By Joel Saget,Mike O’Sullivan,Senior Contributor

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British ethologist and primatologist Jane Goodall poses during a photo session on October 18, 2024 in Paris. (Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP) (Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)
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This week’s note is not about economics nor geopolitics but rather the inspiring Jane Goodall, who very sadly passed away in California this week. I’ve come to know her in the last five years as a trustee of the JG Legacy Foundation, and to add to the great mountain of tributes to her, can attest that she was a remarkable person, which is something we can say of too few figures on the world stage.

Jane was much better known in the Anglophone world than elsewhere, but the contribution of her research is felt internationally. To those who are less familiar with her life, in her early 20’s Jane saved up enough money to travel to Africa to pursue her ambition of studying wildlife (chimpanzees). After a period working with the famous paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, she won his support for a solo research trip into the Gombe reserve in Tanzania to study chimps (though her mother came along to keep her company). There is a very good BBC documentary on Jane’s work in Gombe.

This research became her life’s work and changed the way the scientific community regarded animals and the ways in which they were researched. An early National Geographic article by Jane, authored in 1963, is worth a read, not just because it gives a sense of her patience and intrepid curiosity, but for what it teaches us about the relationship between animals and humans, and the revelation (it was at the time) that animals are social, emotional creatures.

The flip side of this thought is that many humans are only a thin veneer away from the behaviour of chimps, and in a world where the law of the jungle is re-asserting itself, there are more and more displays of what we could call primate type behaviour.

Jane Goodall had many qualities – she was, I think very tough, brave and firmly believed in the causes she pioneered and supported. She travelled everywhere – in the past week she went from Bournemouth to New York and then California and was supposed to come to Cork at the end of this month. Though she was welcomed in the very top echelons of world society, she was most certainly not materialistic, save for a weakness for good whiskey.

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If I could sum her up, and draw lessons from her life to today’s world, I feel she was otherworldly in respects of her life story, comportment, and influence. Without over-moralising her life, there are at least two observations to make.

The first, given that my inbox is full of tales of the de-humanisation of society – collapsing demographics, job markets deflated by AI, diminished social interaction between young people and other angsts created by social media, is of how Jane is a role model. In this context, Jane Goodall is an example to young and old of a life well lived, and one that has mattered. Two of her qualities that I would stress that can inform people today, are her intellectual curiosity and courage.

The second remark, which is all the more obvious, is that the causes Jane pioneered and the values she personified, are increasingly the exception than the rule. USAID budget cuts will lead to deaths in Africa, conservationism and the cause of the environment are no longer fashionable causes though arguably they are more vital than ever. In politics, there is a narrative that ‘bad things are happening’ without meaningful opposition, serious counterarguments, and meaningful leadership. One of Jane’s noteworthy statements was ‘The biggest danger to our future is apathy’. The analogies to the political and corporate worlds are obvious.

I would like to finish this note by encouraging readers to dip into the story of Jane’s life (again sites like National Geographic are good), and the various projects that she has inspired like Roots and Shoots the movement that helps young people impact their communities, the Jane Goodall Institute and then the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation, which will soon start to fund the projects that Jane cared about.

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