Jane Goodall — "We need to teach our children to be good stewards of the Earth, and to protect i…"
We need to teach our children to be good stewards of the Earth, and to protect its resources.
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More from Jane Goodall
"I've touched the soul of a chimpanzee, and it changed my life forever."
"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make."
"I believe that every living creature has a soul, and that we should treat them with respect."
"The future of the planet is in our hands."
"I have hope for the future, but we have to work together to make it happen."
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
Adults have a duty to raise children who genuinely understand their dependence on natural systems — clean water, healthy soil, forests, and wildlife — and who actively work to protect them. Because the planet's resources are finite and current consumption patterns are unsustainable, passing on practical conservation skills and an ethic of stewardship is the most essential thing one generation can give the next.
Relevance to Jane Goodall
Goodall spent decades at Gombe Stream, Tanzania, watching chimpanzees while simultaneously watching their habitat shrink. That direct witness transformed her from field scientist into global activist. In 1991 she launched Roots & Shoots, a youth-focused program now active in over 60 countries, built precisely on this belief: conservation ultimately depends on whether the generation inheriting a damaged planet feels responsible enough to repair it.
The era
From the 1970s onward, accelerating deforestation, rising extinction rates, and climate science warnings put resource depletion at the center of global politics. The Rio Earth Summit (1992), Kyoto Protocol (1997), and Paris Agreement (2015) each framed environmental protection as an intergenerational obligation. By the 2010s, youth-led climate strikes showed that educational messaging had worked — and also that it hadn't worked fast enough.
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