Jane Goodall, pioneering primatologist, conservationist and activist, dies at 91
Jane Goodall, the pioneering primatologist, conservationist and activist who became the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees, died on Wednesday at the age of 91, the Jane Goodall Institute said in a social media post. Born in London on April 3, 1934, Goodall produced a groundbreaking field study on chimpanzees in the wild in the 1960s and dedicated the latter part of her life to protecting their habitats.
Issued on: 01/10/2025 -
FRANCE24
By: Charlotte WILKINS
Jane Goodall, the pioneering primatologist, conservationist and activist who became the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees, died on Wednesday at the age of 91, the Jane Goodall Institute said in a social media post. Born in London on April 3, 1934, Goodall produced a groundbreaking field study on chimpanzees in the wild in the 1960s and dedicated the latter part of her life to protecting their habitats.
Issued on: 01/10/2025 -
FRANCE24
By: Charlotte WILKINS
Jane Goodall, the pioneering primatologist, conservationist and activist, died on October 1 aged 91. © FRANCE 24
Day after day she went out into the bush and climbed into the steep valley forests of the Tanzanian interior. Setting out at first light, sloshing through streams and clambering the treacherous slopes in heavy rain, Jane Goodall’s mission was to get as close to the chimpanzees as possible and study them in the wild.
For the first few months she had little success. She could hear the chimps calling noisily to each other in the trees and stuffing themselves with figs but she couldn’t get close to them. They took one look at “this weird white ape” and fled, as she wrote in her autobiography.
But she persisted, wearing the same dull-coloured clothes every day and trying not to get too close too quickly, and eventually the chimps grew used to her.
One day – five months into her research – instead of running away, two large chimps she named David Greybeard and Goliath, peacefully went on grooming themselves in the sun.
A few months later, one of the chimpanzees took a nut from her open palm.
Read more Half a century in the bush, Jane Goodall takes it to the silver screen...
And then she watched, spellbound, as David Greybeard stripped a twig of leaves and scooped it into a termite mound to pull up insects for him to munch on. It was the first clue that chimps made and used tools the way that man did.
“Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human,” her mentor, the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, wrote in response to her discoveries.
Her extended study and resulting book, “In the Shadow of Man”, was “a piece of research that changes man’s view of himself”, said David Hamburg of Stanford University School of Medicine, adding that Goodall’s “work with chimpanzees represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements”.
A toy chimpanzee called Jubilee
The rugged forests of Tanzania were an unusual place for a young single girl from the British seaside town of Bournemouth to be spending her time in the 1960s.
But then Goodall, born in London in 1934, had been passionate about animals since childhood.
At the age of 4, she locked herself in the henhouse for five hours to observe the laying of an egg while her anguished parents searched for her high and low and her mother rang the police.
Her most beloved childhood possession was a toy chimpanzee called Jubilee and she had dreamed of living in the African bush among wild animals since she was 8 or 9 years old.
After leaving school at 18 and juggling jobs as a secretary and waitress, she saved up enough money to visit a school friend at her family farm in Kenya in 1957.
During her African trip, she was advised to look up Leakey, curator of what was then the National Museum of Natural History in Nairobi.
Taken by her passion for animals, Leakey hired her as his assistant secretary on the spot.
But he was also looking for someone with “an open mind” and “monumental patience” to make a study of chimps in the wild in the hope that this might lead to new insights about the behaviour of early man.
Day after day she went out into the bush and climbed into the steep valley forests of the Tanzanian interior. Setting out at first light, sloshing through streams and clambering the treacherous slopes in heavy rain, Jane Goodall’s mission was to get as close to the chimpanzees as possible and study them in the wild.
For the first few months she had little success. She could hear the chimps calling noisily to each other in the trees and stuffing themselves with figs but she couldn’t get close to them. They took one look at “this weird white ape” and fled, as she wrote in her autobiography.
But she persisted, wearing the same dull-coloured clothes every day and trying not to get too close too quickly, and eventually the chimps grew used to her.
One day – five months into her research – instead of running away, two large chimps she named David Greybeard and Goliath, peacefully went on grooming themselves in the sun.
A few months later, one of the chimpanzees took a nut from her open palm.
Read more Half a century in the bush, Jane Goodall takes it to the silver screen...
