On Wednesday, October 1, the Jane Goodall Institute announced that Goodall—the British-born primatologist, anthropologist, zoologist, and author—had died in her sleep while visiting California for work. She was 91.
Twenty years ago, Alexandra Fuller met with Goodall in Seattle to discuss her childhood in England, her groundbreaking research in Tanzania as a young woman, and her rigorous touring and speaking schedule in her 70s—work that Goodall described as what she “was sent to do.” Revisit that story, from Vogue’s August 2005 issue, right here.
In the flesh, Dr. Jane Goodall, Dame of the British Empire, looks exactly as you would expect, only more so—a rare experience with people whose images are doggedly repeated in photographs or on screens. Hers is not a face aching to appear decades younger than it is (a chemically or surgically altered look that Goodall describes as “blank, vacuous, nothing inside”) but rather the face of a woman who is frankly and unconsciously at home in her (very good) skin. The ponytail is her trademark—a simple, almost impatient gesture—thick, silver hair pulled back into a no-nonsense clasp at the nape of her neck. Her face emerges unimpeded: dark eyes tucked under mildly surprised brows, prominent cheekbones, an upturned nose (in spite of its owner’s egalitarian views), and a small, resolute jaw.
When I spoke with her recently she had come to rest, briefly, in the house of her friend and colleague Gary McAvoy, on the outskirts of Seattle. I had caught her in the midst of a multistate, months-long tour of North America, and her voice—soft with an upper-middle-class English accent—was thin with all the lecturing she had done. “I’m afraid I have to save it for the crowds,” she apologized, hand at her throat. On this day, she was wearing a red wool turtleneck sweater, blue jeans, brown moccasins, and dark glasses to protect her eyes from the glare of a brightly lit day. Behind her a windowsill looking out to the Puget Sound was vibrant with flowering orchids, and beyond that McAvoy’s garden was rapturous with spring. Goodall and McAvoy have just coauthored a book, Harvest for Hope (to be published by Warner this fall), about the importance of choosing to eat responsibly grown food. McAvoy’s garden reflects a correspondingly careful use of land, complete with native shrubs and young, grafted apple trees, about which Goodall jokingly admonished McAvoy, “Oh, Gary, you didn’t torture the poor things, did you?”
In 1964 Jane Goodall was described by The New York Times as “fragile and blonde, with huge green eyes... she looks as if she should be pouring tea or watering the roses instead of prowling the bush.” Which is nonsense, she told me: “There’s nothing fragile about me.” She has, she said, the constitution of “old boots.”
Dismissed, prematurely, as National Geographic’s cover girl in her early days studying chimpanzees in Africa in the sixties and seventies, Goodall has always attracted attention for her fresh, natural looks—a fact that exasperates this world-famous primatologist. “Everyone wants to know,” Goodall told me, “do I work out? No. Do I meditate? Not in the traditional way.... All these ladies in Hollywood ask me, ‘What do you do for your skin?’ The answer is, ‘Nothing.’” She mentioned an interview that took place some years ago with a well-known American television-show host—“He’s a silly man, anyway”—who had insisted, “‘Well, you must do something.’ And he went on and on. I didn’t want to talk about my skin, which seemed to me completely ridiculous,” Goodall said, laughing. “But I don’t think I’m that beautiful,” she added. Which, of course, she is—but it’s not the sort of beauty you can buy; it’s the sort of beauty you are, just by being born and by living it.
Alice Walker has written a poem to this effect that includes the lines “Advertising never/seems to reach/Jane.... Each time/she emerges blinking/out of/the mists/she’s wearing/the exact/same/white blouse indifferent/blue skirt.” Goodall seemed amused by the poem and pleased with how it portrays her. “She gets only one thing wrong... and that’s the blue skirt,” she said (Goodall wore khaki when she emerged from the mist). Restricted in her wardrobe choices to what she can fit in a single suitcase while she travels for months at a time, Goodall adopts a minimal style. She dresses up in an embroidered jacket and khaki trousers and down in an indifferent red windbreaker. Her mother used to buy her clothes, and now her friends shop for her. “I really hate shopping,” she said. “I do it as seldom as possible.” She always wears Minnetonka Moccasins because a member of the board of the Goodall Institute makes them and brings a new pair for her when her last pair has quite worn out.
Then she leaned forward to show me the smallleather medicine bag hanging around her neck. “Shadowhawk’s wife made this for me,” she said (Shadowhawk is a Native American friend of Goodall’s who was also staying with McAvoy when I visited). And of the simple heart-shaped necklace hanging next to the medicine bag, Goodall said, “A young woman just took it off her neck. She said, ‘It was given to me in my grandmother s will.’ So I said, ‘I can’t take that.’ And she said, ‘You absolutely have to. It’s yours.’” “Goodall paused. “But that’s what people do, you see.”
