Jane Goodall Still Has Hope
Why Jane Goodall Still Has Hope for Us Humans
If Jane Goodall can have hope, I must have hope too. She shares this hope in a NYT interview. Here are a few excerpts I found particularly wise, kind and inspiriting.
““You just plod on and do what you can to make the world a better place,” said Goodall, speaking via Zoom from her childhood home in Bournemouth, England, and whose “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times” will be published in October. “That’s all I can do. I can’t do more, I don’t think, than I’m doing.”
Traveling the world I’d see so many projects of restoration, animal and plant species being rescued from the brink of extinction, people tackling what seemed impossible and not giving up. Those are the stories that should have equal time, because they’re what gives people hope. If you don’t have hope, why bother? ”
Jane Goodall Institue
“Religious fundamentalism is one of the strangest things. Religion has a bad name because of fundamentalism. But if you look at every major religion, the golden rule is the same: Do to others as you would have them do to you. These fundamentalists are not actually preaching about the fundamental principles of the religion that they are talking about. They’re educating young people to believe ridiculous things. At the beginning of Islam, nobody ever said that if you went and blew yourself up and killed lots of people, you’d go to heaven.
Kids today are very different because they’re learning all the time: Schools have programs about the environment. You can hardly miss the fact that we’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction, that the climate’s changing. They’re much more aware.
I honestly think the silver lining of this pandemic is that more people understand that we brought it on ourselves by our disrespect of nature, our disrespect of animals. So it’s been awful, but always a bright side.
I have to go on doing it because I care passionately about nature. I care passionately about children. If I didn’t make a difference, I wouldn’t do it. ”