And then she watched, spellbound, as David Greybeard stripped a twig of leaves and scooped it into a termite mound to pull up insects for him to munch on. It was the first clue that chimps made and used tools the way that man did.
“Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human,” her mentor, the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, wrote in response to her discoveries.
Her extended study and resulting book, “In the Shadow of Man”, was “a piece of research that changes man’s view of himself”, said David Hamburg of Stanford University School of Medicine, adding that Goodall’s “work with chimpanzees represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements”.
A toy chimpanzee called Jubilee
The rugged forests of Tanzania were an unusual place for a young single girl from the British seaside town of Bournemouth to be spending her time in the 1960s.
But then Goodall, born in London in 1934, had been passionate about animals since childhood.
At the age of 4, she locked herself in the henhouse for five hours to observe the laying of an egg while her anguished parents searched for her high and low and her mother rang the police.
Her most beloved childhood possession was a toy chimpanzee called Jubilee and she had dreamed of living in the African bush among wild animals since she was 8 or 9 years old.
After leaving school at 18 and juggling jobs as a secretary and waitress, she saved up enough money to visit a school friend at her family farm in Kenya in 1957.
During her African trip, she was advised to look up Leakey, curator of what was then the National Museum of Natural History in Nairobi.
Taken by her passion for animals, Leakey hired her as his assistant secretary on the spot.
But he was also looking for someone with “an open mind” and “monumental patience” to make a study of chimps in the wild in the hope that this might lead to new insights about the behaviour of early man.
Leakey wanted someone whose mind was not “cluttered up by the reductionist thinking of the animal behaviourists of the time” and he felt that someone like Goodall would be more open to recording what was directly in front of her, rather than trying to prove or disprove some hypothesis.
Impressed by Goodall’s hard work, he asked her to take on the chimpanzee project in Tanzania, while choosing Dian Fossey to study gorillas in Rwanda and Birutė Galdikas to study orangutans in Borneo. The three became known as the trimates or “Leakey’s angels”.
So in 1960, Goodall and her mother Vanne set up camp at the Gombe Stream National Park, on the shores of Lake Tangayanika, where she quickly established a routine.
Setting out at dawn to a spot where she could observe the chimps, she would spend all day watching them through binoculars, jotting down observations and recording everything she saw.
Goodall viewed the chimps as sentient beings and gave them names – Mr McGregor, Flo (who was given her own obituary in The Times) and her daughter Fifi, and her beloved David Greybeard – an approach that earned her accusations of “the worst kind of anthropomorphism”.
Indeed scientists – usually men – often tried to discredit her work as “that of a young, untrained girl” because at the time she had no scientific qualifications (she later went on to earn a PhD in ethology from Cambridge), claiming that the blonde, slim, athletic Goodall only won grants “because of her legs”.
But Goodall was never bothered by male criticism – or accusations of “being difficult” – and felt that if her legs earned her publicity for the chimps, then so much the better.
“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us,” she once said.
But in 1962 she was nonetheless perturbed to hear that National Geographic, which was then financing the study of the chimps, was sending a photographer, Hugo van Lawick, to document her work with them.
She often spoke of the delight that she felt at being alone in the forest and loathed the idea of someone imposing on her solitude.
But van Lawick had a quiet voice, they both loved being out in nature and the work they were doing, and they just “got on very well”, she once said. He proposed to her by telegram as soon as he’d left Gombe.
Meanwhile, the emboldened chimpanzees drew closer and closer to her camp. At first they came for the bananas, and then they began to invade the camp in large numbers – stealing anything they could chew on – and enabling her to observe them in close proximity.
Goodall often said that her observations of chimps such as Flo – who were so playful and protective of their children – helped her to be a better mother.
But in 1962 she witnessed the “dark side to their nature” – that they could be brutal and vicious – with the chimps displaying aggressive competition that escalated into cannibalism and genocide.
Indeed her son Grubb, born of her marriage to van Lawick, had to play in a large wire cage as the chimps were known to eat other primates.
And as the camp at Gombe flourished, and welcomed students from around the world, there were other challenging times.
In 1974 she divorced van Lawick, who was spending increasing amounts of time making documentaries in the Serengeti, but they remained good friends. In 1975 she married Derek Bryceson, an MP and then director of Tanzania’s national parks. (Bryceson died of cancer just five years later in 1980).
