GOODALL’S ‘HOPE’ IN A TIME OF PAIN
Book shows her deep empathy for humanity
Hope was hard to come by these last couple of years.
It often felt futile to cling to hope while millions died. Yet what better embodies the spirit of hope than health care workers showing up for the next shift?
Jane Goodall, the primatologist who taught the world how alike humans and chimps are, takes on the subject in “The Book of Hope.” By Goodall and Douglas Abrams, with Gail Hudson, it’s a conversation over tea or whisky (her favorite is Johnnie Walker Green Label) with Goodall, who uses her decades of quietly observing behavior to explain that hope is as much a survival tool as breathing.
And on a week when we take stock of what we have to be thankful for, it seems very fitting to include Goodall among those blessings. It’s even more fitting to take her advice.
“I believe we still have a window of time during which we can start healing the harm we have inflicted on the planet — but that window is closing,” she writes.
At 87, Goodall defiantly has hope. It’s what propelled her to visit people all over the world and encourage them to take care of the planet and themselves. It’s all the more remarkable considering what Goodall has lived through.
Goodall, who was born and raised in England, was a child during World War II. She was in Manhattan on 9/11 and has been witness to hideous conflicts in Africa. Despite all of this, the only way forward is through hope, she maintains.
First, she clarifies what she means. “Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen, but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement. Many people understand the dire state of the planet — but do nothing about it because they feel helpless and hopeless.”
As an ambassador for animals, proving to the world that not only humans have feelings or can use tools, Goodall is often associated strictly with the chimps to which she has dedicated her life.
However, she is also an ambassador of good for humans. She knows many animals are killed, and forests are razed as acts of desperation.
When children are hungry, parents will do whatever they can to feed them including killing endangered animals.
So Goodall takes people, the planet and animals into account as she details what to do before it is too late.
“First — we must alleviate poverty. If you are living in crippling poverty, you will cut down the last tree to grow food. Or fish the last fish because you’re desperate to feed your family.”
“Second, we must reduce the unsustainable lifestyles of the affluent. Let’s face it, so many people have way more stuff than they need — or even want.”
“Third, we must eliminate corruption, for without good governance and honest leadership, we cannot work together to solve our enormous social and environmental challenges.”
“And finally, we must face up to the problems caused by growing populations of humans and their livestock.”
On moral or ethical grounds, how can anyone disagree with these goals?
Yet they’re the sort of sweeping statements that those in power brush off as naive. So rather than wait for those in power to act, Goodall works at the grassroots level.
Thirty years ago, she began Roots & Shoots, a nonprofit for preschoolers through university students to work in their communities. Abrams prompts Goodall to explain how this came about.
“Twelve Tanzanian high school students from eight schools came to my home in Dar es Salaam,” Goodall begins. “Some of them were worried about things like the destruction of coral reefs by illegal dynamiting, and poaching in the national parks — why wasn’t the government clamping down on these? Others were concerned about the plight of street children, and others about the ill treatment of stray dogs and animals in the market. We discussed all this and I suggested they might do something to improve things.”
And so, a movement was born, one that encourages children to act. Often, their parents follow. What’s critical here is that Goodall recognizes how connected every problem — and solution — is. While Roots & Shoots began in Tanzania, it has extended to 68 countries. There’s a chapter in the Bronx, and Goodall mentions how the need reflects the
locale.
Having children involved in the group made them more involved in school. That’s one of her main messages: Becoming involved leads to change.
Like every environmentalist, Goodall stresses how connected we all are and how interconnected nature is.
She makes the point about how removing one animal changes the ecosystem but saving the animal revives it. Her best example of this is the gray wolf of North America.
About a century ago, the gray wolf was close to extinction. What happened in Yellowstone was that
the elk overgrazed the park. That meant smaller mammals couldn’t take refuge, and the underbrush suffered. Then bees had fewer flowers to pollinate. Bears did not have enough berries to eat before hibernation.
By reintroducing wolves to the park, the rest of the ecosystems restored themselves – with the help of humans.
Even when the problems presented to her have no apparent connection to nature, Goodall responds. Strangers write to her, sensing an open heart and someone who can help. She listens and asks others to help.
Since people’s problems are so disparate, Abrams asks Goodall, “What are they wanting from you?”
Goodall recalls one woman, Anne, who wrote about a cold case; Anne’s sister had disappeared 32 years earlier. Anne, who suffered abuse as a child, wrote to Goodall and to 40 others whom she thought might somehow help.
Goodall untangled enough of her story to ask the late neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks about her. It was revealed that Anne had multiple personalities, and he suggested Anne keep notebooks about her feelings. Eventually, she moved past some of the trauma.
An “indomitable spirit can fight the worst abuse and pain and create a whole person again” Goodall writes of Anne, and that is hope at its essence.
Hope, Goodall insists, is a survival trait and one that she had to hone since Hitler was bombing Europe when she was a child. “And now, as I approach my 90s, we must defeat two enemies, one invisible, microscopic enemies; the other — our own stupidity, greed and selfishness.”
As spiritual as Goodall is, she never pushes religion. Instead, she writes of admiring how Indigenous people often consider animals, flowers and even rocks as siblings. So much can
be overcome if hope is infused.
“We can get through the pandemic,” Goodall writes.
“Thanks to our amazing human intellect, scientists have produced vaccines at record speed. And if we get together and use our intellect and play our part, each one of us, we can find ways to slow down climate change and species extinction. Remember that as individuals we make a difference every day, and millions of our individual ethical choices in how we behave will move us toward a more sustainable world.”
That message may be the most important one we reflect on as we offer up gratitude on Thanksgiving.