The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(21)
“Doug, I honestly believe we can turn things around. But—yes, there is a ‘but’—we must get together and act now. We only have a small window of opportunity—a window that is closing all the time. So each of us must do what we can to start healing the harms we have inflicted and do our bit to slow down biodiversity loss and climate change. I have seen or heard about hundreds of successful campaigns and met so many wonderful people. And sharing these stories gives people hope—hope that we can do better.”
Jane and I were meeting less than a month before the first cases of COVID-19 would be reported in China and a few months before public events would largely stop because of the pandemic. But we could not possibly have imagined any of that as we talked in the cabin in the Dutch forest. At the time Jane was still traveling nonstop, sharing her stories of hope around the world—often going to refugee camps and areas of extreme poverty, trying to comfort and uplift people in their darkest times of despair. I could only imagine the toll it must have taken on Jane.
“How do you keep your own spirits and energy up while trying to lift everyone else’s?”
Jane smiled, and I could see the determination back in her eyes.
“When I travel and speak to people all over the world, the feedback I get is so heartening. People really want to believe that they can make a difference, but sometimes they need to hear from someone who has seen firsthand what people are doing. Seeing how people respond helps, but there’s something else,” Jane said, as she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “When I was spending hours alone in the forest at Gombe, I felt part of the natural world, closely connected with a Great Spiritual Power. And that power is with me at all times, a force I can turn to for courage and strength. And sharing that power with others helps me to give people hope.”
The sun had gone back behind the clouds. I wanted to hear more, but we were both shivering. “Shall we head back?” I suggested.
When we returned to the house, we quickly started a fire and as we sat down in front of it to eat a simple lunch, I urged Jane to tell more stories about the extraordinary resilience of nature.
“Well, first, you need to know that there are different kinds of resilience,” Jane explained.
The Will to Live
“There’s a kind of built-in resilience—as when spring brings forth leaves after a bitter winter of snow and ice, or the desert blooms after even a tiny amount of rain falls. And there are seeds that can germinate after lying dormant for many years. They contain that tiny spark of life just waiting for the right conditions to release its power. It’s what Albert Schweitzer—one of my heroes—called the will to live.”
“So life itself has an innate ability to survive and thrive?”
“Yes, absolutely. One of my favorite stories is about a grove of trees whose location is top secret. David Noble, a park ranger in Australia, discovered an unexplored and wild canyon. He rappelled down beside a waterfall and as he walked along the forest floor, he came upon some trees he was unfamiliar with. He picked a few leaves and subsequently gave them to some botanists for identification. They couldn’t identify them at first, but imagine their excitement when they discovered that these leaves were identical with the fossilized imprint of a leaf found on an ancient rock. It was from a species long thought to be extinct—a species known only from the fossil record, a species that turned out to have survived for two hundred million years. Those trees, who came to be known as Wollemi pines, had been in that canyon, getting on with their lives, through seventeen Ice Ages!”
“What does that longevity say to you about resilience?”
“It merely says what many people are saying—that we need nature, but nature does not need us. If we restore an ecosystem in ten years, we feel we have made a big success. If it takes fifty years, it is hard to feel hopeful—the time scale just seems too long, and we are impatient. But it helps if we believe that in the end, even though we probably won’t be around, nature will deal with the destruction we have caused.”
“So you’re saying nature plays the long game,” I said, as I poured us both a coffee.
“Yes, and one thing I find really exciting is the absolutely amazing tenacity of life in seeds. After all the forest around Gombe was clear-cut, we started some tree planting—but it was really hard on the steep slopes. And we found that it was unnecessary, too, because the seeds of some trees, which must have been around for twenty years or so, began to germinate when the land was left to lie fallow. Even some of the roots of trees that had been cut down began to grow again.”
She said there are many examples of this kind of spontaneous regeneration.
“My very favorite example of this is the story of Methuselah and Hannah,” she said, “two very special date palms. Methuselah was the first to be brought back to life—from one of a number of seeds discovered in King Herod’s desert fortress on the shores of the Dead Sea in the Jordan Rift Valley. Carbon dating revealed that these seeds were two thousand years old! Dr. Sarah Sallon, the director of the Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah University Hospital, and Dr. Elaine Solowey, who runs the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura, got permission to try to germinate a few of them. One of the seeds grew—a male whom she called Methuselah after the character in the Bible, Noah’s grandfather, who was said to have lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years old. When I met Sarah to learn more, she told me that she had been allowed to try to wake a few more of the precious seeds from their centuries-long sleep in the hope that one would be a female. That is how another ancient date palm, Hannah, began to grow.