Primatologist Jane Goodall, who recently passed away at age 91, originally traveled to Africa as a 28-year-old woman accompanied by her mother with no college degree to study behavioral and social similarities of primates and humans through direct interactions with them in their environment.
What she learned is both enormously tender and terrifying regarding what her observations teach us about ourselves.
Jane shared her personal story at my home 21 years ago after we first became acquainted at an Explorers’ Club event in West Texas where her discussion of experiences with a community of chimpanzees in Kenyan bush country was the keynote attraction.
My wife Nancy and I had hosted a fund-raising meeting among friends here in Houston in support of goals and activities of the non-profit Roots & Shoots foundation she established in 1991. The organization addresses wide-ranging environmental, conservation, and humanitarian issues.
Jane was born in London in 1932. Lacking finances for college tuition, she attended secretarial school, worked briefly for a London documentary film company, and later waited tables to save money for a dreamed ocean passage to Kenya.
Upon reaching Nairobi, Jane served in a provident secretarial position with the famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leaky.
Leaky's pioneering research into human origins led him to take a strong interest in studies of great apes.
Recognizing her passion for animals and the makings of a good scientist, Leaky arranged for Jane to conduct field observations of primates in forests of what is now Gombe National Park near Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania.
Having previously only known fictional representations of Africa presented by Tarzan movies and Dr. Dolittle books, Jane was to encounter, and immediately fall in love with, a challenging new land of Malaria, parasites, snakes, storms and . . . yes, chimpanzees.
Jane fondly recalled the first time a wild, grizzled male she named David Greybeard took a banana from her outstretched hand, eventually welcoming her into a community of humanity's closest relatives which became the focus of her life's passion.
As recounted in a 2017 documentary, Jane was grateful for the opportunity to gradually be accepted and penetrate further and further into a magic world no human had ever explored before.
Those close engagements, which continued throughout her life, were consequential in raising public appreciation of their many human-like qualities, along with their vulnerability to destructive human encroachments on their habitats.
As Jane reflected:
"At that time in the early 1960s it was believed that it was only humans who had minds capable of rational thought.
"Fortunately, I had not been to a university, and I did not know these things. I felt very much as though I was learning about fellow beings capable of joy and sorrow, fear and jealously."
Jane also learned and taught us that chimpanzees are toolmakers, fashioning fishing probes with a particular brush-tipped design to extract termites from their mounds.
Mothers teach these skills to their offspring.
Sadly, other observations of chimpanzee behaviors were devastatingly upsetting to her.
Coupled with a 1975 cannibalistic infanticide, a violent four-year-long conflict between two communities in northern and southern regions of Gombe Stream Park revealed that a very "dark side" also existed in their nature.
In a memoir, Jane described coming to terms with this revelation in a memoir:
"For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge."
She recounted how savagely primates could attack one other, at times with starkly, lasting bloody consequences.
While emotionally dispiriting, a savage war between two (formerly united) chimpanzees didn't alter Jane's devotion to serving as their tireless advocate.
To this end she has established several primate sanctuaries, including an outdoor facility at Stanford University, has mentored generations of primate and other environmental scientists, and has founded effective charitable fundraising and teaching organizations to promote conservation consciousness.
Jane’s Roots & Shoots initiatives have brought together youth from preschool to university age to identify and work on problems in their own communities affecting people, animals and the environment with chapters in more than 140 countries with over 8,000 local groups and 150,000 worldwide participants.
She attributes her courage and motivation to act upon her passions to motherly confidence:
"My mother used to tell me, 'Jane, if you really want something, you work hard enough, you take advantage of opportunities, you never give up, you will find a way.'"
Jane Goodall's life is a testament to what passion can accomplish.
She demonstrated that a young woman with no previous college education or research experience can impact science, advance public consciousness about important issues, create and lead substantial educational and conservation initiatives, and become the first person without an undergraduate degree to earn a Ph.D. at Cambridge University.
Jane's experiences with tool-making chimpanzees also teach a lesson of tragic potential for intelligent inventions to become used as weapons of inhumane tribal warfare between formerly peaceful communities.
Recognizing this, she never gave up working to warn and discourage we more allegedly "advanced" and "civilized" humans from such primitively savage behaviors.
Her mother's wise spirit must be terribly proud and pleased to once again be traveling in company with her marvelous daughter.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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