Author Margaret Atwood and scientist Jane Goodall on the urgent fight for climate justice

Over the course of their respective 60-year careers, Jane Goodall and Margaret Atwood have each translated a reverence for the natural world into groundbreaking work that’s shifted the conversation around the fight for environmental justice. In 1960, at age 26, Goodall relocated from the UK to what is now Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park to live with and study the Kasakela chimpanzee community. There, she made a monumental discovery: that they had unique personalities and emotions. Her work forever changed the science of primatology. Since then, she has been fighting to conserve the habitat of her beloved chimps, as well as those of other species, through the Jane Goodall Institute and its global youth program, Roots & Shoots. For Atwood, climate change has long been a through line in her work, along with gender, identity, and religion. In her prescient 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, environmental crises, including toxic radiation and chemical spills have devastated what was once the United States, which has become a dark totalitarian patriarchal theocracy known as the Republic of Gilead. Outside of her writing, Atwood also works with the conservation non-profit BirdLife International, for which she has served as an honorary president of its Rare Bird Club. Atwood's book of essays, Burning Questions is a collection of non-fiction pieces she wrote between 2004 and 2021.

Atwood and Goodall recently convened to discuss the evolution of their respective work and why it’s imperative that the climate crisis remain at the forefront of the many issues we’re confronting right now in our relationships with one another and the world

MARGARET ATWOOD: When I’m writing a novel, I first always decide what year people were born so that I know what was happening to them when they were 10, 20, and 30 years old. You were born in 1934, during the Depression. And when you were five, along came World War II. Where were you living then?

JANE GOODALL: My father took a house in Le Touquet in France because he wanted me and my sister to grow up speaking French, for some odd reason. We’d been there three months before war broke out and we had to leave. We went to my grandmother’s farm in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England. 

MA: How soon did you start being interested in animals?

JG: I was born loving to watch anything that crept, crawled, flew, ran. We had a dog. We had a cat. And as soon as we got to Bournemouth, I spent all my time watching animals in the garden and on the cliffs above the sea. But before we go on with me, it’s your turn now. 

MA: I was born in ’39, two months after war broke out. My childhood was similar to yours in the animal-watching department. We were in the Quebec North Woods and did a lot of frog watching and turning over of logs in case there might be a newt or a snake. My dad was a forest entomologist and an early conservationist, during the period when people thought you were a lunatic if you were into those things. I grew up that way, but I don’t imagine your family was saying, “Jane, we want you to go off and study chimpanzees.”

JG: No, not at all! The other thing I did during my childhood was read books. In those days, if you saved up coupons from packets of cereal, you could get something for free, and my grandmother got me this book, The Miracle of Life. It’s not for children at all. It covers evolution and Darwin and ends up with human anatomy. It was one of my most favourite books, along with Tarzan and Doctor Dolittle. I was 10 when I fell in love with Tarzan. I was very jealous because he  married the wrong Jane. That was when my dream began to go to Africa, live with wild animals, and write books about them. Of course, everybody laughed at me because girls weren’t scientists in those days.

MA: The conversation around feminism—or let us call it a debate, because it’s frequently not a conversation, it’s a screaming match—has been going on for a very long time. In the ’40s, women were very active in the workplace and beyond, but that’s the usual thing with revolutions and wars: Women are very instrumental while the men are away, and then they’re told, “That’s enough of you. Back to the bungalow for you, and here’s a washing machine to make you feel happier.”

JG: When I wanted to go and live with wild animals, everybody laughed at me. Africa was still the Dark Continent. We didn’t know much about it. I went to study the chimps in Gombe, Tanzania, and was not thinking about feminism. The other scientists were scornful at first of the findings of this young girl, and they said I only got credit because National Geographic came in with grant money to fund my project because I had nice legs. If that was said now, it would be shocking.But back then, I thought, “Well, thank you, legs.” Even if I’d been a male, the scientists would’ve pushed me away because I was maintaining that chimps had personalities, minds, and emotions, whereas they were maintaining only humans did. 

MA: You got your dream, but it must have been some work getting there. Do you ever think about your legacy, Jane?