And I do see. At 71, Jane Goodall is an icon of her own integrity, and perhaps by attaching pieces of ourselves to her, we hope that some sense of her serenity—some of what we perceive as her unassailable goodness—will wear off on us. Half the time, I don’t think people know what they are responding to when they see Goodall or hear her speak, but thousands spontaneously rise to their feet when she walks onstage—a slim, soft-spoken woman, plainly dressed, with a simple message: “Yes, we are trying to change the world. Yes, we are changing the world. But we can’t do anything alone.” At the end of every lecture she has the crowd stand, hold hands, and raise them above their heads. It feels like a religious meeting, and it is, I realized, a kind of mission for Goodall to connect people to one another, even if it is only for a moment in a lecture hall. “Every single individual makes a difference every day,” she tells the crowds. “When we get a team and we can hold hands, we can change the world together.”
Since 1986, Goodall has been in perpetual motion, touring 300 days a year and not staying in any one place for longer than three weeks. At a meeting in Chicago that year, chimpanzee researchers from around Africa were reporting horrifying stories of habitat destruction and declining chimpanzee populations. It was clear to Goodall that she would have to leave her research life behind and address the planet’s bigger environmental and social issues. “I was impelled. It wasn’t a choice. It was no great nobility,” Goodall said. “I think I am doing what I was sent to do. I wouldn’t choose to live this way. Who would? I don’t enjoy it.” She pauses to reflect. “OK, just before I get up on a platform and there are all those people, I’m thinking, I’m so tired. I can’t do this. But then you get up there and there’s all this strength from somewhere. A bit of it comes from the audience, I know. How amazing that you can go into a high school or an inner city and be greeted like a pop star—because the idols they have, they’re mostly not such clean-living people! So the fact that they greet me that way when I am just what I am—I think that’s very encouraging.”
The Jane Goodall Institute, founded in 1977, now has a global staff of more than 250 to carry out its conservation and research work. But it is the institute’s youth program, Roots Shoots (started in Tanzania in 1991), that is Goodall’s primary focus these days. Comprising more than 6,000 groups in at least 87 countries, the program is as diverse as the children who have joined it. Goodall tells me of a Roots Shoots group in New Zealand that raised $500 to build a clean, ventilated latrine for girls at a Tanzanian school (Goodall had discovered that girls in many Third World countries were leaving school prematurely because of unhygienic, flyblown latrines that lacked privacy). Another Roots Shoots branch in Lagos, Nigeria, had cleared truckloads of debris from a highway drainage system that until then had been not only a flood hazard but a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. For this work with the world’s youth, Kofi Annan made Goodall a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002.
Watching her, over the course of a few days, as she traveled around the Northwest from Seattle to Salem and Bend, Oregon, I saw how Goodall patiently toured Roots Shoots projects and listened attentively to what the children had to say, with seemingly endless interest. But it was animals that Goodall was drawn to for strength and comfort (any animal would do; McAvoy’s cats or a Jack Russell terrier, a lynx, a snow leopard, and chimpanzees at an animal sanctuary in Bend). This affinity with animals is unsurprising, but what is striking is how unguarded and relaxed—even playful—Goodall becomes when she is around them. Her slight reserve—a natural defense against the hordes of people she must meet every day—completely dissolves, and she seems utterly relaxed for a few moments, even while remaining watchful against the sudden ambush of a spitball as administered by one chimpanzee who was simultaneously banging his feed buckets against the fence. “That’s very good,” Goodall told the show-off, admiringly. “You’re very musical!” Then she turned to the owner of the sanctuary. “You must play him music,” she said. “He’d like that.”
Goodall has vigorously campaigned to improve the lives of primates kept in captivity in zoos or for medical research (chimpanzees share at least 95 percent of human genes and are capable of catching almost all known contagious diseases that afflict us, making them especially vulnerable or useful, depending on how you look at it, to medical testing). “We should be searching much harder for an alternative to the use of any animals,” Goodall has said. “If we do continue to use them, we should use as few as possible. We should ensure the conditions in which they are kept are optimal.”
Goodall’s connection with animals started with earthworms that she dug up in the garden (aged eighteen months) and brought into her bed, and with her childhood dog Rusty, whom she credits for her ability to recognize emotions in the animals she later studied. “I’ve had dogs all my life, and they’ve been wonderful, and I adored them—but Rusty was extraordinary, just totally different. He was almost like one of these angels—animal angels.” Goodall also attributes much of her life’s inspiration to her mother. “She was amazing. She encouraged all of this early interest. So everything we did, we were encouraged, my sister and I, in our different ways.”
Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in London, England, on April 3, 1934, the first child of Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall (an engineer and race-car driver) and the former Margaret Myfanwe “Vanne” Joseph (a novelist). Jane’s sister, Judy, was born in 1938. After the divorce of their parents, the very young Jane and Judy moved with their mother to Bournemouth (an English seaside town), where Vanne’s mother and two sisters lived in a home that had been in the Joseph family since the turn of the century. This old Victorian house is what Goodall calls her “home-home” today, “where all my things are, where my roots are.”
