Southern California air regulators issued violations to two foundries in southeast Los Angeles County after air sampling revealed elevated levels of a highly toxic metal near the facilities.

Air samples collected Sept. 10-22 in the city of Paramount had “slightly elevated” levels of hexavalent chromium, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Federal and state regulators have found in the past that the chemical compound is a potent carcinogen with no safe level of exposure.

The samples that led to the violations were collected at a city-run monitoring station near Minnesota Avenue and Madison Street, prompting the air district to launch an investigation and conduct inspections at several industrial facilities nearby.

On Friday, the air district announced that it handed down multiple air-quality violations to Pro Cast Industries, located across the street from the monitoring station, and Fenico, about 1,300 feet east.

Hexavalent chromium, commonly known as chrome, is best known for providing shiny, rust-resistant coating to auto parts, aviation components and tools. Foundries, which liquefy and cast metals, can release hexavalent chromium during melting, welding and grinding.

The heavy metal is 500 times more carcinogenic than diesel exhaust and poses the second-highest cancer risk of all toxic air contaminants tracked by the state, according to the California Air Resources Board. Only dioxins, which come primarily from burning waste materials, are deadlier than airborne hexavalent chromium.

When it comes to the latter, exposure to 1 nanogram per cubic meter for 30 years is associated with a cancer risk of 360 cases in 1 million people, according to a state report. Three air samples collected last month at the Paramount monitor found levels between 1.6 to nearly 2.2 nanograms per cubic meter.

Investigators allege both foundries in Paramount failed to conduct tests to ensure compliance with hexavalent chromium emission limits, did not properly clean areas near chrome-alloy-melting facilities and operated equipment without necessary permits.

Pro Cast was also cited for using more chromium-containing metals than regulators had approved for its processes, and for improperly storing scrap metal that contained chromium.

Pro Cast and Fenico representatives did not respond to The Times’ request for comment.

The air district said that it may seek a settlement with the two foundries, but if one is not reached, it may assess financial penalties.

“We’re working diligently to ensure the air in our city remains safe for all our residents. The South Coast AQMD has the expertise and enforcement tools to investigate and address these readings,” Mayor Peggy Lemons said in a statement last week. “The city is deeply committed to keeping our community informed and working collaboratively with the air district to ensure our residents’ health and safety.”

Paramount is home to dozens of metal-related businesses, which have historically contributed to some of the state’s highest concentrations of hexavalent chromium, including a spike of 26 nanograms per cubic meter in late October 2016.

The air district initially launched a community air monitoring network for hexavalent chromium and other toxic air contaminants in Paramount in 2013, after residents complained about metallic odors near a metal forging and grinding operation.

Air sampling in 2016 revealed that some parts of Paramount were exposed to levels more than 50 times higher than in other areas of Los Angeles County, according the county Department of Public Health. Investigations and inspections of these facilities have reduced levels of toxic metals since then.

Nevertheless, air sampling has continued to find troubling levels of toxic metals after equipment malfunctions, repairs and noncompliance with regulation.

Arbor Energy is, essentially, a poster child of the kind of biomass energy project California keeps saying it wants.

The state’s goal is to reduce wildfire risk on 1 million acres of wildlands every year, including by thinning overgrown forests, which is expected to generate roughly 10 million tons of wood waste annually. Arbor hopes to take that waste, blast it through a “vegetarian rocket engine” to produce energy, then sequester all of the carbon the process would generate underground.

California has billed Arbor — and the handful of other similarly aimed projects it’s financed — as a win-win-win: wildfire mitigation, clean energy and carbon sequestration all in one.

Yet, after Arbor initially won state financial backing for a pilot project in Placer County, the El Segundo-based company’s California ambitions fell through, like many biomass projects before it.

Instead, it’s heading to Louisiana.

California, biomass energy advocates say, has struggled to get past its distrust of the technology, given traditional biomass’ checkered past of clear-cutting forests and polluting poorer communities. Further, the state’s strict permitting requirements have given residents tremendous power to veto projects and created regulatory headaches.

But many environmental groups argue it’s an example of California’s environmental and health protections actually working. If not done carefully, bioenergy projects run the risk of emitting carbon — not sequestering it — and polluting communities already grappling with some of the state’s dirtiest air.

“When you look at biomass facilities across California — and we’ve done Public Records Act requests to look at emissions, violations and exceedances … the reality is that we’re not in some kind of idealized pen-and-paper drawing of what the equipment does,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “In the real world, there are just too many problems with failures and faults in the equipment.”

