Goodall interacts with a chimpanzee.
Jane Goodall, world-renowned wildlife researcher, will be visiting Lawrence on Oct. 26. She will be giving a lecture in the Chapel at 7:30 p.m. The lecture was arranged through the Mosquito Hill Nature Center in New London, WI, and is part of the Jane Goodall Institute lecture tour. Although tickets for the lecture in the Chapel are sold out, those interested in seeing Goodall speak can still watch the lecture at the off-site screening in Stansbury Theater. Tickets for the screening are available at Conkey’s for ten dollars each.
Goodall is perhaps best known in the United States for her work with National Geographic and her books, including My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees (1967), In the Shadow of Man (1971), and Jane Goodall: With Love (1994).
Goodall has also written children’s books that many of us grew up with, and worked on numerous film projects, including Among the Wild Chimpanzees (1984) and Chimps, So Like Us (1990).
Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, Education, and Conservation in 1977, and the institute has been working since then to provide support for field research on wild chimpanzees and to improve the environment for all animals.
Although Goodall did not start working with the chimpanzees in Africa until she was 26 years old, her love for animals, and chimps in particular, is a significant part of her earliest childhood memories. When she was ten or eleven years old, she had already decided that she wanted to go to Africa to live with the animals when she grew up.
At the age of 23, she went to Kenya at the invitation of a school friend, and was accepted as the assistant of Louis Leakey, a famous anthropologist and paleontologist. Goodall went along with him and his wife to the Olduvai Gorge to work on a fossil expedition. It was through Leakey that she began studying chimpanzees at the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. The rest is history; Goodall’s study of chimpanzees was immensely successful, and greatly contributed to the world’s understanding of chimpanzees.
Please call the Mosquito Hill Nature Center at (920) 779-6433 for more information. More information on Jane Goodall’s life and work, and the Jane Goodall Institute, can be found at www.janegoodall.org.