Goodall Creating a Legion of Naturalists : Ecology: Researcher appeals to children to help her save chimpanzees.

Jane Goodall spent half her life learning about chimpanzees in the remote jungles of Tanzania.

After nearly 30 years, it dawned on her: It would be “selfish and heartless” to continue research in her “own little world” while animals and nature are in danger all over the globe.

So the renowned researcher, credited with the first recorded observance of chimpanzees eating meat and using and making tools, left the jungles to jet her message around the world and recruit a legion of young naturalists.

“Roots creep quietly under the ground and make a firm foundation. Shoots seem small and frail, but to reach the light they can move rocks and break open brick walls,” Goodall said.

“Hundreds of thousands of shoots around the world can change the world.”

The idea is the basis for her new club, Roots and Shoots, which recruits young people to help save chimps and the rest of nature.

The organization has taken hold in about 18 countries, including the United States, where Goodall said more than 20 clubs have been started.

At least 40 teens from fledgling U.S. chapters gathered recently at the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Quinnipiac College in Hamden for the first U.S. Roots and Shoots summit, a weekend of meetings and field trips.

Goodall, 59, said her eyes were opened to the worldwide plight of chimps after a conference about five years ago--her 28th consecutive year of research at Gombe National Park in the remote interior of Tanzania.

“If I’d continued in my own little world at Gombe knowing what I knew, I would have been selfish and heartless,” she said.

In laboratories and at zoos, treatment of chimpanzees is improving, she said. “But in the wild it is pretty grim: one step forward, two steps backward.”

She traveled the world promoting the goals of the U.S.-based Jane Goodall Institute, including protecting chimpanzees; then, in 1991, she started recruiting children for Roots and Shoots.

The clubs have formed haphazardly, often wherever her speaking engagements take her. Goodall also visits schools to spread her word and circulates classroom guides.

Roots and Shoots seeks students from diverse backgrounds and promotes the protection of animals and the environment and the importance of scientific observation, Goodall said.

Club projects vary according to community needs. In Tanzania, members have focused on planting trees. In Tulsa, a club member started a Christmas tree recycling project.

From the chimpanzee, club members learn “how close we are to the animal kingdom and that there is not this sharp line between us that we used to believe,” Goodall said.

The chimpanzee population has declined sharply since 1900, largely because of deforestation--which destroys their habitat--and hunting. An estimated 200,000 remain in 21 countries, with significant numbers found only in Gabon, Cameroon, Congo and Zaire.

Goodall, who became famous through her books, lectures and National Geographic specials, is still scientific director of the research center at Gombe. But she is on the road nonstop now and calls jets her home.