There are people who forever change the way we look at the world. Jane Goodall was one of them.
I think of her, very young, arriving in Tanzania in 1960. I imagine her getting off that boat on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with little more than a notebook, used binoculars and boundless curiosity as her luggage. He didn’t have a degree. He did not have the formal credentials that the academic world deemed essential. But he possessed two tools that would revolutionize science and our consciousness: infinite patience and radical empathy.
Her mission, entrusted to her by the famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, was as simple as it was impossible: observe wild chimpanzees and learn from them. Leakey had chosen her, a secretary, precisely because of her mind “free from theories”, not yet pigeonholed into the rigid scientific doctrine of the time which saw animals as automatons moved only by instinct, mere objects of study to be labeled with a number.
And so, Jane listened. For months, the chimpanzees fled her. She didn’t give up. Day after day, he sat in the same spot, letting his presence become part of the Gombe Forest landscape. It was a wait made of respect, a slow courtship based on silent observation. And finally, she was accepted. It was then that the real revolution began.
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Where science saw “subject B7,” Jane saw David Greybeard, the first chimpanzee to trust her, to show her that they, just like us, could use tools, pulling blades of grass to “fish” termites from their nests. This single observation, jotted down in that notebook, forced the world to redefine the very concept of “human.”
But Jane’s teaching went far beyond scientific discovery. By naming each individual – the matriarch Flo, the young Fifi, the belligerent Figan – he forced us to recognize their individuality. He showed us their complex social dynamics: political alliances, loving maternal care, childish games, but also the brutality of clan wars and acts of cannibalism. It opened a window into a world that was neither an idyllic natural utopia nor a senseless chaos, but a complex, layered society, terribly and wonderfully similar to our own.
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Looking into the eyes of a chimpanzee, Jane allowed us to see an unexpected reflection of ourselves. It demolished the wall we had erected between Homo sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom, replacing it with a bridge of understanding. If today we feel the natural world a little closer, a little more ‘home’, we owe it largely to her, to that girl who dared to look at animals and see non-human people.
But his story doesn’t stop at research. Indeed, it is there that his second, and perhaps even more important, life begins. In 1986, during a scientific conference, he realised, by putting together data from all over Africa, the unstoppable speed with which chimpanzee habitats were disappearing due to deforestation and poaching. At that moment, as she herself says, “I entered as a scientist and left as an activist”.
Since then, she hasn’t stopped. He began traveling to spread his message. A message that has evolved, becoming universal. He understood that chimpanzees cannot be saved without helping local communities, that conservation must go hand in hand with education and the fight against poverty.
This new nomadic mission needed a home, 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 any other, but the embodiment 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 most importantly, train new generations of conscious young leaders. His conferences, from prestigious stages to small village schools, have become moments of almost spiritual connection, in which his quiet tenacity manages to stir consciences.
Understanding to cure
His greatest lesson remains, for me, this:
Only if we understand, can we cure. Only if we care, can we help. Only if we help, everything can be saved.
Understanding comes from the empathetic observation that she taught us. Caring is the natural emotional consequence of that understanding. Help is the action that inevitably arises from care.
Today, his legacy is not only in ethology books, but in the millions of young people in his Roots & Shoots program, who carry out projects around the world to help people, animals and the environment. His legacy is in his tireless defense of hope, an active hope that rolls up its sleeves.
Thank you for opening our eyes, immense Jane. Thank you for teaching us that the greatest change always begins with a simple and revolutionary act: looking at the other and recognizing in him a traveling companion on this fragile, very precious Planet.
