Nature 272

"I always want to take women to events, but the problem is that they don't want to go because they feel shy," Bermudez-Coronel said.

And when I flew over the little tiny Gombe National Park in 1960, it was part of this great forest that stretched right across Africa. By 1990, it was a tiny little island of forests with more people than the land can support, who buy food from elsewhere and who are struggling to survive. And that was when I thought, "If we don't do something to help the people find an alternative way of living without destroying the environment, then we can't save chimps, forests or anything else." So we began the Tacare programme.