By Alex Trembath
Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist and environmentalist, died last week. My colleague Elizabeth McCarthy, a permitting expert at Breakthrough, shared what I thought was a lovely reflection on her legacy:
“Jane Goodall inspired me to pursue the work I do. But I found myself sharing her ideology less and less. I doubt she’d endorse what I’m most proud of. Still, her hope made my skepticism possible.”
I’ve offered my own version of Elizabeth’s conversion story from time to time. I give a lot of credit to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” for my own environmental awakening. But over the years, in particular as I grappled with the early work of the Breakthrough Institute, I found myself sharing Gore’s ideology less and less. I realized that the kind of climate catastrophism that led Gore to claim, in 2006, that “the world will reach a point of no return,” is unscientific. And I took seriously the literature that shows that environmental doomism tends to induce anxiety and demobilization.
Still, in a way, Gore’s doomism made my ecomodernism possible.
There are several things that unite Goodall’s naturalism with Gore’s more technocratic environmentalism. But at the core of their shared ideology is something I think of as “anti-primacy”: a rejection of the idea that humans are special within Creation.
And given her field of study, I think Goodall is an interesting window into the implications of anti-primacy.
On Human Primacy
Goodall was a primatologist, and spent a considerable portion of her life living in isolation with chimpanzees. As an influential environmentalist, she was not unique in her close study of non-human animals. William Vogt, one of the founders of modern eugenics, spent his youth studying seabirds in South America. Paul Ehrlich and E.O. Wilson were each entomologists, having primarily studied butterflies and ants, respectively. The biologist Lynn Margulis suggested that humans on Earth are no different than amoebae in a petri dish. Garrett Hardin created his “tragedy of the commons” framework by comparing human populations to cattle in a grazing paddock.
If anything, Goodall’s comparisons between human societies and her field subjects were the most defensible of all of these. The chimpanzees she studied are among the closest biological ancestors of Homo sapiens. From the Latin for “the first rank, chief, principal,” the very word primate implicitly recognizes that humans rank first in the animal kingdom.
I’ve written before about ecomodernism’s fundamental anthropocentrism, one definition of which holds that “the superiority of Homo sapiens, its capacities, the primacy of its values, [and] its position in the universe.” The modern environmental movement emerged, in many ways, to combat this idea of human exceptionalism. Embracing a more ecocentric politics, environmentalists insist that humans remain within biophysical “planetary boundaries,” rely only on flows of “ecosystem services” rather than extractive stocks of natural resources, and otherwise harmonize with the rest of the flora and fauna on Earth.
Goodall, likewise, rejected human primacy. “We’re part of the animal kingdom,” she said, “not separated from it.” This is foundational to the environmentalist view of what makes us human in the first place. Jason Hickel, the degrowther, rejects René Descartes’ notion that the “thinking mind” makes humans distinct from other animals. And if anything it seems anti-primacy is felt especially strongly among Goodall’s professional cohort—consider the recent book The Arrogant Ape by primatologist Christine Webb, who refers to human exceptionalism as a “myth.” But anti-primacy shows up all over the place in environmentalism, in the work of Vogt, Carson, Wilson, Ehrlich, Hardin, Gore, and countless others.
Now, Goodall was not exactly a dogmatist in her anti-primacy. She was an expert after all in the differences between primate species, and she argued that our language and intelligence distinguished us. But this wasn’t necessarily a compliment. The other thing that made humans special, she thought, was our wickedness. “I’ve personally decided that only humans are capable of true evil,” she said.
It’s perhaps with this sour view of her fellow humans that she came to believe that there are far, far too many of us. Goodall said in 2020 that she “would like to, without causing any pain or suffering, reduce the number of people on the planet.”
Many people I respect defended Goodall on this point, insisting that her vision for depopulation is not coercive. “Goodall wasn’t calling for action or predicting collapse,” the historian Paul Sabin assured me. And perhaps that’s fair. Goodall’s rhetoric was distinct from, say, Paul Ehrlich’s, who has yet to acknowledge let alone atone for the harms done by horrifyingly coercive depopulation campaigns he proposed.
Nor was depopulation Goodall’s primary project. And while she was clearly earnest in her philosophical anti-primacy, she was thoughtful about the similarities and differences between humans and other primates. She is rightly best known for cultivating a love of the natural world and the animal kingdom, and for her contributions to animal science.
Population Control or Pro-Natalism?
And it’s with this complexity that I’d like to close. Because I think it’s important to acknowledge the mass public inspiration that scientists like Goodall provided, but only inasmuch as we take seriously the implications of their environmentalism. And I’d argue that it’s precisely because of its sincerely inspiring legacy that we allow environmentalism’s pernicious anti-human sentiment to permeate our culture and our ideology.
It is striking to me, for instance, that it has become acceptable in progressive circles to assert, as Goodall did, that there should be fewer humans on the planet, or to allege that the worst thing you can do for the climate is to have children. In stark contrast, most progressives I talk to find the recent “pro-natalist” push in favor of having kids to be “creepy.”
And to be clear, I sympathize. I also want to construct a pro-natalism that liberates women and families, instead of restoring the gender expectations of yesteryear. I would just emphasize that existing social mores make it fashionable to talk about depopulation, while making it “creepy” to talk about having kids as a positive social or environmental good.
Like Goodall did, I have one son. And partially because of people like her, I’ve dedicated my career to protecting the beauty of the Earth so that he and his children and many billions of future humans can enjoy, protect, and nurture it. In a way, her environmentalism made my pro-natalism possible.
Rest in Primacy, Jane Goodall.
I think this is exactly the kind of discussion we need, and I appreciate you taking it on. I have a follow-up question—more like a thought experiment: when your great-great-grandchild comes of age, what global population size do you believe would give them the best chance at a good life on this planet? To reduce this question to its simplest form, would it be more or fewer people than we have now? If your answer is “more,” I’m curious why. If “less,” how is that different from Goodall’s view?