There are simpler and safer uses for this wood waste, these critics say: fertilizer for agriculture, wood chips and mulch. It may not provide carbon-negative energy but comes with none of the risks of bioenergy projects, they say.

The Center for Biological Diversity and others advocate for a more “hands-off” approach to California’s forests and urge management of the wildfire crisis primarily through home hardening, evacuation planning, prescribed burning and defensible-space vegetation management. But fire and ecology experts say more than a century of fire suppression has made that unrealistic.

However, the sweeping forest-thinning projects these experts say are needed will cost billions, and so the state needs every source of funding it can get. “Our bottleneck right now is, how do we pay for treating a million acres a year?” said Deputy Chief John McCarthy of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, who oversees the agency’s wood products and bioenergy program.

In theory, the class of next-generation biomass energy proposals popping up across California could help fund this work.

“California has an incredible opportunity,” said Arbor chief executive and co-founder Brad Hartwig. With the state’s leftover biomass from forest thinning, “we could make it basically the leader in carbon removal in the world.”

A lot of wood with nowhere to go

Biomass energy first took off in California in the 1980s after small pioneering plants at sawmills and food-processing facilities proved successful and the state’s utilities began offering favorable contracts for energy sources they deemed “renewable” — a category that included biomass.

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the state had more than 60 operating biomass plants, providing up to 9% of the state’s residential power. Researchers estimate the industry supported about 60,000 acres of forest treatment to reduce wildfire risk per year at the time. But biomass energy’s heyday was short-lived.

In 1994, the California Public Utilities Commission shifted the state’s emphasis away from creating a renewable and diverse energy mix and toward simply buying the cheapest possible power.

Biomass — an inherently more expensive endeavor — struggled. Many plants took buyouts to shut down early. Despite California’s repeated attempts to revitalize the industry, the number of biomass plants continued to dwindle.

Today, only 23 biomass plants remain in operation, according to the industry advocate group California Biomass Energy Alliance. The state Energy Commission expects the number to continue declining because of aging infrastructure and a poor bioenergy market. California’s forest and wildfire leadership are trying to change that.

In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom created a task force to address California’s growing wildfire crisis. After convening the state’s top wildfire and forest scientists, the task force quickly came to a daunting conclusion: The more than a century of fire suppression in California’s forests — especially in the Sierra Nevada — had dramatically increased their density, providing fires with ample fuel to explode into raging beasts.

To solve it, the state needed to rapidly remove that extra biomass on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres of wildlands every year through a combination of prescribed burns, rehabilitation of burned areas and mechanically thinning the forest.

McCarthy estimated treating a single acre of land could cost $2,000 to $3,000. At a million acres a year, that’s $2 billion to $3 billion annually.

“Where is that going to come from?” McCarthy said. “Grants — maybe $200 million … 10% of the whole thing. So, we need markets. We need some sort of way to pay for this stuff and in a nontraditional way.”

McCarthy believes bioenergy is one of those ways — essentially, by selling the least valuable, borderline unusable vegetation from the forest floor. You can’t build a house with pine cones, needles and twigs, but you can power a bioenergy plant.

However, while biomass energy has surged in Southern states such as Georgia, projects in California have struggled to get off the ground.

In 2022, a bid by Chevron, Microsoft and the oil-drilling technology company Schlumberger to revive a traditional biomass plant near Fresno and affix carbon capture to it fell through after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requested the project withdraw its permit application. Environmental groups including the Center for Biological Diversity and residents in nearby Mendota opposed the project.

This year, a sweeping effort supported by rural Northern California counties to process more than 1 million tons of biomass a year into wood pellets and ship them to European bioenergy plants (with no carbon capture involved) in effect died after facing pushback from watch groups that feared the project, led by Golden State Natural Resources, would harm forests, and environmental justice groups that worried processing facilities at the Port of Stockton would worsen the air quality in one of the state’s most polluted communities.

Arbor believed its fate would be different.

Bioenergy from the ground up

Before founding Arbor, Hartwig served in the California Air National Guard for six years and on a Marin County search and rescue team. He now recalls a common refrain on the job: “There is no rescue in fire. It’s all search,” Hartwig said. “It’s looking for bodies — not even bodies, it’s teeth and bones.”

In 2022, he started Arbor, with the idea of taking a different approach to bioenergy than the biomass plants shuttering across California.

