
Illustration by Christina
Chung
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Jane Goodall is perhaps best known for
researching primates and advocating for the conservation of the
habitats that sustain them (and us). But her work has also made her
wise to the contradictions and promise of our human
species.
“Bizarre, isn’t it, that the most
intellectual creature — surely, that’s ever lived on the planet — is
destroying its only home,” she mused in her conversation with Krista this week. “I
always believe it’s because there’s a disconnect between that clever,
clever brain and human heart, love and compassion. I truly believe,
only when head and heart work in harmony can we attain our true human
potential.”
Listening to Goodall, I wondered what
we might cultivate in this valley between intellect and empathy,
knowledge and compassion.
Robin
Wall Kimmerer offers one answer. The
botanist, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, says
Indigenous traditions also value this balance in relationship to
plants, trees, and the natural world. “We say that we know a thing
when we know it not only with our physical senses, with our intellect,
but also when we engage our intuitive ways of knowing, of emotional
knowledge and spiritual knowledge,” she says. “And that’s really what
I mean by listening … What is the story that that being might share
with us if we know how to listen as well as we know how to
see?”
In the intersection between the
subjective and the objective, we may also find beauty. As Frank Wilczek told Krista, “There are forms of
beauty that are not found in science, and there are facts about the
world that are not beautiful. But there’s a remarkable intersection
and a remarkable overlap between the concepts of beauty that you find
in art and literature and music, and things that you find as the
deepest themes of our understanding of the physical
world.”
With as many discoveries as she's made,
Jane Goodall still holds more questions than answers. “Part of being
human is a questioning, a curiosity, a trying to find answers, but an
understanding that there are some answers that, at least on this
planet, this life, this life-form, we will not be able to answer,” she
says.
Perhaps this sense of curiosity and
wonder is the compass we need as we continue to both think and feel
our way through the expanse of the unknown.
Yours, Kristin Lin Editor, The On
Being Project
P.S. — We
recorded this week’s conversation with Jane Goodall remotely over
Zoom. At the end of the call she showed us some of her treasures in
her home in Bournemouth, England, including this portrait of herself
as a young woman with her beloved dog, Rusty.

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This
Week at The On Being Project
Our Latest Episode

On Being with Krista
Tippett Jane Goodall “Jane
Goodall on What It Means to Be Human”
The
primatologist on the moral and spiritual convictions that have driven
her and what she’s learned about our species from studying
chimpanzees.
Listen on: Apple
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Website
Recommended Reading & Listening

Read | “Jane
Goodall Is Still Wild at Heart” by Paul
Tullis | The New York Times Magazine This 2015
profile of the primatologist takes a sweeping look at her career, 54
years after her first research trip to the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee
Reserve.
Listen | “Her
Deepness” with Sylvia
Earle Another delightful listen, with the trailblazing
oceanographer who was the first person to walk solo on the bottom of
the sea.
Listen | “We
Are All Wildlife” with Alan
Rabinowitz The wildlife biologist also drew connections
between his research on wild cats and what it means to be human.
Find more in our onbeing.org library on Science
& Being.
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