What Would Jane Goodall Do?

From her early days waiting patiently in the rainforests of Tanzania, Jane Goodall now traverses the world, delivering a message that has turned into her legacy. 

Three months had passed in Tanzania and Jane Goodall hadn’t even come close to a chimpanzee. Her long-dreamt trip to Africa to study animals in the wild was off to a rough start, with setbacks caused by village conflicts, bouts of malaria, and the general reticence of the chimpanzees, who would flee whenever they saw Goodall and her scouts approach. With only a couple of months left before her funds ran out, the 26-year-old British would-be scientist was growing anxious and impatient. Still, she realized that those many weeks she spent hopelessly tracking the chimps from a distance had served their purpose, acclimating her to the rugged terrain. Her skin had hardened, her blood had become immune to the bites of the tsetse fly, and her feet had conformed to the rocky slopes of the Gombe mountains, which she clambered around in canvas sneakers. From her African companions she learned bush lore, how to identify animal tracks, and how to find her way through the forest.  

These moments of waiting primed her for what would be the species-redefining discovery she observed on November 4, 1960, when she closely witnessed David Graybeard, one of the more placid chimps, fishing at a termite mound using a grass stem. She had heard anecdotes from the locals about chimpanzees using objects as tools, like breaking nuts open with a rock, but here she was, recording them actually fashioning a tool, however crude, by stripping the leaves off twigs.

“It is in making tools that man is unique,” anthropologist Kenneth P. Oakley wrote in his influential 1944 essay “Man the Tool-Maker.” Louis Leakey, Goodall’s mentor and benefactor, had uncovered early human fossils which he named Homo habilis or “handy man,” believed to have made and used the first stone tools. It turned out that humans were not unique in that rather limited sense, after all. When Goodall telegrammed her discovery to Leakey, he famously replied, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as human.”

Her early years at the Gombe Stream National Park are chronicled in the remarkable 2017 documentary Jane, which director Brett Morgan assembled from hundreds of hours of unseen footage shot by Hugo Van Lawick for National Geographic. Aside from following Goodall as she begins to form connections with the chimpanzees, the film also shows the blossoming relationship between her and Hugo, both young, good-looking, and passionate about wildlife, thrown together in a remote jungle situation. Hugo and Jane get married, have a son, and work together for the next 10 years. 

Today, Dr. Jane Goodall is the busiest, most traveled 91-year-old on the planet. The work she started at Gombe continues as the longest-running field research on chimpanzees, but she has since turned her efforts toward conservation after noticing the threats to the habitat of her beloved chimps, founding the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. Another pivotal moment came at a landmark 1986 conference called “Understanding Chimpanzees,” where she was confronted with the impact that deforestation and the wild animal and bushmeat trade had on the chimpanzee population across Africa. She was also devastated to learn about the cruel treatment of chimpanzees in research labs and zoos. These two realizations shifted the trajectory of her career; instead of returning to Gombe to do more long-term field work, she became an activist, using her fame and authority to raise awareness about the plight of chimpanzees and other wild animals. In 1991, Goodall met with a group of Tanzanian teenagers who shared with her some of the problems they were facing in their community. Together, they were able to come up with ideas and solutions to their challenges, and this insight birthed the Roots & Shoots program. Now in 75 countries, Roots & Shoots empowers young people to create change in their communities, starting with small steps like composting, cleaning up the beach, or “craftivism.”

Traveling 300 days out of the year to spread her message of hope, Goodall barely even rests when she is at home for those precious few weeks in Bournemouth in the south coast of England, where she grew up. “These days are filled up with film teams.  There’s a film team coming down to film for three days, so it’s horribly busy,” she tells Vogue Philippines just a few days after returning from picking up her Presidential Medal of Freedom from US President Joe Biden, just one of her many awards from over six decades of advocating for animals and the environment. “I didn’t realize until I got to the White House quite how special it was,” she says of the recognition, which was shared with Bono, Magic Johnson, and Anna Wintour, among others. In a few days, she’s off to Dubai, where she’ll spend a whirlwind three days giving interviews, launching a bee garden, signing books, and enthralling students with stories that sound as fresh as if they had happened yesterday. Then, she’ll fly to the next country, where she’ll begin the whole process again, tirelessly pollinating the flowers of hope.

