On July 14, 1960,  Dr. Jane Goodall first arrived to study chimpanzees in what’s now known as Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. Today, on the 60th anniversary of her arrival — a day that’s become known as #WorldChimpanzeeDay — the famed primatologist is taking part in ‘Gombe 60 LIVE with Dr. Jane Goodall,’ a Facebook Live even that allows fans to “go behind the binoculars and learn more about the revolutionary scientific insights, community-centered conservation, current research, and expansive living legacy of work in Gombe.” Click here to register for the event.

In recognition of #WorldChimpanzeeDay, we’re revisiting our 2019 cover story with Goodall, then-84, in which she discusses her work as a primatologist and how she encourages others to do their part.

 

Of the many ways charisma can manifest, Jane Goodall’s power lies in her preternatural calm. In person, she is tiny, dwarfed by her wingback chair in front of a window at Toronto’s Chelsea Hotel on Gerrard. Hers is one of the most iconic faces of the past century and, at 84 years old, her skin appears lit from within, her now snow-white hair pulled back in that trademark ponytail. She speaks softly, in complete sentences, full thoughts, drawing you in.

If it sounds as though I’m beguiled, it is because the primatologist-turned-conservation advocate is a scientist with the drawing power of a rock star booked on a perpetual world tour. She exhibits no evidence of the grueling 300 days she has spent globetrotting each and every year of the past 32 years to spread her message about the urgent need to conserve our natural world.

Jane Goodall
A 1995 photo of Jane Goodall with a chimpanzee in her arms. Photo: Apic/Getty Images

Her biographers have spoken about this hypnotic quality, and indeed you can see it yourself in those famous National Geographic photos taken at Gombe Stream Game Reserve, in what is now Tanzania, where she first started observing chimp behaviour in 1960. You can feel it in the film footage, especially the documentary Jane released in 2017 and now on Netflix, in which lost archival film tells the story behind the story, of her falling in love and then marying her photographer, Hugo van Lawick, as they recorded her historic scientific breakthroughs.

Goodall watching her photographer husband, Baron Hugo Von Lawick, adjust a camera with the help of a baboon in the Gombe Reserve, Africa.
Goodall watching her photographer husband, Baron Hugo Von Lawick, adjust a camera with the help of a baboon in the Gombe Reserve, Africa. (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

 

“In a way,” she says, “it’s like two Janes. The one you’ve read about and heard about and seen movies about and think, you know, gosh what she did was amazing I’d love to do it, or I couldn’t do it and I want to meet her. There’s that Jane. Then there’s me. I’m just me.”

But once she realized the public Jane could motivate people, she worked out how to deploy that persona. “I don’t know why this has happened to me, but it has. So, if this me now realizes that that me is really important for conservation, I have to live up to that me and develop that me even more.”

It is inestimable the number of times she must have retold the story of her first major scientific discovery, when the then 26-year-old untrained observer from Bournemouth, England, reported back from Tanzania the particulars of a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard, who had fashioned a tool out of a stick to gain access to a termite nest. But each retelling comes across as fresh.

This was a turning point in her life because it caught the attention of the scientific world, as toolmaking had previously been considered a key characteristic of what makes humans special in the animal kingdom. It also gained attention in the larger world, which was mostly attracted to the story of the beautiful blond alone in the African jungle.

An equally large turning point came in 1986, just after the publication of her major work The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Patterns of Behavior. In fact, that year – the year she turned 52 – cleaved her working life into two parts. “There was pre-1986 and post-1986,” she says. By that time, there were seven different field sites studying chimps, and the conference – called “Understanding Chimpanzees,” held in Chicago that November – was meant to compare notes. “Are they behaving differently in different places because I believed there was something like culture, which turns out to be true.”

Jane Goodall sitting against a tree writing in a notebook as she observes apes.
Photo: Penelope Breese/Liaison/Getty Images

 

But it was the other sessions, on conservation and on captive conditions, that wound up shaking Goodall to her core. The devastation of forests in Africa, the dwindling numbers of chimps, the beginning of the bush meat trade and the live animal trade for pets, medical research and entertainment.

“I went to a conference planning to continue my wonderful life, which was better than anything I ever dreamed of, actually, and I left, I suppose you could say as an activist. So since then I haven’t been anywhere more than three weeks consecutively in any one place.” It wasn’t a conscious decision, she says. “I didn’t sit down and say, ‘Oh, maybe I’d better do something about it.’ It was ‘I have to do something about it.’”

Growing up in England, Goodall was much influenced by the Second World War, an austere time of rations and sacrifice, and it set her up with discipline and resolve for a lifetime. Her childhood was spent reading Tarzan and Doctor Doolittle, making getting to Africa to be with the animals and write books about them her dream. Once there, she spent decades, often alone, watching chimps from dawn to dusk. There was an interlude where she and first husband, Hugo van Lawick, raised their son, Hugo Eric Louis but famously nicknamed Grub, in the bush at Gombe and in the open on the Serengeti, where van Lawick’s photography became legendary as well. There was also a second marriage, to a Tanzanian director of national parks, who died in 1980. But otherwise, Goodall kept plugging away on her own, setting up a research station that continues to this day.

