Today, the forest is quieter: On Jane Goodall’s Passing

by Oscar Soria, The Common Initiative

A guest blog to Friends of the Earth U.S.

Today, the forest is quieter.

When #JaneGoodall walked into the Gombe forests of Tanzania in 1960, she was a young woman with no formal training, armed only with binoculars, a notebook, and an extraordinary capacity for patience and wonder. She emerged having revolutionized our understanding of what it means to be human.

She taught us that we were not alone in our complexity. Through David Greybeard and the chimpanzees of Gombe, she showed us tool-making, warfare, compassion, grief, and play in our closest relatives. She dissolved the barriers we had constructed between ourselves and the rest of the animal kingdom, forcing science to reckon with consciousness, emotion, and individuality in creatures we had dismissed as lesser.

But Jane was never content to simply observe. She spent six decades traveling 300 days a year, carrying her message of hope to every corner of a world that desperately needed it. While others saw only despair in deforestation, climate change, and extinction, she saw young people ready to act. She saw communities willing to change. She saw reasons for hope, and she insisted we see them too.

"Every individual matters," she would say. "Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference."

She proved it with her own life: a woman who defied convention, who was told she couldn't but did anyway, who transformed from a curious observer into one of the most powerful voices for conservation the world has ever known. She didn't just study chimpanzees; she became their ambassador, their protector, their voice in corridors of power where they had none.

Through the Jane Goodall Institute and her Roots & Shoots program, she created a legacy that will outlive us all, generations of young people empowered to believe they can change the world because she believed it first.

Jane Goodall lived 91 years as if each one mattered, because to her, they did. She lived as if every creature mattered, because to her, they did. She lived as if we could still save this beautiful, broken world, because she believed (even when we didn't) that we could.

The forests of Gombe still stand. The chimpanzees she loved still play and forage and live their complex lives. Millions of young people across 60 countries continue the work she started. Her legacy is not in words written or awards received, but in every child who picks up litter, every community that protects its forest, every person who looks at an animal and sees not a thing, but a someone.

Thank you, Jane, for showing us the world as it truly is: interconnected, precious, and worth fighting for. Thank you for never giving up on us, even when we gave you every reason to. Thank you for your fierce hope, your gentle strength, and your unshakeable conviction that one person, doing what they can, truly does make a difference.

The forest is quieter today. But it is not silent. Because of you, it will never be silent again.

Rest well, dear Jane. Your work continues.