To understand Arbor’s innovation, start with coal plants, which burn fossil fuels to heat up water and produce steam that turns a turbine to generate electricity. Traditional biomass plants work essentially the same but replace coal with vegetation as the fuel. Typically, the smoke from the vegetation burning is simply released into the air.

Small detail of the 16,000-pound proof-of-concept system being tested by Arbor that will burn biomass, capture carbon dioxide and generate electricity.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Arbor’s solution is more like a tree-powered rocket engine.

The company can utilize virtually any form of biomass, from wood to sticks to pine needles and brush. Arbor heats it to extreme temperatures and deprives it of enough oxygen to make the biomass fully combust. The organic waste separates into a flammable gas — made of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen — and a small amount of solid waste.

The machine then combusts the gas at extreme temperatures and pressures, which then accelerates a turbine at much higher rates than typical biomass plants. The resulting carbon dioxide exhaust is then sequestered underground.

Arbor portrays its solution as a flexible, carbon-negative and clean device: It can operate anywhere with a hookup for carbon sequestration. Multiple units can work together for extra power. All of the carbon in the trees and twigs the machine ingests ends up in the ground — not back in the air.

But biomass watchdogs warn previous attempts at technology like Arbor’s have fallen short.

This biomass process creates a dry, flaky ash mainly composed of minerals — essentially everything in the original biomass that wasn’t “bio” — that can include heavy metals that the dead plants sucked up from the air or soil. If agricultural or construction waste is used, it can include nasty chemicals from wood treatments and pesticides.

Arbor plans — at least initially — on using woody biomass directly from the forest, which typically contains less of these dangerous ash chemicals.

Turning wood waste into gas also generates a thick, black tar composed of volatile organic compounds — which are also common contaminants following wildfires. The company says its gasification process uses high enough temperatures to break down the troublesome tar, but researchers say tar is an inevitable byproduct of this process.

Grant Niccum, left, Arbor lead systems engineer and Kevin Saboda, systems engineer, at the company‘s test site in San Bernardino. Biomass is fed into this component and then compressed to 100 times atmospheric pressure and burned to create a synthetic gas.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Watchdogs also caution that the math to determine whether bioenergy projects sequester or release carbon is complicated and finicky.

“Biomass is tricky, and there’s a million exceptions to every rule that need to be accounted for,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead with Frontier Climate, which vets carbon capture projects such as Arbor’s and connects them with companies interested in buying carbon credits. “There are examples where we have found a project that actually works on the carbon accounting math, but we didn’t want to do it because it was touching Canadian boreal forest that’s old-growth forest.”

Frontier Climate, along with the company Isometric, audits Arbor’s technology and operations. However, critics note that because both companies ultimately support the sale of carbon credits, their assessments may be biased.

At worst, biomass projects can decimate forests and release their stored carbon into the atmosphere. Arbor hopes, instead, to be a best-case scenario: improving — or at least maintaining — forest health and stuffing carbon underground.

When it all goes South

Arbor had initially planned to build a proof of concept in Placer County. To do it, Arbor won $2 million through McCarthy’s Cal Fire program and $500,000 through a state Department of Conservation program in 2023.

But as California fell into a deficit in 2023, state funding dried up.

So Arbor turned to private investors. In September 2024, Arbor reached an agreement with Microsoft in which the technology company would buy carbon credits backed by Arbor’s sequestration. In July of this year, the company announced a $41-million deal (well over 15 times the funding it ever received from California) with Frontier Climate, whose carbon credit buyers include Google, the online payment company Stripe and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.

To fulfill the credits, it would build its first commercial facility near Lake Charles, La., in part powering nearby data centers.

“We were very excited about Arbor,” McCarthy said. “They pretty much walked away from their grant and said they’re not going to do this in California. … We were disappointed in that.”

But for Arbor, relying on the state was no longer feasible.

“We can’t rely on California for the money to develop the technology and deploy the initial systems,” said Hartwig, standing in Arbor’s plant-covered El Segundo office. “For a lot of reasons, it makes sense to go test the machine, improve the technology in the market elsewhere before we actually get to do deployments in California, which is a much more difficult permitting and regulatory environment.”

Rigger Arturo Hernandez, left, and systems engineer Kevin Saboda secure Arbor’s proof-of-concept system in the company’s San Bernardino test site after its journey from Arbor’s headquarters in El Segundo. The steel frame was welded in Texas while the valves, tubing and other hardware were installed in El Segundo.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

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It’s not the first next-generation biomass company based in California to build elsewhere. San Francisco-based Charm Industrial, whose technology doesn’t involve energy generation, began its sequestration efforts in the Midwest and plans to expand into Louisiana.

