You know when I was growing up, I was a little girl I loved animals.
When I was 10, I decided I would grow up and go to Africa and live with animals and write
books about them and everybody laughed at me.
How will you possibly do that?
You don't have money and you're just a girl.
Girls don't do that sort of thing.
But I had a wonderful mother who said if you really want something like this
you'll have to work awfully hard, take advantage of every opportunity,
but don't give up.
My name's Jane Goodall. Sometimes known as Dr Jane.
In Tanzania, where I spent
a lot of my life studying chimpanzees
I'm known as mama chimpanzee.
Mama Sokwe.
From a child I wanted to go to Africa and write books
about wild animals. I was lucky enough to be able to do that thanks to meeting
Dr Lewis Leakey, famous paleontologist.
I think he was impressed by how much I knew
about African animals, even though I was just out from the
UK having saved up my fare.
And he gave me this amazing opportunity to learn from not just any
animal but the one most like us.
I began the chimp work in 1960 and then in 1986
by that time there were seven different field sites, where scientists were
studying chimps across Africa. When I began it was just me. So I helped
organise a conference in the US to bring these seven scientists from these seven
field study sites and the idea was to discuss how chimp behaviour was the same or
perhaps different in the different environments.
At the same time as these
discussions on behaviour, there was a session on conservation and a session on
conditions in some captive situations. And in both cases it was utterly shocking.
In Africa, chimpanzee habitats were being destroyed, chimpanzee numbers
were declining and so I went to the conference as a scientist
and I left is an activist.
The biggest difference between us and chimpanzees
and other animals is the explosive development of our intellect.
And it doesn't make any sense if you think we're the most intellectual creature on
the planet that we're destroying, our only home.
I truly believe that we have a window of time
which is all the time closing. If we get together during that
window of time we can start to heal some of the harm weve inflicted or at least
slow down the climate crisis.
My greatest hope in this time is the young people.
All around the world young people are rising up as we listen to them and as we
empower them. And this is why I began our Roots & Shoots program back in 1991
which began with 12 high school students in Tanzania it's now in about 60
countries and growing with young people from Kindergarten, University and
everything in between - and the message is
each one of you makes a difference every day
and I can tell you everywhere there are young people
with shining eyes wanting to tell Dr Jane what they're doing to make the
world a better place.
They are making change.
Secondly, this thing which makes us different, this intellect we are
beginning to use it to come up with solutions, technological solutions that
will enable us to live in greater harmony. Electric cars, renewable energy
that sort of thing and we're beginning to use our brains to think about our own
ecological footprints. And then thirdly this resilience of nature.
I've met so many amazing people who've worked to restore a place that we totally
destroyed and give that place sometimes just time and it will recover, Mother
Nature will come back and it may not be just as it was before and animals on the
very brink of extinction have been given another chance.
So although the tale is doom and gloom, I can't help feeling that with these
possibilities if we really get together that with our intellect and with our
indomitable spirit and with the tools that we have now, that we can't find a
way into the future, a better future.
But do we have time?
I don't know.