The beloved primatologist was a beacon of hope, compassion, and love
Together We Can Change the World:
A Tribute to Jane Goodall
The Sierra Club
(October 8, 2025) — Dr. Jane Goodall was one of the world’s great ambassadors of hope, compassion, and love and at a time when all three are needed as much as ever. She passed away last week, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire millions.
A friend and leader for the entire environmental movement, Goodall was honored with the Sierra Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award at its annual Trail Blazers Ball event in April 2025.
In this moving tribute, writer Michael Shapiro reflects on the life and impact of a woman who transformed how we understand the natural world and our place within it.
Jane Goodall was more than a scientist. She was a connector of worlds — of people and animals, science and emotion, activism and everyday action. And for so many of us, especially those who grew up feeling different for caring deeply about nature, she was a guiding light.
Read the full tribute to Jane Goodall from Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club.
“Together We Can Change the World”:
A Tribute to Jane Goodall
Michael Shapiro / Sierra Magazine
(October 3, 2025) — Dr. Jane Goodall, the beloved primatologist, was one of us. By “us,” I don’t mean solely environmentalists, or even all humans. She was a proud member of the community of life encompassing all sentient beings, but especially the chimpanzees that she began studying in Tanzania in 1960. She died on October 1 in Los Angeles at age 91, while on a speaking tour.
She was my hero. As a kid who rescued spiders and subscribed to Ranger Rick magazine, I felt like an outlier. But when I saw Jane Goodall on TV, clad in khaki and sounding brilliant with her British accent, I sensed I’d found my champion. While my friends roasted bugs in the sun with a magnifying glass, I’d get off my bike to take grasshoppers and newts out of the road and escort them to safety. Hearing Goodall advocate for animals of all shapes and sizes affirmed I was doing the right thing.
Like Dr. Seuss’s Lorax, who spoke for the trees, Goodall gave voice to the voiceless, meeting chimpanzees and other animals in their habitat, on their terms. She approached science without preconceptions; she went into the field with a beginner’s mind and quietly observed. Her patience led the chimps to trust her—I imagine they sensed her kindness—which enabled Goodall to make groundbreaking discoveries, such as chimps’ use of tools as well as their rich and nuanced social and emotional life.
Goodall documented chimpanzees’ close familial bonds; those who hadn’t seen one another for days hugged and leapt for joy when reunited. She observed mothers grieving over deceased infants and tribal groups engaging in vicious warfare.
A United Nations Messenger of Peace, Goodall brought a sense of spirituality and equanimity to the environmental movement. If environmentalism were a religion, she was our Dalai Lama. Goodall didn’t seek authority; her goal was to empower us all. She signed my copy of her 2009 book, Hope for Animals and Their World, about species rebounding from the brink of extinction, with the inscription “Together we can change the world.”
Affectionately known as Dr. Jane, in 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to support conservation research. In 1991, she created Roots & Shoots to inspire children worldwide to become environmental stewards.
During the late-20th century, when eco-warriors such as Dave Foreman, cofounder of Earth First!, pledged to blow up bulldozers, Goodall sought alliances. She convinced the CEO of Conoco Oil to fund the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center for orphaned chimps, which opened in the Republic of Congo in 1992.
In his foreword to Goodall’s 2014 book, Seeds of Hope, author Michael Pollan wrote, “More than any other scientist or writer I can think of, Jane Goodall expanded the circle of human empathy to take in the emotional lives of other creatures.”
I had the good fortune to interview Goodall several times: first in person at a New York hotel in 2007, later by phone, and in 2021 via Zoom for a National Geographic story about her global tree-planting campaign. She was kind and welcoming, choosing her words with precision and care, and though she had a packed schedule, she was fully present and unhurried. It was her assistant who ended our first interview.
“Can you imagine what this was like for a young girl who loves animals, who dreamed about this all her life, to wake up not out of a dream but into a dream? It was magic.”
Goodall grew up in Bournemouth, on England’s south coast, with her mother, sister, grandmother, and two aunts. Her father, a British army officer, was often away so the house became a community of women.
One day when she was four, Jane disappeared for hours, causing her panicked mother to call the police and report her missing. Foretelling the life she’d lead, little Jane was found crouching in a henhouse observing a hen to see how she laid an egg. Jane’s parents divorced when she was 12. Her mother instilled a belief in young Jane that she could do anything if she set her mind to it.
Goodall dreamed of visiting Africa and worked as a waitress to save money until she could afford to visit a school friend whose family lived on a farm in Kenya. When she got there in her mid-20s, she sought out paleontologist Louis Leakey, the director of Nairobi’s national museum. Goodall got a job as his secretary and worked beside him under the searing sun in an archaeological dig in the Olduvai Gorge.
“Can you imagine what this was like for a young girl who loves animals, who dreamed about this all her life, to wake up not out of a dream but into a dream?” she said. “It was magic.” After a few months, Leakey selected her to study a group of chimpanzees, an assignment she hadn’t thought possible because she didn’t have a university degree.
During her early research at Tanzania’s Gombe Stream Game Reserve, authorities required her to have a companion, so she called on the person who’d always offered her the utmost support: her mother.
“My life as a research scientist would not have happened if it weren’t for my mother, Vanne,” Goodall told me. “I was a child dreaming of going to Africa when I was about 11 years old—at that time we didn’t have any money; we couldn’t afford a bicycle, let alone a car—and Africa was still known as the Dark Continent. It was a very faraway place. World War II was raging, and I was a girl. People laughed at me and said, ‘Jane, dream of something you can achieve.’ It was my mother who used to say, ‘If you really want something and you work hard, if you take advantage of opportunity and you never give up, you’ll find a way.’”
