The world-renowned scientist and conservationist has spent the pandemic living at her childhood home in England, watching “mindless television” with her sister at suppertime and working around the clock

By Lane FlorsheimMarch 15, 2021 8:32 am ET

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In our series My Monday Morning, self-motivated people tell WSJ. how they start off the week.

For Dr. Jane Goodall, the pandemic has meant the end of almost all of her normal routines. “There are no weekends anymore,” she says. “Every single day is Zooms and Skypes and interviews and video messages all over the world. And writing, I have writing to do.” Goodall, 86, one of the most famous scientists and conservationists in the world, has been living away from her usual home in Tanzania at her childhood house in Bournemouth, England, with members of her family. The only part of her schedule that’s the same every day comes at 12:30 p.m., when she takes her dog out for a short walk and then eats lunch in the garden, sitting under the beech tree she used to climb when she was young. She often has company. “I’m usually joined by a robin redbreast and a blackbird,” she says. “I’m always out there, even if it’s pouring rain, because I don’t want to disappoint the birds.”

Goodall first began to fulfill her dream of living among African wildlife when, at 22, she voyaged to Nairobi by boat from London. There, she met paleontologist Louis Leakey, who hired her to work as his assistant and eventually sent her to Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, where she began her work with chimpanzees. Goodall’s observations disproved major beliefs about human uniqueness, including that we’re the only species capable of using and making tools and that we’re the only ones who have personalities and emotions. Though she stopped doing fieldwork in 1986, she is at work every day for the Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in 1977 to promote wildlife and environmental conservation. She’s been married twice, first to Dutch wildlife filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, with whom she has a son, named Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, 54, and then to Derek Bryceson, who was a national parks director and assemblyman in Tanzania. Recently, Goodall launched an essential-oils collection sourced throughout Africa in partnership with Forest Remedies and started a podcast called the Jane Goodall Hopecast, which has featured guests like musician Dave Matthews and the teenage animal rights activist Genesis Butler.

Here, she tells WSJ. about her dream podcast guest and how she sees her legacy.

What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do?

Full story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jane-goodalls-advice-on-how-to-lead-a-full-life-11615811551