Jane Goodall

Ambassador of hope

- BY JEFFREY KLUGER

THERE ARE FEW PEOPLE IN HUMAN history whose last names alone are sufficient to conjure up a sense of kindness, goodness, wisdom, grace—Mandela, Gandhi, King, Lincoln. Add to that list Goodall. The other four left us years ago. Jane Goodall—primatologist, zoologist, conservationist, winner of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE)—joined them on Oct. 1, dying at age 91.

“Dr. Jane Goodall DBE, U.N. Messenger for Peace and founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, has passed away, due to natural causes,” the Jane Goodall Institute posted. “Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world.”

The spare prose of the announcement was a fitting reflection of the quiet, deliberate way Goodall lived her remarkable life—qualities that were essential for work that required hours, months, and years crouched in the jungles and clearings of Africa, most notably in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, observing chimpanzees from a sort of intimate distance and discovering their sometimes loving, sometimes violent, sometimes ingenious lives.