When I was 10 years old I remember driving with my mother from our old brick farm house just outside of Coopersburg, Pennsylvania over South Mountain to the biology department at Cedar Crest College, a small women’s college in Allentown. My mother was facilitating an evening screening of a film about Jane Goodall’s work with the chimapnzees at the Gombe Stream National Park for her students who were in one of her Zoology classes. The film made a big impression on me—I still love nature documentaries—but I also felt the importance of Jane Goodall and her work on my mother in the way she shared it with me and her students.
It is natural for children to over-generalize from their early lived experiences and family. My father was a Physics professor at Lehigh University and my mother was Biology professor at Cedar Crest College, so it took some time for me to realize that, not only do women not make up 50% of scientists, but that it takes incredible fortitude and dedication for a woman to earn a PhD in the sciences and make it as an academic. I believe that the example of scientists like Jane Goodall contributed to the strength my mother needed to pursue her passion for nature and the environment in a male-dominated profession.
The way that Jane Goodall’s influence worked through my mother to her students and to me, and through us to others, shows me that a single person has incredible power to change the world. When Goodall passed away yesterday she was in her 90s on a speaking tour carrying her message of a connectedness, conservation, and responsbility. What a great example of hard work and singleness of purpose.
In addition to teaching and mentoring hundreds of students while a professor at Cedar Crest College, my mother volunteered her time and energy working with the Sierra Club of Pennsylvania advocating for regulations and laws protecting clean water. She would read and review legislation and drive back and forth to Harrisburg to testify at hearings. I learned from her that protecting our rivers and streams is one of the most important ways to ensure a healthy environment for our planet.
When I am discouraged about the direction of our country and our planet I am going to try and use the examples of Jane Goodall and my mother to remember how the voice of a single person can make a difference and that individual actions can ripple like a wave through generations of people who have yet to be born.