Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope (Science North, Cosmic Picture Distribution, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Sunday afternoon, March 30, my husband Charles and I went to the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park after the regular Sunday afternoon organ concert and saw Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope, a 2023 vest-pocket documentary issued in both 45-minute and 25-minute versions. (We saw the shorter one.) Written and directed by David Lickley, Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope is framed around footage of Goodall, the legendary primatologist who in the early 1960’s went to Tanzania, lived with chimpanzees, established that they used tools (which previously had been thought to be the key line separating humans from other primates), and starred in a National Geographic TV special in which the narrator announced at the end that if Goodall was right, we’d either have to redefine “human,” redefine “tool,” or accept chimps as human. A much older and more wizened Goodall is shown giving a lecture at the University of Arizona (in a hall that I’m guessing is usually used for rock or pop music concerts, since one of the stage entrances has a black front door with a white outline of an acoustic guitar painted on it), but the main agenda of the movie is to tell stories from around the world of people intervening in potential environmental catastrophes and either mitigating or actually reversing them. One is the site of a former nickel mine in Sudbury, Canada whose emissions severely polluted a nearby lake and, among other things, generated acid rain and almost totally killed off the local population of loons, a water-dwelling bird. A group of environmentalists launched what they called the “Regreening Project,” first sowing the land around the former nickel mine with ground-up limestone to neutralize the harmful effects of the effluent, then replanting trees once the land was sufficiently rehabilitated it could support them again.

Another of Goodall’s hopeful stores was the return of buffalo to Native American lands following their near-total extermination in the late 19th century. This is a story told in even more detail in Ken Burns’s four-hour documentary The American Buffalo, which I wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-american-buffalo-part-1-bloody.html, and though it’s unclear whether white Americans deliberately set out to exterminate the buffalo as part of their genocidal campaign against the Native population or the buffalo simply fell to a clash of cultures, Burns included this chilling justification from President Theodore Roosevelt’s book on the buffalo: “While the slaughter of the buffalo has been in places needless and brutal, and while it is to be greatly regretted that the species is likely to become extinct, it must be remembered that its destruction was the condition necessary for the advance of White civilization in the West. Above all, the extermination of the buffalo was the only way of solving the Indian question … and its disappearance was the only method of forcing them to at least partially abandon their savage mode of life.” One of the ways the buffalo were preserved was some of the surviving herds were taken to Canada and cared for there (it’s interesting that so many of these stories portray Canada as a place of unique enlightenment, especially at a time when President Donald Trump has set out either to destroy Canada economically or force it to become part of the United States!), and now they’re slowly being reintroduced into the Great Plains with the help of Blackfeet Natives like Ervin Carlson and Cristina Momorucci, both of whom appear in the film. The third story is the reintroduction of the ibis, another bird species, to its former home in Austria and Italy, including astonishing footage of powered paragliders flying alongside the birds to help them relearn their former routes of migration. Lickley and his team were as environmentally conscious off screen as they were on it; according to the Wikipedia page on the film, “The production team undertook significant efforts to work in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly way, such as working with local crews to minimize the number of people who had to travel to each location, and careful planning to ensure that all waste materials generated by the production were recycled, inclusive of being prepared to bring any waste back to Canada for recycling if it could not be recycled locally.”