Before she was a Templeton Prize winner, National Geographic Scholar and Ph.D. holder, Jane Goodall was a little girl with a love for the natural world. This love was unlocked when her mother gave her a toy chimpanzee from the London Zoo. Goodall was born in 1934 in Bournemouth, England, to middle-class parents who fostered her passion for animals.
It was clear from a very young age that Goodall would lead an extraordinary life, but perhaps the extent of the extraordinary was not known just yet. When she was 18, she enrolled in a secretarial school and took other jobs, but her desire for nature was still present.
She soon received an invitation to visit a friend’s farm in Kenya and gladly took it. After her arrival, she was directed toward Dr. Louis Leakey, who worked at the National Museum of Natural History in Kenya. He saw the spark of her passion for animals and hired her as assistant secretary. Through her work at the museum her love for the natural world deepened as she learned more and more.
She was fortunate enough to accompany Dr. Leakey on his annual trip to the Serengeti plains for a paleontology expedition, which she describes as being an awe inspiring experience. It was there Leaky informed Goodall about a troop of chimpanzees on the Lake Tanganyika shore. Leaky described the one attempt that had been made to study them as inconclusive because the observation was not long enough.
After describing the tenacity and perseverance the job would require of the scientist that took the job (a two-year stay in the harsh jungle and rugged living conditions), he asked Goodall if she might be up to the challenge. Goodall was shocked, as she had no science degree from a university or real experience in the field and felt unprepared for this nearly unprecedented expedition. Nevertheless, she agreed eagerly.
After the technicalities of her trip were situated, Goodall made her way to Kigoma ready and excited to begin her work. However, due to local issues with fishermen on the lake she would be staying on, she was told her work could not start right away. Arrangements were made for Goodall to travel to Nairobi to conduct a short study on the vervet monkeys of Louis Island, an experience that ultimately taught her invaluable lessons about observing wild primates.
After about three weeks she was allowed to travel to the Gombe Reserve in Kigoma. The first weeks of Goodall’s research were monotonous and yielded no real discovery. After nearly three months and a severe illness under her belt, Goodall had her first substantial sighting of the creatures.
Over her two-year stay in the Gombe Reserve, Goodall grew incredibly close to these creatures through her patience and diligence.
She was eventually welcomed into the chimps’ community, which, as she came to learn, is layered with social complexity, much like our own. Through the development of her relationships with these animals they came to trust her and allowed her to observe them incredibly closely.
Goodall took meticulous notes on the movements, behaviors and even personal differences in the chimpanzees’ lives and noticed they performed incredible human tasks such as creating and operating tools. These discoveries were groundbreaking at their time and filled in many gaps of the theory of evolution, not to mention the immense amount of respect Goodall gained with the scientific community and, eventually, the whole world.
The story of a woman who took on a task full of road blocks and unknown dangers helped inspire an entire generation of women to take their place in scientific discovery, and I am proud to say I was one of them.
Jane Goodall first came into my life in the summer of 2020. One day I watched a documentary on her time in Gombe and was fascinated with her work. I grew up in a rural town surrounded by many animals and I, too, shared a love for them and the world around me.
I learned everything I possibly could about her life and what she did after her two-year expedition. After her time spent in Gombe she pursued a doctoral degree at Cambridge University without having earned an undergraduate, according to National Geographic.
At this level of higher education, she defended her unconventional researching methods against traditional scientists and always aimed her published works to the common public instead of high ranking academics. After successfully earning her Ph.D. in 1966, Goodall spent the next 20 years in Gombe.
As time passed, Goodall shifted her work from research to conservation of the chimpanzees’ natural habitats. Conservation work is so important, especially here in south Louisiana where our coast line is receding rapidly. Jane Goodall’s work is in part what inspired me to pursue a career path of writing and advocating for our natural wetlands here in Louisiana.
The life of Jane Goodall was incredible and her impact is impossible to capture in words. I believe that her legacy is carried on exactly where she wanted it to, in others with her spirit and in the nature she loved so dearly.