The American South has less stringent logging and environmental regulations, which has led biomass energy projects to flock to the area: In 2024, about 2.3% of the South’s energy came from woody biomass — up from 2% in 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Meanwhile, that number on the West Coast was only 1.2%, continuing on its slow decline.

And, unlike in the West, companies aiming to create wood pellets to ship abroad have proliferated in the South. In 2024, the U.S. produced more than 10.7 million tons of biomass pellets; 82% of which was exported. That’s up from virtually zero in 2000. The vast majority of the biomass pellets produced last year — 84% — was from the South.

Watchdogs warn that this lack of guardrails has allowed the biomass industry to harm the South’s forests, pollute poor communities living near biomass facilities and fall short of its climate claims.

Over the last five years, Drax — a company that harvests and exports wood pellets and was working with Golden State Natural Resources — has had to pay Louisiana and Mississippi a combined $5 million for violating air pollution laws. Residents living next to biomass plants, like Drax’s, say the operations have worsened asthma and routinely leave a film of dust on their cars.

But operating a traditional biomass facility or shipping wood pellets to Europe wasn’t Arbor’s founding goal — albeit powering data centers in the American South wasn’t exactly either.

Hartwig, who grew up in the Golden State, hopes Arbor’s technology can someday return to California to help finance the solution for the wildfire crisis he spent so many years facing head-on.

“We’ve got an interest in Arkansas, in Texas, all the way up to Minnesota,” Hartwig said. “Eventually, we’d like to come back to California.”

Jane Goodall, the trailblazing naturalist whose intimate observations of chimpanzees in the African wild produced powerful insights that transformed basic conceptions of humankind, has died. She was 91.

A tireless advocate of preserving chimpanzees’ natural habitat, Goodall died on Wednesday morning in California of natural causes, the Jane Goodall Institute announced on its Instagram page.

“Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science,” the Jane Goodall Institute said in a statement.

A protege of anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey, Goodall made history in 1960 when she discovered that chimpanzees, humankind’s closest living relatives, made and used tools, characteristics that scientists had long thought were exclusive to humans.

She also found that chimps hunted prey, ate meat, and were capable of a range of emotions and behaviors similar to those of humans, including filial love, grief and violence bordering on warfare.

In the course of establishing one of the world’s longest-running studies of wild animal behavior at what is now Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, she gave her chimp subjects names instead of numbers, a practice that raised eyebrows in the male-dominated field of primate studies in the 1960s. But within a decade, the trim British scientist with the tidy ponytail was a National Geographic heroine, whose books and films educated a worldwide audience with stories of the apes she called David Graybeard, Mr. McGregor, Gilka and Flo.

“When we read about a woman who gives funny names to chimpanzees and then follows them into the bush, meticulously recording their every grunt and groom, we are reluctant to admit such activity into the big leagues,” the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote of the scientific world’s initial reaction to Goodall.

But Goodall overcame her critics and produced work that Gould later characterized as “one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

Tenacious and keenly observant, Goodall paved the way for other women in primatology, including the late gorilla researcher Dian Fossey and orangutan expert Birutė Galdikas. She was honored in 1995 with the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, which then had been bestowed only 31 times in the previous 90 years to such eminent figures as North Pole explorer Robert E. Peary and aviator Charles Lindbergh.

In her 80s she continued to travel 300 days a year to speak to schoolchildren and others about the need to fight deforestation, preserve chimpanzees’ natural habitat and promote sustainable development in Africa. She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the U.S. at the time of her death.

Goodall was born April 3, 1934, in London and grew up in the English coastal town of Bournemouth. The daughter of a businessman and a writer who separated when she was a child and later divorced, she was raised in a matriarchal household that included her maternal grandmother, her mother, Vanne, some aunts and her sister, Judy.

She demonstrated an affinity for nature from a young age, filling her bedroom with worms and sea snails that she rushed back to their natural homes after her mother told her they would otherwise die.

When she was about 5, she disappeared for hours to a dark henhouse to see how chickens laid eggs, so absorbed that she was oblivious to her family’s frantic search for her. She did not abandon her study until she observed the wondrous event.

“Suddenly with a plop, the egg landed on the straw. With clucks of pleasure the hen shook her feathers, nudged the egg with her beak, and left,” Goodall wrote almost 60 years later. “It is quite extraordinary how clearly I remember that whole sequence of events.”

