The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(61)
I would not last long without the love and support of my brilliant wife, Rachel, and our children, Jesse, Kayla, and Eliana, who are three of my greatest hopes for the future and demonstrate the power of young people, each in their own unique way.
As Jane has said, the entire team at Celadon was incredible to work with and saw the vision and potential of this book from the beginning, including Cecily van Buren-Freedman, Christine Mykityshyn, Anna Belle Hindenlang, Rachel Chou, Don Weisberg, Deb Futter, and most of all, Jamie Raab. Jamie has been someone I have long admired as one of the most brilliant and creative publishers in the world, and she has been a joy to work with from start to finish, helping to guide the project with her wisdom, kindness, and deep knowledge of the reader’s hopes and dreams.
I’d like to thank all at the Jane Goodall Institute who helped with this project, from my first conversations with Susana Name to my joyous lunch with Mary Lewis, who has been there at every step of the way with her warmth, her insight, and her ability to make miracles happen in Jane’s impossibly crowded schedule. Adrian Sington, Jane’s literary agent, has been a catalyst and a cherished colleague who made the project possible even against so many odds and in the face of the global pandemic. Our first meeting at the London Book Fair is one of the very happy memories of my life. Gail Hudson, Jane’s longtime collaborator and friend, helped us immensely as we wove our dialogues together. She was instrumental to the book’s completion and has become my trusted friend and advisor, too.
And finally, I would like to thank Jane for the great gift of self that she has given the world in this book. I sought out Jane because she is a naturalist who has rare and necessary knowledge of our world, but I also discovered a humanitarian and wisdom figure who speaks for us and for the Earth. As a poet and writer, her devotion to making sure that every word expressed her greatest truth was deeply inspiring. It has been one of the great privileges of my life to companion Jane into the depths of her understanding of human nature and how hope might be part of what saves us. Despite the extraordinary demands of an aching world desperate for her guidance, she was extremely generous with her time, her wisdom, and her friendship, first as I was traveling the rocky terrain of personal grief and then during the unprecedented global pandemic that revealed to all of us how vulnerable and precious our world truly is.
Further Reading
I: What Is Hope?
For a deeper exploration of Jane’s life and the experiences that have formed her views, see her spiritual autobiography, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (Warner Books, 1999). For more information about her work with chimpanzees, see her classic works on the chimpanzees of Gombe, In the Shadow of Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1971) and Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (Houghton Mifflin, 1990).
For more on the subject of hope studies, see Charles Snyder’s Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here (Free Press, 1994); Shane Lopez’s Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (Atria Paperback, 2014); and Casey Gwinn and Chan Hellman’s Hope Rising: How the Science of HOPE Can Change Your Life (Morgan James, 2019). There’s also an excellent brief article by Kirsten Weir, writing for the American Psychological Association (“Mission Impossible,” Monitor on Psychology 44, no. 9 [October 2013], www.apa.org/monitor/2013/10/mission-impossible).
The idea that when we think of the future we’re either fantasizing, dwelling, or hoping comes from Lopez’s book cited above (p. 16) as does the meta-analysis of hope’s impact on academic success, workplace productivity, and overall happiness (p. 50).
In another study, psychologists at the University of Leicester looked at students over three years and found that the more hopeful students did better academically. In fact, hope mattered more than intelligence, personality, and even prior academic achievement. (“Hope Uniquely Predicts Objective Academic Achievement Above Intelligence, Personality, and Previous Academic Achievement,” Journal of Research in Personality, 44 [August 2010]: 550–53, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2010.05.009). In another study, researchers compared the relationship between hope and productivity in their analysis of forty-five studies that examined more than eleven thousand employees in a variety of fields. (“Having the Will and Finding the Way: A Review and Meta-Analysis of Hope at Work,” Journal of Positive Psychology 8, no. 4 [May 2013]: 292–304, https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.800903). They concluded that hope determines 14 percent of workplace productivity, which was more than other measures including intelligence or optimism.
Hope can impact us collectively as well as individually. In a survey of a thousand people in a medium-sized city, researcher Chan Hellman found that collective hope was the most significant predictor for overall community well-being. When the survey was connected to public health data, they even found that both individual hope and collective hope predicted life expectancy (Hellman, C. M., & Schaefer, S. M. [2017]. How hopeful is Tulsa: A community wide assessment of hope and well-being. Unpublished manuscript.)
Other research shows that hope seems to impact our physical health. Stephen Stern, a physician at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and his colleagues conducted a mortality study of almost eight hundred Mexican Americans and European Americans (Stephen L. Stern, Rahul Dhanda, and Helen P. Hazuda, “Hopelessness Predicts Mortality in Older Mexican and European Americans,” Psychosomatic Medicine 63, no. 3 [May-June 2001]: 344–51, doi: 10.1097/00006842–200105000–00003). When controlling for gender, education, ethnicity, blood pressure, body mass index, and drinking behavior, the people who were less hopeful were more than twice as likely to have died from cancer and heart disease within three years. Stern believes that hope for the future drives our behaviors in the present, and the choices we make in the present determine whether we have a longer or shorter life.