Swamp Rabbit was asking if I’d listened to the year-old podcast featuring environmentalist Jane Goodall that was aired again on public radio not long after she died on Oct. 1 at age 91.

Of course I’d listened. Goodall helped overturn conventional wisdom regarding how humans should treat the rest of the animal kingdom and nature in general. Early on she conducted breakthrough field research about the behavior of chimpanzees. Throughout her career she used humor and empathy to spark support for animal and human rights, and for sustainability, a concept that was still fairly obscure when she first made a name for herself.

“Well, how about that,” Swamp Rabbit said. “It’s about time you wrote about a good person instead of Donald Trump and Pam Bondi and them other degenerates.”

In the podcast Goodall describes what happened after her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey, talked her into pursuing a PhD at Cambridge in the 1960s:

I was told [by instructors] I’d done everything wrong. You shouldn’t have given the chimpanzees names. They’re just animals. They should have numbers. And you can’t talk about their personality, their mind, or their emotion. Those are characteristics unique to us. Nor must you have empathy, because to be a good scientist, you must be coldly objective. So, fortunately, I had this wonderful teacher when I was a child, who taught me that in this respect, those professors were totally, completely different. Talking rubbish. And, um, that teacher was my dog, Rusty. You, you can’t have an animal and not know that of course we’re not the only beings on this planet with personalities, minds, and emotions.

Not your standard stuffy academic. She got her PhD in ethology and went on with her life’s work. People everywhere liked her because she was a down-to-earth believer in the power of good. A humanist, in other words.

“You sure you want to call her a humanist?” Swamp Rabbit said. “I ain’t heard that word in a long time.”