How did you make the shift from studying a small group of chimpanzees to becoming a global environmental activist?
[In 1986,] for the very first time, we brought together people from different [chimpanzee] study sites in Africa.… It was fantastic what we learned, but we also had a session on conservation. And it was so shocking to see that right across Africa were the same kind of problems I was seeing at Gombe National Park with the deforestation, the growing human populations and bush-meat trade, which is the commercial hunting of wild animals for food, the live-animal trade, shooting mothers to take babies. The chimpanzee population, which was somewhere between 1 million and 2 million a hundred years ago, definitely more than a million when I began in ’60, and then in ’86 the maximum would have been 350,000. Today, 220,000 is the closest estimate. I realized that although I went to the conference as a scientist planning to carry on this wonderful life I was living – learning about the chimpanzees, being out in the forest, analyzing the data, doing some teaching, writing books, I mean, you know,
