Much has been written about the universally loved Jane Goodall, primatologist and animal rights campaigner, on whom awards and honours far too numerous to list have been showered. She passed away on October 1 aged 91. One recognition, however, she did not but should have received is the Nobel Peace Prize. For all her life, Goodall worked for peace and harmony not just between humans but between Homo sapiens and all life on Earth.

Her own words best describe the start of her seven-decade-long journey to convince humanity to protect our magical planet: ‘If you are interested in animals,’ someone said to me about a month after my arrival in Africa, ‘then you should meet Dr. Leakey.’ I had already started on a somewhat dreary office job, since I had not wanted to overstay my welcome at my friend’s farm. I went to see Louis Leakey at what is now the National Museum of natural history in Nairobi, where at that same time he was Curator. Somehow he must have sensed that my interest in animals was not just a passing phase, but was rooted deep, for on the spot he gave me a job as an assistant secretary.

First encounter

I never got to meet Jane Goodall but she entered my life in 1966, six years after she began her work with the legendary Louis Leaky in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, when the National Geographic magazine placed her on their cover. Down the years, I could not help but compare her to the other Jane… Tarzan’s Jane, about whom she recently said with an impish smile: “Tarzan married the wrong Jane.” Her fascination for Africa and chimpanzees was undoubtedly influenced by her love for Tarzan of the Apes (1912) and Tarzan’s sidekick Cheeta the chimpanzee. Her version was a stuffed toy chimp named Mr. H. “[He] goes everywhere with me. We’ve been to 59 countries together and he’s probably been touched by about nearly 4 million people,” she once said.

In 1978, I bought a large format pictorial book, Savage Africa, authored by Hugo van Lawick, only to discover that Jane Goodall was Lawick’s former wife, and that they had jointly put together a book in 1971, Innocent Killers, with Goodall doing the writing and Hugo the photography. The detailed descriptions of hunts by carnivores such as hyenas, cheetahs and leopards were graphic and gory, but they conveyed an elemental truth: unlike humans, wild animals were not ‘cruel’ as judged by ethical human standards. Animals ate what they killed. Nothing went to waste.

Blazing a trail

Down the decades, Goodall showed the world that it was possible to love animals (she likes dogs more than chimps!). She told us that chimps lived in societies akin to ours and used tools to access food, an ability thus far attributed only to humans. What’s more, they had distinct personalities. Some, like one individual she named David Greybeard, displayed likeable traits, while some were unlikeable, even cannibalistic. None of these field observations came easy. It took years to win the trust of the chimps, never hiding from them until she became a part of the non-threatening backdrop, a harmless pale-coloured ape. No naturalist had ever attempted this before. The most important of all her observations was the ability of apes to insert twigs into termite nests, pull them out repeatedly with ants attached and consume as food. When Louis Leaky saw evidence of this from images shot by a National Geographic photographer, he sent this now-famous telegram to his protégé: “NOW WE MUST REDEFINE TOOL STOP REDEFINE MAN STOP OR ACCEPT CHIMPANZEES AS HUMAN”.

Goodall faced considerable opposition over the years, largely by testosterone-driven males who questioned both her capability and ability to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of Africa’s jungle life. Her mother, nevertheless, travelled all the way to be with her young daughter as the attitude of men spurred her on to achieve more and discover more, and cut a trail not merely in Africa but clean through academia in England.

Misplaced criticism

She was also the target of misplaced criticism from human rights activists who accused her of protecting apes at the cost of local human communities. Working in a male-dominated sector in her early days, she was unfairly criticised for being an amateur with anthropomorphic biases that ended up superimposing human attributes and capabilities onto wild apes.

A decade ago, some academics pointed out that a manuscript of hers, for Seeds of Hope (2013), omitted crediting sources. Emily Brelage of DePauw University wrote, “It’s important to not ignore the flaws that make them [admired heroes] human, while we celebrate what makes them great.” With characteristic grace, Goodall responded that she would delay publication with added credits, saying, “I hope it is obvious that my only objective was to learn as much as I could so that I could provide straightforward factual information.”

