Author: Jane Goodall

On this day, let us please celebrate the progress science is making in finding a cure for HIV/AIDS. It is a day for giving thanks to those scientists who have worked so hard and continue to work to find new advancements for treatments and medications. We must also take time to think of all of the individuals and organizations fighting to prevent transmission and provide resources for those with the virus. It is a day for giving thanks to those doctors, nurses, family members and friends who tirelessly care for those with living with HIV/AIDS. It is a day to…

Over the past few weeks, friends and colleagues from around the world have written to express concern about what the results of the US presidential election might mean for all of us who care passionately about every aspect of JGI’s work – conservation, animal welfare, peace, human rights and wellbeing and environmental education. I absolutely share their concern. I am writing today to call on each of you, my friends and colleagues, to maintain hope, whilst being prepared to work even harder to do what is right for people, other animals and Planet Earth. And be prepared to stand up…

How could we have ever believed that it as a good idea to grow our food with poisons. – Dr. Jane Goodall  To celebrate the end of Non-GMO month, we are excited to share the below excerpt from Dr. Jane Goodall’s book, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants, published by Grand Central Publishing, a branch of Hachette Book Group. To read more about Dr. Goodall’s findings on GMOs and to take the journey with her as she discovers some of the most amazing things about trees and other plants, be sure to pick up a…

This story comes from another dark chapter in human history. A recent horror, which all but young children will remember. A day in 2001 when the World Trade Center was attacked, when the Twin Towers fell, when the world changed forever. I was in New York on that terrible day, traveling with my friend and JGI colleague Mary Lewis, We were staying in mid-Manhattan at the Roger Smith Hotel. First came the confused reporting from the television screen. Then another colleague arrived, white and shaken. She had been on the very last plane to land before the airport closed, and…

Today is World Elephant Day and I am thinking of the magical times when I have been privileged to watch wild elephants in different places in Africa. How wonderful it was to see them feeding, using their trunks like hands to pick leaves overhead, or tear up lush green grass in great bunches, then push the food into their mouths. And special times when I watched them bathing in a river, sucking up trunk fulls of water and squirting it over their backs, sometimes submerging with just the tips of their trunks showing like periscopes above the water. And what…

There were some individuals who were special. I am thinking of Rafiki (meaning ‘friend’ in Kiswahili) with her twin calves. I first saw them when they were only a couple of weeks old. It was when Derek Bryceson, my former husband, was Director of Tanzania National Parks. I had suggested that we might train park rangers to follow and observe elephants in the same sort of way as our field staff follow chimpanzees at Gombe. Ian Douglas-Hamilton agreed to give some workshops for rangers from the Ruaha, Tarangire and Manyara national parks. Four rangers from each of the parks were…

I will never forget my first sighting of a wild lion. Today lions are listed as threatened, but this was far from the case when I arrived in Africa in 1957. Louis and Mary Leakey invited me to take part in a three month ‘dig’ at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. The Leakey’s were sure that the “Olduvan pebbles” were bolus stones, used by early hominids although, at that time, only the fossilized bones of a variety of prehistoric animals had been found – caevotherium, the forerunner of the modern giraffe, giant warthogs and baboons the size of gorillas. Gillian (another young…

It was a great honour for me to be a United Nations Messenger of Peace along with Elie Wiesel. Having survived the horrors of the Nazi death camps that killed his father, and almost killed him, it would be understandable if thoughts of hatred and a desire for revenge had coloured the rest of his life. Instead he spoke, along with Nelson Mandela, of the need for forgiveness. I heard him speak twice to the young people of different nationalities gathered on International Day of Peace at the UN headquarters in New York. And on both occasions they listened with…

For years I have talked of my four reasons for hope: the energy, commitment, passion and sometimes courage of young people once they are aware of the problems facing us, and are empowered to take action; the human brain; the resilience of nature, and the indomitable human spirit. It was during the Climate March in September 2014 in New York that I suddenly realized there was another reason for hope. As I walked with Al Gore, the Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon and his wife, the French foreign minister, the Peruvian environment minister and others, I could see, all around, people…

Today is World Refugee Day. A day for us to reflect on the plight of the hundreds of thousands of refugees around the world. People – men, women, and children – who have escaped from countries torn apart by the horrors of war and violence. Or left their homes and all that they know in their desperation to find a future that is not blighted by crippling poverty. Or wanting to be reunited with family members who have already left. There are people trapped in refugee camps throughout Europe and Africa, often in the most terrible conditions. People for whom…