Though Goodall has traversed the globe many times over, the Philippines remains an unchecked destination (“It’s on my list,” she assures). And yet the ethologist and conservationist has lent her name to a couple of local causes that were aligned with her values: first in 2012, when she sent a letter to President Benigno Aquino III in support of transferring the suffering Mali, “the world’s saddest elephant,” from the Manila Zoo to a sanctuary in Thailand. “The scientific evidence is irrefutable: Elephants need the company and companionship of other elephants. Even if Mali were in a sound state physically, keeping her alone in a cramped, barren pen is still ethically indefensible,” she wrote. “The Manila Zoo has failed Mali.”

Mali remained in her pen until November 2023, where she died of heart failure and undetected cancer. What’s worse is that the Manila city government decided to have her remains stuffed and returned to the zoo where she is on permanent display, along with a sign advertising the taxidermy service. Even in death, Mali is denied her freedom.

Dr. Goodall again used her influence in solidarity with other prominent figures like Greta Thunberg and Leonardo DiCaprio in the #SaveMasungi movement, coming after a revelation by the BBC that the Masungi Georeserve and its stewards have been the target of a disinformation campaign. “I want you to know you are not alone in your efforts, you’ve got friends in the international conservation community, friends who are supporting your work,” she says in a video that was shared on her Instagram account with 1.4 million followers. Goodall’s support has helped bring international attention to local efforts while emphasizing the connected nature of conservation work around the world.

The paths of Masungi Georeserve co-founder Ann Dumaliang and Goodall had crossed at the World Economic Forum 2024 in Davos when Dumaliang moderated a panel called “Earth’s Wisdom Keepers” that included Goodall and two young changemakers from Switzerland and Brazil. Dumaliang framed the discussion with an introduction that called for the need to listen not only to science but also the indigenous forms of wisdom that has shaped our relationship with the natural world. “This is the kind of AI that we should really be talking about: ancestral intelligence.” 

In her calm and compelling way, Goodall offered simply, “We are part of the natural world, we’re not separate from it.” Explaining that even though she would have been content to spend the rest of her life in the rainforest, she chose to go back out into the world and work on holistic conservation that helps protect the natural world and improve the lives of people. She feels a sense of responsibility for the environmental damage her generation has inflicted. “We’ve compromised your future,” she tells her three co-panelists, women who undoubtedly looked up to the legend of Jane Goodall as young girls. “The world you’ve been born into, it’s not fair.

“There’s so much talk about tech solving the climate crisis,” she continues. “But there’s an older and simpler way: protect our forests. It will take a long time for carbon capture so we have to protect the Amazon now.” Goodall has lived long enough to see how ecological systems work and know that species can be brought back from the brink of extinction only if people cared enough. Nature’s resilience is one of the things that gives her hope, and one of the reasons she doesn’t have the doom-and-gloom outlook of some people who are a third her age.

“Being angry doesn’t work. How do we change the minds of decision makers? It’s not by finger pointing. You’ve got to reach their hearts; they must change from within.” Goodall does this so very well by telling stories, not just from her time in Gombe, but about all the people she has met over the years. She often tells the story of Mr. H, a stuffed monkey she carries with her, given by a former US marine who lost his eyesight in a helicopter crash. Despite his impairment, he followed his dreams of becoming a magician. 

One of the most important stories Goodall has to tell is that of a young girl growing up during World War II who had the wildest dream of going to Africa during a time when women didn’t go off and have adventures, much less make groundbreaking scientific discoveries. A combination of determination, destiny, and unwavering support from her mother led Goodall on the path to Tanzania and propelled her into a life’s work all of her own doing. She reminds us that hope is an action, not just a feeling, and that what may seem impossible now can one day become reality if you just start with the first, small step. 