And in 1975, three of her student helpers were kidnapped by a rebel group led by Laurent Kabila from what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and held hostage for weeks until a ransom was paid – an episode she described as “the worst time” of her life.
From scientist to activist
But the real turning point came in October 1986 when she attended a conference in Chicago held by leading chimpanzee researchers and discovered for the first time the extent of rampant deforestation and the threats to the chimps’ habitats.
She learned about the trade in chimpanzee meat – escalated by the sharp increase in commercial logging and bushmeat hunters riding in on the logging trucks – and that chimps were being used for medical research.
“I went as a scientist, I left as an activist,” she said.
From then on, she traveled widely to lobby governments, visit schools and give speeches – barely spending three weeks in the same place – in a bid to raise awareness about the chimps’ plight.
In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, a global community organisation that works to protect chimpanzees and their habitats, and in 1991 she set up the “Roots and Shoots” programme, which inspires young people around the world to be conservation leaders.
“The greatest danger to our future is apathy,” she told TIME magazine in 2002. “We can do something to preserve our planet.”
In 2017 she gave an online Masterclass in Conservation, which she opened in fluent Chimpanzee, calling and whooping what she translated as, “This is me, Jane.”
Indeed, Goodall saw her conservation work as “very much a paying back” for all the time she had spent in the forest.
“How many people are lucky enough to live their dream for so long? To be in paradise,” she said.
Goodall is survived by her son Grubb, a boatbuilder in Tanzania.
Jane Goodall: crusader for chimpanzees and the planet
Paris (AFP) – British primatologist Jane Goodall imitated chimpanzees, sat with them in trees and shared their bananas during her trail-blazing research in Tanzania into the apes' true nature.
Issued on: 01/10/2025 -
FRAHCE24
Primatologist Jane Goodall, who has spent her life researching and fighting for the conservation of chimpanzees, pictured in Entebbe in 2018 © SUMY SADURNI / AFP/File
Acclaimed for her discoveries she later morphed into a wildlife crusader, criss-crossing the world to plead the cause of human's closest ape relatives and the wider planet.
She died, aged 91, while conducting a speaking tour in the United States, her institute said Wednesday.
Clad in her classic collared shirt and shorts, binoculars in hand, Goodall transformed human understanding of chimpanzees.
She was the first researcher to give them names, rather than numbers.
She was also the first scientist to observe that the apes, like humans, use tools and feel emotions.
Fellow naturalist and friend David Attenborough told Britain's Daily Telegraph in 2010 she was "a woman who had turned the world of zoology upside down".
Her scientific breakthroughs "have profoundly altered the world's view of animal intelligence and enriched our understanding of humanity", the head of the US-based John Templeton Foundation said in 2021 when awarding her its prestigious individual lifetime achievement award.
- Termites and twigs -
Born on April 3, 1934, in London, Goodall's love of wild animals began in infancy, when her father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee, which she kept for the rest of her life.
She was also a fan of Tarzan books, about a boy raised in the jungle by apes who falls in love with a woman called Jane.
"When I was 10, I dreamed of going to Africa, living with animals and writing books about them," she told CNN in 2017.
In 1957 she took up a friend's invitation to visit Kenya, where she began working for famed palaeontologist Louis Leakey.
Her big break came when Leakey sent her to study chimpanzees in the wild in Tanzania, becoming the first of three women he appointed to study great apes in their natural habitat, along with America's Dian Fossey (gorillas) and Canada's Birute Galdikas (orangutans).
Despite Goodall's lack of scientific training, Leakey "felt her passion for and knowledge of animals and nature, high energy, and fortitude made her a great candidate to study the chimpanzees," according to National Geographic magazine, which featured Goodall on its cover in 1965.
It was in Gombe National Park that Goodall famously witnessed a male whom she called David Greybeard using a grass stalk to fish termites out of a termite mound.
She later saw Greybeard and a second animal, Goliath, stripping leaves off a twig to turn it into a better tool for digging out termites.
On the strength of her discoveries Leakey packed Goodall off to Cambridge University for doctoral research.
She became only the eighth person to earn a PhD at Cambridge without first possessing an undergraduate degree.
From scientist to activist
Barbie doll
Paris (AFP) – British primatologist Jane Goodall imitated chimpanzees, sat with them in trees and shared their bananas during her trail-blazing research in Tanzania into the apes' true nature.
