Jane Goodall’s Survival Guide

Before the pandemic, Jane Goodall travelled three hundred days a year to speak to audiences about the climate crisis. “I used to do, like, three days in the Netherlands, three days in Belgium, three days in France,” Goodall, who is eighty-seven, recalled recently. In China or Australia, “it would be, like, two weeks, where they’d spread me through their country.” Everywhere she went, she met young people who were “angry, depressed, or just apathetic, because, they’ve told me, we have compromised their future and they feel there is nothing they can do about it,” she writes in her twenty-first and most recent work, “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.” Amid flooding and wildfires, impassivity and eco-grief, the question she was asked most often was “Do you honestly believe there is hope for our world?”

She does, and she’ll tell you why. “The Book of Hope,” which she wrote with Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson, is structured like a dialogue in which the naturalist (Ph.D., D.B.E., U.N. Messenger of Peace) plays whack-a-mole with the darkest fears we hold for our ailing planet. Stories of the human intellect and indomitable spirit abound. Also, the resilience of nature and the power of young people. Hope, she argues, is not merely “passive wishful thinking” but a “crucial survival trait.” She noted, “If you don’t have hope that your action is going to make a difference, why bother to do anything? You just become a zombie.”

Goodall was seated on a sofa in the drawing room of her childhood home, in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England. She had her hair in a ponytail and was wearing a Patagonia jacket with jeans, moccasins, and whale-print socks. Shuttered in the house since the outbreak began, Goodall has adopted a relentless schedule of online engagements, Zooming to multiple countries each day. “Virtual Jane has been busier than ever,” she said. “It’s hurting my voice, my eyes.” She has not taken a day off in a year and a half; she Zoomed twice on Christmas, launched a podcast called “The Hopecast,” and, in May, accepted the Templeton Prize (previous recipients include Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama). “But the pluses!” she said. “I’ve reached literally millions more people in many more countries. I was in Tanzania this morning, and then I was in the Netherlands for an interview. Or is it Belgium?”

Goodall was sharing the Gothic-style house (built in 1872) with her sister, Judy, Judy’s daughter and grandchildren, and an aging rescue whippet named Bean. It’s not the first time the family has taken refuge there. “It was my grandmother’s,” she said. “Mum and Judy and I came here when the war broke out. World War Two.” In the garden, butterflies flitted by; Bean was asleep in an armchair. Growing up, there were always animals around, she said. Dogs, cats, “a couple of tortoises.” “Peter the canary, who used to fly around the whole house. Hamlet the hamster, who escaped and spent the rest of her life in the back of the sofa, coming out at night for food.”

In 1960, at the age of twenty-six, Goodall left England for Gombe National Park, in Tanzania, to study animals in the wild. She took her mother with her. (“Mum played a very important role.”) It was in Gombe that Goodall almost lost hope. She was up at dawn every morning, crawling through the forest with binoculars, looking for chimps. She would return to camp unsuccessful and depressed. Finally, a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard (“very handsome”) let her observe him using grass stems to collect termites, the report of which prompted Goodall’s mentor to send an exuberant telegram: “Ah! We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as human!”

In the drawing room, Goodall checked the time: fifteen minutes until she needed to record a message for French university students. She poured herself a drop of whiskey. “When my voice goes like this, it’s the only thing that works,” she said. (It was a lifesaver when she had bronchitis at Davos.) Did she ever get tired? “I care about the future, I care about animals, I care about trees, I care about children,” she said. “And I’m obstinate and I won’t give in. I won’t be defeated by the Bushes, and the Putins, and the Bolsonaros, all these terrible, terrible people.”

Lately, Goodall has been working from an attic bedroom surrounded by objects that give her hope: a photograph of David Greybeard, a Native American talking stick, a bell made from a defused land mine. She climbed the stairs slowly, held up the bell, and rang it. “Special,” she said. She checked the time again. The French students beckoned. 

Fonte: New Yorker