Image Via Flickr User Jeekc

Until the day I met Jane Goodall, I had never been in a honeymoon suite. As it turns out, the honeymoon suite at the Delta Chelsea hotel in Toronto was the only spare room available to conduct my interview with the renowned social and animal activist, the ‘chimpanzee lady’ herself. Jane is best known for conducting a decades- long study of chimpanzee life in Africa. Her research has corrected many of the conventional wisdoms about what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Jane was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2004 and was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002. Today, she tirelessly travels around the globe three hundred days a year promoting the Jane Goodall Institute and her latest initiative ‘Roots and Shoots’ which aims to “inspire youth of all ages to make a difference by becoming involved in their communities.”

Jane Goodall is the closest thing to a saint that the environmental movement has today. And every saint deserves a good mystery surrounding the circumstances of their birth.

By chance, I already had some advance intelligence about the events leading up to her birth and an unexpected glimpse into Jane’s family history. A friend’s grandfather supposedly played a role in delivering Jane into this world. The story goes: Jane’s father was off at war in Europe so my friend’s grandfather drove Jane’s pregnant mother to the hospital for the birth.

“Not so,” Jane said. “I was not born during World War II.” Indeed, Jane was born in 1933 and her father was home at the time. As Jane tells it, the grandfather in question insisted on transporting Jane’s pregnant mother to the hospital on the grounds that Jane’s father’s open-air Aston Marten “was not fit to drive a pregnant lady. It just would not be proper for a woman in her condition to be driving to the hospital in that car.”

Thus Jane’s mother went to the hospital in a fully-roofed vehicle.

Having cleared up that small error about where her unusual life began, we went on a journey to see where Jane wound up and what she had learned about the future of our planet.