Jane Goodall — "We need to teach our children to be compassionate, and to care about all living …"
We need to teach our children to be compassionate, and to care about all living things.
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More from Jane Goodall
"We need to educate the next generation about the importance of protecting the environment."
"The future of the planet depends on us."
"We have a moral obligation to protect the environment for future generations."
"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 often feel like I'm a voice for the voiceless."
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
Compassion toward all living beings isn't automatic—it must be deliberately cultivated in children. The quote argues that empathy shouldn't stop at other humans but should extend to animals, plants, and ecosystems. When children are raised to value life broadly, they grow into adults whose daily choices—about food, consumption, and environmental policy—reflect care for the world rather than indifference to it.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall spent decades at Gombe Stream in Tanzania documenting chimpanzee tool use, grief, and social bonds, proving animals have rich inner lives deserving moral consideration. In 1991 she founded Roots & Shoots, a global youth program explicitly built on this belief. After witnessing accelerating habitat destruction firsthand, she shifted from pure research to advocacy, making the moral education of children the cornerstone of her conservation strategy.
The era
Goodall's active career spans the late 20th and early 21st centuries—a period of accelerating species extinction, tropical deforestation, and industrial animal agriculture scaling to billions of animals annually. Environmental education entered school curricula for the first time during this era. Scientists were documenting biodiversity collapse in real time, giving her message direct urgency: the generation being raised then would cast the votes and make the consumer choices that determined ecological survival.
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