Jane Goodall — "We are a part of the natural world, and when we destroy it, we destroy ourselves…"
We are a part of the natural world, and when we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.
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More from Jane Goodall
"I'm not a saint. I'm just a woman who cares deeply about the natural world."
"The natural world is our greatest teacher, and we should listen to its lessons."
"Chimpanzees, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that there is no sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom."
"I think the most important thing is to realize that we are part of the animal kingdom, and we're not above it."
"The only way to make sure that we don't destroy the future is to make sure that our children are educated in a way that they understand the interconnectedness of all life."
About Jane Goodall (born 1934)
British primatologist who in 1960 began the longest-running wild primate study at Gombe Stream, transforming our understanding of chimpanzees. Closely associated with Dian Fossey (mountain-gorilla researcher) and Birutė Galdikas (orangutan researcher; together with Goodall and Fossey one of Louis Leakey's 'Trimates'). For an intellectual contrast, see Walter Palmer, American dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe in 2015 — Palmer represents the trophy-hunting tradition Goodall's life's work has been organized against — the colonial-era hunter-naturalist worldview that treated primates and big game as specimens or trophies, which Goodall's Roots & Shoots and Jane Goodall Institute exist specifically to displace.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Humans are not separate from nature — we evolved inside it and depend on it every day for clean air, water, food, and a stable climate. Damaging ecosystems is ultimately damaging ourselves. Deforestation, species extinction, and pollution circle back to erode human health, food security, and survival. We are one thread in the web of life, and cutting other threads unravels our own.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall spent decades living in Gombe Stream, Tanzania, tracking wild chimpanzees — documenting tool use, social bonds, and grief. Watching deforestation erase chimp habitat converted her from pure scientist into global activist. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots youth network, driven by a lifelong conviction that humans and wildlife share an indivisible biological fate — not just geography.
The era
Goodall's career spans from the 1960s onward, coinciding with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), which exposed DDT's destruction of wildlife. By the 1980s–90s, Amazon deforestation hit record rates, climate science entered mainstream debate, and early UN Environment summits put biodiversity loss on political agendas. Her words gave moral weight to data showing ecological collapse was not a distant abstraction but an immediate human crisis.
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