Dispatch from San Diego: Primatologist Jane Goodall keeps a frenetic tour schedule

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Times reporter Tami Abdollah sent L.A. Unleashed this dispatch from San Diego, where she is reporting an upcoming story on Jane Goodall (seen at left in a 2006 photo):

SAN DIEGO -- About 300 middle and high school students listened closely this afternoon as Jane Goodall, renowned primatologist and a United Nations messenger of peace, did a ‘pant-hoot’ chimpanzee call.

‘Hello,’ she said afterward.

Goodall will spend two days here as a University of San Diego Joan B. Kroc Distinguished Lecturer.

Outside, before her half-hour afternoon talk, she planted a tree with members of the college anthropology club, grasping dirt between her fingers and throwing it around the trunk of a Pacific Madrone.

‘I have to use my hands, even though you’re supposed to use a shovel,’ Goodall said somewhat apologetically.

Once the trunk was surrounded with level dirt, Goodall carefully pressed her right foot over the soil to pack it in and then reached over to a leaf and kissed it. She asked the students to make sure the tree got enough water so that it could grow.

‘It’s a really good feeling to go somewhere, plant a tree and know it’s going to stay there,’ she said afterward.

The San Diego stop is one of many she has made since she began her frenetic travel schedule after a 1986 conference in Chicago. There she learned about the destruction of chimpanzee habitat and about the conditions of chimpanzees in medical labs...

...’I went in as a scientist...I came out as an activist,’ Goodall said. ‘From that day until now, I haven’t been any one place for more than three weeks.’

She travels at least 300 days a year meeting with youth and encouraging them to care for their environment and the planet.

Tomorrow at 7 p.m. she will talk to college students at the University of San Diego in a lecture titled: ‘A Reason for Hope.’

She will also sit down with this reporter for a one-on-one interview.

--Tami Abdollah