"There's a little Bible box that I made for my grandmother when I was 12 (it's got little text from all throughout the Bible and I've read it all), and three times - when I was feeling grumpy about having to go out on the road again, I picked the same one out of hundreds. It said 'He who has once set his hand to the ploughshare and set it back is not fit for the Kingdom of Heaven'. And my sister said (to me) 'Off you go!'"
The great passion of Jane's life has been taking care of God's gift of creation, especially chimpanzees. From the time she was a child in England, she had a passion for animals. When she was a little over one, her father gave her a toy chimpanzee, in honor of a baby chimp born at the London Zoo. She named her toy "Jubilee," and carried him everywhere.
She was a good student, but she had more interest in being outdoors and learning about animals. Even as a child, she demonstrated a remarkable ability to be quiet, patient, observe, and take notes: once she spent five hours in a hen-house so that she could observe how a hen lays an egg. She loved animals so much that by the time she was ten or eleven she dreamed of living with animals in Africa. Her mother encouraged Goodall's dream. She told her,
"Jane, if you really want something, and if you work hard, take advantage of the opportunities, and never give up, you will somehow find a way."
Sadly, Jane's parents didn't have the finances to send their brilliant daughter to college, so she attended secretarial school. Then she worked at Oxford, and later for a documentary film company in London. When a friend invited her to her family's farm in Kenya, she returned home and waited tables to save for an ocean passage to Kenya.
Once she was in Africa, she managed to finagle an interview with famous paleontologist Louis S. B. Leakey, who was interested in great apes because of his pioneering research into human origins. Leakey, inspired both by her secretarial background and her self-acquired knowledge of Africa and great apes, hired her as his assistant. He immediately saw that she had the makings of a scientist, and, Jane has said, he especially respected women's patience for doing scientific observations.
By 1960, at the age of twenty-six, Jane, with her mother as chaperone, was setting up camp in the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, near the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in what is now called Tanzania. She had funding for only six months of field work. But - she had leaped at her opportunity, and found a way to begin to fulfill her childhood dream. She had finally set her hand to the plough in her work for the Kingdom: to seriously observe and befriend the great ape she had loved since she was a child.
Not knowing established scientific practice, she came to scientific observation and research with fresh eyes and a unique approach. Scientists - most of them males - wanted to keep their distance and observe animals while detached from emotions, which they believed would adversely affect their research. So they identified each animal with a number. Jane desired a personal relationship with the chimpanzees, and observed them to be distinct individuals, with distinct personalities and emotions, so she gave each chimpanzee a name, such as Fifi, Flo, Mr. McGregor, David Greybeard.
She made three discoveries that would turn the scientific world on its head and ignite tremendous controversy. First, scientists had believed that chimpanzees were vegetarians. Jane, who spent all day every day observing her chimps through binoculars, saw one chimp, David Greybeard, eating the carcass of a small animal. Later she saw groups of chimpanzees hunting and eating smaller animals.
On another occasion, she saw David Greybeard use a blade of grass to poke into a tunnel, and then pull it out covered with termites, which he ate. He also took a twig, stripped it of leaves, and then used it to fish for termites in a termite hill. Scientists had believed that animals could not make tools, but David had demonstrated both tool use and tool making.
When Jane cabled Leakey with these findings, he approached National Geographic and convinced them to give Jane a grant to continue her game-changing work at Gombe. Eventually, National Geographic sent a photographer, Hugo van Lawick, to photograph and document Jane's research. As Hugo was a genius in photography, and a perfectionist dedicated to photographing each animal as an individual, Jane and Hugo understood and respected each other. His photographs of a willowy English beauty in high-top canvas sneakers, and khaki shorts, her hair in a ponytail, interacting with great apes in unheard-of ways, led to the production of a wildly popular National Geographic film, "Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees."
