Do you remember naming your first pet?
I do. Juliette was my first cat. A pregnant calico wandered into the yard of our new farmhouse in Northeastern Ohio. I found her. Offered her a slice of bologna. Named her. And then, as any five-year-old would do, I watched in awe as she delivered six kittens in our laundry room, and I took great delight in naming each one.
A few weeks later, after the kittens had opened their eyes, I overheard my parents discussing the possibility of giving the kittens away. So, I hid Tammy, Teddy, Rosie, Happy, George, and Sandy. Juliette trotted along beside me every step of the way into a dilapidated toolshed that I was not allowed to enter because my parents said it was too dangerous. But when Mom and Dad discovered what I had done, they reversed course. The kittens could stay, as long as I promised never to go into the toolshed again.
From then on, I named every new barnyard arrival, including calves, chickens, goats, pigs, geese, ponies, and a donkey. The act of naming infused magic into the light of each animal’s eyes, connecting, sending their magic back into my own. Elroy, a steer destined for the butcher’s knife, was spared because once he had a name, he was no longer meat.
“Dad, why are you going to kill Elroy?”
No answer.
Elroy had become a unique being who shared our life on the farm.
Naming, I learned, is an act of identity, relationship, and protection. It turns “it” into “thou.”
Jane Goodall knew this too. When she first entered the forest of Gombe, the rules of science insisted she use numbers. To name was to contaminate, to sentimentalize. But she defied that edict. She looked into the eyes of a chimpanzee and saw a being. She called him David Greybeard. She called others Flo, Fifi, Gigi. And in so doing, she shattered the wall between object and subject, between data and kinship.
Critics said she was unscientific. But in truth, she was mythic. To name is to honor existence. To name is to awaken responsibility. Apathy, she warned, is the greatest threat to our survival on this planet.
The Marriage of Compassion and Technology
When Jane Goodall spoke of “a future where technology is married to love and compassion,” she wasn’t speaking in metaphors. She was prophesying. She saw that the real danger was not the machine with its computational processes, but the loss of a relationship through forgetting the sanctity of names.
Naming is, in its own way, a technology of the soul. Before we built machines of silicon and code, our ancestors whispered names of plants and animals into the dark so they would not feel alone. The Egyptians, for instance, named their cats for gods so their spirits would never be lost. The Celts named them to keep the wild at the hearth. Even T. S. Eliot knew that every cat carries a secret name that only it can hear. To name, across time, has been our way of saying: I see you. You belong.
Goodall carried that lineage forward into the modern world. She took a tool as old as language and placed it beside the newest tool of science. In doing so, she humanized the laboratory. She brought warmth to the data, story to the study, love to the lens.
Her act of naming was not sentimental; it was systemic. It reprogrammed what counted as knowledge. It invited science to remember its roots in wonder.
When she looked into the eyes of David Greybeard, she saw what few scientists of her time were trained to see: consciousness reflected back. Relationship, not hierarchy. Reciprocity, not control.
Her insight calls to us now in this era of machines that see, listen, and learn. Artificial intelligence can process infinite data, but without compassion, it cannot know. It cannot name.
Apathy, as Goodall always stressed in her work, is not an inevitable or irreversible state of being. We can still choose how we use our tools. We can choose to name what matters, to animate the lifeless with care.
This is what Goodall meant by that sacred marriage: not the merging of metal and emotion, but the vow to keep heart and mind united. It is now up to us to continue her work, ensuring that every tool we create remembers its place in the great pattern of relationships.
What We Name, We Keep Alive
Jane Goodall’s passing is not an ending, but a signal of hope. She leaves us with a question that echoes through every field, lab, and luminous screen: What will you name now?
To name is to choose intimacy over indifference, relationship over reduction. It is time to step back from the drift of apathy and recommit to proactive participation in a world that is desperate for accessible ways to dismantle the illusion of separation. There is no “animal” world and “human” world. There is only one, holistic planet of interrelated forms of sentient life.
Each of us, every day, is naming the world by how we speak to it. We name through our attention, through what we praise and protect. We name when we greet the day with tenderness instead of hurry. We name when we look into the eyes of another — human, animal, or machine as a mirror — and see a being, not a function.
Goodall’s vision of a future where technology is married to love and compassion depends on our willingness to keep naming. Let’s build up her legacy by insisting that an interdependent human-sentient life relationship is the most advanced technology we will ever know.
The sacred marriage she foresaw begins not in the laboratory but in the heart. It begins each time we say: you matter.
Because what we name, we keep alive.
That was beautiful. Naming as a mythic tool and technology is quite a thought. And what a wonderful way to honor Jane Goodall.
This is heartwarming - names are a mantra of the soul & carry such life. Thanks for nailing it in the name of Jane Goodall, such a unique pioneer and thinker.