Among Jane Goodall's Many Lasting Legacies Is Advocacy For A Sustainable Earth, Climate Change Solutions

Practicing what she preached: During Jane
Goodall's September visit to New York City
for Climate Week, she got around town
on an environmentally friendly 
Pedicab.  Goodall passed away
Wednesday at age 91. 

As you've almost surely heard already, the world lost a Great One Wednesday. Jane Goodall, the famous  primatologist, anthropologist, conservationist, media figure and one of the best women to ever grace this Earth, passed away at the age of 91.  

A big part of Goodall's advocacy was creating and keeping a sustainable planet for all creatures. Climate change might have seemed tangental to Goodall's mission, but it was a critical part of it.   

For Goodall, it wasn't just about keep the world safe and clean and stable for chimpanzees. She had all animals - including us humans - in her heart. 

In a 2019 ABC interview, she said climate change has left the planet imperiled. "We are definitely at a point where we need to make something happen... We are imperiled. We have a window of time. I'm fairly sure we do. But, we've got to take action," she said. 

Her advocacy lasted until the very end. Goodall was on a speaking tour in California this week and died of natural causes. Retirement had never really crossed her mind. 

Just recently, on September 21-28, she attended New York Climate Week  during which she gave interviews to publications like Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg regarding the natural world and our need to preserve it. 

She has acknowledged that people have come to her "depressed" 'about climate change and other environmental dangers. But she responded with a message of courage.

On her Facebook page from Climate Week, Goodall said the climate crisis is the greatest challenge of our time, but change is still possible if we act with courage and hope.  

Alway finding ways to be a good example, Goodall got around New York City when visiting there by hiring Pedicabs, which are carriages powered by drivers propelling the vehicles via bicycle. 

Vox highlighted recent interviews in which Goodall gave a plug for literally saving Earth from excessive technology, the worst excesses of business interests and - of course - climate change. 

According to Vox:  

"'It seems these days everybody is so involved with technology that we forgot that we're not only part of the natural world, we're an animal like all the others,' Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, a conservation group, said last week during the Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit in NYC. 'We're an animal like all the others. But we depend on it for clean air, water, food, clothing -everything.'

And yet - 'We're destroying the planet,' she said.

Vox noted that as recently as last week, she said we know what's killing the planet: Industrial agriculture, including livestock and burning fossil fuels. 

People magazine noted that Goodall acknowledged that caring for humans and the environment is "a tough problem" as she put it. But she believed solutions were out there.

"We've got to get together," she said. "And scientists are beginning now to really work out the technology that can help us live in greater harmony with the natural world....But it's a problem that should be at the heart of everything. It should be at the heart of politics, and it should be at the heart of business."

At her core, Goodall was an optimist, a rarity in our fraught world nowadays. I suspect she saw how animals often ingeniously figure things out. She had confidence that the creatures known as humans could do the same if we could just learn to understand that advancement isn't necessarily just bulldozing through everything. 

Goodall taught me and I'm sure countless others to look at all animals with awe and wonder, and, ultimately, understanding. In large part because of Goodell, I frequently stop and watch the animals and birds I encounter as they live their lives.   

I observe how nothing goes to waste in the animal world, that everything has its purpose, there are important symbiotic relationships between species, and that we also need to take a moment to play, and find joy. (If you've ever seen a bear cub in action, you know what I'm talking about).  

Goodall was a joyful warrior on a quest to teach us (sometimes dumb) humans that we can find ways to live in a world that sustains us all. To the end, she had faith that we would somehow find a way to make it happen. Wrestling climate change to submission is a big part of that. 

Her thinking on this might seem naive and pollyann-ish. But Goodall was far, far too smart to indulge in optimistic fantasies. 

She spend a lifetime watching and researching and loving the animal kingdom and all the wonderful things they do.

If chimpanzees can do it, so can us humans.  Where others saw defeatism, Goodall saw possibility. Of all the incredible things Goodall did in her 91 years, her sense of hope is her greatest legacy.