The last tree

Jane Goodall was born on 3 April 1934 in London. Her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee toy named Jubilee when she was a toddler. She kept it for the rest of her life.

She did not follow a conventional path into science. She worked as a secretary, a waitress, and a film production assistant. In 1957, she visited a school friend in Kenya and arranged a meeting with Louis Leakey, the palaeontologist and anthropologist who was then the most influential figure in East African field research. Leakey hired her as his secretary, then as his research assistant.

Leakey believed that studying great apes in the wild could illuminate the behaviour of early humans. He wanted an observer without formal scientific training, someone who would watch the animals without the preconceptions that a university education might impose. Goodall fit the description perfectly.

In July 1960, Goodall arrived at the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. She was 26. For the first months, the chimpanzees fled from her. She sat in the forest, watched from a distance, and waited. Gradually, they tolerated her presence. A male she named David Greybeard became the first to allow her close observation.

What she saw changed biology. In October 1960, she watched David Greybeard strip leaves from a twig and insert it into a termite mound to extract insects. He was making a tool. When she reported this to Leakey, he sent his famous reply: 'Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.'

Goodall's early discoveries were extraordinary, but her methods infuriated the scientific establishment.

She named her chimpanzees. David Greybeard. Flo. Frodo. Passion. The convention in animal behaviour research was to assign numbers: Subject 1, Subject 2. Naming implied personality, individuality, emotional life. These were qualities the behavioural science of the 1960s reserved for humans.

Goodall also described chimpanzees as having emotions: grief, joy, anger, affection. She wrote about their social relationships in language that read more like biography than data. Her PhD supervisor at Cambridge, Robert Hinde, initially pushed back on the anthropomorphic framing. Goodall pushed back harder.

I was told I had done everything wrong. I shouldn't have given the chimps names. I shouldn't have talked about personality, mind, or emotions. Those were unique to the human animal. Fortunately, I had been taught by my dog as a child that that wasn't true.Jane Goodall, Various public lectures

She earned her PhD from Cambridge in 1966, one of very few people in the university's history to be admitted to a doctoral programme without an undergraduate degree. Her thesis documented tool use, hunting behaviour, and social structures among the Gombe chimpanzees. The work could not be dismissed, however much the methodology offended purists.

Time proved Goodall right on nearly every count. The idea that animals have emotions, use tools, and possess individual personalities is now mainstream in behavioural science. In the 1960s, it was heresy. Goodall committed the heresy first and waited for the field to catch up.

In 1977, Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI). Its initial mission was to continue and protect the Gombe research. Over the following decades, it expanded into habitat conservation, community development, and advocacy.

The shift in Goodall's own focus happened gradually, then all at once. Through the 1960s and 1970s, she was primarily a field researcher. She spent months at a time at Gombe. She published papers. She trained a new generation of primatologists. But by the mid-1980s, the scale of the threat to chimpanzees and their habitat had become impossible to study from a single research site.

Chimpanzee populations were collapsing. Deforestation across equatorial Africa was destroying habitat. The bushmeat trade was killing thousands of chimps a year. Goodall realised that saving chimpanzees required saving forests, and saving forests required changing how the communities living in and around them earned their livelihoods.

JGI developed community-centred conservation programmes that linked forest protection to education, healthcare, and sustainable agriculture. The model was ahead of its time: conservation that treated local people as partners rather than obstacles. By the 2000s, it was operating across Africa and had become a template for community-based conservation worldwide.

Goodall herself transitioned from scientist to advocate. She later described the decision as painful but necessary. The forest needed her voice more than her data.

In 1991, Goodall launched Roots & Shoots, a youth education and action programme. It began with 12 students in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The programme's premise was direct: young people identify problems in their communities involving people, animals, or the environment, and then design and execute projects to address them. No prescribed curriculum. No top-down direction. The students choose the problem and build the solution.

Roots & Shoots grew into one of the largest youth conservation networks on earth. By 2025, it was active in more than 65 countries. Hundreds of thousands of young people had participated. Projects ranged from wetland restoration in China to wildlife corridor mapping in Uganda to urban tree planting in Los Angeles.

Goodall considered Roots & Shoots her most important legacy, more than the chimpanzee research, more than the institute. She described it as an investment in the generation that would inherit the consequences of the current one's decisions.

The programme's survival beyond Goodall's death was something she planned for deliberately. JGI's structure ensures that Roots & Shoots operates independently of any single figure. Goodall spent the last decade of her life building something designed to outlast her.

Goodall received virtually every major honour available to a scientist and conservationist: the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the UNESCO Gold Medal, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, United Nations Messenger of Peace. She was on Time's list of the 100 most influential people. She received honorary degrees from universities on every inhabited continent.

She never received the Nobel Prize.

There is no Nobel Prize for environmental science or conservation. The Peace Prize, the closest fit, has been awarded to environmentalists only twice: to Wangari Maathai in 2004 and to the IPCC jointly with Al Gore in 2007. Goodall was nominated repeatedly. The Nobel committee never selected her.

The omission says more about the Nobel system than about Goodall. She redefined a scientific field, built a global conservation infrastructure, and inspired millions of young people to engage with the natural world. The prize system simply had no category for what she did.

Goodall did not appear to lose sleep over it. When asked about the Nobel in interviews, she typically redirected the conversation to chimpanzees or to whatever forest was being cut down that week.

In her final years, Goodall maintained a schedule that would have exhausted someone half her age. She travelled 300 days a year. She gave lectures, attended fundraisers, met with heads of state, and visited Roots & Shoots projects on multiple continents. She carried a stuffed monkey named Mr. H (a gift from a blind magician named Gary Haun) to every public appearance.

By 2025, she was frail but still active. Her speaking tour that autumn included events across the United States. She was scheduled to participate in a tree-planting ceremony near the burn zones left by the Los Angeles wildfires earlier that year.

On 1 October 2025, she died in her sleep at a friend's home in California. The Jane Goodall Institute confirmed her death the following morning.

The tree planting went ahead. Organisers gathered near the burn zone, observed a moment of silence, and put the first sapling into the scorched earth. They named the site after her.

Goodall's final public message, posted to social media days before her death, urged people not to give up. She had spent 30 years telling audiences the same thing: there is still time, the natural world is resilient, young people are already doing the work. She never wavered from this position, even as the evidence for optimism grew thinner and the forests kept shrinking.