A CONVERSATION WITH JANE GOODALL
AND
A TEDx TALK ON GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS IN BHUTAN
August 22, 2011
The Green Interview is happy to announce the release of a new interview between host Silver Donald Cameron and renowned primatologist Dame Jane Goodall. Goodall is world-famous not only for her trailblazing research with wild chimpanzees, but also for her international environmental advocacy and for her youth organization, Roots and Shoots.
“Naturally, we talked a great deal about the human relationship with animals, particularly wild animals,” says Silver Donald, “and I was smart enough to bring MacTavish, my little Shetland Sheepdog, to the interview. Jane Goodall loves dogs, but she now travels 300 days a year advocating and raising funds for environmental initiatives, so she can’t have a dog herself. But I just thought it was silly to talk with Jane Goodall without any animals present at all. She and MacTavish bonded instantly.
“She was particularly brilliant on the relationship between a healthy environment and a robust economy. People often talk as though we had to choose between job creation and respect for the environment. The truth is, if you wreck your environment, you also wreck your economy. Jane and her people have been doing a spectacular job of enlisting people around the chimpanzee preserve in Tanzania in the task of restoring their sustainable lifestyle by restoring their clear-cut forest.
Dr. Cameron noted that, as a Nova Scotian, he is particularly sensitive to the relationship between environment and economy.
“The destruction of the Atlantic cod stocks was one of the world’s greatest ecological disasters,” he said, “ and it destroyed 40,000 jobs in the fishery and devastated hundreds of coastal communities. If we’d protected the fish and its habitat, we’d still have the jobs.”
The Green Interview also recently posted Silver Donald Cameron’s TEDx talk on Bhutan, an entertaining, heavily-illustrated account of the tiny Himalayan nation and its decision to pursue Gross National Happiness as opposed to Gross National Product.
“Gross National Happiness sounds flaky, but in fact it’s extremely realistic – and it leads to good results,” Silver Donald explains. “If we’d been paying attention to the long-term happiness and well-being of our community, we wouldn’t have wrecked the fishery. If you measure progress by dollars alone, you end up with desperate people in a ruined landscape. Bhutan provides a whole alternative approach.”
The Jane Goodall interview is available at http://www.thegreeninterview.com/Jane-Goodall-interview. The TEDx talk is posted at www.thegreeninterview.com/tedx. For more information, contact Silver Donald Cameron at sdc@thegreeninterview.com or call (902)446-5577.