There must be very few 72-year-olds who spend their lives hopping in and out of airports, zipping between jungles and skyscraping cities, fired by a burning passion that powers them on. Even fewer would be those who are as comfortable conversing with chimpanzees as with royalty. Who else, but Dr Jane Goodall, of course.

Dr Goodall was in the country to launch the Wildscreen nature film festival at Chennai recently.

As a child, she hated her namesake – Tarzan’s Jane. “Because she was living the jungle life I longed to live and married Tarzan, who was my hero,” says Goodall in her low and barely audible voice.

But eventually, in the summer of 1960, when she was 26, an age when other women dream of Hollywood, Jane Goodall did make a life for herself in the wilds - studying wild chimpanzees in the Gombe forests on the banks of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa .

There, she discovered that like man, chimps could make tools, had personalities, family relationships (with some even adopting orphans), warfare among their groups, and like man, supplemented their diet with insects and small rodents.

These epochal discoveries sealed chimps’ close ties with man and prompted her mentor and famous biologist Louis Leakey say to the world, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Passing the baton

Today, 47 years since then, Goodall continues her tryst with nature. In 1977, Goodall had established the Gombe Stream Research Centre and the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education and Conservation.

Now, the Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots & Shoots, a community-centric conservation programme, has branches in more than 70 countries.

“We have received 30 registrations requests from India alone,” informs  Goodall, who also happens to be a ‘Messenger of Peace’ of the United Nations and a Dame of the British Empire. “If we can get all our youth to feel for nature and care for it, our beautiful earth will survive,” she says.

Slender, elegant and porcelain pink,  Jane Goodall looked (and continues to look the same today, plus a few wrinkles) as far removed anybody’s conception of a jungle woman.

In fact, the sponsors who financed her six-month, chimpanzee observation field trip in the jungles of Gombe in Africa insisted that she take a companion with her. “Eventually, my mother chose to come with me. We learned a smattering of Ki-Swahili (the local language) and managed communication with the locals there,” she recalls.

Luckily for her, despite living unarmed in deepest Africa, she never found herself under attack from any wild animal. Goodall gave the chimps names like David Graybeard and Goliath and though she adored them, she fought hard to remain detached from them, as the idea was to observe their behaviour in the wild.

There are many things I learnt from chimps, she says. “Their humbleness, first of all; and how experiences in childhood can shape their character as adults. Not just chimps, I like every one of the great apes, the bonobos, the gorillas, the orangutans,” she adds.

Ever since Goodall’s (“just Jane then”) epochal discovery in the Gombe forests, we stopped viewing ourselves as separate from animals. So, how did Jane Goodall feel on making this stupendous observation? “Relieved, because we were into the fifth month of the field trip; time was running out as the sponsorship was only for six months,” she says, surprising you with an understated sense of humour.

Where is evolution taking us now? “Man is still evolving. Our eyes are degenerating; our little toe and the appendix are disappearing. But it is our spiritual evolution that worries me, especially the attitude ‘Money, Me, Now’ that people everywhere have,” she says.

Her mission today is to promote the message that individuals do have the power to save nature. With animal species becoming extinct and forest cover vanishing by the day, the world seems hurtling towards ecological disaster, but Goodall finds reason for hope.

Signs of hope

“The world is in a mess,” agrees  Goodall. “But people are now beginning to realize it. A decade ago, there wasn’t even awareness about the ecological disaster our lifestyles are creating. Today, I see many signs of hope. Along a lakeshore in Tanzania, for example, villagers are planting trees where all the trees had disappeared.

Many companies have begun ‘greening’ their operations, and people, especially the younger generation, are beginning to think of the consequence of what they do, what they eat, the energy we consume, and are beginning to think of buying more local things, of conserving water and energy. New technologies also show great promise,”  Goodall feels.

“Finally, I have great belief in the resilience of nature. I have been to Nagasaki, the site of where the second atomic bomb was exploded during the World War II. After the explosion, scientists predicted that nothing would grow there for at least 30 years. But, amazingly, greenery grew back very quickly. One sapling actually managed to survive the bombing, and today it is a large tree and produces leaves,” she says.  Goodall carries one of its leaves with her as a symbol of hope.

In a life that has been well lived, Goodall has just a single grouse – that she doesn’t find much time to revel in the green lap of her precious Gombe forest. “Time has become a scarce commodity for me now. This is my second visit to India and I still haven’t found time to see India’s famed jungles.”

She adds, “Three hundred and twenty days of the year, I live on planes, in airports or in hotels.” Whew! How does a 72-year-old manage such a pace? “I take each day as it comes – one at a time. I don’t mind that, because there is so much work to do. The sad thing is, I just manage to find four days in a year to catch up with beloved Gombe.”

VIRTUAL WILD

Now you can virtually visit wild Gombe, actually see and find out for yourself what Jane's chimps have been up to today, courtesy the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog (http://www.janegoodall.org), an interactive blog launched by the Jane Goodall Institute.

The JGI puts up daily updated stories and photos of these famous chimps on the blog, giving you the inside feel of this research effort on chimpanzees. It also happens to be a Google Earth 'geoblog' that starts off with Google's Earth image.

With successive clicks, you are transported to eastern Africa and then into the Gombe National Park and even specific sites there, drawing from Google Earth's high resolution satellite images.

The Gombe Chimpanzee Blog was launched in January 2006.  The site allows users to leave comments. Visitors to the site are not likely to miss the striking difference between the verdant greens inside the Gombe national park and the deforested areas around it. Get the message?