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PHOTOGRAPH BY CBS/GETTY IMAGES
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By Rachael Bale, ANIMALS Executive Editor
Jane Goodall is hopeful.
The 87-year-old primatologist, conservationist, and Nat Geo Explorer has spent most of her life fighting to protect wildlife and nature from the cruelty and destruction of humans, yet Goodall, pictured above in 1965, has maintained an upbeat outlook that seems to defy reason. In her 2000 memoir, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, Goodall explored where that feeling comes from, with the help of religious scholar Phillip Berman:
“There are really only two ways, it seems to me, in which we can think about our existence here on Earth,” she writes. “We either agree with Macbeth that life is nothing more than a ‘tale told by an idiot,’ a purposeless emergence of life-forms....Or we believe that, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, ‘There is something afoot in the universe, something that looks like gestation and birth.’ In other words, a plan, a purpose to it all.”
For both her writings on spirituality and the effects that her groundbreaking chimpanzee discoveries had on how humans see themselves, Goodall today was awarded the 2021 Templeton Prize, a $1.5 million award that honors people whose scientific work sheds light on “the deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose within it.” She joins the ranks of other Templeton laureates, who include the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, physicist Freeman Dyson, and other religious leaders, scientists, philosophers, and humanitarians.
Best known for her long-term field studies of chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, which began in 1960, Goodall and her studies of their personalities, family bonds, and rituals helped transform the public’s view of animals. She discovered they use tools, wage war, form tight mother-baby bonds, and show compassion—more like humans than anyone had considered.
I encourage you to discover more about Jane Goodall, including:
* Her 1963 article for National Geographic about the Gombe chimps.
* A Q&A with Goodall on her 80th birthday
* In Praise of Difficult Women: An excerpt from author Karen Karbo’s book on 29 heroines who dared to break the rules.
* How Jane Goodall changed what we know about chimps
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