Jane Goodall honoured at Observer Ethical Awards 2012

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/30/jane-goodall-observer-ethical-awards



Jane Goodall could not receive the award in person because she spends much of the year on the road. Photograph: Freek Van Asperen/AFP/Getty Images


Dame Jane Goodall will always be celebrated for her 45-year study of chimpanzee social and family life, her passion for Africa and her ceaseless campaigning for animals and the environment. But the world's foremost primatologist, who went to Tanzania as a young woman in 1960 and never totally left, told the Guardian she wanted to be known just as much for the youth movement she set up in 1991.

"Wherever I go, I meet people with very little hope or future, so they become angry or apathetic", she says. "The idea of Roots & Shoots is to give people hope. The children decide what they are passionate about and then they volunteer to work for people, animals and the environment.

"It's now working in 130 countries and growing all the time. In Britain we have 1,600 groups, mainly in schools and universities, in the US there are over 3,000 and we have 900 groups in China. Everywhere I go, they all say they want to meet 'Dr Jane'. They are unbelievable, extraordinary young people who together contribute hundreds of thousands of hours of voluntary work a year."

The woman whose observations in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania challenged science and showed that chimps, too, could construct and use tools and were not vegetarians, is constantly on the move. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award in this year's Observer Ethical Awards for what the judges said were her "promotion of the planet" and her "extraordinary contribution to the development of our understanding of the natural world, particularly broadening our knowledge of the habits of chimpanzees".