Standing Beside Jane Goodhall
Today we pause to honour the life of Dr Jane Goodall: scientist, storyteller, and tireless advocate for the living world. Jane’s pioneering work with chimpanzees transformed how many in the West think about human and non-human life. She showed that our closest relatives use tools, grieve, play, and nurture in ways that echo our own. […]
Today we pause to honour the life of Dr Jane Goodall: scientist, storyteller, and tireless advocate for the living world.
Jane’s pioneering work with chimpanzees transformed how many in the West think about human and non-human life. She showed that our closest relatives use tools, grieve, play, and nurture in ways that echo our own. For audiences accustomed to a sharp divide between “us” and “them,” her research was revolutionary. But for countless Indigenous and nature-connected peoples, this was never news. They have always lived in kinship with the beings around them.
What Jane did so powerfully was to speak across cultures. She used the authority of science to remind the nature-disconnected world of what others have long known: that we are part of nature, not apart from it. She carried this message with courage, humility, and deep love qualities that allowed her to inspire not just respect for chimpanzees, but reverence for the whole web of life.
Through the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme she founded in 1991, Jane empowered people to care for each other, for their communities, and for the natural world. She called this Hope through Action, the belief that even small acts of courage and care, when multiplied, can ripple outward to transform the world.
At I Stand Beside, we are guided by this same conviction: that connection with nature, expressed through creativity, empathy, and shared action, is the root of change.
We stand beside her legacy in profound gratitude for the way she invited us into relationship, for the hope she never let go of, and for the courage she showed in reminding us that we are part of nature, not apart from it. We also stand beside the many other teachers — often unrecognised, often marginalised — who embody and sustain these truths in their everyday lives.
May Jane’s spirit continue to inspire us to choose connection, imagination, and love, and spark courage in all who seek to repair our bonds with the living world.
Listen to Jane, in conversation with others, on her podcast Hopecast.
More about Jane, from her Foundation