Four Things I Learned from Jane Goodall

Here comes my most sentimental post of all time

I love Jane Goodall, and was sad to hear she passed away last month, at the ripe age of 91. Who doesn’t love Jane Goodall? What’s not to love? (My husband had apparently never heard of her, because he lives under a rock, but honestly, you don’t need to be a primatology geek to have heard of her).

In case you live under a rock like my husband, Jane Goodall was the first person to ever seriously study chimpanzee behavior, which basically launched the entire field of primatology (no big deal). She was the first to discover that other nonhuman primates are tool-users, have emotional intelligence, and are far more like us than we ever imagined. The famous anthropologist Louis Leakey said of her findings, “We must now either redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

For those of you who don’t know me personally (or who are new to this newsletter), most of my writing here concerns human hunter-gatherers, but I am actually a huge primatology nerd, and my interest in humanity’s evolutionary history was sparked by two incredible teachers and mentors, both of whom were primatologists. The first is Dr. Leah Domb, a Harvard-trained primatologist and anthropologist who was the Science Master at my high school. I traveled to East Africa with Leah on three separate occasions, to study primatology and ecology. The second is Professor Robert Sapolsky, a world-renowned neuroscientist, who I had the good fortune of studying with as an undergraduate at Stanford. Although his research was lab-based during the time I was there, he got his start as a primatologist, studying baboon behavior in East Africa (I highly recommend A Primate’s Memoir, his story about the time he spent there).

So I perhaps have more affinity and respect for Jane Goodall than your average girl, because of our shared love of primates (human and non-human), but her legacy is so much bigger than her chimpanzee research. Having made critical contributions to our understanding of primate behavior and human evolution, she went on to become a highly influential environmental activist, conservationist, and humanitarian, whose impact on the world has been massive and undeniably positive. I highly recommend this National Geographic documentary on her life. It will make you cry.

I’ve honestly never met a person who did not like Jane Goodall (though I am sure there are some who don’t), but different people respect her for different reasons. Apart from being an all-around baller female scientist, here’s why I personally feel she is an inspiration. (Is this starting to feel like a college admissions essay? I guess I’m okay with that).

1. There is something spiritual about the natural world.

There’s this beautiful moment in the documentary (the one I linked to above) where she talks about how she felt when she was spending time in the field, researching chimpanzees. She was out there all alone, sometimes for months, in this really remote part of East Africa–which is stunningly beautiful, by the way–far from the density and noise of human activity. She said of her time there:

“Being out in the forest, I had this great sense of spiritual awareness, of some spiritual power, and it was so strong out in the forest. You cannot help but understand how everything is interconnected. I often used to think, sitting out there on my own, that maybe there is a spark of that great spiritual power in every one of us. And if it’s so, then maybe it’s in every animal too.”

Many people (wrongly) assume that naturalists, and especially evolutionary biologists, are non-believers: extreme atheists who view the universe as cruel and meaningless. It’s true that if you accept and believe in evolution by natural selection, you cannot also believe in intelligent design in a literal sense, and many religious teachings become defunct. But I strongly agree with Jane that there is something deeply spiritual about nature. Because I have also spent months in the field, living in a tent in the rainforest, closer to the earth, to animals, to life and death, and I have also felt exactly what she describes. You don’t need to spend months in East Africa to access this though; sometimes all it takes is an overnight in a tent in the mountains. Experiencing nature in this way probably won’t make you suddenly want to go to church on Sundays and memorize the Lord’s Prayer (unless that’s already your thing) but I think a lot of naturalists arrive at the conclusion that nature, even though harsh and often cruel, is beautiful in its diversity and interconnectedness. There is something akin to religion baked in the natural law that neither energy nor matter can be created or destroyed, only transformed.

People like to make fun of my nostalgia for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, which is totally fair. My husband likes to remind me that I wouldn’t make it one day as a forager, and he’s probably right. I try not to romanticize human prehistory, because the truth is that, depending on the time period and conditions, it was often brutal, because nature is brutal. It seems, for instance, that the Neanderthal demise was brought about by a combination of inbreeding, starvation, cannibalism and annihilation by Homo sapiens. In other words, not pretty. Even during the best of times, early human history was characterized by high rates of infant and child mortality. Average life expectancy was short. A minor injury could mean the end of your life. Evolution by natural selection is inherently brutal, and this can be hard to square for us nature lovers. Jane knew this too–she saw chimpanzees kill (and sometimes cannibalize) one another after territorial disputes–but this didn’t dampen her love for them or for nature.

