IN MEMORIAM

The quiet power of Jane Goodall

The first time I met Jane Goodall, she was nursing a glass of Irish whiskey, neat. It was 2019 and I was interviewing her for a column on leadership after she had just finished a long day of public appearances.

The whiskey was not to calm her nerves, she told me, but to help soothe her voice.

This is what Goodall did toward the end of her extraordinary life. She talked. To anyone who would listen. To presidents and preschoolers. In classrooms and at keynotes. She was indefatigable, traveling relentlessly and imploring humanity to protect the natural world.

Her stump speech had long ago moved beyond discussing her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees that had made her famous. Instead, she preached a message of interdependence, the need to care for the planet and our fragile role in the web of life.

I didn’t blink when Goodall told me she needed the whiskey. She spoke softly, her voice sometimes little more than a whisper. She was petite, too. But her presence filled the room.

It wasn’t only her celebrity that lit people up with delight. Rather, there was a quasi-spiritual quality to Goodall, a sense that she somehow embodied the wisdom of the world.

She was cleareyed about the precarious state of the natural environment, about the threats posed by biodiversity loss and climate change. And yet she was still compassionate, still joyful, still hopeful. As my colleague Catrin Einhorn wrote yesterday, she seemed “full of quiet energy. She was gentle and sharp, all at once.” (Read the entire piece here.)

Over the past few years, I stayed in touch with Goodall, catching up with her at gala dinners and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. We didn’t talk that often, but when we did we would talk about climate change and animals and children, and even Donald Trump.

Just as often, however, we would sit together and sometimes not say a word.

During her days as a primatologist in Tanzania, Goodall spent long stretches of her life alone in the wilderness as she observed Flo, Fifi and David Greybeard and many others, earning their trust and discovering that chimps are not so unlike we humans. She learned to be perfectly at peace away from the thrum of the modern world, totally comfortable in absolute silence.

The last time I saw Goodall, she had yet again finished a long day of public appearances. She was tired of talking, so after exchanging a few pleasantries, we sat down and stayed there for 30 minutes or so, sometimes locking eyes, sometimes looking out the window and into the mountains.

Then she gave me a hug and we said goodbye.