Goodall headlines summit for the young and the green

For the teenagers who track their carbon emissions, the high schoolers who snark at others flaunting stylish clothes likely hewn in sweatshops, and for the young folks who feel impotent in the battle against pollution, this summit is for you.

The Boston Teen Leadership Summit will be held Thursday and Friday at the Boston Nature Center in Mattapan. Highlighting the event will be lectures from world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, who will speak about her global grass-roots youth initiative, Roots and Shoots.

"Everywhere I've gone, I've met young people who have lost hope," Goodall said in a phone interview as she attended another global conference in Orlando, Fla. "They felt like we messed up their future. Long and short, we have messed up their future in many, many ways."

She hopes the summit will serve as a wellspring of communication leading to new conservation projects. Members of nine local Roots and Shoots groups, out of some 9,000 active chapters worldwide, are expected to attend.

Youth groups are asked to pay $50 a year to participate in Roots and Shoots, but fees are sometimes waived for those with little money. Roots and Shoots also offers small grants to support local initiatives.

In Greater Boston, groups are creating a program for waste-free cafeterias in the Cambridge schools, helping in a tree-planting campaign in Dorchester, and planning to restore trails and clean a tributary of Canterbury Brook.

For teenagers such as Teeyana Roxton, 15, of Roslindale, who looks up to Goodall as a strong female role model, the summit will serve to inspire. Roxton, a member of the Boston Nature Center's Teen Youth Ambassadors, said she looks forward to meeting fellow Roots and Shoots members because "it's showing that they care, so other people would care."

MARC LAROCQUE