The chronicle interview.

• Position: Jane Goodall - Interview

Jane Goodall was appointed a United Nations Messenger of Peace on 16 April 2002. As such, she joins a group of nine prominent people that Secretary-General Kofi Annan has appointed to the role since 1997. Messengers of Peace help mobilize the public to get involved in work that makes the world a better place, serving as advocates in a variety of areas. She is also a member of the advisory panel named by the Secretary-General to discuss new approaches to sustainable development and promote the goals of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held in Johannesburg in September 2002. Although known primarily for her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees, Dr. Goodall today works primarily as an activist, speaking about the threats facing chimpanzees, other environmental crises, and her reasons for hope that humankind will solve the problems it has imposed on the earth. She spoke with the UN Chronicle's Russell Taylor on 16 April in New York.

You first went to Africa when you were 23 and you met up with Louis Leakey.

I heard about him. So I called and made an appointment. There I was--no degree, fresh from England. What faith we had!

What brought him to suggest you study a group of living primates as opposed to pursuing paleontology?

He was very far ahead in his thinking. He felt that learning about chimps, who were our closest relatives in the natural habitat, would give him a better understanding of how early humans might have behaved. If we found behaviour that was more or less the same in humans and chimpanzees today, it was possible that it had been inherited from a common ancestor millions of years ago. In which place, the Stone Age man and woman would also have behaved in those ways: kissing, embracing, holding hands, patting on the back, swaggering, forming long-term family relationships. Those things indeed are the same, and are found in the same context.

When you went back to Tanzania in 1960 and began your research, which has made you certainly among the most widely-recognized primatologists today, it must have been a different world. At the turn of the last century, there were possibly two million chimpanzees in western and central Africa; today, there is only an eighth of that left. Why?

Habitat destruction. Growth of human populations. The great, great threat right now is the bushmeat trade--that's the commercial trade in the flesh of wild animals. And it's made possible by the logging companies going in and opening up the forest. So, even if they practise sustainable logging--and in the Congo Basin most of the big European companies do practise sustainable logging and are not clear cutting--they are still opening up the forest. That means the hunters from the towns are going in on trucks, camping at the end of the road where there are still a few animals left, and shooting gorillas, chimps, antelopes, birds, bats, etc.

Is there still anything to learn from higher primates that could be of benefit to the human race?

I think the main lesson we've learned is a little humility--that we are unique but we're not just as different as we used to think. Between chimps and humans, there is only about a 1-per-cent difference in DNA. The brain--they're capable of doing so many intellectual feats that we used to think unique to us...