So much for beer mixers and salmon barbecues. For its 50th anniversary, the Nature Conservancy of Washington pulled out the stops: a grand Born to be Wild Gala at the cavernous Fremont Studios. Actors impersonating Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir greeted arrives. The 550 guests, who’d paid from $150 a seat to $10,000 a table, trailed through a mock campground, complete with potted pines, pitched tents, and piped-in babbling brooks, croaking frogs, and chirping crickets.

Inside, images of beautiful wild places beamed across three giant walls. Local African dance troupe Gansango rocked the stage through the salad course. For keynote speaker, the Conservancy had brought in the one conservation superstar who can outshine any Hollywood celebrity greenie: Jane Goodall, the pint-sized primatologist-turned-elder stateswoman of conservation. “You know I’m going to do this,” she joked, and gave her signature greeting—the morning hoot of a chimp in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, where, also 50 years ago, she began the research that transformed scientific and popular views of apes and human nature.

Goodall’s too frail now for such research, and has no time anyway. “I’m traveling 300 days a year,” she explained, pitching for groups like the Conservancy and her own Roots & Shoots campaign to green depleted lands and coming generations. “I know, somebody is going say, ‘What about your carbon footprint?’ Roots & Shoots is planting millions of trees a year. If someone can find a way for me to take my message to people without getting on airplanes, I’d love to hear about it.”

A few heads turned nervously when Goodall cited an example of the “unsustainable lifestyles” that, together with poverty, overpopulation, and deforestation, drive the crisis she’s combating: raising methane-belching grain-fed livestock “because we all want cheaper and cheaper meat.” But wild-caught salmon cakes were the meatiest item on the night’s menu.

Heads turned again when Washington Nature Conservancy director Karen Anderson told Conservancy members, “You are full of wisdom. Your average age is 65. At Greenpeace”—that former hotbed of monkey-wrenching iconoclasm—“the average age is 60. Somehow, we have not brought along the younger generation.”

But enough dire thoughts. The mostly gray-haired attendees enjoyed more performances—Tlingit drumming, dancing, and storytelling. A constellation of local luminaries—from ex-governor Dan Evans and founding EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (Republicans in the now-extinct Roosevelt vein) to fishing-rights warrior Billy Frank, Jr. and old-growth guru Jerry Franklin, trooped up to receive “conservation hero” awards and, echoing Sounders FC, green scarves. One irrepressible hero, philanthropist Harriet Bullitt, received a Makah drum and jammed with the Tlingits. At evening’s end 550 conservation supporters, cheered for the struggle, trooped out into the chill, where valets waited to retrieve their cars.

Click here for videos of the “Born to be Wild” gala and Goodall’s and Anderson’s speeches.