The disconnect between young people and nature is “appalling” and a major issue that society needs to address, says the award-winning conservationist Jane Goodall.
Goodall, famous for her groundbreaking fieldwork on chimpanzees, says she welcomes the , but more education is needed to help children engage with nature.
“It’s one of the big, big problems, dissociation from nature,” says Goodall. “Scientifically, we need nature, and young children in particular [need it] to develop properly psychologically. They need to spend time out in the green.” Giving children more time in natural environments would negate the tendency for parents to reach for smartphones or dummies to distract them, she adds. “It’s appalling,” she says of the disconnect.
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A slew of research has highlighted the health benefits of time spent in green spaces. However, the covid-19 pandemic the time many children in the UK were able to spend outside in such environments, much more than it did for adults.
Goodall also says the war in Ukraine is preoccupying her and she is losing sleep over the conflict. “It’s horrific. It’s the fact it’s happening again – I lived through world war two and I remember every single thing that happened,” she says.
The conservationist is concerned by the repeated delay of a United Nations summit for a new global deal on stopping biodiversity loss. But she is also sceptical of how much such meetings can achieve. “You know, lots of promises are made, lots of targets are set,” she says, questioning how seriously countries have followed through with action after signing the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Nonetheless, she says it is vital to arrest the decline in nature. “It’s a huge worry because as we lose biodiversity, we’re losing healthy ecosystems and [seeing] the collapse of species,” she says.
Goodall was speaking to 91av ahead of being awarded the on 5 May, and as the National Geographic Society announced a $2.7 million grant to find the “next Jane Goodalls”.
Asked what qualities those future field researchers will need, Goodall says: “Patience, in huge oodles and bucketfuls.” She advises people to volunteer and experience how physically hard working in the wild in some climates can be, but says she never had a moment in her decades of fieldwork where harsh conditions had stopped her. “There were moments when I was depressed, and the chimps were running away, and I was a long time in the field. I thought: oh bother, drat. [But] if I’d given up, I would never have forgiven myself. I could never live with myself.”
She says technology – such as camera traps for wildlife and machine learning to sift through the many images they produce – has been a boon, helping scientists identify and name 49 individual chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania without approaching them or making them too accustomed to humans. But she notes the technology is “not always a good thing”, as it can be abused: she cites hunters using camera traps to find prey.
Goodall says the answer to better engagement with nature is educational initiatives such as , which she has been working on seven days a week throughout the pandemic. She will reward herself with a visit to the chimpanzee-rich Gombe park in August. In the meantime, she is contenting herself with a lunchtime ritual of feeding a robin and a blackbird that visit her garden, under the beech tree where she spent much of her childhood.
Fortunately, she is also able to transport herself back to the wild. “I spent so long in nature on my own that I really only need to close my eyes, and I’m sort of back there. If I’m in the middle of the city, I can close my eyes; I can imagine the rumbling rain was the rain pounding on the canvas, a waterfall or something silly like that.”
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