A 71-Year-Old Jane Goodall on Her Fight to Save the Planet

On Wednesday, October 1, the Jane Goodall Institute announced that Goodall—the British-born primatologist, anthropologist, zoologist, and author—had died while traveling in Calfornia for work. She was 91.

Twenty years ago, Alexandra Fuller met with Goodall in Seattle to discuss her childhood in England, her groundbreaking research in Tanzania as a young woman, and her rigorous touring and speaking schedule in her 70s—work that Goodall described as what she “was sent to do.” Revisit that story, from Vogue’s August 2005 issue, right here.

In the flesh, Dr. Jane Goodall, Dame of the British Empire, looks exactly as you would expect, only more so—a rare experience with people whose images are doggedly repeated in photographs or on screens. Hers is not a face aching to appear decades younger than it is (a chemically or surgically altered look that Goodall describes as “blank, vacuous, nothing inside”) but rather the face of a woman who is frankly and unconsciously at home in her (very good) skin. The ponytail is her trademark—a simple, almost impatient gesture—thick, silver hair pulled back into a no-nonsense clasp at the nape of her neck. Her face emerges unimpeded: dark eyes tucked under mildly surprised brows, prominent cheekbones, an upturned nose (in spite of its owner’s egalitarian views), and a small, resolute jaw.

When I spoke with her recently she had come to rest, briefly, in the house of her friend and colleague Gary McAvoy, on the outskirts of Seattle. I had caught her in the midst of a multistate, months-long tour of North America, and her voice—soft with an upper-middle-class English accent—was thin with all the lecturing she had done. “I’m afraid I have to save it for the crowds,” she apologized, hand at her throat. On this day, she was wearing a red wool turtleneck sweater, blue jeans, brown moccasins, and dark glasses to protect her eyes from the glare of a brightly lit day. Behind her a windowsill looking out to the Puget Sound was vibrant with flowering orchids, and beyond that McAvoy’s garden was rapturous with spring. Goodall and McAvoy have just coauthored a book, Harvest for Hope (to be published by Warner this fall), about the importance of choosing to eat responsibly grown food. McAvoy’s garden reflects a correspondingly careful use of land, complete with native shrubs and young, grafted apple trees, about which Goodall jokingly admonished McAvoy, “Oh, Gary, you didn’t torture the poor things, did you?”

In 1964 Jane Goodall was described by The New York Times as “fragile and blonde, with huge green eyes… she looks as if she should be pouring tea or watering the roses instead of prowling the bush.” Which is nonsense, she told me: “There’s nothing fragile about me.” She has, she said, the constitution of “old boots.”