We’ll be looking back at a life of courage, intelligence, and compassion, a life well-lived, in this remembrance of Jane Goodall. I grew up reading Ranger Rick as a kid who enjoyed camping, hiking, fishing and catching snakes in the lakes and forests of Georgia and Colorado. I learned of a lady who studied chimpanzees from Ranger Rick as a young person, but I didn’t come to associate her endeavor with her name and face until I became involved with advocating for animal welfare in my twenties. A couple of years ago, I was recommended, and listened to A Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey on Audible. I was inspired by the vivid story of Jane Goodall’ s life and the magnitude of the paradigm shift in science that she set in motion. I hope to honor Dr. Goodall’s life in this reflection on her life and impact.
Jane Goodall was a trailblazing scientist, educator, and activist whose life’s work encompasses pioneering research on chimpanzees. Her devotion to understanding the lives of chimpanzees revealed that they use tools, have complex social bonds, and display emotions. Her discoveries fundamentally changed our understanding of primates and started a movement to better understand animal sentience.
Photo courtesy of the Goodall Family
Her early years reading books like Tarzan and The Jungle Book filled her with a wonder for the natural world and dreams of leading a life in Africa. At 20 years old she had saved enough money to travel to Kenya where she met the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and worked for him as a secretary. In the years working for Leakey, Jane’s dreams met a supporter who encouraged her to visit Gombe, Tanzania to study the chimpanzees as a way of gaining insight into early humans. At 26, she took the courageous leap to move to Tanzania to be amongst the chimpanzee communities that lived there.
Photograph by Hugo Van Lawick/National Geographic Creative
During this time she dove deep into the jungles of Gombe to map out the chimpanzee communities and to study the individuals she encountered. She gave them names and watched their interactions with the other chimpanzees. Through patient and careful observation she came to discover that the chimpanzees had complex social relationships which situated them in various roles in the community suited to their distinct personalities. In witness to these qualities, she gave them names instead of numbers, She noted their use of tools, a trait previously thought to be unique to humans. Her publications and speeches were at first met with skepticism and sexism because of her willingness to empathize and view the chimpanzees as other beings which violated scientific norms of objectivity. Her anthropomorphization of her chimpanzee companions was criticized as being that of a “typically sentimental female,” and was seen as biased. With her caring persistence and genuine awe of the chimpanzees, her message began to be received, and it started to break through long-held assumptions about animals and human uniqueness, ultimately revolutionizing the field of primatology, and raising questions about the limitations of “scientific objectivity.”
“My job now is to try and help people understand that every one of us makes a difference. And cumulatively, wise choices in how we act each day can begin to change the world”
Dr. Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall acted on the premise that with patience and careful attention she could see through the consensus understanding of primates as simple apes and perceive the consciousness of her chimpanzee friends in greater depth to discover the agency and surprising level of sentience similar to ourselves.
“The least I can do is speak out for those who cannot speak for themselves.”
Dr. Jane Goodall
Photographed by Carolyn Djanogly, Vanity Fair, April 2014
Goodall’s experience in Gombe fundamentally changed her relationship with animals and the natural world. She’s used her life’s work to advocate for animal rights, promoting humane treatment of animals and ending animal laboratory testing. She was outspoken about the choice to be vegan out of compassion for animals.
“Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs.”
Dr. Jane Goodall
She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to support the chimpanzee research in Gombe for her entire lifetime, and to lead community centered conservation efforts to protect their habitats from deforestation and poaching. In 1991, she founded Roots & Shoots, a global youth program that empowers young people to undertake projects benefitting the environment, wildlife, and their communities. She’s written numerous inspiring books for adults and children and has inspired countless people around the world with her presence, story, lectures, and writing.
Gombe, Tanzania – “Flo” watches as Jane Goodall pets “Fifi” and “Flint.” (National Geographic Creative / Hugo Van Lawick)
She championed empathy as an indispensable tool. “Empathy and objectivity can coexist,” she insisted. “People will not rally to protect what they don’t know. That’s why it’s crucial to engage children with nature as early as possible.”
Her methods, combining empathy with meticulous observation, were first met with scrutiny and challenged by segments of the scientific community. Eventually, Dr. Goodall’s perseverance with publishing her findings and speaking publicly about them, began to open minds to the possibility that current standards of objectivity in the scientific methods of studying primates might actually be preventing us from perceiving and discovering the richness of chimpanzee’s lives. A paradigm shift was underway as her findings began to be accepted.
Photograph by Hugo Van Lawick/National Geographic Creative
In a previous article, we began to unpack the interrelationship between the observed and the observer in an exploration of the origins of the word empathy and today we’ll look at how empathy is the foundation of animacy. Animacy is a linguistic concept that classifies nouns based on their degree of sentience or “aliveness,” ranging from humans to inanimate objects. The degree to which we allow our consciousness to empathize with the matter of the world may be proportional to how much animacy we perceive. We learned of the possibility that a shared substrate of empathic feeling capacity may precede our more recently evolved perceptions of separation made possible by the frontal cortex. We know from the double-slit experiment in Physics that the nature of the observer affects the observed. We learned from Robin Wall Kimmerer about the Potawatomi language and its emphasis on the infusion of spirit in the more-than-human world.
“Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms”
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
On this theme of interrelationship, the philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his work The Flesh of the World, introduced the concept of the flesh of the world (la chair du monde), in which he proposed a deeper ontological unity between the perceiving body and the world it perceives. He suggests there is a “reversibility between the seeing and the seen,” where the world can inscribe itself upon us, implying a deep continuity between living and non-living things.
“Thus the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being; or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there. The fact is that sensible being, which is announced to me in my strictly private life, summons up within that life all other corporeality – It is the being which reaches me in my most secret parts, but which I also reach in its brute or untamed state, in an absolute of presence which holds the secret of the world , others, and what is true.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs
Jane Goodall grasped this knowledge described above intuitively, as evidenced by her allowance of the emergence of empathic connection whilst making her observations of the chimps. Her willingness to release “forced objectivity,” a fallacy of scientific dogma, likely created the possibility for the chimps to demonstrate behaviors previously reserved for humans alone.
Dr Goodall’s humane message and life’s work resonate deep lessons about the nature of our relationship with the more-than-human world. Her legacy encourages us to look deeply at our assumptions and to allow for empathy to animate our world. She invites us into an experiential encounter with the adage “everything is sacred” and to be transformed by what we find.
Photograph by Hugo Van Lawick/National Geographic Creative
