Jane Goodall at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Friday. Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Jane Goodall only wants one thing
When I caught up with Jane Goodall in 2019, she was calling on consumers and businesses to make responsible choices and protect the natural world.
Now she is telling people something much more simple: vote.
The celebrated primatologist thinks governments around the globe are not working hard enough to combat climate change. And in a year when more than 40 countries — including the United States, India and South Africa — will be electing their leaders, Goodall is telling anyone who will listen that the health of Earth itself is on the ballot.
“Half of the population of the planet is going to be voting,” she said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. “This year could be the most consequential voting year in terms of the fate of our planet.”
As my colleague Manuela Andreoni wrote last week, the leaders elected this year will face consequential choices on energy policy, deforestation and emissions reductions. In the United States, Republicans are planning to undo environmental regulations if former president Donald J. Trump wins re-election. In Mexico, the favorite to win the presidency in June is Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist who is now mayor of Mexico City and has vowed to take action to reduce emissions.
Goodall noted that the outcomes of national elections can have profound and immediate impacts. She pointed to Brazil, where two years ago, voters ousted the far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro, and brought back President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Overnight, Lula abandoned Bolsonaro’s laissez faire approach to environmental regulation and redoubled efforts to protect the Amazon rainforest.
Similar swings in policy will reverberate around the world as people go to the polls in the months to come, Goodall said: “Every vote matters, more this year than perhaps any time in history.”
‘The wealthy are being hit’
Goodall refrained from endorsing specific candidates.
But she believes that as extreme weather batters every corner of the globe, more voters were coming to understand that climate policies matter.
“When climate change began to make itself known, it was Bangladesh and the poorer countries that were suffering,” she said. “Now the wealthy are being hit. The industrialized countries are being hit where it hurts them economically.”
In the United States alone last year, there were 28 storms, wildfires or other disasters that each cost at least $1 billion or more in damages, my colleague Christopher Flavelle reported this month.
“There are floods in New York, floods in Britain, floods in several parts of Europe, unprecedented heat waves killing people in France,” Goodall told me. “It has changed.”
Yet in what is expected to be a tight race between President Biden and Trump, climate is not one of the dominant issues of the campaign. Inasmuch as it is a factor, it is often invoked by activists who believe the Biden administration is not doing enough to curb emissions, or by Trump with promises to expand oil and gas drilling.
Goodall also expressed hope that companies could do more to reduce emissions. Just as voters might respond to climate crises at the polls, she said corporations might begin funneling their lobbying dollars toward candidates who prioritized climate issues.
“I’m hoping that because companies are being hit economically, some of them will think, ‘Well, we better put a bit more money into the right politicians,’” she said.
‘An all of the above moment’
Goodall, who turns 90 in a few months, was in Davos talking up her efforts to educate young people about the plight of the natural world — and to bend the ear of the policymakers and C.E.O.s who sought her out for selfies.
Elections, she said, matter to the degree that they help preserve the natural world.
“The ecosystem is this tapestry of interconnected plants and animals, and each single one has a role to play,” she said. “When a species becomes extinct, it’s like pulling a thread. And if enough threads are pulled, the tapestry hangs in tatters. The ecosystem will collapse.”
Goodall, who spent decades living in the jungle studying chimpanzees, is not dogmatic in her approach to fighting climate change.
“We need the technology,” she said. “We need transfer to renewable energy. We need to stop subsidizing fossil fuel companies. We must think about human population with its cattle. It’s an all-of-the-above moment.”
But she said those policies will only be enacted by leaders who appreciate the gravity of the crises facing planet Earth.
“We’ve got to get the message out there for people to understand, and then they’ll vote in the right way,” she said. “Then they’ll understand how important it is for their children, and their children’s children.”
