The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(29)

At that moment, I felt as though I could sit forever by the fire and listen to Jane’s stories, but as I looked out the window at the first stars, I knew it was time to go, to rest, so we could return the next day to explore her last two reasons for hope. “Shall we stop for the night?” I asked.

“I just want to share one last story about hope and the resilience of nature,” Jane said, coming out of her deep reverie.

“Last year, on the UN International Day of Peace, I took part in a very special ceremony in New York. There were about twenty members of JGI’s international youth program, Roots & Shoots, many of them African American high school children from across America. We gathered around The Survivor Tree—the tree who was rescued after she was crushed and wounded on 9/11. The devoted nurseryman Richie Cabo, who had helped to heal her, was with us. We looked up at the strong branches reaching toward the sky.

“Only a short time before they had been filled with beautiful white blossoms, and now the leaves were beginning to fall. We stood silently and prayed for peace on Earth, for an end to racial hatred and discrimination, for a new respect for animals and nature. I looked around at the young faces, the faces of those who would inherit the planet wounded by countless generations of humans. And then I saw it, I saw the neat perfection of the nest of some small bird. I imagined the parents feeding the nestlings, the fledging, the final hopeful flight into the as yet unknown world. The children were also staring up at the nest. Some smiled, others had tears in their eyes. They, too, were ready to move out into the world. And The Survivor Tree, brought back from the dead, had not only put out new leaves herself but nurtured the lives of others.”


Visiting The Survivor Tree on the UN International Day of Peace. Only deep wounds in her trunk tell the story of her suffering. Two of the men who gave her the chance to survive are with me—Richie Carbo, the nurseryman, is closest to me, and on my far right is Ron Vega, who made sure she had a home at the memorial site. (MARK MAGLIO)



Jane turned to me, there in the little cabin in the woods in the Netherlands.

“Now do you understand how I dare hope?” she asked quietly.





REASON 3: THE POWER OF YOUNG PEOPLE


“I’ve always wanted to work with children,” Jane said. “It’s funny, when I was young, I used to think, one day I’ll be old—as I am now—and I always pictured myself sitting on a rustic seat under a tree telling stories to little groups of children.”


With Roots & Shoots group invited to the United Nations with me for UN International Day of Peace. (JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE/MARY LEWIS)



It was easy to imagine Jane under her beloved beech tree, surrounded by children. I could see the trees outside through the two windows beside us, but was grateful that we were cozy inside, sitting by the fire.

The morning sun was making Jane’s cheeks glow as we began another day of interviews. Looking at her in her salmon-colored turtleneck and gray puffy jacket, I realized I never thought of her as being old. There was something so vibrant, so alive, so unstoppable about her. I marveled at how differently people age: some people in their forties and fifties seem like they have been defeated by life and begin to recede; some in their eighties and nineties seem to be endlessly curious and engaged with all that life’s laboratory has to discover.

Just then, as if to prompt us in the direction of Jane’s third reason for hope, we heard children laughing outside.

“The talks that I like giving best,” Jane said, “are to high school and university students. They are so engaged, so alive. But it actually works better than you think even with the little ones. They’re wriggling about on the floor, and you’re telling them stories and thinking, ‘Well, they’re not really listening.’ And then I meet the parents, and the children have told their parents exactly what I’ve said. They’re not supposed to be sitting still at that age—same with a baby chimp—because they’re learning and listening while they play. That’s why school can be so bad. It keeps small children sitting. It’s awful, they’re not meant to do that. They’re meant to be learning from experience. Fortunately, more schools are beginning to change now, taking children out into nature, answering their questions and encouraging them to draw and tell stories.”

“How did you start working with young people?” I asked.

“As I began traveling around the world, raising awareness about the environmental crisis, I met young people on all continents who were apathetic and disengaged, or angry and sometimes violent, or deeply depressed. I began talking to them and they all said more or less the same thing: ‘We feel this way because our future has been compromised, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Indeed, we have compromised their future.

“There is a famous saying,” Jane continued. “‘We have not inherited the Earth from our ancestors but borrowed it from our children.’ And yet we have not borrowed it from our children. We’ve stolen it! When you borrow something, the expectation is that you will repay. We have been stealing their future for countless years and the magnitude of our theft has now reached absolutely unacceptable proportions.”

“It’s not just from this generation that we are stealing,” I added. “We are stealing it from all future generations. Some are calling it intergenerational injustice because the children of the future, the people of the future, do not have a vote or a say in our boardrooms.”