We Need More Jane Goodalls

Not the teachers with thick textbooks or the graphs with red lines trending up or down. I mean the voices that made you pause. That made you look at an animal not as a specimen, but as a neighbor. That made you look at a pond as a microecosystem full of life.

For many of us, those voices are growing quieter. One by one, we’re losing the great science communicators and activists who taught us to care. The ones who spoke not just in data, but in stories. Who helped us fall in love with forests, oceans, elephants, insects, and the fragile web that holds it all together.

And with each loss, the question grows louder: who’s left to carry that torch? Whose voices are we raising?

The truth is, science on its own has never been enough. Charts and reports rarely stir people to act. What moves us is empathy, love, and passion. What changes us are stories. About humans who cared, about why we should care.

Think of Rachel Carson, credited with launching the modern environmental movement, whose book Silent Spring pulled back the curtain on pesticides and reshaped environmental law. Or Carl Sagan, whose Cosmos made galaxies feel like home. These were scientists, yes, but they were also storytellers.

They translated evidence into meaning.

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And among them stood Jane Goodall.

She didn’t arrive with a PhD in hand or an ivory tower pedigree. She arrived with patience, curiosity, and a willingness to sit still in a Tanzanian forest long enough for the chimpanzees to accept her.

What she found changed science forever. Chimps making and using tools. Chimps mourning their dead. Chimps hunting in groups, strategizing, forming alliances and rivalries.

But her gift wasn’t just the discoveries. It was how she told them.

She spoke about individual chimps by name, despite other scientists insisting on using numbers and codes. She refused to reduce them to data points because she had seen their personalities, their choices, their lives. David Greybeard, Flo, and Fifi are some of the names even my kids have learned from reading about Dr. Goodall's work.

That simple act, introducing animals as subjects with dignity, cracked something open in our collective imagination. It made us reconsider not just chimpanzees, but the entire spectrum of life around us.

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And her words on stage, “Only if we understand, will we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall they be saved,” became a mantra for a generation. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve used a similar quote on my own Climate Ages’ mission: When we understand, we care. When we care, we protect.

For me, and for countless others, she was a bridge. A reminder that science doesn’t have to choose between rigor and empathy. It can carry both.

Now that she is gone, I keep telling friends the same thing: we need more Jane Goodalls. Not because we need more chimp researchers in Tanzania. But because we need more scientists willing to be human in public. To risk being vulnerable. To speak with care as well as evidence.

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