![]() ![]() I was hiding in a henhouse, waiting, because nobody would tell me where the hole was where the egg came out. And I have to say that it was my supportive mother, I think, who’s enabled me to do what I’ve done, because she didn’t know where I was. My first serious observation of animals was four-and-a-half, when I waited four hours to see a hen lay an egg. Goodall: From the womb onwards, yes, when I was one-and-a-half. Tippett: You’ve said that you really feel like you loved animals and loved nature, I think, from the womb onwards. And I suppose that was the closest to some kind of spiritual feeling of nature that I had, although I wouldn’t have thought of it as that, at that time. I had one special tree, which I’m looking at right now, Beech, and I spent hours and hours up Beech, feeling close to the sky and the birds. So I learned a lot from nature.Īnd I was outside, and I loved climbing trees. And so we had books and imagination and nature. It was pre-television, pre-laptops, pre-cellphones and all the rest of it. And I loved to spend most of my time outside, in the garden. And so we sometimes went to church - we weren’t particularly religious. And I wish I’d met him, because he sounds completely wonderful, but I didn’t. Goodall: That’s right, he was the husband of Danny. Tippett: So was he the husband of Danny? Was he that grandfather, of your grandmother you called Danny? We - Mum, my sister, and I, came to live in this house where I am now, with my grandmother and Mum’s two sisters. You know, my grandfather was a Congregational minister. ![]() Goodall: Well, I certainly wouldn’t have thought of anything spiritual when I was a child. So I want to start where I always start, which is, if I ask you about the spiritual background of your childhood, of your earliest life, however you understand that word now, where does that memory take you? Both feature largely in her many books and stories. She spoke to me over Zoom from pandemic lockdown in Bournemouth England, in the home where she spent part of her childhood, living with her mother and her beloved grandmother, whom she called Danny. Jane Goodall’s new book is The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. And all that has enabled us to ask questions like, Who am I? Why am I here? And I believe part of being human is a questioning, a curiosity, a trying to find answers, but an understanding that there are some answers that, at least on this planet, this life, this life-form, we will not be able to answer. We can teach children about things that aren’t present. Jane Goodall: I believe that a trick of this development of the intellect, which is so startling, really, was the fact that we developed this way of communicating. We experience the moral and spiritual convictions that have driven this extraordinary woman what she is teaching, and still learning, about what it means to be human. This hour, in honor of the publication of her 32nd book, we revisit the beautiful conversation I had with her in 2020. With the same careful, empathic eye she trained on the entire ecosystem of the Gombe forest, she began to do her part to tend to the human pain and misunderstanding that led to her beloved chimpanzees’ suffering. Humanity had become a threat to its own kin in the natural world. She recalled modern Western science to the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it.īut what I’d never gleaned from all I’d read about her across the years - yet saw powerfully when we met - is how fully she had, mid-career, given her life’s work over to a new passion. ![]() The science she proceeded to do also ended up shaping the self-understanding of our species. I knew about her epic early years studying chimpanzees in the wild, at first without even a college degree. Krista Tippett, host: Several years ago, I moderated a gathering on an island off Istanbul that included the primatologist Jane Goodall. ![]()
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