Guardians, Not Owners: Honouring the Legacy of Dr Jane Goodall

There are lives that illuminate the path for everyone else.
Dr Jane Goodall’s is one of those rare lives.

News of her passing at ninety-one, while on a speaking tour in California on 1 October 2025, has moved people everywhere to pause, remember, and recommit to what matters most: our shared responsibility for the protection and restoration of the natural world.

The First Time I Met Her

I still remember the first time I met her — not in person, but on the soft, matte pages of an old ecological magazine I had borrowed. I must have been in my early teens. There was a photo of a slight, quietly-poised woman sitting on the forest floor of Gombe, a young chimpanzee studying her with the same calm curiosity.

I read the article in one breath, mesmerised by the idea that someone could live among wild beings not to capture or control them, but to watch, to listen, to learn and to understand. That single story shifted something in me: it made me believe that science could be tender, and that care could be methodical.

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” — Jane Goodall

That line, which I underlined in the margins of that magazine, still feels like both a warning and a call to action.

A Life that Braided Science and Compassion

Born in London on 3 April 1934, Jane Goodall travelled to East Africa in the late 1950s and, in 1960, stepped into the green canopies of Gombe Stream, Tanzania. She entered the forest not as a conqueror but as a guest, prepared to spend long days simply observing.

Within months she recorded a sight no scientist had witnessed before: chimpanzees stripping twigs to fish termites from their mounds — a discovery that upended the assumption that humans alone made and used tools.

Her decades of patient fieldwork as an ecologist and primatologist revealed to the world that chimpanzees — and by extension many animals — are not mere instinct-driven creatures, but intelligent, social, and deeply sentient beings with emotions, relationships, even grief. This recognition helped shift not only the direction of science but also global conversations about how animals deserve to be treated — with dignity, empathy, and moral consideration.

What followed was a lifetime proving that rigorous science and deep compassion are not opposites but partners — that precise data-keeping can live in the same hand that gently names a wild neighbour instead of reducing it to a lab number.

Jane challenged the centuries-old story that placed humans at the top of a hierarchy — the “alpha species” entitled to dominate everything beneath it. Her work in Gombe showed that we are not landlords of the Earth but co-inhabitants of one shared home: kin among kin, woven into the same ecological fabric as the beings we once called “lesser.”

In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute to protect great apes and their habitats in collaboration with local communities. In 1991 she launched Roots & Shoots, a youth-led movement that now spans more than a hundred countries.

She showed an entire generation of researchers, conservationists, and ordinary citizens that policy shifts often begin with a change of perception in a single mind — and that fieldwork could be both precise and humane.

Recognition — as a Microphone, Not a Medal

Over the decades the world recognised her service: she was appointed a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002, invested as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003, and most recently awarded the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom on 4 January 2025.

Jane wore those honours not as ornaments but as a louder microphone — championing the forests, the voiceless animals, and the communities that needed representation at global tables.

Carrying Her Lessons Forward

What has always stayed with me is that she never separated science from feeling. That is something I think about often at T.Berry — how the work of our hands can be meticulous and disciplined, yet still come from a place of tenderness.

She proved that data and empathy strengthen each other. In a small way, that is what we try to practise here: slow processes, botanically-dyed fabrics that do least harm, and treating a silkworm, a tree, or a river as part of a shared home rather than a resource to be owned.

Her insistence that we are guardians, not owners of this planet’s life is what I hope T.Berry keeps echoing through every garment and ritual object we make.

Three Lessons I Hold Close

• Every small choice matters — the water we save, the fibres we choose, the meals we waste or don’t waste.
• Hope is not naïve; it’s a discipline — a daily decision to keep acting even when progress feels slow.
• Paying close attention is an act of love — to an animal in the wild, to a community we serve, even to a piece of cloth in our hands.

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
I think of that every time I’m tempted to believe one step is too small to count.

An Invitation

As we remember her, perhaps each of us can honour her legacy by choosing one small act:

• plant something native where you live;
• reduce what you throw away;
• support a local conservation or re-wilding effort;
• teach a child that animals are neighbours, not property;
• explore the Jane Goodall Institute or a Roots & Shoots group near you.

These gestures may seem ordinary, but as she showed the world, enough small gestures can change the future of a forest — or of a planet.

Thank you, Dr Jane Goodall, for showing us that science and compassion together can bend the course of the world.
Thank you for teaching us that the boundary we once drew between human and wild was never meant to be a wall but a meeting place; that we share the same breath, the same rivers, the same fragile future.

At T.Berry, I hope we continue to walk the quieter path you lit — one of guardianship, never ownership; shared inhabitation, never domination — so that the beauty we create never comes at the cost of the living world that sustains us all.
May we hold to your belief that hope is a discipline, and that even the smallest acts of care can tip the balance of a forest — or a planet.