Dr Jane Goodall’s Today Programme
Best of Today
BBC
4.0 • 837 Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2021
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr Jane Goodall is a primatologist, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a UN Messenger of Peace. She is best known for revolutionising the world's understanding of chimpanzees.
She used her Today guest edit to explore some of the ways we can inspire change to protect animals and our environment. She asked the BBC’s Climate Editor, Justin Rowlatt, to look at the links between poverty and climate change. The programme featured reporting from Tanzania where 30 years ago Jane challenged a group of students to take action to protect the wildlife in their towns and villages. Martha Kearney interviewed the Environment Minister Zac Goldsmith on Jane’s behalf, asking him about COP 26 and trophy hunting. There’s music from Notre Dame and Jane reflects on the reaction to her work and image in the 1960s. With Martha Kearney and Mishal Husain.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Hello and welcome to the best of today podcast. I'm Martha Carney. |
| 0:09.1 | And our guest editor this morning is somebody I've admired ever since I interviewed her for Woman's Hour a few years back. |
| 0:16.9 | Dr Jane Goodall. She's dedicated her life to conservation. |
| 0:20.6 | She's a primatologist, an expert on the |
| 0:23.0 | behaviour and interactions of chimpanzees after first going to study them back in 1960 in a trip |
| 0:29.2 | documented by National Geographic. She is to observe the daily lives of chimpanzees in East Africa. |
| 0:36.9 | It's a five days journey to Tanzania's Gombe Stream Reserve. |
| 0:41.3 | For a girl who'd hated dolls and collected worms, it's a very special day. |
| 0:46.3 | When I arrived at the Gombe Stream Reserve, |
| 0:49.3 | I felt that at long last my childhood ambition was being realized. Always I had wanted to go out into the field and study animals. |
| 0:58.0 | On that first day, when I looked at the wild and rugged mountains where the chimpanzees live, |
| 1:04.0 | I knew that my task was not going to be easy. |
| 1:07.0 | Jane Goodall was just 26 when she made her major scientific discovery |
| 1:11.9 | about chimpanzees using tools. |
| 1:14.6 | And that's led her to be able to challenge young people nowadays to do more. |
| 1:19.0 | In 1991, a dozen teenagers came to see her on her back porch in Tanzania, |
| 1:24.1 | the country where she's been carrying out her research. |
| 1:27.0 | Even then at that time, there were high school students, university students, |
| 1:32.0 | worrying about the impact that we'd had on the environment, on their future, |
| 1:38.0 | and they were losing hope. Many were angry. And for the most part, they were just |
| 1:44.0 | apathetic. |
... |
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