When finally she ran out of the henhouse with the exciting news, her mother did not scold her but patiently listened to her daughter’s account of her first scientific observation.

Later, she gave Goodall books about animals and adventure — especially the Doctor Dolittle tales and Tarzan. Her daughter became so enchanted with Tarzan’s world that she insisted on doing her homework in a tree.

“I was madly in love with the Lord of the Jungle, terribly jealous of his Jane,” Goodall wrote in her 1999 memoir, “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey.” “It was daydreaming about life in the forest with Tarzan that led to my determination to go to Africa, to live with animals and write books about them.”

Her opportunity came after she finished high school. A week before Christmas in 1956 she was invited to visit an old school chum’s family farm in Kenya. Goodall saved her earnings from a waitress job until she had enough for a round-trip ticket.

Jane Goodall gives a little kiss to Tess, a 5- or 6-year-old female chimpanzee, in 1997.

(Jean-Marc Bouju / Associated Press)

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She arrived in Kenya in 1957, thrilled to be living in the Africa she had “always felt stirring in my blood.” At a dinner party in Nairobi shortly after her arrival, someone told her that if she was interested in animals, she should meet Leakey, already famous for his discoveries in East Africa of man’s fossil ancestors.

She went to see him at what’s now the National Museum of Kenya, where he was curator. He hired her as a secretary and soon had her helping him and his wife, Mary, dig for fossils at Olduvai Gorge, a famous site in the Serengeti Plains in what is now northern Tanzania.

Leakey spoke to her of his desire to learn more about all the great apes. He said he had heard of a community of chimpanzees on the rugged eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika where an intrepid researcher might make valuable discoveries.

When Goodall told him this was exactly the kind of work she dreamed of doing, Leakey agreed to send her there.

It took Leakey two years to find funding, which gave Goodall time to study primate behavior and anatomy in London. She finally landed in Gombe in the summer of 1960.

On a rocky outcropping she called the Peak, Goodall made her first important observation. Scientists had thought chimps were docile vegetarians, but on this day about three months after her arrival, Goodall spied a group of the apes feasting on something pink. It turned out to be a baby bush pig.

Two weeks later, she made an even more exciting discovery — the one that would establish her reputation. She had begun to recognize individual chimps, and on a rainy October day in 1960, she spotted the one with white hair on his chin. He was sitting beside a mound of red earth, carefully pushing a blade of grass into a hole, then withdrawing it and poking it into his mouth.

When he finally ambled off, Goodall hurried over for a closer look. She picked up the abandoned grass stalk, stuck it into the same hole and pulled it out to find it covered with termites. The chimp she later named David Graybeard had been using the stalk to fish for the bugs.

“It was hard for me to believe what I had seen,” Goodall later wrote. “It had long been thought that we were the only creatures on earth that used and made tools. ‘Man the Toolmaker’ is how we were defined …” What Goodall saw challenged man’s uniqueness.

When she sent her report to Leakey, he responded: “We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!”

Goodall’s startling finding, published in Nature in 1964, enabled Leakey to line up funding to extend her stay at Gombe. It also eased Goodall’s admission to Cambridge University to study ethology. In 1965, she became the eighth person in Cambridge history to earn a doctorate without first having a bachelor’s degree.

In the meantime, she had met and in 1964 married Hugo Van Lawick, a gifted filmmaker who had traveled to Gombe to make a documentary about her chimp project. They had a child, Hugo Eric Louis — later nicknamed Grub — in 1967.

Goodall later said that raising Grub, who lived at Gombe until he was 9, gave her insights into the behavior of chimp mothers. Conversely, she had “no doubt that my observation of the chimpanzees helped me to be a better mother.”

She and Van Lawick were married for 10 years, divorcing in 1974. The following year she married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania National Parks. He died of colon cancer four years later.

Within a year of arriving at Gombe, Goodall had chimps literally eating out of her hands. Toward the end of her second year there, David Graybeard, who had shown the least fear of her, was the first to allow her physical contact. She touched him lightly and he permitted her to groom him for a full minute before gently pushing her hand away. For an adult male chimpanzee who had grown up in the wild to tolerate physical contact with a human was, she wrote in her 1971 book “In the Shadow of Man,” “a Christmas gift to treasure.”

Jane Goodall plays with Bahati, a 3-year-old female chimpanzee, at the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, north of Nairobi, on Dec. 6, 1997.

