Remembering Jane Goodall

1934-2025

Sometimes I think of the great musicians I’ve seen in person who are gone now. I saw James Brown do the splits onstage in D.C., Prince strutting in block-heeled boots in Raleigh, Leonard Cohen crooning from a wooden stool in Durham. Two summers ago we took the girls to see Willie Nelson so they wouldn’t miss the chance to hear his gentle voice in person. Time on Earth is so fleeting! When the greats pass, you never get them back!

None of these performances, as incredible as they were and as grateful as I was to see them, means as much to me as the time I saw Jane Goodall with a class of fifth graders eighteen years ago. This was in October 2007, when I worked at a small project-based charter school in Durham. We had been studying lemurs when I learned that Jane Goodall was coming to speak at Duke University. Duke is home to the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center, including her archives and field notes. At the school where I taught you could plan field trips pretty much whenever, so I got permission to take the students to the evening talk. Many parents came too.

I remember where we sat, and our view of Jane at the lectern, her silver hair pulled back in a ponytail and a scarf draped over her shoulders. She was very beautiful and regal. She would have been 73 at the time. To my students, who’d seen the photos of her as a young woman in In the Shadow of Man, she looked both the same and different. They knew how important she was, and that before she and her mother went to the Gombe National Park in Tanzania (she wasn’t allowed to go alone!), scientists believed—incorrectly—that humans were the only animals who used tools. It resonated with them that a young person could make a discovery that no one else could.

After she left her research post in 1986, she had never been back to Gombe for a significant stretch of time, even though it was her favorite place in the world. She told us that she did some 300 appearances a year, traveling all around the world to raise money and awareness for conservation.

Jane’s love of Gombe’s grasslands and forests shines throughout In the Shadow of Man (which is actually a great read-aloud and much better than the for-kids biographies). Her life with Fifi and and David Greybeard and Flo sounded like such a dream to us. How could she give it up?

She put it aside to do the even more important work of telling all of us what was at stake if we did not change course, not only for chimpanzees but also for all of humanity. She fought for an end to deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels for almost forty years, working long past the time that most people retire. In fact, she was on a speaking tour when she died, at 91.

We haven’t changed course—not yet. But her Roots & Shoots clubs are active in 140 countries. Roots & Shoots is a youth organization that works on conservation and humanitarian efforts around the world, because Jane Goodall believed so strongly in the power and purpose of young people. There must be hundreds of thousands of people, like me and my students, who had a chance to hear her speak at some point in those many years of travel, and I bet each one of us has remembered that moment with gratitude this week.

Roots & Shoots has offered this list of simple actions you can do in memory of Dr. Goodall, everything from reducing food waste to improving wildlife habitats in your backyard (like making a toad abode).

Here is Jane Goodall receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden:

And here is a video of Fifi, the longest-lived chimpanzee from Goodall’s time in Gombe:

Happy World Teacher Day! Lots of love from us.