Jane Goodall

I had the great good fortune to meet Jane Goodall at the 2010 AARP National Conference, where I introduced her before she gave a major address. Speaking to thousands of elders she gave a message she has repeated in the years since then: “I just know that if we carry on with business as usual, we’re going to destroy ourselves. It would be the end of us, as well as life on Earth as we know it,” warned Jane Goodall (Berardeli, 2020). She has articulated her message with clear implications for the 2020 COVID crisis. She pointed to the role of zoonotic diseases that leap from animals to human, noting that biologists have long been predicting this. In Wuhan or Africa or the Amazon, we are chopping down the rainforest and coming into contact with animals. By eroding biodiversity, we end up creating environments where microorganisms can cross species, as COVID-19 has evidently done.

Jane Goodall has worried that the climate crisis is being put into second place because our attention is riveted by the pandemic. Since the time she spoke to the AARP conference, Jane Goodall has turned 80 and she travels more than 300 days a year, bringing her warning to groups around the world. But she is much more than a prophetess. She has created connections across the generations. In 1991 Goodall launched a program for young people known as Roots and Shoots. All over the world, she met young people who have lost hope in the future. In her eyes, it is the role of elders to recognize that “we have compromised their future and there was nothing they could do about it.” Jane Goodall’s answer was that it is not too late, that elders and young people can work together to slow down climate change and educate the world. Erik Erikson said that the last stage of life is framed by the struggle between ego-integrity and despair. Jane Goodall works to overcome despair. This is the path of action and the path of healing, and, into her eighties, Jane Goodall does not stop working for that goal.