I have read countless memoriams about Jane, deliberately holding back mine until the dust had settled. The world has been writing about her for days now, scrambling to capture what Jane meant. But the truth is simpler and stranger than all that: she was someone who sat very still and paid very close attention. For over sixty years. And because she did, the rest of us learned that we're not as alone as we thought.
Jane didn't discover that chimpanzees use tools - she discovered that the line between "us" and "them" was drawn in disappearing ink. Watching David Greybeard fish for termites with a grass stem, she realised the textbooks were wrong. "Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as beings like ourselves," her mentor Louis Leakey said. Jane chose the third option and spent the rest of her life convincing the world to do the same.
She was 26 when she arrived at what is now Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania with no formal training, just an insatiable curiosity about animals that had started with a stuffed toy chimpanzee named Jubilee some years earlier. The scientific establishment wasn't exactly thrilled - a young woman with no degree, heading alone into the African wilderness to watch chimpanzees? The National Geographic Society's all-male committee was skeptical. Jane proved them magnificently wrong. She proved many people magnificently wrong throughout her life in fact.
What made her special wasn't just her discoveries but how she shared these discoveries with earth. Her 1963 National Geographic article brought the secret lives of chimpanzees into living rooms across the world. She gave them names instead of numbers - Flo, Fifi, Frodo, David Greybeard - and told their stories with the kind of affection usually reserved for family. Because to Jane, that's exactly what they were. Family.
The woman who spent her twenties crouched in forests became the woman who spent her later decades on aeroplanes, traveling 300 days a year to remind anyone who would listen that hope isn't naive - it's necessary. "Without hope," she said in her final public message, "we become apathetic and do nothing". Even in her last week, she was working on documents until 10:30pm the night before she died, still believing that small actions, multiplied by millions, could save the world. This could not be closer to the values I hold close, and the values that we work by at Roots.
At 91, Jane remained stubbornly optimistic about young people. Her Roots & Shoots programme, which began in 1991 with 12 Tanzanian students, now operates in over 65 countries. She never talked down to teenagers - instead, she handed them the future and trusted them to fix it. That faith feels like Jane's truest gift: the belief that caring isn't childish, it's revolutionary.
Jane's final words, recorded for Netflix's Famous Last Words earlier this year, weren't about chimpanzees or conservation - they were about us. "Your life matters," she said, looking directly into the camera. "Every day you live, you impact the world. You can choose what kind of difference you make." Even at the end, she was still teaching, still hoping, still believing we could be better than we are.
The world feels quieter without Jane's voice calling chimps in the forest, without her laugh echoing through conference halls, without her words reminding us of our place in nature. But her real legacy isn't in the 32 books she wrote or the 40 films made about her life - it's in every young person who looks at an animal and sees a fellow being, every activist who refuses to give up hope, every small action taken with the faith that it matters.
Jane taught us that wisdom often comes from sitting still and paying attention. That the boundaries between species are more porous than we imagined. That hope is a choice we make every day, and that choosing it - especially when the world feels dark - might be the most human thing we do.
For all of us at Roots Media, and for everyone who ever believed that one person could change the world: thank you, Jane. For showing us that the gentlest revolutions are the most important revolutions of all.
Lucas Brendon | Director & Head of Media Roots
