mean by that. How does nature show its resilience despite all our depredations?

Dr. Jane Goodall: These are the stories that more people in the media should tell. To give people hope like the one time around Gambi the trees had virtually gone. What was once forest was bare hills, with more people than the land could support. That's when it hit me. If we don't help these people living in poverty to find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we haven't a hope of saving chimps, forests or anything else. So we began our program Take Care, or Tacare it's known as. It's restoring fertility to the overused land and so on. The trees have come back. This is operating throughout chimp range in Tanzania and in six other African countries.

Andy Borowitz: You have this great program called Roots and Shoots. What is it about young people that gives you a reason for hope?

Dr. Jane Goodall: It was in the late '80s when I was traveling around the world that I kept meeting young people who seemed to have lost hope. Mostly they were just apathetic, didn't seem to care. Some were really depressed. Some were angry. I talked to them. "You've compromised our future. There's nothing we can do about it." We have compromised their future. We've been stealing it for years and years and years. I started Roots and Shoots, which I think the reason it's growing so fast, it's in more than 65 countries, we don't dictate to the young people. They choose between them as a group a project to help people, a project to help animals, a project to help the environment because everything's interrelated.

The main message is every single one of us makes an impact on the planet every single day. We can choose what impact we make, which leads into the fact that we've got to alleviate poverty. If you're really poor you're going to destroy the environment to get land to grow food to feed your family or buy cheap junk food. You can't afford to ask, "Did it harm the environment?" These young people, once you listen to them, educate them and empower them, they talk about what they care about. They roll up their sleeves and they get out there and they take action.

Andy Borowitz: Reason number four is what you call the indomitable human spirit. You are certainly an embodiment of that. You are indomitable. Just out of curiosity, where did your energy come from? What pushes you forward?

Dr. Jane Goodall: First of all I care. I am very passionate. Secondly, I am probably obstinate and I'm pretty resilient. Knock me over and I'm going to bounce back up because I will not be defeated. As I get older, nearly 88 now, I've got less time left. I have to do more and more and more because there's so much to do.

Andy Borowitz: We only have a few minutes left. Would you indulge me and let me ask you a few questions that my readers posted on Facebook?

Dr. Jane Goodall: Yes.

Andy Borowitz: Question number one, what are a couple of things that the average person can do to stop climate change?

Dr. Jane Goodall: One really important thing is moving towards a plant-based diet. These factory farms, not only horribly cruel with billions of animals, but they all have to be fed. Huge areas of environment are destroyed to grow the grain. Masses of fossil fuel to get the grain to the animals to the abattoir, meat to the table. Water. Uses lots of water to change vegetable to animal protein and water is getting increasingly scarce in many parts of the world.

Andy Borowitz: I have a question. This is a personal question, but a minor but significant character in the Book of Hope is whiskey. How did your acquaintanceship with whiskey begin and what is your favorite whiskey.

Dr. Jane Goodall: I don't like the very expensive malty, peaty whiskey. I don't like them. It began because my mother couldn't drink wine. She couldn't drink gin. She could drink whiskey. Every evening when I was here, we used to have a little tot at seven o'clock before supper. When I was traveling we kept this up at seven o'clock in the time where we were, we raised a glass to each other of whiskey.

Andy Borowitz: Third question came up from a lot of people. They want to know what you think about bonobos.

Dr. Jane Goodall: They are equally closely related to us as chimps. I'm very glad Leakey didn't choose bonobos for me to study because the females are permanently sexually receptive and they have big pink swellings on their backside and the Geographic would never at that time [unintelligible 00:25:27] photographs. There's no question. One of the early pictures that Hugo took came back and it was a beautiful picture, four males sitting and they were all a bit excited. They all had penile erections and the graphic got back with a circle around each one saying "Blend into fur."

Andy Borowitz: Jane, I want to personally thank you so much. This is actually a conversation I've waited my entire life to have. I just want to send you my gratitude and my love.

Dr. Jane Goodall: Thank you too. It's been really lovely talking to you and I hope that when I'm next over your side of the Atlantic we can meet in person and share a whiskey.

Andy Borowitz: Thanks, Jane. I will hold you to that.

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