“I get my three weeks in Bournemouth,” said Goodall of the break she allows herself each year from her relentless touring schedule, “with dogs and family and the house I grew up in and the trees I can see from the window, where I used to sit and dream of Africa and Tarzan. And I’m just getting on with writing, which I love, and I’ve got to pack up and get on another plane. It’s really horrid.” What keeps her going, she says, is her belief in “this great spiritual power.... I must get my strength from somewhere.” Her grounding in spirituality—and an emphasis on being a good person—was also something instilled in her from her childhood. “The way I was brought up in the family,” she said, “what mattered was what you were and what you did and what you felt and how you acted. Those were the important things, and that’s what we stress in Roots Shoots.”
Goodall knew from the moment she was conscious of such things that she wanted to study animals and write. “It was animals, Africa, and books,” she told me. When, at 23, she received a letter of invitation from a school friend in Nairobi, she jumped at the chance to visit Africa. Meeting the renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey while she was there, she impressed him with her knowledge of animals, and he offered her work in Gombe, Tanzania. He had been waiting ten years for someone exactly like Goodall to study chimpanzees, which he hoped to prove shared some common behavioral past with early man. She was a woman (he believed women made more patient observers than men), she was untrained (and therefore unbiased), and she didn’t care about boyfriends or comfort (and would therefore be happy in what was then a very remote part of Tanganyika). “It didn’t mean I didn t have boyfriends, by the way,” Goodall clarified, “it meant I was prepared to do without them. I especially didn’t care about clothes and parties.”
When the funds Leakey had given her for her six-month study of the primates began to run out, she ate tiny rations to eke out her supplies. She continues to eat next to nothing (friends say she eats only one meal a day), and she has been a vegetarian for decades. “I read Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation,” she told me. “It was just like such a shock, a total shock. You know, from that moment on, a piece of meat on my plate represented fear, pain, and death. And who wants to eat that?”
In 1962, Leakey helped Goodall find a place to earn a Ph.D. at Cambridge University. By then she had been studying the chimpanzees at Gombe for about eighteen months, ignoring traditional study methods and naming the chimps instead of giving them impersonal numbers. She immersed herself in their world and gained impressively fresh insights into chimpanzee social behavior. Her most important discovery was that chimps made “tools” (grass inserted into an anthill with which to catch ants, for example). Until then, humans had distinguished themselves from all other beasts as the “toolmakers.” Hearing of Goodall’s breakthrough discovery, Leakey famously quipped, “Now we must redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as human.”
In 1964 Goodall married Baron Hugo Van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer who had come to Gombe to take pictures for National Geographic magazine. Their son, Hugo (nicknamed “Grub”), born in 1967, is Goodall’s only child (he is now a commercial fisherman in Dar es Salaam). The marriage ended amicably in 1974. The following year, Goodall married Derek Bryceson, a Tanzanian politician, the director of that country’s national parks, and, by all accounts, the love of Goodall’s life. He died, painfully, of cancer in 1980, after spending his last months in England with Goodall.
I get the impression Goodall has grown more serious over the years. She started out as a girl in love with animals and the idea of Africa, with “a huge crush on Tarzan” and “terribly jealous of that wimpy Jane.” And she evolved from being one of the world’s most recognized animal researchers to becoming a full-time activist, urgently concerned with what we have done to the planet and almost evangelical in her desire to save it. “It’s like defiling a cathedral or a temple,” she told me. “It’s so scary. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, it’s all contaminated, all of it. It gets into breast milk, fetuses. Some of the whales washed ashore in British Columbia are treated as toxic waste…”
Perhaps part of this seriousness is due to the fact that Goodall’s world has become less forgiving and more traumatic than it was when she first went to Africa, armed with little more than naïve, if optimistic, enthusiasm. In 1975 three students and a research assistant were kidnapped from her research station in Gombe by Zairean rebels (a two-month ordeal, at the end of which all were released unharmed); she has lived through divorce and the death of her beloved second husband; she has, she said, “felt this pain that ruined the world,” which led her to start Roots Shoots.
“You know,” Goodall told me, “you look back on my life, and all these different steps brought me to do what I feel I have to do now. And without the steps I couldn’t have done any of it.... I suppose it was kind of weird that I changed so completely”—she’s referring to her “Damascus moment” in 1986, when she shifted from research to advocacy work—“but it was timing. If my second husband was still alive, it would be impossible for me to do all this traveling.” Then she sighed, and for a moment she allowed herself to look exhausted and slightly bewildered. And I was suddenly conscious of the inexplicable instinct, which I had seen her friends demonstrate, to protect and nourish this woman who has made it her life’s work, and driving ambition, to protect and nourish every living thing on the Earth. “When I die, I want to be able to look at my three grandchildren, whom I care about very deeply, and tell them that I really tried my best,” she said.