The world is still grieving the loss of the late primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, who passed away on May 13, 2025. However, she is ensuring that her memory lives on through her work and a Netflix docuseries that was secretly filmed and released after her death.
On Famous Last Words on Netflix, Dame Jane Goodall talks about her legacy (not in a boasting kind of way) and the need for individuals and groups to pay attention to their surroundings. While her primary focus remains on the conservation of nature and the environment, she also emphasises other aspects such as the need for human connections and interdependence.
While the list of all the things Goodall feels positively about is long, during the interview, she spoke about some of the things that bother her, including people. At the top of that list were Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin, followed by other world leaders who, in the past couple of years, have wreaked havoc on the human population and caused natural destruction. Goodall expressed interest in putting all of them in Elon Musk’s spaceship and sending them off to space to a planet that “he’s sure he’s going to discover.” Her full quote on the plan she has set for ridding the world of the toxic individuals currently exploiting it was:
“Along with Musk would be Trump and some of Trump’s real supporters. And then I would put Putin in there, and I would put President Xi. I’d certainly put Netanyahu in there and his far-right government. Put them all on that spaceship and send them off.”
Goodall’s comments about these people do not come as a shock, as she has always been critical of them. She has expressed her displeasure with Donald Trump several times over the years. In a 2022 interview with MSNBC, she likened Trump’s behaviour to that of a male chimpanzee, noting that he is “upright” and less powerful than he shows himself to be. Talking about the similarities between their behaviours, she said:
“ I see the same sort of behavior as a male chimpanzee will show when he’s competing for dominance with another. They’re upright, they swagger, they project themselves as really more large and aggressive than they may actually be in order to intimidate their rivals.”
With Jane Goodall’s passing, only a few people remain who feel so intensely about the environment as she did. It’s a huge loss for everyone.
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