The death this week of Jane Goodall, at the age of 91, closes a chapter in the history of modern science and environmental advocacy. #Goodall was justly celebrated for her pioneering studies of chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, which transformed the field of primatology and altered the way millions of people saw the relationship between humans and the natural world. Yet her stature as a global moral voice for conservation was ultimately constrained by the narrow framework of individual responsibility and moral persuasion. In an epoch where climate change, deforestation and mass extinction are driven by the systemic imperatives of capitalist profit, this outlook proves inadequate.
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| Jane Goodall (1934-2025) |
Goodall began her research in 1960 with little formal training but a profound fascination for the lives of chimpanzees. Rejecting the sterile detachment of earlier zoology, she gave names to the individuals she studied, documented tool-making and hunting, and revealed the complex social bonds and conflicts within their communities. These discoveries shattered long-held dogmas about the “uniqueness” of humans and earned her international recognition.
Over time she moved beyond fieldwork into global advocacy. The Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots program sought to educate and inspire millions, particularly young people, to take responsibility for the environment, to plant trees, to conserve habitats and to resist indifference to the plight of endangered species. She spoke tirelessly, often with extraordinary personal warmth and sincerity, about the need for change.
In recent months, following the Trump administration’s dismantling of public funding programs, millions of dollars were cut from the Jane Goodall Institute. This compelled Goodall to turn to corporate sponsors, raising serious questions of conflict of interest. She justified these alternative funding sources on the grounds that they were “environmentally sustainable” in their operations — a rationale that further underscored the limitations of her perspective, which sought accommodation with corporate interests rather than a political struggle against them.
Goodall’s advocacy, however admirable in intent, never rose to the level demanded by the crisis she so clearly described. Her central message was always directed at individual responsibility: to recycle, to consume less, to plant, to demand that leaders “do the right thing.” She even went to the extent of identifying a phenomenon of “over-population” as a global crisis. At times, she directed her appeals to political leaders and even corporate executives, convinced that appeals to conscience—“speaking to the heart,” “telling stories”—and to reason could temper the capitalist destruction of the planet. For her, this was what sustained “hope.”
Here lies the fundamental weakness. Appeals to the morality of the ruling class presuppose that ecological devastation is the result of poor choices or ignorance, rather than the inexorable outcome of the profit system. The multinational agribusinesses, fossil-fuel corporations, and financial oligarchies that plunder rainforests and poison ecosystems are not misguided individuals but expressions of a social order driven by the accumulation of private wealth.
Technology—together with the labor force—constitutes the core of the productive forces and is the fundamental motor of social progress. Yet technique itself is not autonomous; it is shaped and limited by the prevailing social regime. Science, once it attains a certain stage of development, becomes a direct productive force. But science does not develop in a vacuum. It evolves within human society, which is divided into classes. The ruling, possessing class controls technique, and through it, commands nature itself.
This points to the real barrier confronting all conservationist projects: under capitalism, science and technology are subordinated to private property and profit. Goodall’s faith in persuasion could not address this reality.
The liberation of science from the fetters of private ownership is a precondition for humanity’s harmonious relation with nature. The significance of this for the ecological crisis is clear. No amount of individual virtue can overcome the structural imperatives of capital accumulation. Conservation requires the conscious, collective, and democratic reorganization of global production by the international working class. Rainforests, biodiversity, the atmosphere itself — these cannot be defended on the basis of private profit. They require socialist planning on a world scale.
Jane Goodall’s life and work reflected a deep love of the natural world and an unflagging effort to awaken humanity’s conscience. For this she deserves respect and remembrance. Yet the tragedy of her political perspective was that it sought salvation in the morality of the very order that has brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe.
In honoring her memory, the working class and youth who today fight to save the environment must draw the necessary lesson: moral appeals and individual responsibility are no substitute for the struggle to overthrow capitalism. The defense of the natural world requires the conscious intervention of the international proletariat, armed with a socialist program, to reorganize production for human need, not private profit.
Image courtesy of The Sydney Morning Herald.
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