Goodall never fails to give credit to her mother for being the strong foundation from which she would grow. From nurturing her early interest in animals to eventually accompanying Goodall to Tanzania when she wasn’t permitted to travel there alone as a young unmarried woman, Vanne Morris-Goodall was a force of her own. Once at Gombe, her mother didn’t just sit around at camp, but took the initiative to start a clinic for the villagers with the simple medical supplies they had brought, like bandages, Epsom salts, and aspirin. 

“That established really good relations with the local people right from the beginning,” Goodall says, pointing out that it was her mother who was the brave one, dealing with baboons who would raid their food supplies or buffaloes that would trample through the camp, while Jane was out in the forest observing the relatively milder chimpanzees. The women had also come with a Tanzanian cook named Dominic, who, as Goodall describes, “had this absolute fondness for alcohol” and would pinch the cooking sherry, until he found a very strong drink made of fermented bananas. “So that was mum, with fierce baboons, buffaloes, and a semi-drunken cook.” 

Goodall also had to brush off a lot of skepticism and thinly veiled misogyny from male colleagues early in her career. Despite her academic credentials—a PhD from Cambridge and a visiting professorship at Stanford—and her unmatched field experience, she was still fighting against deeply entrenched male-dominated perspectives, and would be criticized for presenting disruptive findings that went against the prevailing scientific opinion, like the time she suggested that aggression was something inborn. 

“It was in the middle of the big, big argument on aggression: is it innate or learned? And there was a strong body of scientific opinion that said it was learned, and that we were born innocent,” Goodall says, recalling one particular conference in 1974. “My work with the chimpanzees, where I know so much of their behavior is triggered by the same causes as human aggression, I thought, no, human aggression is inborn. We have an innate tendency to be aggressive in the right situation, which now everybody believes, but back then, I was attacked.”

Chimpanzees, they’re just like us. A whole range of what resembles human emotion can be detected in Goodall’s fascinating descriptions of the chimp families she followed. They express jealousy, rage, annoyance, playfulness, even forgiveness. “They’re very quick at reconciliation. That’s something we can learn from,” she says, though she chuckles at the thought of humans reconciling like chimps, where the lower ranking animal offers their rump to the alpha male, who responds with a reassuring pat.

Remembering Goodall’s poetic account of the “almost mystical awareness of beauty and eternity” that she experienced in Gombe as a young woman, I ask if she misses just being out there in the wilderness, alone with the animals. “Well, yes, I do, but I wouldn’t be happy if I was, because I know I shouldn’t be doing that, and I did have years of absolute bliss.” Her work now lies beyond the forest’s edge. In just the Asian leg of her 27-country tour in 2024, she saw coral reefs regenerating in Singapore waters, witnessed the release of a rehabilitated bird in Hong Kong, planted a native pocket forest in Kathmandu, and visited the protected urban leopards of Mumbai’s National Park. After decades of pioneering work, Goodall is running on the energy and inspiration she receives from the young conservationists who carry her legacy forward.   

“Remember the most important message is that every single one of us makes an impact every single day, and we get to choose what sort of impact we make,” she says. “We think about what we buy, where did it come from? How was it made? Did it harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals, like the factory farms? Is it cheap because of unfair wages?  Then don’t buy it. Consumer pressure is beginning to change business.”

Every. Single. Day. The scale of the climate crisis can be paralyzing to us regular folk, but Goodall offers another way ahead: to focus on the present and make a choice today whose impact builds up over time. When individual actions are multiplied, the ripples are felt far beyond our communities, whether it be in the choice to eat less meat or say no to fast fashion. And if you’re ever faced with an ethical decision about how to live your life, run a business, or lead a nation, just ask yourself: what would Jane do? 

By AUDREY CARPIO. Photographs by ARTU NEPOMUCENO. Executive Producer: Anz Hizon. Producer: Priscilla Chan. Production Coordinator: Denise Chia. Photographer’s Assistant: Melvin Leong. Shot on location at the AllSpice Institute Singapore.

Special thanks to Mary Lewis of the Jane Goodall Institute, Dr. Andie Ang of Primate Conservation & Singapore Programmes, and the Jane Goodall Institute in Singapore.