Jane Goodall’s most radical message was not about saving the planet

Most people know Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist who died on Wednesday at 91, for her singular, field-defining work on wild chimpanzees. She first entered the field in the early 1960s with no formal academic training, at a time when influential scientific frameworks like behaviorism often viewed animals as little more than stimulus-response machines. Unencumbered by scientific orthodoxy, Goodall helped the world see chimps as socially and cognitively sophisticated creatures. Her work opened up space for scientists to understand animals as beings with interiority (although even today, that approach is far from universally accepted).

But Goodall also devoted herself to something even more radical, and far rarer for scientists of her international stature. Goodall’s recognition of an