成为珍·古道尔 Being Jane Goodall: Fifty Years at 1)Gombe
文字难度：★★★☆
Most of us don’t 2)enter upon our life’s destiny at any neatly 3)discernible time. Jane Goodall did. On the morning of July 14th, 1960, she stepped onto a pebble beach along a remote stretch of the east shore of 4)Lake Tanganyika. It was her first arrival at what was then called the Gombe Stream 5)Game Reserve, a small protected area that had been established by the British colonial government back in 1943. She had brought a tent, a few 6)tin plates, a cup without a handle, a 7)shoddy pair of 8)binoculars, an African cook named Dominic, and—as a companion, at the insistence of people who feared for her safety in the wilds of pre-independence 9)Tanganyika—her mother. She had come to study 10)chimpanzees. Or anyway, to try. 11)Casual observers expected her to fail. One person, the 12)paleontologist Louis Leakey, who had recruited her to the task up in 13)Nairobi, believed she might succeed. 
我们大多数人对于“踏入命定轨迹”的时刻没有一个截然清晰的概念,但在珍·古道尔的生命中却有这样的转折点。1960年7月14日的清晨,她踏上了坦噶尼喀湖东岸一处偏僻的卵石滩,这是珍·古道尔第一次来到这块当时被称为“冈贝河野生动物保护区”的区域,这一小块保护区是英国殖民政府于1943年设立的。她随身携带了一顶帐篷,几只锡碟子,一个没有把手的杯子,一副劣质双筒望远镜,一名叫多尼米克的非洲厨子,以及大家因担忧她在尚未获得独立的坦噶尼喀野外的安全问题而一直劝说她要带上的一位同伴——她的母亲。珍·古道尔此行是为了研究黑猩猩,更准确点说,是尝试去研究。无关的观察者都觉得她会失败,不过有一位名叫路易斯·李基的古生物学家相信她可能会成功,他曾招募珍参加过他在内罗毕的考古工作。
Jane and her mother spent the afternoon putting their camp in order. Then, around 5 p.m., somebody reported having seen a chimpanzee. “So off we went,” Jane wrote later that night in her journal, “and there was the chimp.” She had gotten only a distant, indistinct glimpse. “It moved away as we 14)drew level with the crowd of fishermen gazing at it, and, though we climbed the neighbouring slope, we didn’t see it again.” But she had noticed, and recorded, some bent branches flattened together in a nearby tree: a chimp nest. That 15)datum, that first nest, was the starting point of what has become one of the most significant ongoing sagas in modern 16)field biology: the continuous, 17)minutely detailed, 50-year study, by Jane Goodall and others, of the behavior of the chimps of Gombe.
珍和母亲花了一个下午的时间才将营地建好。等到下午大约五点钟的时候,有人报告说刚看到了一只黑猩猩。“于是我们马上就出发了,”珍当晚在自己的日记中这样写道,“那里真的有只黑猩猩。”当时她只能从远处模糊地看了一眼。“当我们走近那群正盯着黑猩猩在看的渔民时,黑猩猩早已溜走了,虽然我们爬到了附近的一个斜坡上,但并没有找到它的踪迹。”尽管如此,珍还是发现了附近一棵树上有一些弯曲的树枝被铺平在一起:这是一处黑猩猩的巢穴,她对此作了记录。那段数据,那第一个巢穴,正是现代野外生物学中一段经久不衰的重要传奇的起点:珍·古道尔及其后来者开始对冈贝黑猩猩的行为进行连续、详尽细致、长达五十年的研究。
Young Goodall had no scientific18)credentials when she began, not even an undergraduate degree. She was a bright, motivated secretarial school graduate from England who had always loved animals and dreamed of studying them in Africa. She came from a family of strong women, little money, and absent men. During the early weeks at Gombe she struggled, 19)groping for a methodology, losing time to a fever that was probably 20)malaria, hiking many miles in the forested mountains, and glimpsing few chimpanzees, until an elderly male with21)grizzled chin 22)whiskers extended to her a 23)tentative, startling gesture of trust. She named the old chimp David Greybeard.
刚开始时,年轻的古道尔在科研方面并无任何科班底子,甚至连本科学位都没有。聪明而有干劲的珍毕业于英格兰一所文秘学校,一直热爱动物,总是梦想去非洲进行实地研究。她自幼家境贫寒,家中没有男人,全靠女人当家。刚到冈贝的头几个星期里,珍一直在努力摸索研究黑猩猩的方法,曾因感染疟疾而发烧以致浪费了一段时间,也曾在森林密布的山林中跋涉数百里后瞥见了几只黑猩猩,直到一只下巴胡须已变成灰白的黑猩猩开始尝试对她投以信任的回应,事情才开始有所改观。她给这只老黑猩猩起名叫灰胡子大卫。
The issue of how to study chimpanzees, and of what can be 24)inferred from behavioral observations, has faced Jane Goodall since early in her career. It began 25)coming into focus after her first field season, when Louis Leakey informed Jane of his next bright idea for shaping her life: He would get her into a Ph.D. program in 26)ethology at Cambridge University. Once enrolled at Cambridge, she found herself27)crosswise with departmental elders and the prevailing 28)certitudes of the field. “It was a bit shocking to be told I’d done everything wrong. Everything.” By then she had 15 months of field data from Gombe, most of it gathered through patient observation of individuals she knew by 29)monikers such as David Greybeard and Fifi. Such personification didn’t play well at Cambridge; to 30)impute individuality and emotion to nonhuman animals was 31)anthropomorphism, not ethology. “Fortunately, I thought back to my first teacher, when I was a child, who taught me that that wasn’t true.” Her first teacher had been her dog, Rusty. “You cannot share your life in a meaningful way with any kind of animal with a reasonably well-developed brain and not realize that animals have personalities.” She pushed back against the prevailing view and on February 9th, 1966, she became Dr. Jane Goodall.
