There are people who change forever the way we look at the world. Jane Goodall was one of these.
I think of her, very young, who arrived in Tanzania in 1960. I imagine her descending from that boat on the banks of the tangano lake, with little more than a notebook, used binoculars and a boundless curiosity to make her luggage. He didn’t have a degree. He had no formal credentials that the academic world considered indispensable. But he owned two tools that would revolutionize science and our conscience: infinite patience and radical empathy.
His mission, entrusted by the famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leikey, was as simple as it is impossible: to observe wild chimpanzees and learn from them. Leikey had chosen her, a secretary, precisely because of her mind “clearing from theories”, not yet pigeonholed in the rigid scientific doctrine of the time that saw animals as automators moved only by instinct, mere objects of study to be labored with a number.
And so, Jane listened. For months, the chimpanzees fled her. She did not give up. Day after day, he sat in the same point, letting his presence became part of the landscape of the Gombe Forest. It was a wait made of respect, a slow courtship based on silent observation. And in the end, it was accepted. It was then that the real revolution began.
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Where science saw the “subject B7”, Jane saw David Greybeard, the first chimpanzee to trust her, to show them that they too, just like us, could use tools, detaching wires of grass to “fish” the end of their nests. This single observation, noted on that notebook, forced the world to redefine the very concept of “human”.
But Jane’s teaching went well beyond scientific discovery. Giving a name to each individual – Matriarch Flo, the young Fifi, the belligerent Figan – forced us to recognize their individuality. He showed us their complex social dynamics: political alliances, loving maternal care, childhood games, but also the brutality of the wars between clans and the acts of cannibalism. He opened a window on a world that was neither a natural utopia nor a senseless chaos, but a complex and stratified society, terribly and wonderfully similar to ours.
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Looking in the eyes of a chimpanzee, Jane allowed us to see an unexpected reflection of ourselves. He demolished the wall that we had erected between Homo Sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom, replacing him with a bridge of understanding. If today we hear the natural world a little closer, a little more ‘home’, we owe it to her most, to that girl who dared to look at animals and see non-human people.
But his story does not stop looking. Indeed, that’s where his second begins, and perhaps even more important, life. In 1986, during a scientific conference, he realized, putting together the data from all over Africa, of the unstoppable speed with which the habitats of the chimpanzees were disappearing due to deforestation and poaching. At that moment, as she tells herself, “I entered as a scientist and came out as an activist”.
Since then, he has never stopped. He started traveling to spread his message. A message that has evolved, becoming universal. He understood that the chimpanzees cannot be saved without helping local communities, that conservation must walk hand in hand with education and the fight against poverty.
This new nomadic mission needed a house, a structure that could amplify its voice. Thus, already in 1977, together with Genevieve di San Faustino, he founded the Jane Goodall Institute. Not an organization like the others, but the incarnation of its philosophy: a global engine to improve the understanding of primates, protect their habitats by working side by side with local communities and, perhaps more importantly, form new generations of young people aware. His conferences, from prestigious stages to small village schools, have become moments of almost spiritual connection, in which his quiet tenacity manages to move consciences.
His greatest lesson remains, for me, this:
Only if we understand, can we cure. Only if we take care, can we help. Only if we help, can everything be saved.
Understanding arises from the empathic observation that she taught us. The cure is the natural emotional consequence of that understanding. Help is the action that inevitably arises from the cure.
Today, its legacy is not only in the books of ethology, but in the millions of young people of its Roots & Shoots program (“Radici and sprouts”), which all over the world carry on projects to help people, animals and the environment. His inheritance is in his tireless defense of hope, an active hope, which rolls out his sleeves.
Thanks for opening your eyes, immense Jane. Thanks for teaching us that the biggest change always begins with a simple and revolutionary act: to look at the other and recognize in him a travel companion on this fragile, very precious, planet.