Issued on: 01/10/2025 -
FRAHCE24
Primatologist Jane Goodall, who has spent her life researching and fighting for the conservation of chimpanzees, pictured in Entebbe in 2018 © SUMY SADURNI / AFP/FileAcclaimed for her discoveries she later morphed into a wildlife crusader, criss-crossing the world to plead the cause of human's closest ape relatives and the wider planet.
She died, aged 91, while conducting a speaking tour in the United States, her institute said Wednesday.
Clad in her classic collared shirt and shorts, binoculars in hand, Goodall transformed human understanding of chimpanzees.
She was the first researcher to give them names, rather than numbers.
She was also the first scientist to observe that the apes, like humans, use tools and feel emotions.
Fellow naturalist and friend David Attenborough told Britain's Daily Telegraph in 2010 she was "a woman who had turned the world of zoology upside down".
Her scientific breakthroughs "have profoundly altered the world's view of animal intelligence and enriched our understanding of humanity", the head of the US-based John Templeton Foundation said in 2021 when awarding her its prestigious individual lifetime achievement award.
- Termites and twigs -
Born on April 3, 1934, in London, Goodall's love of wild animals began in infancy, when her father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee, which she kept for the rest of her life.
She was also a fan of Tarzan books, about a boy raised in the jungle by apes who falls in love with a woman called Jane.
"When I was 10, I dreamed of going to Africa, living with animals and writing books about them," she told CNN in 2017.
In 1957 she took up a friend's invitation to visit Kenya, where she began working for famed palaeontologist Louis Leakey.
Her big break came when Leakey sent her to study chimpanzees in the wild in Tanzania, becoming the first of three women he appointed to study great apes in their natural habitat, along with America's Dian Fossey (gorillas) and Canada's Birute Galdikas (orangutans).
Despite Goodall's lack of scientific training, Leakey "felt her passion for and knowledge of animals and nature, high energy, and fortitude made her a great candidate to study the chimpanzees," according to National Geographic magazine, which featured Goodall on its cover in 1965.
It was in Gombe National Park that Goodall famously witnessed a male whom she called David Greybeard using a grass stalk to fish termites out of a termite mound.
She later saw Greybeard and a second animal, Goliath, stripping leaves off a twig to turn it into a better tool for digging out termites.
On the strength of her discoveries Leakey packed Goodall off to Cambridge University for doctoral research.
She became only the eighth person to earn a PhD at Cambridge without first possessing an undergraduate degree.
From scientist to activist
Jane Goodall speaks in her role as UN Messenger of Peace at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2020 © Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
Her life as an activist began at a US conference on chimpanzees in the 1980s, where she heard accounts of endangered chimpanzees being used in medical research, snared for bush meat and having their habitats destroyed.
"I went in as a scientist happily learning about chimpanzee behaviour... but I left that conference as an activist," Goodall told an audience in Nairobi in 2013.
Her unique insights into the animal world -- she livened up conferences with her renditions of chimpanzee calls in Gombe Park, to which she regularly returned -- got people to sit up and take notice.
When she "knocks at somebody's door they come," said Ian Redmond, chair of the Ape Alliance, a coalition of conservation groups.
In 1977 Goodall founded an institute in her name to further the study of chimpanzees and in 1991 created the Roots and Shoots project, which works with young people in over 60 countries on environmental issues.
Her life as an activist began at a US conference on chimpanzees in the 1980s, where she heard accounts of endangered chimpanzees being used in medical research, snared for bush meat and having their habitats destroyed.
"I went in as a scientist happily learning about chimpanzee behaviour... but I left that conference as an activist," Goodall told an audience in Nairobi in 2013.
Her unique insights into the animal world -- she livened up conferences with her renditions of chimpanzee calls in Gombe Park, to which she regularly returned -- got people to sit up and take notice.
When she "knocks at somebody's door they come," said Ian Redmond, chair of the Ape Alliance, a coalition of conservation groups.
In 1977 Goodall founded an institute in her name to further the study of chimpanzees and in 1991 created the Roots and Shoots project, which works with young people in over 60 countries on environmental issues.
