Jane Goodall walking along the beach of Lake Tanganyika National Geographic/Michael Haertlein

Jane Goodall: The Hope National Geographic

Jane Goodall has achieved an incredible amount in her life. As a researcher, she has changed our understanding of chimpanzees – highly intelligent animals with unique cultures and tight family bonds. As a conservationist, she has galvanised generations of activists.


A new documentary, Jane Goodall: The Hope, features footage spanning more than seven decades, including her early chimpanzee work at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. The film picks up where the 2017 documentary Jane ended, focusing more on Goodall’s shift to environmental activism.

“We are part of the natural world,” she says in the film. “As we destroy the natural world we destroy our own future.”

Before the covid-19 pandemic shut borders, Goodall was travelling 300 days of the year, giving talks to packed theatres and meeting thousands of school children through her youth programme, Roots & Shoots, which runs in more than 60 countries. “The kind of life I’m living now is completely crazy and there are times when I think I cannot go on like this,” she says.

We see Goodall in her home in Bournemouth in the UK, toasting bread on an iron in a hotel room, and working on her laptop while sitting on the ground in an airport. She seems propelled by an urgent sense that time is running out.

“I think this pandemic is waking people up,” Goodall told me during a press call. The impact of environmental destruction has been brought into focus by the covid-19 outbreak, she says, as a result of practices that bring different species into closer proximity with each other, creating opportunities for viruses to jump from animals to humans.

Great apes are known to be susceptible to human respiratory illnesses. In her sanctuaries for orphaned chimps, staff are wearing protective gear as a precaution against covid-19.

“We’ve stopped actually following the chimps in our studies,” she says on the call. “We just have one person a day in protective masks and gloves… not going near the chimps, just from a distance monitoring them to see if there is any sign of disease, and hopefully not coming across dead bodies.

A chimpanzee eats a mango in a tree National Geographic/Bill Wallauer

“It is a big worry because we can’t protect all the chimps across Africa and once the virus gets into them, which I pray it won’t, then I don’t know what can be done.”

But despite the current state of the world, she remains hopeful. “Nature is so resilient. We see that now that the pollution from driving and so on has stopped [due to lockdowns across the world], the air in the big cities is clean,” she says on the press call.

“That’s another hope: that enough people will suddenly realise what it could be like without the pollution, and that there’d be enough of them to persuade their politicians to make legislation to stop the pollution coming back.”

It may be an era of climate emergency and overwhelmingly negative news, but for Goodall, despair is simply not an option. “If we lose hope, then we might as well all give up,” she says while giving a lecture in the film. “If we think there’s no way forward and that we’re doomed, as many scientists tell us, then eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we’re going to die.” The audience laughs, but she presses on. “We mustn’t let it happen.”

“Wherever I go, there are young people with shining eyes wanting to tell Dr Jane what they’re doing to make this a better world,” she says on the press call. “They’re…influencing their parents and grandparents. Some of their parents may be in government; some of them may be in big corporations.”

Her message, one The Hope conveys clearly, is of the promise of collective action.

“Hope is contingent upon our taking action together soon,” she tells an audience in the film. “All of us, every single one of us, we’ve all got to do our bit.”