Over a half a century ago, when 26 year old Jane Goodall ventured into the wild, she barely held anything other than a notebook and binoculars in her hand. She had no field experience and no college degree but in her heart, she bore pure fascination and sheer will to learn.
Her distinct interest was captured by a species none other than our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. For 55 years, Goodall remainedin Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania,studying the Kasakela chimpanzee community.
She had been sent to Tanzania by Kenyan paleoanthropologist and archaeologist Dr. Louise Leaky and she studied chimps for more than 57 years and by the 80s, the looming threat of habitat destruction inspired Goodall to leave the jungle and begin advocating for conservation full time.
Today, at age 83, her endeavor is still in motion and she has come to be a renowned and respected primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace. She inspires people to conserve nature, connects them to a forgotten part ofit and travels up to 300 days a year in order to accomplish her task as a fellow earthling.
“I think I was given a mission, and I feel something up there pushing me.”
Bound to nature
“All the time, I was getting closer to animals and nature and, as a result, closer to myself and more in tune with the spiritual power I felt all around,” she says in the new documentary JANE which follows Goodall into the field and recounts her work studying primates.Most of the footage is culled from 134 hours of film shot by Goodall's ex-husband Hugo van Lawick while they were in Tanzania.
“I've always loved being alone, and being alone is very different from being lonely. Being alone out in the rain forest you're not alone, you're surrounded by life forms, where everything is interconnected and in the rare moments where you are completely in tune with the natural world you are part of it,” she once said to presenter Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand.
Enclosed in the green nest of the wild, Goodall raised her son, Hugo amidst the natural world. “Mama,” he says, “big lion out there eat me.” Dr. Goodall laughed in delight at the memory, says dailytelegraph.com. It was, she conceded, a hell of a first sentence.
“It was wonderful,” Goodall told the site. “Hugo very much grew up in nature. He never wore any clothes, and every single afternoon I’d be out with him, the two of us discovering the world together.
“But I had to be careful and make sure he was never alone outside, and I had a big cage on the verandah where I would put him at times — because chimpanzees have been known to eat human children.”
The young animal-lover
Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born on April 3, 1934 London to Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall, a businessman, and Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, a novelist who wrote under the name Vanne Morris-Goodall.
As a child, she was given a lifelike chimpanzee stuffed animal named Jubilee by her father; her fondness for the toy started her early love of animals. Today, the stuffed animal still sits on her dresser in London. As she writes in her book, Reason for Hope: “My mother’s friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares.”
Goodall loved books about animals and Africa, especially The Story of Dr. Dolittle and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan series. However, Goodall was disdainful of Tarzan's romantic interest, Jane Porter, and thought that she would be a better romantic match for the tree-swinging hero.
“Everybody said I'd never do it, but not my mum,” Goodall told motherboard of launching her career in the jungle. “So I didn't care what anybody else said, and I knew I could do it. I watched animals all my life. I knew I was going to go to Africa and live with animals. I was right,”
She did well in school despite an unusual neurological condition, known as prosopagnosia, which makes it difficult to recognize faces – She reveals about the condition in her autobiography. Unable to afford a university education, she moved to London after school to work as a secretary for a documentary film company.
Goodall has a sister, Judith, who shares the same birthday, though the two were born four years apart.
A woman of science
Despite Leakey’s confidence in her abilities, other experienced professionals did not believe a lone young woman from England could survive in the African bush.She speaks to hollywoodreporter on how her womanhood was a beneficial factor in the challenge she found in life in the wild. “Being a woman helped me, I think. Louis Leakey believed that women would be better observers than men, had more patience. That's why he chose [me]. I'd say way over half of people now out in the field studying animals are women.”
Goodall is largely an apolitical figure, though she couldn't resist taking a few digs at political stances that rejected science. She says, in the same interview, that she is “more shocked than surprised,” that some people tend to not accept science even today.“They're denying the scientific observations of thousands of scientists around the world. How do I get through to them? Sometimes if you get the feeling of a person and you find out who he is, you can tell a story that gets into the heart so that he might take away some different thoughts.”
A radiant rose
Goodall is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute which contributes to the wellbeing of the planet by restoring critical habitat to save chimpanzees from extinction; improving health for women and education for girls; cultivating local livelihoods in harmony with nature; and helping young people become the informed generation of conservation leaders the world so urgently needs through the Roots & Shoots youth programs in nearly 100 countries.
She has served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project since its founding in 1996 and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues.
Jane Goodall is a soft flame of light in the path of nature, science and society as a whole. That softness received the gratitude it deserves when she recently got a rose named after her. A portion of sales for the sunrise colored pink-yellow hybrid tea rose goes to help the work of the Jane Goodall Institute as her mission still continues to this day.
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