Barbie doll
American toy manufacturer Mattel's Barbie dolls modeled after primatologist Jane Goodall and her research specimen, a chimpanzee named David Greybeard © Chris DELMAS / AFP/File
In 1964, Goodall married Dutch photographer Hugo van Lawick, who had immortalised her and her chimpanzees in National Geographic and LIFE magazines. A model of David Greybeard graced the wedding cake.
The couple had a son Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick, nicknamed Grub.
Goodall married her second husband Derek Bryceson, a former director of Tanzania's national parks and MP, in 1975. Five years later Bryceson died of cancer.
In April 2002, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan named her a United Nations Messenger of Peace, and she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004.
She has a Barbie doll named after her, complete with binoculars, safari outfit and chimpanzee.
burs/jmy/cb
© 2025 AFP
In 1964, Goodall married Dutch photographer Hugo van Lawick, who had immortalised her and her chimpanzees in National Geographic and LIFE magazines. A model of David Greybeard graced the wedding cake.
The couple had a son Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick, nicknamed Grub.
Goodall married her second husband Derek Bryceson, a former director of Tanzania's national parks and MP, in 1975. Five years later Bryceson died of cancer.
In April 2002, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan named her a United Nations Messenger of Peace, and she became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004.
She has a Barbie doll named after her, complete with binoculars, safari outfit and chimpanzee.
burs/jmy/cb
© 2025 AFP
Jane Goodall, pioneering primatologist and voice for wildlife, dies aged 91
Jane Goodall, the British primatologist whose pioneering research transformed humanity’s understanding of chimpanzees and who went on to become one of the world’s most influential voices for nature, has died aged 91, her institute announced on Wednesday.
Issued on: 01/10/2025 - RFI
Research and global advocacy
In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, which has since become a global leader in primate research, conservation, and community-led environmental projects.
Fourteen years later she launched Roots & Shoots, a youth movement dedicated to environmental and humanitarian action that now spans more than 60 countries.
Goodall’s transition from scientist to activist began in the 1980s after attending a US conference on chimpanzees, where she was confronted with the grim reality of animals used in biomedical research and the accelerating destruction of African forests. Deeply shaken, she resolved to speak out.
Anthropologist, conservationist and eternal optimist Richard Leakey dies at 77
From then on she travelled tirelessly, sometimes visiting more than 300 cities in a single year, urging audiences to act with compassion towards both animals and the planet. She became a powerful voice in global debates on biodiversity, climate change, and sustainable development.
Even in her later years, Goodall remained a commanding presence. Ahead of a United Nations biodiversity summit in Colombia in 2024, she told AFP: “The time for words and false promises is past if we want to save the planet.”
Her philosophy was rooted in the belief that every person, no matter how ordinary, can make a difference. “Each individual has a role to play,” she said, “and every one of us makes some impact on the planet every single day. We can choose what sort of impact we make.”
Indigenous Kenyans forced off ancestral lands in name of conservation: NGOs
Enduring legacy
Goodall received countless accolades during her lifetime, including damehood in 2004, the French Legion of Honour, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, and the Templeton Prize. She authored numerous books — from academic works to children’s stories — and was the subject of acclaimed documentaries, including National Geographic’s Jane (2017).
Despite her fame, she remained humble, often describing herself as “just a girl who loved animals”. Her legacy lies not only in her scientific achievements but also in the millions she inspired to treat animals and the natural world with empathy and respect.
(with newswires)
Jane Goodall, the British primatologist whose pioneering research transformed humanity’s understanding of chimpanzees and who went on to become one of the world’s most influential voices for nature, has died aged 91, her institute announced on Wednesday.
Issued on: 01/10/2025 - RFI
Jane Goodall speaks during the annual Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Forum in Manhattan, New York in 2025. © REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
Goodall “passed away of natural causes” while in California during a speaking tour of the United States, the Jane Goodall Institute said in a statement on social media.
“Dr Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionised science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” it added.
Scientific pioneer
Born on 3 April 1934 in London, Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall - later known simply as Jane Goodall - displayed a fascination with animals from a very young age. Her father gave her a toy chimpanzee, “Jubilee”, which she cherished throughout her life.
Enthralled by the Tarzan adventure books, she later remarked with amusement that Tarzan had married the “wrong Jane”.
Goodall’s unconventional path began in 1957 when, at the age of 23, she travelled to Kenya to visit a friend.
