Jane Goodall, 1934–2025: Hopeful to the End

When the conservation community gathered at CITES COP20 for a side event marking Jane Goodall’s death, the chair declined to call it a formal occasion. Ian Redmond – primatologist, representative of the International Primate Protection League and a man who began his own career as Dian Fossey’s research assistant in the mountains of Rwanda – described what he wanted instead: an open microphone, a room full of people with stories to tell and enough wine to make the telling easier. He described Goodall’s death, at 91, as premature. She had been travelling the world at pace, he noted, until very close to the end. He called her a merchant of hope: someone who had spent the final three decades of her life distributing conviction to people and places that were running short of it.

The research career that made her irreplaceable began in 1960 when Leakey – then excavating the bones of fossil humans in East Africa and reasoning that the behaviour of living great apes might illuminate the past he was trying to reconstruct – sent his young secretary to the forests of Gombe Stream in Tanzania. She had no formal scientific training. She had a notebook, a pair of binoculars and, as she described it, the best possible preparation: an open mind. What she found there changed the boundaries of what science understood to be human. Watching a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard strip leaves from a grass stem and probe a termite mound, she documented tool use in a wild non-human species for the first time. Goodall spent 35 years at Gombe. She described them, without qualification, as the best days of her life. Among the best wildlife films to document this period are those drawing directly on her own testimony – the first-person account of what it meant to enter that forest as an outsider and to be, eventually, accepted.

What the Gombe research revealed over those decades was the full complexity of chimpanzee society: the coalitions and hierarchies, the long maternal bonds, the capacity for grief and for play, the transmission of knowledge between generations that looked, to the researchers who followed her, more like culture than instinct. She named her subjects, a decision her academic peers initially resisted as unscientific, and in doing so helped shift permanently the frame through which the public understood what primates were. David Greybeard, the first chimpanzee to trust her, became one of the most consequential animals in the history of field science. Her choice to name him was the first indication that the science emerging from Gombe would ask more of its audience than most wildlife research had dared to.

In the late 1980s, having recognised that chimpanzees were losing ground across Africa and the natural environment was under siege far beyond any single research site, Goodall made the decision to leave Gombe and become a full-time advocate. She built the Roots and Shoots programme – founded in 1991 with a group of students in Tanzania, eventually a network in more than 70 countries with hundreds of branches – on the principle that young people, given accurate information and genuine agency, would act. She maintained the advocacy schedule of someone in their forties well into her late eighties: an estimated 300 days a year on the road, meeting heads of state, addressing parliaments and, equally, staying after every public lecture to meet every person still waiting in the queue. She was, as one speaker at the CITES memorial put it, never the loudest voice in a room. She did not need to be.

Stories from those who knew her and those who did not filled the CITES evening in equal measure. Natalie Schmitt, a conservation scientist and founder of WildTech DNA, described how Goodall wrote personally and regularly to each of the environmental researchers imprisoned by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – not once, but throughout the years of their detention. Will Travers of the Born Free Foundation recalled a book signing negotiated for the price of a large whisky. Adams Cassinga, founder of Conserve Congo and a leading figure in undercover primate protection work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said he had never met Goodall but felt her presence in everything he did: what he was doing was, in his words, a continuation of where she started. Yvonne Higuero, who had met Goodall during her years as coordinator of the UN’s Great Apes Survival Partnership, described her as one of the most soft-spoken and kind people she had ever encountered – someone whose manner gave no indication of scale, whose attention to those in front of her was complete.

She died in 2025 having remade, in the view of those gathered to remember her, not just primatology but the wider cultural understanding of what the natural world asks of us. Goodall’s argument – that hope is not a feeling but a discipline, that the window for meaningful action remains open if people are willing to go through it – was the same argument she had been making for thirty years. The Roots and Shoots members, the researchers who followed her to Gombe, the conservationists across five continents who traced their own commitments back to a book, a lecture or a moment in her company: they are, collectively, the evidence that the argument worked. Remembering Jane Goodall, now available on Ecoflix, documents that legacy through the voices of those who were there at CITES to articulate it.

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External Links
Jane Goodall Institute
Roots and Shoots

First published in the Ecoflix newsroom.