Dr. Jane Goodall died last Wednesday at the age of 91. For people of my generation, especially those of us who were young girls at the time, she emerged on the world scene in a 1965 National Geographic documentary. She captured the imagination and endured as a unique and inspiring figure. 

Her story starts with determination and resourcefulness in pursuit of her childhood dream to study animals. She waited tables to pay her passage to Kenya in 1957, where she secured an interview with the renowned paleontologist Dr. Louis Leakey.  Leakey gave her a job as a secretary at the National Museum in Nairobi, and then invited her to join him and his wife Mary and their team hunting for fossils at the Olduvai Gorge site in Tanzania, where the Leakeys had made groundbreaking discoveries about the earliest humans and their hominid ancestors.  Leakey wanted to advance our understanding of human evolution by studying our closest living relatives among the great apes: chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. He recruited three brilliant young women to do this work: Goodall, Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas, dubbing them “the Trimates.” 

Despite her lack of an academic degree, Leakey saw in Goodall all of the intellectual qualities he envisioned for this work, including extraordinary patience, curiosity, keen powers of observation and meticulous attention to detail. Though at the time largely self-taught, she already possessed broad knowledge of wildlife and, most importantly, an open mind. In 1960, 26-year-old Jane Goodall traveled to the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to embark on her lifelong adventure. Her discovery and documentation of chimpanzees using blades of grass as tools, and her observations of their rich social and family lives, forethought and individualized personalities upended accepted theories of animal behavior and human evolution, introducing a new understanding of the intelligence and emotional lives of non-human animals. Her respectful methodology of immersive, long-term observation was equally transformative. 

She also excelled at evoking the profound wonder she experienced in the field, engaging non-scientists in an unprecedented way.  “All the time I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to myself and more and more in tune with the spiritual power that I felt all around... The beauty was always there, but moments of true awareness were rare. They would come, unannounced, perhaps when I was watching the pale flush preceding dawn or looking up through the rustling leaves of some giant forest tree into the greens and browns and the black shadows and the occasionally ensured bright fleck of blue sky; or when I stood, as darkness fell, with one hand on the still warm trunk of a tree and looked at the sparkling of an early moon on the never still, softly sighing water of Lake Tanganyika.”

In 1965, Goodall earned a PhD in ethology at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her work evolved over the years, seeking to repair the damaged sense of connection between modern-day humans and the natural world in the realms of animal welfare, biological diversity, human rights and climate change. On accepting the Templeton Prize in 2021, she said: “Some people seem to believe that we can live separated from nature, but we can’t. We’re animals, too, you know, by definition... We just happen to have [less] hair and have had an explosive development of our intellect. But we seem to fail when it comes to wisdom—the wisdom that says, ‘The decision I make now, how will that affect future generations or the health of the planet?’”

Louis Leakey once remarked that “the past shows clearly that we all have a common origin and that our differences in race, color and creed are only superficial.” Goodall expanded on that message in her 1999 book “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey,” warning against what she described as “cultural mind prisons.” “Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born... Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village,’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.” She became a United Nations Messenger for Peace in 2002.

Her work continues through the Jane Goodall Institute, founded in 1977 to support ongoing chimpanzee research and conservation, and Roots & Shoots, a global program founded in 1991 that empowers young people to lead hands-on projects in their communities. In 2017, she established the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation to ensure the ongoing stability of the programs that represent her life’s work.

Legacy was on her mind when she recorded an interview in March for the Netflix series “Famous Last Words,” which offers leaders in various fields the opportunity to share a final message to the world, to be aired after their deaths. “I would say I was somebody sent to this world to try to give people hope in dark times, because without hope, we fall into apathy and do nothing.” Unflinching in the face of her own mortality, Dr. Goodall urged us to “fight to the last” to protect the world’s ecosystems, keep faith with the natural world that is the source of all life, and remember that each of us holds the power to effect change through our decisions and our compassion.