The Ecological Tantra of Jane Goodall

In tribute.

Jane Goodall died on October 1st, 2025, at the age of 91, while on a speaking tour in California: still teaching, still engaged, still devoted to the work. In her dying, we are invited to see her life whole, and to recognize in it a spiritual path that the usual framings of “primatologist” or “conservationist” only partially capture.

For those of us coming of age, she was not just a scientist. She was an icon. The image of a young Englishwoman alone in the forests of Africa, notebook in hand, radiant with courage and tenderness, held the imagination like Amelia Earhart at the cockpit or Rachel Carson at her desk. She showed that a woman could be devoted, pure of heart, rigorous of mind, and still wholly herself.

What Goodall practiced, across six decades in the forest and beyond, might be understood as a form of ecological tantra. She had a way of being in the world where observation became devotion, where scientific rigor and spiritual openness were two aspects of the same deep attention, where the wild was both teacher and temple.

The tantric worldview recognizes the divine suffusing everything, available not through transcendence but through deeper engagement with material reality. Goodall embodied this: her most profound experiences happened precisely through immersion in the forest at Gombe, among the chimpanzees, in the immediacy of the sensory world, in the smell of rain on leaves, the weight of a chimpanzee infant’s hand, the shock of grief when one of them died. And it was not nature romanticized. She stayed with the whole: life and death, sex and play, tenderness and violence, tool-making and warfare. Tantra insists that nothing is outside the field of the sacred — not the dark, not the difficult, not the embodied. She allowed it all in- and in this and many other ways, I see her as a hidden tantrika. She demonstrated a complete path: a way of being in which deep attention to the more-than-human world becomes spiritual practice, in which love itself becomes knowledge, in which the sacred is discovered not by leaving the world but by entering it more fully.

Jane Goodall was devoted, iconic, awake in relationship with the living world. She showed us that devotion can look like a notebook in the forest.

She modeled sitting quietly, watching, listening, until separation dissolves and kinship is all that remains... and then taking that kinship out and magnifying message in the world. For the entire life span. Until the last breath in this body.

Feel so much respect right now for all the deep and devoted people who keep things running and growing and learning, beneath the performative bluster of the power hungry world. Those who are willing to live among and interrelated.

In memory of Dr. Jane Goodall (1934–2025), who taught us to see with new eyes.