Jane Goodall, conservationist and chimpanzee researcher, died at 91

Jane Goodall, the world’s primatologist, activist and environmentalist, whose discoveries on chimpanzees have forever changed what a human being means, died at the age of 91.

Jane Goodall Institute confirmed his death on Instagram on Wednesday, saying that its founder died of natural causes.

She was in California where she visited a speech tour in the United States

“The discoveries of Dr. Goodall as an ethologist transformed science, and it was a tireless defender of the protection and restoration of the natural world,” said the position.

During its five decades living among chimpanzees in what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, Goodall has made revolutionary observations which have fundamentally modified not only how scientists understand endangered primates, but how humanity understands its place in the world.

Even when this emblematic chapter of his life ended in 1986, Goodall continued to be a passionate activist. She spent this last part of her life to go through the world, to speak in front of the crowd and to meet world leaders to raise awareness of the devastating effects of climate change on the planet and all those who inhabit it – human and animals, like.

‘Girls did not do this kind of thing’

Goodall began the work of her life as a young woman without formal education in science, armed only with tenacity, a deep affection for animals and a childhood dream to explore the desert in Africa.

She was born in London in 1934 from the businessman Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall and the novelist Margaret Myfanwe Joseph.

She inherited her mother’s passion for written speech and read with Voraciously the books of Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan when he was a child. These stories opened her imagination and she swore that when she grew up, she lived in Africa and worked with animals.

“Everyone laughed except my incredible mother. I attribute so much what I did to her support. She would say:” If you really want to do it, you will probably have to work very hard and take advantage of opportunities and never give up, “Goodall told the former CBC host at Wendy Mesley in an interview in April 2016 The National.

The Second World War was raging and the family had no money, said Goodall.

“Africa was far away and the girls did not do that kind of thing.”

Determined, Goodall worked as a waitress and did odd jobs and secretarial work to save enough money to go to the farm of a childhood friend outside Nairobi, Kenya, in 1957 at the age of 23.

There she met the paleontologist Louis Leakey, who employed her as assistant. Later, seeing both his potential as a researcher and his passion for fauna, he offered him the opportunity that would change his life forever.

It was to observe the chimpanzees in the wild.

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A plea life

Goodall arrived on the eastern bank of Lake Tanganyika on July 13, 1960, with a tent, a pair of twins and – on the insistence of the British authorities who said that a young woman should not be unaccompanied in the desert – his mother.

She spotted her first chimpanzee in the evening, a graying man whom she nicknamed David Graybeard. In the four months following Graybeard and her companions, she made three major discoveries that rocked the scientific community.

The first was that the chimpanzees, considered vegetarians, eat termites. In addition, they collect these termites from their nests with sticks, which means that they use tools. And above all, they strip the branches of the leaves to obtain these sticks, which means that they develop their tools.

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The conservationist Jane Goodall died at 91

Jane Goodall, British conservation and researcher renowned for her work with chimpanzees, died at 91 years of natural causes.

According to the National Geographic, this last discovery has transformed the contemporary thought of humanity. Until then, it was greatly believed that the ability to make tools has distinguished humans from the animal kingdom. We often called “man, the tool manufacturer”.

When Goodall wrote to Leakey on what she had learned, he wrote: “Now we have to redefine” the tool “,” redefine “, or accept chimpanzees as humans”.

Later, the biographer of Goodall, Dale Peterson, would call him “the woman who redefined the man”.

Unconventional thinking

It was not the last time that Goodall would face the status quo.

After 15 months on the ground, she took a brief break from Chimpanzees to obtain her doctorate in ethology, the study of animal behavior, from the University of Cambridge.

There, Goodall has kicked heads with his teachers, who deduced his methods on the ground. The way Goodall wrote on the chimpanzees – give them names instead of numbers and assign them personality traits – was called anthropomorphism, and he stole from the scientific convention.

“It was a little shocking to be said that I had done everything wrong,” he said Goodall National Geographic in 2010.

However, she kept her convictions and the lesson, she says that she learned to spend time with her company dog ​​Rusty when she was a child: “You cannot share your life significantly with any kind of animal with a reasonably well developed brain and not realize that animals have personalities.”

It is this philosophy that would guide her throughout her career.

Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees

In a few years in Gombe in Tanzania, Goodall’s work began to attract international attention, largely thanks to the 1965 television film Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees. She would appear in 83 movies and television programs and write dozens of books.

His fame helped her transform her small field camp into Gombe Stream Research Center, which gave 165,000 hours of data thanks to the observations of more than 320 chimpanzees, which led to more than 430 academic and theses.

In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, a global non -profit organization which aims to protect large apes and preserve their habitats. He has offices around the world, including three in Canada.

After more than two decades with the Graybeard descendants, Goodall decided that it was time for a new chapter in his life to begin. In 1986, she retired from work in the field and devoted her life to plea.

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At the top of her philanthropic career, it was said that she spent 300 days a year to travel, to speak during events, to collect funds and to meet government personalities to defend Jane Goodall Institute and other causes that are close to heart.

In 2002, she was appointed Messenger of the United Nations Peace by the Secretary General of the time, Kofi Annan.

His plea mark has concentrated not only on conservation efforts, but also on the reduction of poverty and the empowerment of girls and women – problems which she considered intrinsically interconnected.

“How could we even try to save the chimpanzees when people had trouble surviving?” Goodall told Huffington Post in 2011.

His reforestation and education project on the Lake Tanganyika watershed, launched in 1994, helps people who live near the great African lakes thanks to microfinance, education and health initiatives, largely targeting women and girls.

Goodall has often explained how proud it was in the Institute’s youth program, Roots & Shots, which encourages young people to identify challenges in their communities and develop solutions. It started with a dozen students in Tanzania and have since spread to 130 countries, including Canada.

“His main message is that each of us counts and makes a difference every day,” Goodall told Mesley in this last CBC interview. “I think it’s such a success because we do not tell them what to do, except to choose a project that makes the world better for people, for animals, for the environment that we all share.”

Before leaving his duties in January, the president of the time, Joe Biden, awarded Goodall the Presidential Liberty Medal, the highest civil distinction in the country.

Goodall leaves his son behind him, Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick, better known as Grub, of his first marriage to National Geographic The filmmaker Hugo Van Lawick, as well as three grandchildren.

Her second husband, Derek Bryceson, a member of the Tanzanian parliament and former director of the national parks of Tanzania, died in 1980 from cancer.

During a Ted 2008 conference, Goodall credited his grandchildren as the inspiring force behind his activism.

“Whenever I look at them and I think how we have injured this beautiful planet since I was their age, I feel this despair,” she said.

“Do we care about the planet for our children? How many of us have children or grandchildren, nieces, nephews? We care about their future? And if we care about their future, we, as an elite in the world, we can do something.”