She never needed to respond to the accusations of anthropomorphic biases because in 1965, Newnham College in Cambridge University settled the issue by accepting her deeply scientific doctoral thesis titled ‘The Behaviour of Free-living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve’. Valerie Jane Morris Goodall was now Dr. Jane Goodall.

To the human rights activists, she responded as saying that protecting the apes’ jungles was in the interests of the African people whose jungles were being brutally colonised by the industrial North.

Even today, the developed world continues to trot out arguments to justify deforestation, a primary cause of our current climate crisis. In my book, that amounts to intergenerational colonisation. In her last days, Goodall travelled the globe, met young and old, villagers, royalty and power brokers, urging them all to rein in carbon, protect the biosphere, and leave our children a climate-safe world.

She was met everywhere with what can only be called veneration. Jane Goodall did her job on Planet Earth by re-emphasising conclusively what Charles Darwin had posited on November 24, 1859, the day his controversial book On the Origin of Species was published. He said we were descended from apes. She revealed that chimps’ brains were capable of using tools, a fact that scientists of the day refused to accept.

Both suffered severe criticism from religious quarters that believed only humans had souls, and were given dominion over all other life by ‘the creator’. What is more, Jane Goodall sprinkled us with the magic of hope with the example of a life well lived.

The writer is editor of Sanctuary Asia and founder of Sanctuary Nature Foundation.

Published – October 09, 2025 06:16 pm IST

Scientist and global activist Jane Goodall, who turned her childhood love of primates into a lifelong quest for protecting the environment, died on Wednesday (October 1, 2025) at 91, the institute she founded said.

Dr. Goodall died of natural causes, the Jane Goodall Institute said in a social media post.

“Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” it said.

The primatologist-turned-conservationist spun her love of wildlife into a life-long campaign that took her from a seaside English village to Africa and then across the globe in a quest to better understand chimpanzees, as well as the role that humans play in safeguarding their habitat and the planet’s health overall.

Dr. Goodall was a pioneer in her field, both as a female scientist in the 1960s and for her work studying the behaviour of primates. She created a path for a string of other women to follow suit, including the late Dian Fossey.

She also drew the public into the wild, partnering with the National Geographic Society to bring her beloved chimps into their lives through film, TV and magazines.

She upended scientific norms of the time, giving chimpanzees names instead of numbers, observing their distinct personalities, and incorporating their family relationships and emotions into her work. She also found that, like humans, they use tools.

“We have found that after all there isn’t a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom,” she said in a 2002 TED Talk.

As her career evolved, she shifted her focus from primatology to climate advocacy after witnessing widespread habitat devastation, urging the world to take quick and urgent action on climate change.

“We’re forgetting that were part of the natural world,” she told CNN in 2020. “There’s still a window of time.”

In 2003, she was appointed a Dame of the British Empire and, in 2025, she received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Kenya-bound

Born in London in 1934 and then growing up in Bournemouth on England’s south coast, Dr. Goodall had long dreamed of living among wild animals. She said her passion for animals, stoked by the gift of a stuffed toy gorilla from her father, grew as she immersed herself in books such as “Tarzan” and “Dr. Dolittle”.

She set her dreams aside after leaving school, unable to afford university. She worked as a secretary and then for a film company until a friend’s invitation to visit Kenya put the jungle — and its inhabitants — within reach.

Also read | The Chimpanzee Lady

After saving up money for the journey, by boat, Dr. Goodall arrived in the East African nation in 1957. There, an encounter with famed anthropologist and paleontologist Dr. Louis Leakey and his wife, archaeologist Mary Leakey, set her on course to work with primates.

Under Leakey, Dr. Goodall set up the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, later renamed the Gombe Stream Research Centre, near Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania. There she discovered chimpanzees ate meat, fought fierce wars, and perhaps most importantly, fashioned tools in order to eat termites.

“Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans,” Leakey said of the discovery.

Although she eventually paused her research to earn a PhD at Cambridge University, Dr. Goodall remained in the jungle for years. Her first husband and frequent collaborator was wildlife cameraman Hugo van Lawick.

Through the National Geographic’s coverage, the chimpanzees at Gombe Stream soon became household names — most famously, one Goodall called David Greybeard for his silver streak of hair.