Human prehistory was probably violent, full of death and epic struggles for survival, but can you imagine what the stars would have looked like in the night sky back then? My husband and I spent our honeymoon scuba diving on some very remote islands in French Polynesia and I have never seen stars like that before. I think if you saw the galaxy like that every night, it would change you, even if you did not know what you were seeing. Imagine living at a time when there were no lights or buildings, no frontiers, no screens, no houses, no cars, no sound except the sound of other animals or the wind in the trees or the thunder of an approaching storm. It was just you and your band of human travelers, around a fire, in the wild. The world was this vast unknowable place. It must have been totally magical.

It’s no accident, in my opinion, that the first known human temples were full of animal deities. People found spirituality through nature, not through a paternalistic all-knowing father figure. And look, I know I have a lot of religious readers here, and I think religion (even the paternalistic kind) is generally good for people, but I also think it’s possible to find meaning and beauty–and even spirituality–through the natural world. Jane Goodall is proof of that.

Our planet is fucking phenomenal. And I will never understand why billionaires are more interested in spending money on colonizing mars than on saving what we’ve got here on earth. But it’s not just up to the billionaires. Whenever I think about Jane, I think, my God, there’s so much more I could be doing to help protect the natural world. And maybe I will start doing more. That’s the power of her influence.

2. It’s better to have empathy than morals.

I often feel that human morals actually get in the way of true empathy. We used to look to organized religion to provide us with a moral framework, and humans spent a good portion of history killing one another in disputes over whose morals were the “right” ones. But didn’t Jesus say, “do to others what you would have them do to you”? Isn’t that, like, one of the key teachings?

These days, people seem to have largely abandoned religion and attached their morals to politics. And let me tell you, there is nothing more annoying in a human than a sense of self-righteousness, and there is no better way to kill a productive discussion than by asserting your moral superiority. This is how Democrats lost the last election, in my humble opinion.

Jane Goodall was one of those rare birds who didn’t really care about politics, but who had this incredible sense of empathy for people and animals and the earth. I can’t find the exact quote, but she’s spoken about how her communication with chimpanzees is almost telepathic, like she can see with them mind to mind. That sounds crazy but just watch some footage of how she interacts with them and you might believe it. So perhaps it’s because of the time she spent with the chimpanzees, or perhaps it’s just the way she is, but she sees people, non-judgmentally; she sees what they need, and she tries to help.

In our current complex political landscape, I admit that I sometimes feel myself slipping into a kind of moral relativism. What is Good? What is Right? I refuse to believe that half of the American population wants Bad things because they are Bad people. At the policy level, there’s hardly anything that is unequivocally Good or Bad, because policies affect different people in different ways. Peoples needs come into conflict, just as animal’s needs come into conflict. That’s just part of nature. What is Good for the hungry mother orca is very Bad for the baby humpback whale. What is Good for the pack of wild dogs is Bad for the water buffalo mother and her young calf.

For instance, it’s hard for me to sort out my feelings on immigration, at the policy level, because it’s obvious to me that it’s good for some people and not so good for others, and a lot depends on the specifics. But I can tell you with great certainty that I do not like it when I read about ICE agents ripping a child from its mother’s arms. That feels Bad. It activates my brain’s emotional centers. As a mother, who feels there is something deeply sacred and untouchable about the mother-child bond, I can’t get behind policies of any kind that rip families apart. I think most people would agree. Jane would have focused on those personal stories, and appealed to our emotions and empathy, rather than trying to make high-level policy arguments about why immigration is good for GDP. This strikes me as a distinctly feminine style of leadership, and something we need more of.

Jane had a macro impact, but she was always focused on doing the next best thing, for anyone she saw suffering. You can’t save everyone, and you can’t stop suffering and death, you can’t alter the physics of the universe, and you’re not really helping anyone by sitting on your couch stuck in the news-doom cycle, but you sure as hell can adopt a rescue animal or drive your elderly neighbor to their doctor’s appointment, and that matters for them. At the macro level, nothing matters, because the universe is vast and indifferent, and people’s needs and values come into conflict, but at the micro level, there are little things you can do every day that come at very little cost to you, but could mean a great deal for others. If everyone was just a little more like Jane, the world would be a better place.

So, do unto others as you would have done unto you…Unless you are a really, really hungry mother orca, in which case it’s okay to brutally kill and eat the other mother humpback whale’s baby so that yours can live. I guess.