如何研究黑猩猩以及如何能从行为观察中推断出真相这些问题自考察初期便一直困扰着珍·古道尔。但随着第一个野外考察期的结束,这些问题的答案慢慢地清晰起来。这时路易斯·李基将一个想法告知珍——这改变了她的命运——他说准备把她招入剑桥大学攻读动物行为学的博士学位。入读剑桥以后,在专业前辈和他们对野外考察的传统信念面前,珍·古道尔很快发现自己显得格格不入。“让我震惊的是,有人告诉我,说我之前做的所有工作都是错的。所有的一切。”当时她已经在冈贝考察了15个月,收集了大量的野外数据,这些数据大多是通过对某些黑猩猩个体的耐心观察而得到的,例如灰胡子大卫和菲 菲——这些都是她给起的名字。但这样把猩猩人格化并没有博得剑桥学究们的欢心,在他们眼中,为非人类的动物赋予个性和情感属于拟人论的研究范畴,与动物行为学毫不相干。“幸运的是,在我很小的时候,我的第一位老师就告诉我,这种看法是完全错误的。”实际上,她所说的老师指的是她的小狗拉斯蒂。“如果你没意识到动物也有个性,那你是不可能跟那些大脑发育已初具水平的动物真正相知相处的。”最终,珍·古道尔以实际行动对这些传统观点予以了回击,1966年2月9日,她正式成为了珍·古道尔博士。
In 1968 the little game reserve underwent its own graduation, becoming 32)Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. By then Jane was receiving research funding from the 33)National Geographic Society. She was married and a mother and famous worldwide, owing in part to her articles for this magazine and her 34)comely, forceful presence in a televised film, Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees. She had institutionalized her field camp, in order to fund and 35)perpetuate it, as the Gombe Stream Research Center. In 1971 she published In the Shadow of Man, her account of the early Gombe studies and adventures, which became a best seller. Around the same time, she began hosting students and graduate researchers to help with chimp-data collection and other research at Gombe.
1968年,原本小小的冈贝野生动物保护区正式升级为坦桑尼亚冈贝国家公园。当时,珍已经得到国家地理学会的研究资助。珍在《国家地理》杂志上发表的数篇文章,以及在电视上播出的电影《古道尔小姐和野生黑猩猩》中那清秀且执着的形象让当时已经结婚生子的她誉满全球。她在之前野外考察营地的基础上设立了冈贝河研究中心,以此寻求研究经费来使之得以延续。1971年,她出版了畅销书《黑猩猩在召唤》,描述了自己早期在冈贝丛林的研究和冒险经历。几乎是在同一时期,她开始召集学生以及其他研究学者前往冈贝,帮助收集黑猩猩的相关数据和展开其他研究。
Impelled by broader 36)imperatives, Jane ended her career as a field biologist in 1986, just after publication of her great scientific book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Since then she has lived as an advocate, a traveling lecturer, a woman driven by a sense of public mission. Her 37)first cause, which arose from her years at Gombe, was improving the grim treatment 38)inflicted on chimpanzees held in many medical research labs. Combining her toughness and moral outrage with her personal charm and willingness to interact graciously, she achieved some negotiated successes. She also founded39)sanctuaries for chimps who could be freed from 40)captivity, including many orphaned by the 41)bushmeat trade. That work led to her concerns about human conduct toward other species. She established a program called Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots, encouraging young people around the world to become active in projects that promote greater concern for animals, the environment, and the human community.
在出版了一本伟大的科学著作《冈贝黑猩猩》之后,越来越大的责任感促使珍在1986年结束了自己的野外生物学家生涯。从那以后,心中强烈的公共使命感驱使她成为了一位动物维权人士,四处演讲。在冈贝的那些岁月让珍决心去改变黑猩猩在很多医学研究实验室中遭受残酷对待的境况。她坚定干练,义愤辞严,又充满个人魅力,谈吐大方优雅,她把两者结合得恰到好处,从而在谈判交涉中取得了不少成果。珍还设立了若干个保护区,专门收养那些从囚笼中被解救出来的黑猩猩,以及那些因丛林野生动物肉品交易而沦为孤儿的小黑猩猩们。这些工作让珍开始关注人类行为对其他生物所造成的伤害,她设立了一个名为“珍·古道尔的根与芽”的公益项目,专门鼓励世界各地的年轻人积极投身于环保,关注动物、环境和人类群落这样的项目当中。
She now spends about 300 days a year on the road, giving countless interviews and schoolroom talks, lecturing in big venues, meeting with government officials, raising money to turn the wheels of the 42)Jane Goodall Institute. Occasionally she sneaks away into a forest or onto a prairie, sometimes with a few friends, to watch chimps or 43)sandhill cranes or black-footed 44)ferrets and to restore her energy and sanity. It’s important to remember that the meaning of Gombe, after half a century, is bigger than Jane Goodall’s life and work. But make no mistake: Her life and work have been very, very big.
现在,珍每年有300天的时间是奔波于各地,做无数次的访谈和学校讲座,在大礼堂演讲,与政府官员会面,为珍·古道尔研究会筹款以维持运营。偶尔,珍也会和一些朋友溜到森林里或草原上,去观察黑猩猩、沙丘鹤或黑爪雪貂,借此振作精神,恢复活力。历经了半个世纪以后,冈贝的意义已然超越了珍·古道尔个人的生活和工作经历。但毫无疑问的是,这位女性的生活和工作无愧于“伟大”二字!
