The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(34)
“What an amazing letter,” I said, when Jane had finished reading it. I then learned that the story gets even better.
Jane has kept up the personal correspondence with Joy over the years and so learned that Joy’s mother became such an enthusiast that she began to design courses and write plays related to environmental protection.
All over the world young people are clearing up litter—in the streets, on the beaches, and installing recycling bins in school cafeterias, such as here in Kibale, Uganda. (JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE/MIE HORIUCHI)
And Joy, now eighteen years old and attending university, has rallied the local government behind her Roots & Shoots group in a highly successful recycling program to make Chengdu free of litter.
Jane’s story about Joy and her mother reminded me of a story I heard from Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris Agreement. At a gathering of the World Economic Forum, Ben van Beurden, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, had requested to meet with her one-on-one, without the usual accompanying staff on either side. At the close of their meeting he said, “Christiana, let me be very frank. We are both parents.” He told her about a profound moment when his ten-year-old daughter came to him and asked whether it was true that his company was destroying the planet. He made a pledge to her that he would do anything to make sure she would grow up on a planet that was safe and sustainable for her and future generations. And he decided to support the Paris Agreement.
Clearly, Jane and her thirty-one Jane Goodall Institutes around the world were inspiring a young army of environmental defenders in more than sixty-five countries, but I still wondered if it was enough to change the values of our extraction and consumption civilization without leadership from the top. I wanted to know exactly why she put so much hope in this next generation and whether it was misguided to think that young people could really address the problems previous generations had created.
Millions of Drops Make an Ocean
“I have heard from many of the older visionaries I have met that young people give them hope,” I said, “and I am still wondering what exactly it is about these young people that gives you hope. Do you feel like this generation of young people is different from other generations?”
“In terms of the environment and social justice,” Jane said, “this generation is different. When I was growing up there was nothing taught about these issues in school. But gradually more activists began to write about them. One of the most significant books that influenced people back in the 1960s was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, about the horrific damage caused by the use of DDT.”
“That book really did help start a movement,” I agreed. “The right book or the right film at the right time really can change the culture. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is another example. Books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy have helped create a criminal justice reform movement in the United States.”
“Yes, it’s true. Gradually, over the past sixty years, these issues have been brought out into the open—and some schools began to include awareness of environmental and social issues in the curriculum. And nowadays even if they’re not taught at school, they’re in the news, on television—everywhere. Children can’t escape from hearing about the climate crisis—pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss—and increasingly about our social crises—racism, inequality, poverty. So young people are now much better equipped than we were to understand and deal with the problems we’ve created. And to understand how all these issues are connected.”
“Indeed,” I said, “it’s great that we are educating future generations to be more environmentally and socially aware and that they are changing their parents, but we have massive challenges now. We need change makers in power right now. We don’t have the time to wait for those young people to grow up—”
“A lot of them have already grown up,” Jane countered. “There are three decades of Roots & Shoots alumni now, who have taken the values they acquired as members into their adult lives.”
Still, I wasn’t convinced. “I hear that, but I think that a lot of people push back on saying that youth are the solution. After all, most past members of Roots & Shoots are not in positions of power yet. We need the president of the United States—who’s not going to be a twenty-year-old or thirty-year-old—to lead the way. We need all of the people to be dealing with this in the next ten years.”
Jane didn’t miss a beat. “That’s true. But it’s going to be the twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds who will vote in the right president.”
Once again, Jane was prescient. Eleven months later, an increase in young voter turnout would help vote out Donald Trump, who had pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, and elect Joe Biden—and one of the first major acts of his presidency would be to rejoin the Paris Agreement and recommit to building a healthier economy and planet. Sixty-one percent of Americans age eighteen to twenty-nine—who made up almost one-fifth of the electorate—would vote for Biden. Although Biden would earn over seven million more votes than his opponent, in the bizarre math of the Electoral College, the election would ultimately be decided by just a few hundred thousand votes in key battleground states. It would be the votes of the Jane Generation that would guide the globe’s largest superpower in the right direction. But that was all in the future as we talked that day in the cabin in the woods, and at the time, all I could say to Jane was, “Let’s hope you are right.”