There she met Louis Leakey, the eminent Kenyan-based palaeontologist, who hired her as his secretary and soon recognised her extraordinary observational gifts.
Zoologist Jane Goodall warns: ‘The world is a mess’ ahead of COP16
Leakey dispatched her to what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, where she embarked on a groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in their natural habitat.
With no formal scientific training at the time, Goodall’s approach was unconventional but revolutionary: she named the chimpanzees she observed, rather than assigning them numbers, and emphasised their individuality, emotions, and social bonds.
Her most celebrated discovery came in 1960, when she observed chimpanzees using sticks and blades of grass as tools to extract termites from their mounds.
This shattered the long-held belief that tool-making was a uniquely human trait, forcing a profound re-evaluation of the boundary between humans and other animals.
Encouraged by Leakey, Goodall went on to pursue a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, becoming only the eighth person in the institution’s history to be awarded a PhD without first obtaining an undergraduate degree. Her thesis, based on her Gombe research, was published in 1965.
Goodall “passed away of natural causes” while in California during a speaking tour of the United States, the Jane Goodall Institute said in a statement on social media.
“Dr Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionised science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” it added.
Scientific pioneer
Born on 3 April 1934 in London, Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall - later known simply as Jane Goodall - displayed a fascination with animals from a very young age. Her father gave her a toy chimpanzee, “Jubilee”, which she cherished throughout her life.
Enthralled by the Tarzan adventure books, she later remarked with amusement that Tarzan had married the “wrong Jane”.
Goodall’s unconventional path began in 1957 when, at the age of 23, she travelled to Kenya to visit a friend.
There she met Louis Leakey, the eminent Kenyan-based palaeontologist, who hired her as his secretary and soon recognised her extraordinary observational gifts.
Zoologist Jane Goodall warns: ‘The world is a mess’ ahead of COP16
Leakey dispatched her to what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, where she embarked on a groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in their natural habitat.
With no formal scientific training at the time, Goodall’s approach was unconventional but revolutionary: she named the chimpanzees she observed, rather than assigning them numbers, and emphasised their individuality, emotions, and social bonds.
Her most celebrated discovery came in 1960, when she observed chimpanzees using sticks and blades of grass as tools to extract termites from their mounds.
This shattered the long-held belief that tool-making was a uniquely human trait, forcing a profound re-evaluation of the boundary between humans and other animals.
Encouraged by Leakey, Goodall went on to pursue a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, becoming only the eighth person in the institution’s history to be awarded a PhD without first obtaining an undergraduate degree. Her thesis, based on her Gombe research, was published in 1965.
Research and global advocacy
In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, which has since become a global leader in primate research, conservation, and community-led environmental projects.
Fourteen years later she launched Roots & Shoots, a youth movement dedicated to environmental and humanitarian action that now spans more than 60 countries.
Goodall’s transition from scientist to activist began in the 1980s after attending a US conference on chimpanzees, where she was confronted with the grim reality of animals used in biomedical research and the accelerating destruction of African forests. Deeply shaken, she resolved to speak out.
Anthropologist, conservationist and eternal optimist Richard Leakey dies at 77
From then on she travelled tirelessly, sometimes visiting more than 300 cities in a single year, urging audiences to act with compassion towards both animals and the planet. She became a powerful voice in global debates on biodiversity, climate change, and sustainable development.
Even in her later years, Goodall remained a commanding presence. Ahead of a United Nations biodiversity summit in Colombia in 2024, she told AFP: “The time for words and false promises is past if we want to save the planet.”
Her philosophy was rooted in the belief that every person, no matter how ordinary, can make a difference. “Each individual has a role to play,” she said, “and every one of us makes some impact on the planet every single day. We can choose what sort of impact we make.”
Indigenous Kenyans forced off ancestral lands in name of conservation: NGOs
Enduring legacy
Goodall received countless accolades during her lifetime, including damehood in 2004, the French Legion of Honour, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, and the Templeton Prize. She authored numerous books — from academic works to children’s stories — and was the subject of acclaimed documentaries, including National Geographic’s Jane (2017).
Despite her fame, she remained humble, often describing herself as “just a girl who loved animals”. Her legacy lies not only in her scientific achievements but also in the millions she inspired to treat animals and the natural world with empathy and respect.
(with newswires)
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