(Jean-Marc Bouju / Associated Press)

Her studies yielded a trove of other observations on behaviors, including etiquette (such as soliciting a pat on the rump to indicate submission) and the sex lives of chimps. She collected some of the most fascinating information on the latter by watching Flo, an older female with a bulbous nose and an amazing retinue of suitors who was bearing children well into her 40s.

Her reports initially caused much skepticism in the scientific community. “I was not taken very seriously by many of the scientists. I was known as a [National] Geographic cover girl,” she recalled in a CBS interview in 2012.

Her unorthodox personalizing of the chimps was particularly controversial. The editor of one of her first published papers insisted on crossing out all references to the creatures as “he” or “she” in favor of “it.” Goodall eventually prevailed.

Her most disturbing studies came in the mid-1970s, when she and her team of field workers began to record a series of savage attacks.

The incidents grew into what Goodall called the four-year war, a period of brutality carried out by a band of male chimpanzees from a region known as the Kasakela Valley. The marauders beat and slashed to death all the males in a neighboring colony and subjugated the breeding females, essentially annihilating an entire community.

It was the first time a scientist had witnessed organized aggression by one group of non-human primates against another. Goodall said this “nightmare time” forever changed her view of ape nature.

“During the first 10 years of the study I had believed … that the Gombe chimpanzees were, for the most part, rather nicer than human beings,” she wrote in “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey,” a 1999 book co-authored with Phillip Berman. “Then suddenly we found that the chimpanzees could be brutal — that they, like us, had a dark side to their nature.”

Critics tried to dismiss the evidence as merely anecdotal. Others thought she was wrong to publicize the violence, fearing that irresponsible scientists would use the information to “prove” that the tendency to war is innate in humans, a legacy from their ape ancestors. Goodall persisted in talking about the attacks, maintaining that her purpose was not to support or debunk theories about human aggression but to “understand a little better” the nature of chimpanzee aggression.

“My question was: How far along our human path, which has led to hatred and evil and full-scale war, have chimpanzees traveled?”

Her observations of chimp violence marked a turning point for primate researchers, who had considered it taboo to talk about chimpanzee behavior in human terms. But by the 1980s, much chimp behavior was being interpreted in ways that would have been labeled anthropomorphism — ascribing human traits to non-human entities — decades earlier. Goodall, in removing the barriers, raised primatology to new heights, opening the way for research on subjects ranging from political coalitions among baboons to the use of deception by an array of primates.

Her concern about protecting chimpanzees in the wild and in captivity led her in 1977 to found the Jane Goodall Institute to advocate for great apes and support research and public education. She also established Roots and Shoots, a program aimed at youths in 130 countries, and TACARE, which involves African villagers in sustainable development.

She became an international ambassador for chimps and conservation in 1986 when she saw a film about the mistreatment of laboratory chimps. The secretly taped footage “was like looking into the Holocaust,” she told interviewer Cathleen Rountree in 1998. From that moment, she became a globe-trotting crusader for animal rights.

In the 2017 documentary “Jane,” the producer pored through 140 hours of footage of Goodall that had been hidden away in the National Geographic archives. The film won a Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. Award, one of many honors it received.

In a ranging 2009 interview with Times columnist Patt Morrison, Goodall mused on topics from traditional zoos — she said most captive environments should be abolished — to climate change, a battle she feared humankind was quickly losing, if not lost already. She also spoke about the power of what one human can accomplish.

“I always say, ‘If you would spend just a little bit of time learning about the consequences of the choices you make each day’ — what you buy, what you eat, what you wear, how you interact with people and animals — and start consciously making choices, that would be beneficial rather than harmful.”

As the years passed, Goodall continued to track Gombe’s chimps, accumulating enough information to draw the arcs of their lives — from birth through sometimes troubled adolescence, maturity, illness and finally death.

She wrote movingly about how she followed Mr. McGregor, an older, somewhat curmudgeonly chimp, through his agonizing death from polio, and how the orphan Gilka survived to lonely adulthood only to have her babies snatched from her by a pair of cannibalistic female chimps.

Jane Goodall in San Diego.

(Sam Hodgson / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Her reaction in 1972 to the death of Flo, a prolific female known as Gombe’s most devoted mother, suggested the depth of feeling that Goodall had for the animals. Knowing that Flo’s faithful son Flint was nearby and grieving, Goodall watched over the body all night to keep marauding bush pigs from violating her remains.

“People say to me, thank you for giving them characters and personalities,” Goodall once told CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “I said I didn’t give them anything. I merely translated them for people.”

Woo is a former Times staff writer.