The climate emergency has been a wakeup call to everyone, and the ethologist and environmentalist is working as hard as ever to defeat it. She discusses horror, hope and heroism in her late 80s

In Jane Goodall’s new book, there is a vivid description of her “deep bond” with a beech tree in the garden of her childhood home in Bournemouth. She would climb into its branches to read, hauling books and her homework up in a basket, and persuaded her grandmother to bequeath her the tree, named just Beech, in her will. She called the tree, as alive to her as any person or animal, “one of my closest childhood friends”. “There’s Beech,” she says now, pointing to the handsome tree, its leaves glowing in the morning sun, from the front doorstep.

The house, which first belonged to Goodall’s grandmother, is large and lovely, but modest, perhaps little changed from when Goodall lived here as a child; there are various animal feeding bowls in the living room, comfortingly cluttered, where we sit, with big windows that look out on to the garden. Her sister, Judy, and her family live here, and it’s home to Goodall when she’s not travelling the world, spreading her message of hope, and demanding action. Goodall was on her way to give a talk for Compassion in World Farming in Brussels last March, the taxi leaving the driveway, when Judy came rushing out to say it had been called off, and she has been grounded here since, mainly working from her attic bedroom.