Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall isn’t letting a serious case of eco-grief slow her down, said Emine Saner in TheGuardian.com. The famed primatologist, now 87, long ago turned her attention from chimpanzees to the gathering climate crisis, and she remains a fulltime activist despite considerable obstacles.

The pandemic has limited her travels, for one. Also, she feels at times that she’s fighting a hopeless battle against the greed that she sees as the root of so much environmental destruction. “I mean, you have to feel depressed,” she says. “But then there’s something that says there is still an awful lot left and that’s what we’ve got to fight to save. I have days when I feel like not getting up, like, I wish I was dead. But it doesn’t last long. I guess because I’m obstinate. I’ll die fighting, that’s for sure.”

Goodall’s The Book of Hope, co-authored by Douglas Abrams and published this past week, tells readers how to think the same way, said Richard Schiffman in The Washington Post. Goodall gives four reasons for remaining optimistic about the future: the human intellect, the human spirit, the resilience of nature, and the power of young people. She argues that with a change in people’s hearts, climate change, deforestation, even pandemics can be tackled. “We’ve already got the solutions,” she says. “There are amazing ways to restore fertility to overused farmland. We know what to do to minimize future pandemics by closing wildlife markets and banning the factory farming of animals. We know how to improve the health of the soil by changing to regenerative agriculture. We’ve got a window of time to do these things. But it’s not a big window, and it’s closing.”