Dr Jane Goodall

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2000

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Dr. Jane Goodall. She had no formal scientific qualifications when she first went to Africa to study the Gombe chimpanzees. But it was this lack of preconceptions which made her so successful as a naturalist. Watching chimps use sticks to extract termites from their mounds she realised that she was about to smash the assumption that only humans used tools. Now, forty years after she first stepped into the bush, she describes how she has halted her patient study of the chimpanzees to fight for their survival.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Under the Milk Wood by Richard Burton Book: The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien Luxury: Pencil and paper

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue she travelled to Africa to
0:35.8	fulfill a lifelong dream and study animals. At a place called Gombe on the shores of
0:40.9	Lake Tanganyika, her dreams became reality.
0:44.0	From her observation of the chimpanzees who lived there
0:47.0	came the realization of how close we humans are to our animal ancestors
0:52.0	and a life devoted to man's relationship to the planet he
0:55.9	inhabits. Her critics have called her anthropomorphic unscientific but she is
1:01.7	unrepentant. I've tried to assuage some of the guilt we all must feel
1:06.8	for our inhumanity to man and beast alike, she says, and I shall go on trying to the end.
1:13.0	She is Jane Goodall.
1:15.0	Jane, yours really is a story of a dream coming true.
1:18.0	Can you remember when you first arrived in the Gombi,
1:22.0	did you know instantly that this was the place you
1:24.4	were going to be happy in? I knew from the moment that I went along the lake shore
1:29.0	looking up at the rugged mountains that this was going to be a challenge but that I was going to just
1:35.8	have an amazing extraordinary adventure and I couldn't actually believe that it was
1:41.2	happening it was very hard for me to think that this is me and this is really real and not a dream anymore.
1:46.6	Because it was where you'd always intended to be.
1:48.9	Yes, it was Africa, Africa from the time when I was 11 it had to be Africa and you know eventually through
1:55.5	thick and thin I got there and this amazing opportunity came. Can you describe it to me?
	...

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