3. Pragmatic activists have more impact than purists.

Jane got a lot of criticism for working with Conoco oil in the Congo to establish what is now the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Centre. She was looking for a way to rehabilitate the dozens of chimpanzees who were taken from the wild and sold as pets, or thrown into the terrible Brazzaville zoo, where they were basically left to starve. Jane looked at the suffering animals, and she thought about the opportunity Conoco was offering, and she decided to go for it, because nobody was going to win if she played the moral purist. Of course, she got heaps of criticism for using “dirty money” and for helping Conoco “greenwash” its bad reputation. But she also saved what is now upwards of 70 suffering chimpanzees and rehabituated them to a semi-wild environment where they can live “naturally,” as they were meant to, until the end of their lives.

She also got criticism for working with right-wing politicians who were famous hunters. But hunters actually love the natural world, because without it there would be no hunting, and they were often some of her most powerful allies. In East Africa today, private hunting reserves are a critical part of the conservation strategy, because the managers have an incentive to maintain a healthy ecosystem to support the future of their business. These outfits know not to let a tourist shoot the dominant male lion in a pride, for instance, since a new male will come in to fill his place and kill all of the nursing cubs in order to get the females cycling again. Killing a lone male will make the hunter just as happy, while having far less impact on the lion population and wild ecosystem.

There are so many good projects that never get done these days because we are too busy yelling at each other in order to find common ground. But at the end of the day, if you have an important message to get out to the world, or an important project that you want to see materialize, and someone who doesn’t pass the moral purity test wants to help you do it, just get over yourself and fucking do it.

4. Unconventional mothers can raise great kids.

Jane had one son and raised him in Gombe National Park without skipping a beat in her field work. She is famous for having kept him in a “cage” in camp (actually more of a mesh enclosure, not unlike a playpen) to keep him safe from the baboons and wild animals. Otherwise, he apparently had a very carefree childhood (not unlike the hunter-gatherer childhoods I often write about), close to nature, to animals, and to other free range children, and by all accounts had a close relationship with his mother. Unsurprisingly, he choose to pursue a career in primatology research. His children, Jane’s grandchildren, continue to be very involved in her conservation work.

I think she’s a wonderful example of how we can integrate children into our work, passions, and broader lifestyles, no matter how unconventional, and this can be a gift to them. Many of the anthropologists whose work I cite in this newsletter worked as family units, including Jane’s mentor, Louis Leakey. He and his wife, Mary Leakey, are famous paleoanthropologists who worked as a family in Tanzania excavating early human fossils, and were the first to prove that human evolution started in Africa. They had three children, all of whom worked helping them excavate. It was actually their oldest son who uncovered the first Homo habilis specimen at Olduvai Gorge in 1960 (the first known human fossil), and the middle son, Richard Leakey, went on to become a famous paleoanthropologist in his own right. Mary was apparently quite the character: a chain smoker, who kept pet hyraxes in camp, and always dressed as if she were about to start excavating something, even if she was simply going out for tea.

It just goes to show you, there’s no one way to raise children! Sometimes when I start worrying about how other parents with children my age already have them enrolled in a long list of extracurricular activities, I stop and think, Okay, but what if my kids and I are happier staying home and reading The Pop-Up Book of Human Evolution and drawing pictures of fossils?? Meanwhile, their father, who is single-mindedly obsessed with surfing, is already busy inculcating them into wave culture. Would it really be so bad if they grew up without tennis lessons, but a bizarre love of paleoanthropology and the ability to throw epic cutbacks on a shortboard? They might not get into Stanford, but we can’t afford it anyway.

…

Jane is the kind of person who makes you think about your own legacy and impact. She’s certainly made me think about mine. I’ve always been the kind of person who feels driven to “make a difference,” but after becoming a mother, my understanding of how one does this shifted. I used to think “impact” meant working your tail off for an NGO (how I spent the first several years of my career) and later, making inroads for women in the tech sector. Now that I spend most of my time writing (and actually have quite a lot of readers), it feels like an appropriate time to consider what all of this writing and research is for. Maybe it’s not for anything? My writing and research work has been driven more by sheer curiosity than a desire to be a do-gooder, but sometimes I worry that I am on the verge of opening Pandora’s box (or maybe I already have) and that some things are better left unsaid.

Increasingly, I feel the purpose of life is just to live it, and to be good to the people around you. Perhaps my greatest impact will be how I care for my own children. But I think Jane would argue that we can take it one step further. We don’t all have to be conservation activists, but we can live our values, every day, in small ways. It really does matter when you take the time to compost, when you bike instead of driving somewhere, when you plant a garden. It matters how you treat your neighbors. It matters what you model for your children. We’re all just doing our best, but people like Jane inspire us to make our best just a little bit better.