JG: I think about whose legacies I want to build on—people like Rachel Carson, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi.

MA: I suppose both of us would like to achieve the same thing, but I don’t consider it any one person’s legacy. It’s going to have to be a group effort. And that would be to preserve a habitable planet with a lot of biodiversity. Let us try not to lose any more species, because we’ve already lost a lot. 

JG: We have. We’re in the middle of the sixth great extinction.

MA: It’s terrifying and very dispiriting, but if we’re hopeful, that may generate more hope and actually inspire people to take action. People who say we’re doomed—I’m just not interested in that. It doesn’t generate any sort of positive activity.

JG: We’re in a very dark tunnel right now, there’s no question. We’ve got climate change. We’ve got loss of biodiversity. We’ve got the pandemic. We’ve got racial discrimination. We’ve got all these problems. But right at the end of the tunnel is a little speck of light. We have to roll up our sleeves and crawl under, climb over, work our way around all these obstacles on the way until we reach it. 

MA: Where have you found the most meaning in your life?

JG: I’ve had a lot of rewarding moments with animals, like when the chimpanzees lost their fear of me after four months. I have lunch every day under my favorite beech tree, and a little robin comes along, and he’ll now sit on my hand to eat his little suet crumbs. I’m afraid I’m a vegan, but he’s not. Having a baby was also incredibly rewarding. Watching my son grow up and comparing him with the little chimps growing up—they’re so the same.

MA: I find it a very difficult question to answer. I think it’s rewarding that I’m still working. I’m happy and grateful about that.  

JG: Your new book of essays, Burning Questions, is out this month. What are some of the topics that it addresses?

MA: It’s a collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, which were pretty tumultuous years. We had the big financial meltdown. Then it goes on through the election of the person whose name shall not be mentioned and other kinds of social changes and uproars. But of course, environmental questions are front and center. I tell people that if they kill the oceans, they’ll stop breathing. That’s my short form of why they should do something. Because people usually are slow to action until it’s impacting them.

JG: That’s just it. That’s why I kept saying, awful though it is, the fact that the hurricanes and flooding and fires are hitting the United States and Europe—suddenly [to people in the West] it’s not just Bangladesh or India or places in Africa that are being impacted.

MA: Big-time. Weather events will only become more numerous and stronger. And of course, one of the net results of that is going to be food shortages because people are used to growing certain things in certain places. And if you have fires, floods and droughts, and extreme temperatures, you’re just not going to get the harvest. 

JG: And that’s why we get all these climate refugees.

MA: That is exactly right. It causes social unrest. It causes wars. It causes climate refugees because people’s places where they’re used to living are being destroyed. 

JG: We also need to ban factory farming. We need to ban unsustainable commercial fishing. There’s an awful lot we need to change. My biggest hope of all is young people. I started our youth program, Roots & Shoots, in 1991 with 12 high school students in Tanzania, and now we’re in more than 60 countries and growing. And Tacare, the community-led conservation project we started in Gombe, is now in six African countries. It started in 1994 with the 12 villages around the chimp park and involved a group of Tanzanians asking the local people what we could do to make their lives better. We started doing some reforestation but mainly restored fertility to the overused farmland and aided in providing better health and educational resources. Now we have scholarships that give girls a chance at secondary education, micro-credit programmes so women can start small businesses, and family-planning information.

MA: That’s amazing and so essential. What is your next big thing?

JG: You mean other than dying? I’m carrying on with what I’m doing. I miss my friends, really—I do—and they miss me. I haven’t seen my grandchildren who are in Tanzania for two years. I haven’t been back to Gombe to see the staff there. I need to visit the Jane Goodall Institute centers. Anyway, I think we should end on a very nice, positive note relating to your work with gender equality. I once spoke with a Latin American chief who said, “Our tribe is like an eagle. One wing is male, the other wing is female, and only when the wings are equal will our tribe fly high.”

MA: That is a wonderful thought.

JG: It’s been great meeting you and talking to you.

MA: I’m going to go look up your legs right away.

This piece originally appeared in the print version of Harper's Bazaar US