Jane's fame continued to spread, and eventually she was accepted at Cambridge University in their doctoral program, one of very few individuals accepted without a Master's Degree. She completed her Ph.D., wrote dozens of books, became the subject of more films - National Geographic just released a new film, "Jane," in 2017 - and became a mentor to several new generations of scientists, many of them young women who continued her work of observing the great apes and helping to establish sanctuaries for them. Gombe and her experiences there continued to be the high point of her intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life.
In her classic book "Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey," she says,
"I do not want to discuss evolution in [depth], only touch on it from my own perspective: from the moment when I stood on the Serengeti plains holding the fossilized bones of ancient creatures in my hands to the moment when, staring into the eyes of a chimpanzee, I saw a thinking, reasoning personality looking back. You may not believe in evolution, and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves. How should the mind that can contemplate God relate to our fellow beings, the other life-forms of the world? What is our human responsibility? And what, ultimately, is our human destiny?"
She continues by pointedly challenging all of us to take up our responsibility to care for our planet:
"With language we can ask, as can no other living beings, those questions about who we are and why we are here. And this highly developed intellect means, surely, that we have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own human species — quite regardless of whether or not we believe in God. Indeed, those who acknowledge no God, but are convinced that we are in this world as an evolutionary accident, may be more active in environmental responsibility — for if there is no God, then, obviously, it is entirely up to us to put things right. On the other hand, I have encountered a number of people with a strong faith in God who shrug off their own human responsibilities, believing that everything is safely “in God’s hands.” I was brought up to believe that 'God helps those who help themselves.' We should all take responsibility, all play our part in helping to clean up and heal the planet that, in so many ways, we have desecrated."
The woman, who, as a girl, read the Bible and fantasized about being a martyr, has surely still given her life to save God's creation. It's in living with the animals and being in green spaces where she feels closest to the great spiritual Mystery which is beyond all of us and yet still surrounds us, strengthens us, and gives us peace. Yet, she rarely visits the soul-nourishing green spaces of Gombe these days. She spends a lot of time in airport terminals. She well understands the cost of discipleship; as a woman in her eighties she is still challenged by Jesus' words in Luke 9:62:
"No man who puts his hand to the plough and then looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God."
As an evangelist for preserving our earth, she has established the Jane Goodall Institute, which has as its mission statement:"We are a global community conservation organization that advances the vision and work of Dr. Jane Goodall. By protecting chimpanzees and inspiring people to conserve the natural world we all share, we improve the lives of people, animals and the environment. Everything is connected—everyone can make a difference." She has also established the Jane Goodall Institute's Roots and Shoots program (photo below) in nearly a hundred countries, training young people to be conservation leaders, because one day she was approached by a group of young people who told her their concerns about vanishing animal populations and pollution.
"13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report Friday, November 3, that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has occurred since the start of the 20th century, creating the warmest period in the history of civilization.
"Over the past 115 years, global average temperatures have increased 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to record-breaking weather events and temperature extremes, the report says. The global long-term warming trend is 'unambiguous,' it says, and there is 'no convincing alternate explanation' that anything other than humans - the cars we drive, the power plants we operate, the forests we destroy - are to blame....
"The climate science report is part of a congressionally mandated review conducted every four years known as the National Climate Assessment. The product of hundreds of experts within the government and academia and peer-reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, it is considered the United States' most definitive statement on climate change science." (Lisa Friedman, "New York Times," as quoted in the Nov. 4 edition of "The Buffalo News.")
Will this report change the Trump Administration's views on climate change? Will it affect President Trump's stance at the United Nations' Climate Change Conference this coming week in Bonn, Germany? At this point we are the only nation that has walked away from the Paris Climate Accord. Will it influence the Environmental Protection Agency, which has wiped references to climate change from its website and bars scientists from presenting scientific reports on the subject? Has President Trump read the report yet?
We can only hope and pray that scientists today - and indeed all of us - will follow the courageous example and dedicated energy of Jane Goodall, who told the truth while in her twenties in spite of extreme criticism, and speaks the truth around the world as she ages into her eighties. She has never withdrawn her hand from the plough. Neither must we, if we want to enter the heavenly Kingdom.