Out of Africa

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When Jane Goodall first journeyed to Africa at age 23 with hopes of studying chimpanzees and other animals, her life was a solitary one. "I am sitting halfway up the slope leading up from our camp," she wrote her family from Kenya. "All around the crickets are singing their nightly chorus--and so many different types of song, it is hard to imagine...An owl is hooting about a half-mile down the gorge, and before supper we heard the weird call of the hyena--which means His Lordship the Lion is around somewhere...At the moment I must stop, and after sitting up here, quite alone with the wind, the moon, the stars, the whole immense vastness of Africa and the Serengeti with the mysterious universe all around and very real, creep into my bed and build up enough energy in the minute atom that is Jane for tomorrow."

Goodall, now 67, still needs to build up energy, but these days she expends it on the road rather than in the bush. She is traveling 300 days a year, trying to meet the needs of a demanding public and the conservationist causes that she did so much to inspire. "There's such an onslaught of people wanting information, people wanting this, that and the other," she says.

Goodall would have been content to stay in Africa, but over time she realized that to maximize the reach of her life's work she had to shift her attention from animals to humans. "My focus was learning about chimpanzees," she explains. "Then my focus changed to protecting chimpanzees and making sure the research continued. Then the focus changed to youth. That was because traveling the world for the conservation message, I found so many young people who had no hope. They thought we'd compromised their future. They were right."

Goodall, the neophyte animal behaviorist whom famed anthropologist Louis Leakey dared to send into the jungle, would become the reigning expert on chimpanzee behavior. Her discoveries about man's close cousins, showing that chimps made and used tools (most famously, adapting sticks to hunt for termites), electrified the academic world. But now, many books and National Geographic specials later, she is more than a famous naturalist. She has become a scientific saint and the recipient of many honors, including the Gandhi-King Award for Nonviolence, just given to her by the Millennium World Peace Summit at the U.N.

Beatification can be a bummer, though, and St. Jane of the Chimps is no fan of the road-warrior lifestyle. "When I do get back to England for three weeks solid or I'm doing my writing, the thought of packing up and setting off is literally scary," says a woman who has lived among all sorts of dangerous beasties. "But when you're actually on the road, it's just a way of life, like a gypsy, I suppose." She gets to her home in Bournemouth "three days in between trips here, and four days there, and occasionally as long as three weeks. That's maximum." Her other home is in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, but that one is filled with students. When she visits her beloved Gombe National Park, where her chimps live, she is usually accompanied by one film crew or another. She spends most of her time in the U.S. and Canada but also gets to Japan and China. "There are other places," she notes. "They're desperately clamoring for me in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia."

Goodall admits that she is wistful for Africa. "I miss the chimps. I miss the absolute peace." But, she says, "I couldn't do it now, because I don't think it would be the right thing to do." That epiphany came 15 years ago at a conference of chimpanzee experts in Chicago, when speaker after speaker documented the devastation that had been wrought by hunting, trapping, the destruction of forests and laboratory research. "I suddenly realized that I couldn't just go on sitting in my forest paradise. I had to try and do something about it," she says. It was then that she became a salesman for the cause.

Her current passion is children. Roots & Shoots, her program for boys and girls, is a decade old, and has spread to 68 countries. Goodall says that Roots & Shoots, a scouting-type organization with a nonviolent philosophy, seeks "to make the world a better place for animals, humans and the environment." She gets thousands of letters from kids. "They say that they love what I do with chimps, that I'm their hero and they want to be just like me, and what was it like in the jungle and did I really eat bugs?" says Goodall. "They send me wonderful pictures and book reports. I could paper a wall with little Jane Goodalls in pith helmets, what they think I looked like in the jungle." Naturally, the 2001 Jane Goodall also has a website, www.janegoodall.org. In October, Scholastic published a compelling new children's book by Goodall, The Chimpanzees I Love: Saving Their World and Ours. The text and lush photos, intended for kids but equally appealing to adults, tell the story of Goodall's life and work.

Goodall, who is widowed, has an adult son Hugo, who lives in Dar es Salaam with her three grandchildren. "Unfortunately, he's not at all involved in anything I care about," she says. "He does fishing. He takes people out sports fishing, but he's also mixed up in commercial fishing." Don't look for fish or anything animal on Goodall's plate. She has been a vegetarian for nearly 30 years.