‘Dr. Jane, do you really have hope for the future?’ Looking back at the legacy, impact and message Goodall shared with the world

In 1957, a 23-year-old Jane Goodall saved up enough money out of secretarial school and traveled from England to a friend’s farm in Kenya. While there, she met paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who offered her a job at a nearby natural history museum. It did not take long for Leakey to realize that Goodall’s passion for animals, her elevated patience, high energy and bravery would make her a great fit for studying wild chimpanzees.

He sent Goodall to the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in July 1960. She was accompanied by her mother because the British government that controlled Tanginika, or the mainland part of Tanzania today, said a young woman could not go into the African bush alone.

Within months of her arrival, the 26-year-old Goodall, without a college degree, became the first person to witness a non-human use a tool. She observed a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard stick a stiff blade of grass into a termite hole to extract the tasty bugs.

She reported her findings back to Leakey, who famously stated in response, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

“One of her major impacts is really the contribution of a long-term field study and inspiring others to do that,” Heather Watts, a professor in the school of biological sciences at Washington State University, said of Goodall. “She was one of the first to study animals in the same population over many years.”

The 91-year-old primatologist died of natural causes on Wednesday in Los Angeles while on a speaking tour.

As the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees, Goodall studied humanity’s closest relative for more than 60 years. Besides discovering chimpanzees could use and make tools, Goodall also found they had complex emotional lives and personalities. While she is well-known for her chimpanzee research and tireless advocacy for conserving the planet, there is a broader concept that, for many, Goodall defined.

“Just her message of hope, even in light of witnessing things like poaching of the species that she was so connected to and environmental impacts of human agriculture and things like that,” said Diana Goodrich, the co-director of Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest just outside of Cle Elum, Washington. “She always maintained a sense of hope, and I think that just motivated her so much to continue advocating for the planet.”

The Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest has 16 chimpanzees across 113 acres of farm and forested land in the Cascade mountains. It is the only home for chimpanzees in Washington.

Goodrich began working for the sanctuary in 2008 and said it is not an exaggeration to say that they would not be where they are today without the influence of the world’s most legendary primatologist. She praised Goodall for being one of the first field researchers to insist on using and publishing the names of chimpanzees rather than just assigning them a number, as was common practice back in the day.

“We are, in some ways, carrying on in a similar fashion,” Goodrich said. “We really want people to get connected to the individual personalities of the chimpanzees here. We have a blog that we post every day so that people can dive into day-to-day life with the chimps and understand that they have the same needs and differences that humans do.”

Goodrich wishes more people knew about the kind of rich, emotional lives chimps have. Some chimps get along well with one another; others, not so much. She said some chimps at the sanctuary are really funny, while others are much more serious. The more disturbing side of Goodall’s research revealed chimpanzees can exhibit cruelty and commit violent acts against one another. All in all, chimpanzees have interests, desires and dislikes just like the humans with whom they share about 98.7% of their DNA.

As a young girl, Goodall dreamed of living with and studying animals. Much of that love came from reading books like Dr. Doolittle and Tarzan. She even once mentioned during a speech at Lafayette College that Tarzan had “married the wrong Jane.”

Goodall attended Cambridge University in 1962 and got her doctorate without ever attaining an undergraduate degree. By 1966, she had her PhD in ethology, the science of animal behavior.

In 1986, Goodall shifted from researcher to activist after attending a primatology conference. Many of the presenters at this conference referenced deforestation and the threat it posed to habitats and species around the world. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute, a community-focused conservation group, in 1977, and the Institute’s Roots and Shoots in 1991. Roots and Shoots was a program that encouraged young people around the world to care about conservation.

Watts studies animal behavior and spent time in Africa studying spotted hyenas for her PhD dissertation. She said seeing Goodall featured in National Geographic as a young girl is what made her realize she could have a career studying animal behavior. Without Goodall’s work, Watts doubts she would have ever gone down the path of becoming a scientist.

“In the later parts of her career, she was a public figure that did a lot to get the public more generally interested in caring about wildlife and conservation issues, especially young people,” Watts said. “Her work beyond the scientific community as a role model for that is something that she’ll perhaps be best remembered for.”

Her remarkable ability to connect science with the average person in an interesting, funny and popular way was like no other, Goodrich said. She remembers meeting Goodall back stage several years ago after the scientist gave a speech at a school in Seattle and was struck by her presence and honesty.

“She was really funny. She was kind of self-deprecating about how she was nervous, which really surprised me, because she did this for a living,” Goodrich said.

In 2013, Goodall spoke at Gonzaga University as part of the Presidential Speakers Series. In her closing remarks, she spoke about hope, just as she had done countless times in books, on TV and in other speeches available on the internet.

The four reasons she gave for hope were the human brain, the energy of youth, the resilience of nature and the indomitable human spirit.

Even in a Ted Talk in Monterey, California, six years before her talk at Gonzaga, she responded to a question she often received from young people: “Dr. Jane, do you really have hope for the future?”

“Yes, there is hope,” Goodall said in the Ted Talk. “And where is the hope? Is it out there with the politicians? It’s in our hands. It’s in your hands and my hands and those of our children. It’s really up to us. We’re the ones who can make a difference. If we lead lives where we consciously leave the lightest possible ecological footprints, if we buy the things that are ethical for us to buy and don’t buy the things that are not, we can change the world overnight.”