Listening to Jane
“What you have to do is get into the heart. And how do you get into the heart? With stories.”
— Dr. Jane Goodall, World Economic Forum, 2020
A week ago, on October first, Jane passed while on a speaking tour—doing what she always did, the only thing she knew: crusading for kindness, love, and care for all life on this planet through storytelling and inspiring individuals.
It’s taken me this past week to put this piece together. Over those seven days, there have been hundreds of memoriams, retrospectives, and writings about Jane’s life. Most have detailed her incredible mark on the study of chimpanzees, her impact on science, and her commitment to conserving not just chimps but all life on Earth. This is not that. This is selfish—it’s about what Jane gave to me. Except for a few meals on the lakeshore of Tanganyika, I don’t think I gave her much in the brief time we spent together. It’s about inspiring individuals—what I believe is Jane’s greatest legacy.
Over the past few days, I’ve found myself frozen in a hazy pause, not quite knowing how to process the idea of her being gone. In these past 30 years, we crossed paths only a few times since the early 1990s when I first journeyed to Gombe three times. In many ways, that’s where my formal connection to great apes took root, and where the seeds of GLOBIO were planted—the nonprofit parent of this channel, Apes Like Us, and our podcast Talking Apes.
I was incredibly naïve when I first arrived at Gombe—both in the primate world and as a photographer and filmmaker. My five years in Australia and Papua New Guinea had prepared me for some things, but not for Africa, and certainly not for the orbit of a science luminary the size of Jane Goodall. Someone who worked with Jane once described it as “following behind a comet as she streaked across the universe, touching thousands of lives along her journey.” I was one of those lives, though I didn’t know it yet.
My comet encounter came in the tropical forests of Gombe, surrounded by her familiar family: Fifi and her offspring—Freud, Frodo, and the newest, two-year-old Faustino. It was an accident of fortune; I found myself there filming and photographing Gombe’s chimps—easily the most famous chimpanzees in the world.
Photo: ©G.Ellis/GLOBIO
On trips two and three, life at Gombe settled into a rhythm. Jane did her thing, and I did mine. After a brief breakfast, I headed out to find chimps and film; Jane was busy with—well, Jane stuff. To this day, I can’t offer many details; we were simply doing our own things. Each evening, after a dip in Lake Tanganyika, I’d make dinner. Jane had cooked once—after that, I took over. She was delighted I did. Clearly, being a master cook isn’t a prerequisite for being a world-famous primatologist.
We’d sit on the lakeshore, eating and watching lightning dance across the lake in storm clouds above what was then Zaire. Those were the same storm clouds that unleashed their torrent over Gombe every day at 3 p.m., like clockwork. The chimps knew it, Jane knew it, and I quickly learned it. The rains broke the humid heat and created some of my most memorable images from Gombe.
Photo: ©G.Ellis/GLOBIO
Over the years, I’ve thought about those three Gombe trips, often wishing I had spent more time filming Jane. But even early on, it was clear she wasn’t a prima donna begging to be photographed—after all, she’d already been photographed and filmed hundreds of times. It was those evening lakeshore conversations that became the indelible images of Jane that remain with me after all these years. We talked and listened and talked some more—rarely about chimps, mostly about life. We both agreed that 105 years old was our goal. Maybe that’s why news of her passing stunned me so deeply.
During my third trip, Jane suggested I leave for the Virungas. She said, “The chimps are safe; they’ll be here. The gorillas may not be there in five years.” (Dian Fossey’s murder a few years earlier had left mountain gorillas without a conservation defender.)
A few days later, I backtracked down Lake Tanganyika on a water taxi to Kigoma, boarded the MV Liemba, and sailed overnight to Bujumbura, Burundi—never returning to Gombe. I spent the next few years with mountain gorillas. That same year, in 1991, Jane sat listening to a dozen young Tanzanians on her back porch in Dar es Salaam. The students expressed their frustration about local issues and their feelings of powerlessness. Jane, impressed by their energy and compassion, encouraged them to take action on the problems they identified in their communities. That Jane-quality—the art of listening—gave birth to Roots & Shoots, which has since grown into a global movement. I didn’t see Jane again until more than a decade later, in the U.S.
Gerry photographing mountain gorillas 1992 Photo: ©G.Ellis/GLOBIO
Jane inspired something different in everyone. She had a magical ability to tap into the thing each of us could use to drive ourselves.
“unless you touch their hearts, they won’t act.”
She inspired in me the art of listening—listening to others of my species and to species of other kinds.
A decade after Jane listened to Tanzanian students, I spent a few hours outside Nairobi, Kenya, listening to inner-city kids trying to understand the dangers African elephants were facing. That conversation gave birth to GLOBIO.
GLOBIO is about storytelling—connecting people to species and to the planet. Jane was a master storyteller because she first listened and then found the words to move the heart. “You can bombard people with statistics,” she said, “but unless you touch their hearts, they won’t act.” That touching of hearts fueled hope—not pixie-dust hope, but the tangible kind reflected in the thousands of lives that have become the legion of change known as Roots & Shoots, and all those who have been inspired to act in their own way.
Originally written for a video remembrance by our Executive Director Gerry Ellis, on our Apes Like Us YouTube channel.