She looks back now on the way she was treated. News reports at the time, which flash onscreen in Jane, used words such as “pert” and “comely” to describe her in their headlines. “You wouldn’t use those words today,” she says, “but it was normal back then. You didn’t think anything of it. It was just a bit silly.”

Jane Goodall holding a babt chimpanzee.
Photo: Michel Gunther/Getty Images

 

She hated the media at first, then learned to accept it as a tool. “When the media first started haunting me, I tried to hide from them. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t what I wanted,” she says. “And it wasn’t for some time that I realized that I needed the media: if you raise awareness, you find it easier to raise money.”

The charged attention continued when she went to Cambridge to get her PhD, after her first few years at Gombe. “There was no time to mess with a BA,” she says. “I had to go straight for a PhD, so I was extremely nervous. When I got to Cambridge, these professors told me I did everything wrong, that I shouldn’t have given the chimps names. It’s more scientific to number them. And I shouldn’t talk about personality or a mind capable of thought and certainly not emotion because those were unique to us.”

She credits her childhood dog with being the “teacher,” who gave her the confidence to stand up to the scientific establishment. “You can’t share your life in any meaningful way with any animal and not know those professors were wrong.”

Armed with the doctor designation, she was ready to take on the larger world. And she went back to the research that resulted in that seminal 1986 book. “I always felt in a way the people who said, oh, I was famous because of my legs and things like that, I had feeling in a way that they were right.” But after that book, “I knew that I was completely qualified, and I could call myself a scientist.”

Today, there are 31 Jane Goodall Institute offices around the world, each one clambering for her time and attention. Closest to her heart is a program she began in 1991 in Tanzania with a group of high school students. Called Roots and Shoots, the organization today boasts some 150,000 members spread around 130 countries with 600 groups in Canada alone. “We have members from kindergarten to university, in senior citizens centres and some in prisons.”

The emphasis, she says, is that each individual makes an impact on the planet every single day, and we can choose what kind of impact. “What gives me the energy is everywhere I go in the world now, young people with shining eyes are wanting to tell Dr. Jane what they’ve been doing to make the world a better place.”

Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images

 

Goodall understands the power of multiplying the celebrity factor: last November, she (with JGI USA) teamed up with the actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio. Together they devised a clothing line to fundraise for and raise awareness about the preservation of ape habitats.

The line, which DiCaprio announced on his Instagram, consists of organic Ts, recycled hoodies and an eco-fleece sweatshirt, bearing the catchphrase Don’t Let Them Disappear. The designs are intended to honour the five species of apes – gibbons, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

Goodall walks the talk, says Andria Teather, CEO of JGI Canada. “If you travel with her, she won’t take a napkin on a plane or use disposable plastic of any kind.” She is also, Teather says, a real person. There is indeed a sharp side to her tongue, and criticisms are delivered in the same even tone. Which, of course, makes them much more effective.

Asked about the impact of safari tourism in Africa, she replies it can be a force for enlightenment “if it is properly controlled. But even if one [company] does everything right, if there are 20 with half doing everything wrong, it ends up as being harmful.” Multiply that effect by hundreds. Unfortunately, she adds, “The best tourism is the very lavish safaris that go to wild places and provide money, which helps conservation as well as bringing resources and jobs into the communities and foreign exchange.”

She sees an opening here for her real message. “What I detest and despise and loathe is the sports hunting. It’s disgusting to shoot an elephant or a rhino, knowing how endangered they are. And they say, ‘Oh, those animals were post-reproductive.’” She pauses for effect, raising an eyebrow. “So, is it fine to go around the human community and say you are post-reproductive so it’s fine to shoot you?”

Of that post-reproductive age group, she continues, “More and more people are beginning to realize that we want to die knowing we’ve made a difference.” And she sets the example, getting up in a different place most mornings to give lectures and shake hands and sign books. Teather says Goodall never leaves a book signing without speaking to every person in line, many of whom end up in tears, “even if we are there until midnight.”

Africa is still in her soul. Goodall gets back to her beloved Gombe just twice each year, though she laments, “It’s not the same Gombe.” Her son, his wife and their children live in Dar es Salaam. She still loves Kenya, where she first arrived in Africa in 1957 to talk Dr. Louis Leakey into giving her a job (he also later sent Goodall’s fellow female pioneering primatologists Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas into the field). And she gets to see the “very wild and very beautiful” newer sanctuary in the Republic of Congo every two to three years. She ostensibly “lives” back home in Bournemouth but is hardly ever there, either.

Indeed, she keeps up the pace because she worries the Earth is running out of time, “because there are always new people.

“And I have to get the story to them. Otherwise, there is no point to my doing this.”

RELATED:

Prince Harry Teams Up With Jane Goodall at a Conservation Summit – And They Share a Sweet “Chimp Greeting” Dance