Author: Jane Goodall

I am horrified and deeply distressed to hear about the fire that is raging in the historic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It is a truly terrible tragedy. As I wrote in my book Reason for Hope, the cathedral played an important part during a very difficult time in my personal life, and the experience I had there, when I visited in 1977, marked an epiphany in my thinking about my place on Planet Earth and the meaning of my life. My thoughts and prayers are with the firefighters tackling the frightful flames, and all those in France for whom…

Written testimony of Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder, the Jane Goodall Institute UN Messenger of Peace U.S. House of Representatives House Natural Resources Committee September 26, 2018 Thank you for this opportunity to express my strong support for the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and my strong opposition to the package of nine bills before the House Natural Resources Committee on September 26, 2018. It is my considered opinion that if these bills are passed it will undermine the scientific integrity of the act and make it more difficult to protect and recover endangered species. We, as humans, are fortunate to…

The death of Kofi Annan will be mourned not only by his family, but by people around the world. In particular, the African nations will grieve at the passing of the first black African to be appointed Secretary General of the UN. It was a position which laid heavy responsibilities on him at a time when so much conflict raged around the world. I was honoured to be appointed by Kofi as one of his UN Messengers of Peace. This was because of the Jane Goodall Institute’s program for young people of all ages in over 80 countries, Roots &…

Animals help me survive my days of travel. As I go place to place around the world, I take note and remember well those animals I’ve gotten to meet along the way. Here are a few. A highlight of my visit to Kelowna in Canada was my meeting with Tundra, an 11 year old wolf who came with her owner, Gary Allan, to the green room prior to my lecture. She is a magnificent being, very calm, very relaxed.  But when I looked into her eyes I saw a wildness in her – though she was adopted as a 3…

The giraffe shot by Tess Thompson Talley of Texas was particularly valuable as a trophy because of his unusual black colouring. He was also a thinking, feeling being. During his 18 or so years we can only imagine what he had experienced. But he had undoubtedly been raised by a caring mother and surely enjoyed the company of the other youngsters in the group. And he must have engaged in many ‘necking’ contests with other males as he grew older. If he had been part of a study, or an animal known to rangers, he would have been easy to…

It is now 58 years to the day since I arrived for the very first time in what I then referred to, in my letters home, as “Chimpanzee Land”. At the time it was the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what was then Tanganyika – a British Protectorate. Today, of course, it is the Gombe National Park in the independent country of Tanzania. I was 26 years old back then, and 58 years is a long time. But if I close my eyes and let my mind free to wander into the past, I can relive that boat ride along…

Koko I so well remember when I visited Koko, at the invitation of Francine (Penny) Patterson (the woman who taught Koko a modified form of American Sign Language), for the first time. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but she already knew a great many words. She was not the first signing ape I met, for I was already familiar with Washo, the chimpanzee first taught sign language by the Gardeners, her tuition subsequently taken over by Roger Fouts (who also gave lessons to other signing chimpanzees, many of whom I met). In my studies at Gombe of wild chimpanzees,…

One of my five reasons for hope is “the indomitable human spirit”. No one exemplifies this more than Stephen Hawking. He was diagnosed with the slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, when he was 21 years old, and told he had only two years to live. At first he was very depressed and wanted to give up his studies. “What was the point?”, he said. But his doctors persuaded him to carry on, and, as everyone knows, he became an academic genius, a brilliant theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was, quite rightly, treated as…

I have known Esmond Bradley Martin for many years.  His murder is a real shock.  Esmond’s untiring commitment to fighting the illegal trade in ivory was unrivaled. The conservation community has lost a remarkable ally. His persistence and courage were boundless, and it is certain that his work resulted in the arrest of many illegal traffickers and the saving of many elephant lives.  It is particularly tragic that his death comes so soon after the murder of Wayne Lotter in Tanzania last year, another man who was indefatigable in his fight against the ivory trade. My thoughts and prayers are…

Let me now share with you the New Year message that I wrote very early on the last morning of 2017. It summarizes what I am feeling as we enter 2018. On December 23, I finally returned home (to The Birches, the house where I grew up in Bournemouth, UK, where my sister lives with her family and where I retreat between tours) after more than two months without a break, “on the road”. Which means airplanes, airports, hotels, lectures, meetings and so on. It was a crazy schedule that took me in that time period to Osaka and Tokyo…