“It was good having her those first four months,” Goodall said. “At Gombe, she boosted my morale because the chimpanzees ran away day after day after day. It took them months to get used to me, and feelings of depression and despair clawed at me. I knew if I didn’t see something exciting before the six months’ money ran out, that would be the end [of the research project]. She reminded me never to give up.”
“This highly developed intellect, this ability to communicate, should put us in a position of responsibility to be good stewards to this amazing and extraordinary planet. And yet that’s not happening. We’re destroying the planet.”
After several months, Goodall was allowed to venture alone into the forest, and the chimps gradually became accustomed to her presence. She soon recognized their differences—physical aspects and personalities—and gave the chimps names. “Some scientists feel that animals should be labeled by numbers—that to name them is anthropomorphic—but I have always been interested in the differences between individuals,” she writes in In the Shadow of Man, “and a name is not only more individual than a number but also far easier to remember.”
In our interview, she took aim at conventional science: “If I was talking about numbers 12 and 6 and 29, you wouldn’t know who I was talking about.” She noted the chimps had “vivid” and distinct personalities. “Why shouldn’t they all have names? Why must they have numbers? That’s what people in concentration camps had: numbers.”
Just before the grant money expired, Goodall discovered that chimpanzees used tools. She found a chimp she called David Greybeard inserting a long grass stem into a termite mound and eating insects that clamped onto the stalk. This was the first documented tool use by chimpanzees.
“She was the one who showed everyone how to do it. No one before her knew how to study primates,” said her biographer Dale Peterson. “Before people went with 30 African porters and spent a month in the field. No one realized that you had to get them used to you. Wild chimps are emotional, volatile, and several times stronger than humans, but Jane had courage, patience, and longevity.”
After a year in the field, she returned to Britain, at Leakey’s urging, to get her PhD at the University of Cambridge. “I was very nervous,” she told me. “It was very shocking to be told that I had done everything wrong. [Professors] told me that I couldn’t talk about chimpanzees having personalities. . . . I was very naive, but I had this obstinate nature, and I thought I was right.”
Time and further research proved she was correct. Goodall’s discoveries led to a 1963 feature in National Geographic. In December 1965, Goodall appeared on the cover of the magazine, and CBS aired a special called Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees.
Derided as National Geographic’s “cover girl,” Goodall and her early studies were dismissed with headlines such as “Eat Your Heart Out, Fay Wray” (the actress who starred in the 1933 film King Kong). Like a martial artist, she spun the characterization of damsel in the jungle to further her aims. Early in her life, she told me, she’d fallen “passionately in love” with Tarzan, who “married that other wimpy Jane. I would have made a better mate for Tarzan myself.”
Initially she believed the great apes were “like us but nicer,” but then she saw them engage in horrific battles. “Although they’re quite violent,” she told me, “they hate the time between the attack and a reconciliation. There is an enormous desire on the part of the victim for reconciliation to improve the relationship and return social harmony.”
Yet Goodall always said the human mind is unique. “Our intellect has leapt into a new realm, and I’ve always believed that’s because . . . we developed a sophisticated spoken language so we can teach children about things that aren’t there, learn from the past, and plan for the far-distant future. If chimpanzees could do that, then they wouldn’t be disappearing at the rate they are today,” she said during our 2007 interview.
“Chimpanzees can do amazing things, but they can’t give a lecture. They can’t build cathedrals, and they can’t write books. They can’t send people to the moon. They can’t make weapons of mass destruction. They can’t destroy forests. Only we can do that. This highly developed intellect, this ability to communicate, should put us in a position of responsibility to be good stewards to this amazing and extraordinary planet. And yet that’s not happening. We’re destroying the planet.”
“The lust for greed and power has destroyed the beauty we inherited, but altruism, compassion, and love have not been destroyed.”
Into her 80s, until the pandemic sent us to our rooms, Goodall traveled 300 or more days each year, doing all she could to inspire us to conserve the planet and its inhabitants. I sensed she was a reluctant ambassador of hope, who would rather have been at the Bournemouth family home she shared with her sister, Judy, or venturing barefoot into the forests of Gombe to hear the calls of chimps.
She understood the links between human rights and global sustainability and radiated hope to audiences who were hungry for it. The exiled Dalai Lama steadfastly emanates joy despite the Chinese occupation of Tibet, his people’s homeland—Goodall, despite living during the Anthropocene, was a beacon of hope her entire adult life.
In a 2017 opinion piece in The New York Times, she wrote: “The lust for greed and power has destroyed the beauty we inherited, but altruism, compassion, and love have not been destroyed. All that is beautiful in humanity has not been destroyed. The beauty of our planet is not dead but lying dormant, like the seeds of a dead tree. We shall have another chance.”
I asked Goodall how she remains hopeful. “You can’t give up,” she said defiantly. “There’s all this horror, but with our backs to the wall we’ve always done pretty well as a species. So we either go under—but we’ll jolly well go under fighting—or we’ll get enough people woken in time to turn it around.”
Through the Roots & Shoots program, Goodall learned of kids who instead of using a tortoise they found for soup, let him live freely and even fed him some mushrooms. “Those are the stories that give hope,” she told me. “It shows that you can change. People say you can’t change the culture. Well, you can. You have to start somewhere and hope that it spreads. If the time is right, it will. And if it doesn’t, well, I’ll be dead.”
I imagine Goodall wouldn’t want us to grieve her passing. She’d want us to act and do all we can to preserve our magnificent and stunningly varied planet.
“Now,” she’d tenderly tell us, “it’s up to you.”
Michael Shapiro is the author of The Creative Spark: How musicians, writers, explorers and other artists found their inner fire and followed their dreams — his full interview with Goodall appears in that book. He’s also the author of A Sense of Place, a collection of interviews with travel writers. Shapiro’s stories have appeared in National Geographic, the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Afar, and Sierra magazine.
