During her early fieldwork, Goodall realized that lifting people out of poverty was essential to conserving the biodiversity of national parks. She created the Tacare program, which offers small loans to start sustainable businesses, scholarships for girls who would otherwise not be able to attend post-secondary education, and family planning counseling. In addition, farmers receive advice on permaculture and other sustainable, pesticide-free agricultural practices.
“We realized that the reason trees were being cut down was because people were struggling to survive,” the scientist recalls. “Families were growing and they couldn’t afford to buy food from elsewhere. Their farmland was overused and infertile. So trees were being cut down to make more land, to grow food, or to make money from charcoal or timber.”
Only when individuals are able to provide for their own livelihoods do they begin to face the consequences of their actions and address their impact on the environment. This change in behavior is evident in villages around national parks, where new technology is helping local people. Using a simple mobile phone app, villagers can take pictures of fallen trunks and report illegal logging. The initiative first started in 12 villages in Gombe but is now implemented in 104 villages across Tanzania and six African countries.
With deforestation halted, the chimpanzees were no longer forced to live in small territories isolated from the outside world. They were able to create corridors through which they could move freely and interact with other groups, facilitating the exchange of genes. Today, Gombe’s chimpanzees are connected to those in neighboring Burundi, improving their chances of survival.
A little further north in Uganda, Goodall says, there is a farmer who is part of the Jane Goodall Program. His main livelihood is growing sugarcane. But his farming activities are attracting the attention of chimpanzees, whose habitat and food sources are being reduced by agriculture. So he decided to dedicate some of the land around his farm, near the rainforest, to growing crops that chimpanzees like. That way, the chimpanzees will have less incentive to destroy his sugarcane fields.
“Local people now understand that conservation benefits both wildlife and their own future,” the primatologist says. Goodall is a firm believer in the transformative power of grassroots movements to protect the planet’s biodiversity and ensure a sustainable future for all.
She offers one heartwarming example after another of environmentalism that paints a picture of human progress in conservation. But Goodall tempers this optimism with harsh reality: “Take the United States, for example. Biden has reinstated many regulations to protect wildlife. Trump has boasted that if he returns to office he will open national parks to logging and mining. I mean, he actually brags about it,” she says.
In Africa, China has become increasingly aggressive, investing in rapid road building, dam construction and mineral extraction at the expense of space for the environment and wildlife.
“The funny thing is, China is ahead in developing solar power. They’re so keen to protect their own environment right now,” Goodall says. “You could blame China, but what they’re doing is protecting their own environment and destroying other environments to get all the materials they need. But that’s what the colonial powers did and that’s what big corporations still do. The US gets its raw materials by going to other countries, developing countries, and mining them.”
