for the first time. Then and there, her dream of moving to Africa to live with wild animals and write about them was born. Just 13 years later, she was in Kenya.
That spark she possessed as a young person ignited a lifetime career as a conservationist. Now 89, Goodall says it's the youth of today that keep her hope alive amid all that's going on in the world environmentally, politically and socially. I was able to spend weeks and weeks out in the forest alone with the chimpanzees learning about how the ecosystem is made up of this complex mix of plant and animal species. And you find that each one has a role to play. If you think of it as like a beautiful living tapestry, every time a species goes from that ecosystem is like pulling a thread from that tapestry. If enough threads are pulled, the tapestry hangs in tatters. The ecosystem collapses.
The Current's Matt Galloway visited Goodall at her Toronto hotel to learn about her groundbreaking work and insights into the urgent issues of conservation and climate change. And so when I was asking them why this way, they'd answer, "Well, you've compromised our future. There's nothing we can do about it."It's not compromise; we've been stealing their future. And we're still stealing their future today. But then I say there's this window of time…and weIn Roots and Shoots the kids choose three projects: one to help people, one to help animals and one to help the environment, because they're all interconnected.
She just said, "Jane, you were looking at them as though you were wondering, how do they walk without legs?" And she just gently said that they ought to be in the garden or they might die. So we took them into the garden. And it was like that through my childhood.I'm still curious. I've always been curious. I mean, I'm curious as to why we still go to war. We're the most intellectual creatures to ever walk on the planet, and yet we're destroying our only home.