Nearly 30 years after first arriving in Africa, however, Dr. Goodall said she realised she could not support or protect the chimpanzees without addressing the dire disappearance of their habitat. She said she realised she would have to look beyond Gombe, leave the jungle, and take up a larger global role as a conservationist.

In 1977, she set up the Jane Goodall Institute, a nonprofit organisation aimed at supporting the research in Gombe as well as conservation and development efforts across Africa. Its work has since expanded worldwide and includes efforts to tackle environmental education, health and advocacy.

She made a new name for herself, traveling an average of 300 days a year to meet with local officials in countries around the world and speaking with community and school groups. She continued her world tours into her 90s.

She later expanded the institute to include Roots & Shoots, a conservation programme aimed at children.

It was a stark shift from her isolated research, spending long days watching chimpanzees.

“It never ceases to amaze me that there’s this person who travels around and does all these things,” she told the New York Times during a 2014 trip to Burundi and back to Gombe. “And it’s me. It doesn’t seem like me at all.”

A prolific author, she published more than 30 books with her observations, including her 1999 bestseller Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey, as well as a dozen aimed at children.

Dr. Goodall said she never doubted the planet’s resilience or human ability to overcome environmental challenges.

“Yes, there is hope… It’s in our hands, it’s in your hands and my hands and those of our children. It’s really up to us,” she said in 2002, urging people to “leave the lightest possible ecological footprints”.

She had one son, known as ‘Grub,’ with van Lawick, whom she divorced in 1974. Van Lawick died in 2002.

In 1975, she married Derek Bryceson. He died in 1980.

Renowned primatologist and conservationist Dr Jane Goodall has sounded the alarm on the biodiversity crisis, warning that Earth is in the midst of the “sixth great extinction.” Unlike previous mass extinctions caused by natural phenomena, this crisis is almost entirely human-induced. In an exclusive interview with BBC, Dr Goodall emphasized the human role in this crisis and the urgent need for action. The conservationist noted that the crisis, driven largely by human activities like deforestation, threatens the survival of countless species and the delicate balance of ecosystems worldwide.

“We’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction. The more we can do to restore nature and protect existing forests, the better. Trees have to grow to a certain size before they can really do their work. But all this [tree-planting] is helping to absorb carbon dioxide,” Dr Goodall told Victoria Gill during an interview for BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science. 

Dr Goodall stressed the importance of taking immediate action to mitigate global warming. She emphasised that there is still a narrow window of opportunity to combat climate change and biodiversity loss, but it is rapidly closing. 

“If we don’t get together and impose tough regulations on what people can do to the environment – if we don’t rapidly move away from fossil fuel, if we don’t put a stop to industrial farming, that’s destroying the environment and killing the soil, having a devastating effect on biodiversity – the future ultimately is doomed,” she noted.

Even at 90 years old, Dr. Jane Goodall shows no signs of slowing down in her relentless efforts for conservation and environmental advocacy. She firmly believes that if people care about their children’s future, they must demand stronger environmental legislation. “Surely people want a future for their children. If they do, we have to get tougher about [environmental] legislation. We don’t have much time left to start helping the environment. We’ve done so much to destroy it,” she said. 

What is the sixth mass extinction?

As per WWF, a mass extinction event is characterised by a significant loss of biodiversity over a relatively short geological period, resulting in the disappearance of a substantial percentage of distinct species across various taxonomic groups, including bacteria, fungi, plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates.

Throughout Earth’s history, five mass extinctions have occurred, with the most recent one taking place 65.5 million years ago, famously wiping out the dinosaurs from existence. Now, experts warn that we are experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, that is mainly driven by human activities. 

Unsustainable land, water, and energy use, along with climate change, are key factors. Currently, 40% of the Earth’s land has been converted for food production, with severe environmental consequences. Agriculture is the primary driver of global deforestation, responsible for 90% of forest clearance. Further, the sector’s immense water requirements account for 70% of the planet’s freshwater usage. These practices have catastrophic effects on ecosystems, causing widespread habitat destruction and displacement of countless species.

Scientists estimate that around one million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades unless urgent action is taken. Conservationists are calling for stronger global policies, increased funding for preservation, and individual action to reduce human impact on the planet.