When Jane Goodall died last week aged 91, Mother Nature lost one of her most inspiring and dedicated protectors.
She led a truly extraordinary life, beginning in a quiet part of England and then embarking on a scientific adventure, aged 26, in what is now Tanzania to study the behaviour of chimpanzees.
She challenged the then scientific paradigm that greatly underestimated the intelligence and complexity of chimpanzee behaviour. Proving that chimps could not only use tools, but make them, she also found that their social behaviour was similar to humans, with tight social bonds, hierarchies and complex social structures. She also demonstrated that chimps could experience emotions ranging from jealousy to joy and grief.
Noting that we humans share 98.7 per cent of our DNA with apes, she concluded that both species share a tendency towards aggression, that it might be innate and not simply learned behaviour. However, because humans have language, we have the ability to learn from our experiences and mistakes, and share this with our young. This sets us apart, and gives us a special responsibility to take care of nature.
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Like many of my generation, I grew up watching Goodall in National Geographic films shot by her then husband Hugo van Lawick, alongside documentaries by David Attenborough.
These films brought exotic places, species and scientific discoveries from all around the world into our drab sitting rooms in the 1970s. They also brought with them new ways of thinking about other species and our relationship as humans to them. It was the beginning of what we might now call environmental education.
But Goodall’s legacy was more than educational. In addition to her extraordinary scientific achievements, Goodall modelled the kind of behaviours and attitudes that we will need to cope with climate breakdown and ecological crisis. Working tirelessly up to her death - she spoke about doing up to four Zooms a day during the Covid pandemic - she dedicated her life to the protection of animals and their habitats.
For decades, she spent no more than three weeks in one place as she travelled endlessly, building her Roots and Shoots youth organisation and addressing anyone who would listen about the urgent need to take better care of our one and only planet. She fought for nature reserves, against animal testing, for legal safeguards against deforestation and ecocide. She never gave up. She was on a speaking tour in the US when she died last week aged 91.
Right to the end, as the Netflix documentary Famous Last Words captured, she focused on the urgency of acting in the face of the ecological crisis, arguing that hopelessness leads to apathy, and inaction. By contrast, hope inspires purpose and gives us the opportunity to make sense of our lives.
Perhaps her special gift was to be present. There are touching videos of her exchanging long embraces with chimps, sitting quietly in their presence or grooming her favourite chimp David Greybeard.
[ Jane Goodall, primatologist and global activist, dies aged 91Opens in new window ]
This ability to be truly present to another being is what writer Donna Haraway calls “making kin”: the act of creating rich multi-species assemblages with intense commitment and collaborative work and play.
According to Haraway, the era of cheap nature is over. Most of the earth’s reserves have been drained, burned, depleted, poisoned, exterminated and otherwise exhausted. Wilderness as refuge for any species is shrinking. This is exactly what Goodall found in Tanzania and what motivated her to become an advocate for nature conservation.
After decades of effort however, the prognosis for both humans and chimps and all the other critters seems bleaker than ever. Wild animals all around the world are threatened with extinction and habitat loss. Livestock far outweighs wild animals in biomass; a recent study found livestock makes up roughly 60 per cent of the world’s mammalian biomass, while humans account for 36 per cent and wild mammals only 4 per cent.
What is to be done then? First order of business: protect what we have, and reverse the decline. But the task is much more complex given the human tendency to justify the exploitation of nature on the grounds of our superior intelligence or greater need. Perhaps we need a change of attitude.
[ Jane Goodall: ‘I’m not going to give in. I’ll die fighting, that’s for sure’Opens in new window ]
Our job, Haraway argues, is to make the Anthropocene as short/ thin as possible and “to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs that can replenish refuge”.
As Goodall demonstrated throughout her life, we must stretch our definition of kin beyond ancestry or genealogy. As this current epoch declines, we need to imagine a new one in which there is space for all beings, one in which humans - especially the aggressive white male variety - are no longer dominant and disrespectful of the dignity of other creatures.
Does it mean we shouldn’t swat a fly, or eat meat? Not necessarily, but it does mean, at a minimum avoiding cruelty and needless waste, and seeing ourselves as intimately connected to other living beings. After all, we are all earthlings and kin in the deepest sense.
