Even before Jane passed this week, I had been thinking about her a lot.
During my appearances to promote DIRTBAG BILLIONAIRE: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away, I’m often asked who else is like Chouinard, the climber turned businessman who gave away his fortune to protect the planet.
I always resist comparisons to other business leaders. There just aren’t many good analogs.
But I often bring up Jane.
While she earned renown as a primatologist, it was her tireless advocacy for the natural world that made her a global icon.
Jane was an indefatigable champion of plants and animals and ecosystems, and her message was much the same as Chouinard’s: Humans are mucking up nature. The animals are going quiet. The hour is late.
I knew Jane.
The first time I met her, as I wrote in the Times yesterday, she was nursing a glass of Irish whiskey, neat. It was 2019 and I was interviewing her for a column on leadership after she had just finished a long day of public appearances. The whiskey wasn’t to calm her nerves, she told me, but to help soothe her voice.
I didn’t blink when she told me she needed a nip. She spoke softly, her voice sometimes little more than a whisper. And she had been talking all day.
Yet there was a deeper sense of quiet about Jane, too.
During her days as a primatologist in Tanzania, she spent long stretches of her life alone in the wilderness as she observed Flo, Fifi and David Greybeard, earning their trust and discovering that chimps are not so unlike we humans. She learned to be perfectly at peace away from the thrum of the modern world, totally comfortable in absolute silence.
Chouinard has some of this abiding quiet about him as well. Like Jane, he’s spent cumulative years in the woods, listening not to the TV and traffic, but to the wind and the water. He doesn’t need smalltalk to be at ease. In fact, Chouinard would generally prefer it if people just kept their mouths shut.
They were different kinds of quiet. Jane had a quasi-spiritual quality about her. There was a sense that she somehow embodied the wisdom of the world, and she inspired joy in just about everyone she met.
Chouinard’s quiet is more interior, more intense. His time in the backcountry was dangerous, and he’s as pessimistic as Jane was hopeful.
But both of them had been transformed by solitude and nature, and the result was a profound love for planet Earth.
Chouinard and Jane knew one another. I talked with Chouinard about Jane once, and I sent Jane an early copy of DIRTBAG BILLIONAIRE. Chouinard himself issued a rare statement honoring her on Instagram yesterday.
I would see Jane once or twice a year, and we would talk about climate change and animals and children. Just as often, however, we would sit together and not say a word.
The last time I saw Jane, she had yet again finished a long day of public appearances. She was tired of talking, so after exchanging a few pleasantries, we sat down and stayed there for 30 minutes or so, sometimes locking eyes, sometimes looking out the window and into the mountains.
Then she gave me a hug and we said goodbye.
How you can help
I’m out here hustling.
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If you haven’t already, please buy DIRTBAG BILLIONAIRE. If you already have, thank you, and please consider gifting some to friends and colleagues. Amazon, Bookshop, Porchlight (bulk discounts), or Barnes & Noble are all great.
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Please leave a 5-star review! It really helps. You can review it right now on Amazon. Or get in the fight on Goodreads.
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Please share! Forward this. Here’s an easy-to-post cover graphic, here’s a Linkedin post, here’s an IG reel and a post. I promise to get better at BlueSky and Threads, and yes I still call it Twitter. Please also tell your parent groups, Slack buddies, and groupchats.
The buzz
The DIRTBAG BILLIONAIRE book tour continues. This week I was onstage with Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation.
The Financial Times just came out with a great review, calling it “a warts-and-all portrayal of Yvon Chouinard, clothing tycoon.”
And my interview with Dan Harris on the 10% Happier podcast just went up.
I’m now on my way to California for a full week of events, including a public conversation with Paul Lightfoot of Patagonia Provisions at Book Passage in Corte Madera on Thursday October 9.
That’s it for now.
Thanks for the support.
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David