Jane Goodall, Influencer
How Jane Goodall Influenced the World, and My Daughter ,to never Give Up Hope About Our Dying Planet
When Dr. Jane Goodall died on October 1, 2025, I happened to be in Australia after spending a few weeks in Bali, Indonesia. Decades ago, I spent several months living in Ubud, Bali, observing temple monkeys, known to us primatologists as long-tailed macaques. It was good to see them again, to stand among their group at the Ubud Monkey Sanctuary and just stare. It felt like coming home. Although I no longer do that kind of primatological research, and haven’t for a while, Dr. Goodall’s death hit me hard. And I was touched, and a little confused, by several texts from friends back home sending their condolences, as if I were a close friend of Jane’s, which I wasn’t. They were just acknowledging that we primatologists, the people who study nonhuman primates, are a small band of brothers and sisters who have stood for hours, days, months, and years in the hot sun and the pouring rain to collect behavior data on the prosimians, monkeys, and apes, with whom humans share an ancestry. The goal, at least for anthropologists who study other primates, is to figure out if anything they do is something we humans do, underscoring our evolutionary connection.
But actually, I knew Jane a bit. I once did a long telephone interview with her for an article for Discover Magazine. And I once stayed in a bungalow in her sprawling compound in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a place designed to house primatologists passing through, although she was not there. I was also part of a committee that brought her to Cornell University for two visits as an A.D. White Scholar and introduced her to adoring campus audiences for her public talks. And on one visit, I initiated a small discussion with those across campus who would be interested in chimpanzee research. At that seminar, I simply stood and asked Jane to tell us about the work at Gombe Stream, where she first began to observe wild chimpanzees in 1960. For the next hour and a half, Jane went through every research project that had ever been conducted there, from memory, reminding her audience that she was still a primatologist although she had turned to speaking out about how humans were now destroying the planet.
But my most memorable moment in her presence occurred when she came for dinner at my house in Ithaca. Jane walked into my back door with a bunch of other people, saw my 5-year-old daughter, got down on her knees and, ignoring everyone else, talked only to my child. And then Jane began to teach her the chimpanzee long call—ooha, ooha, screech scheech. Jane Goodall pant-hooting in my kitchen and my daughter responding in kind. This was a moment. I also have a photograph from the next day, with Jane and my kid in a deep conversation on a porch somewhere on campus.
Jane Goodall was a woman who changed the world, science, and our understanding of the evolution of human behavior with her ground-breaking and long-term observations of chimpanzees. She then went on to try to change to world and the damage that humans are inflicting on our planet. In the second half of her life, Jane Goodall was surely on a “mission from God” to get people, especially young people, to do something about all that damage. Some of my primatology colleagues, especially the “chimp people,” academics who now study chimpanzees in the wild with much more scientific rigor than that available when Jane did her ground-breaking work, often denigrated her for that shift. But I always felt it was brave, important, imperative, and amazing that she would embrace her fame and use it to spend the rest of her life traveling the world and speaking to anyone who would listen about making this dying planet inhabited by self-serving humans a better, more viable place. To never give up hope.
And I’ve seen firsthand the power of her presence and words and how they affect young people. My little girl named the doll she received for Christmas that year Jane Goodall. And then last year, at the age of 27, for no apparent reason, she asked for copies of the photos I had of her and Jane. And more amazing, when I texted my duaghter from Australia, commenting that she must remember that Jane wants her never to give up hope that our plant can be batter (with a video of Jane speaking to the came and saying “never forget you can make a different”), my girl wrote back that a night or two before Jane died, she had a dream about Jane. Was Jane saying goodbye and telling that little girl back in Ithaca to “make a difference”? Did she also appear to millions of other young people before she left?
I don’t know where this might go in the future, but I do know that my daughter, as well as I, saw that remarkable, tireless, hopeful woman in action, and we will be forever reminded that we can make a difference in a world set on fire.
And now we have to, for Jane, and for ourselves.
