Humainologie creative dialogue on Wed Dec 29 and my synopsis of The Book of Hope by Jane Goodall

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” – Emily Dickinson

“Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.” – Nelson Mandela

“You are not here merely to make a living, you are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.” – Woodrow Wilson

Cancelled airline flights and cancelled family gatherings, health care workers burned out and airline pilots coming down with Covid, and no end to the pandemic in sight; the gathering storm of the climate crisis and its consequences for future generations; and persistent human stupidity in so many aspects of our behavior: How is it possible to find any realistic hope for now or for the future?

So glad you asked! I have appended herewith my synopsis of The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams, to provide some answers to your good question. There are stories of the indomitable human spirit in the book that I could not find room to include in the synopsis. One is the story of two Chinese men, Jia Haixia and Jia Wenqui, who were friends from childhood. One became blind due to an accident; and the other lost both his arms when as a child he had touched a downed high-voltage power line. To keep their spirits up, they began acting as a team to plant trees and planted more than ten thousand. A documentary film was made about them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx6hBgNNacE Jane sees hope as partly a stubborn determination to keep going toward a chosen goal, a vision. In the words of Rudyard Kipling,

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it….

What Jane Goodall writes about and manifests in her own life is something we all need for our own lives, and for our contribution to the future.

For our creative dialogues in January and subsequent months, I will organise the first and third Wednesdays of each month, while the other Wednesdays will usually be “open” for others to organise if they wish to do so. After our Poetry Night this past Wednesday, Zenia suggested we continue with the readings this coming Wednesday, December 29, and believe me I would not miss this chance to read poems! Before next Wednesday, I will send out another email with poems and ideas in preparation for the reading.

Here is the Zoom link for our second Poetry Night on Wednesday December 29, provided by Shinobu: Topic: Humainologie Dialogue Session Time: December 29, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Dec 29, 2021, 9 occurrence(s) Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89600374916?pwd=OXg2dkF4NEtsMmNzSkdRdW1kdUV5UT09 Meeting ID: 896 0037 4916 Passcode: 12345

Think like a bakery and make it fresh every day!

Arthur

Book: (Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams with Gail Hudson) The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times (2021)

Jane Goodall needs no introduction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIzRWqORVIU The book is organised into “An Invitation to Hope” (the opening section); then three main sections, I. “What Is Hope?” II. “Jane’s Four Reasons for Hope” III. “Becoming a Messenger for Hope”; and the conclusion, “A Message of Hope from Jane.” She writes the invitation and the conclusion, while Douglas Abrams authors a large part of the rest, with Jane responding to his questions.

“We are going through dark times,” writes Jane in her “Invitation to Hope.” She mentions explicitly such things as the climate crisis, the pandemic, the increasing disparity between rich and poor, and terrorist attacks. Inviting the reader to a life based on hope, she writes: “Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement. Many people understand the dire state of the planet – but do nothing about it because they feel helpless and hopeless.” Jane (born 1934) has long been and continues to be an inspiration for many people. Section I, “What Is Hope?” expands upon her emphasis on hope as something that inspires us to action. She describes the dangerous and unfamiliar wilderness into which she went when she accepted Louis Leakey’s challenge of studying chimpanzees. Her resilience, and with it her pragmatic sense of hope, grew with experience. Much later, at the age of seventy-four, her face was seriously injured by a falling rock when she was climbing a rock face. Her response to it was that she didn’t have time for aches and pains because she had a job to do. She defines herself as a naturalist rather than a scientist. A scientist seeks to quantify and gather facts to answer specific questions; the naturalist is more open to the wonder of nature and brings empathy, intuition, and love to their work.

In Section II, Jane gives four reasons for hope, including as Reason 3, the power of young people. Jane and twelve Tanzanian students founded the Roots and Shoots program in 1991. It’s a global community action program https://rootsandshoots.global/ with members from kindergarten to university ages and has branch programs in many countries including Canada https://janegoodall.ca/our-work/roots-and-shoots/ Now thirty years on, its projects – community gardens, opposing the use of Styrofoam in a school, and many others – have given participants “a sense of self-worth and purpose they had lacked,” as for example on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where suicides among young indigenous men had been frequent before the Roots and Shoots program in that community. She emphasises the growing impact of the program with its many alumni, and that “Roots & Shoots…is more than an environmental program. It’s actually teaching people the values of participation and democracy. Joint discussions, joint decisions, doing things together.” Jane had met Greta Thunberg, and Abrams asked her what she thought of Thunberg’s provocative speech at the World Economic Forum when she declared, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7dVF9xylaw Thunberg’s statement is a provocative way of saying it is much too late for polite and largely meaningless words like “hope.” Jane is not using hope as a polite and meaningless word. She says “We do need to respond with fear and anger about what is happening, …Our house is on fire. But if we don’t have hope that we can put the fire out, we will give up. It’s not hope or fear – or anger. We need them all.”

Jane’s first reason for hope is “the amazing human intellect.”She finds intelligence in all of life (and refers to Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees) but contrasts intellect with intelligence. Human language is the means by which the intellect has been able to accomplish so much, including a moon landing and books that convey wisdom from the past; but also things like nuclear weapons. Intelligence, on the other hand, can be found in a growing number of human beings. Intelligence involves a collaboration of the head and the heart. Jane mentions the decline in warfare among parts of Europe and elsewhere, but also quotes Desmond Tutu that human history is characterised by two steps forward and one step back. She refers to the Nazi Holocaust. She had “hated” the Nazis, and – turning attention to this issue of hatred for evil – she emphasizes what children learn in childhood. In referring to what’s needed, she emphasises the Golden Rule as the essence of a new global ethic: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We need intelligence. The human intellect could be the worst or the best thing that has happened in evolution, depending on how we use it. She notes that Indigenous cultures had always had a close connection with the intelligence of nature. She emphasises four challenges we must address before it is too late: 1) alleviate poverty; 2) reduce the unsustainable lifestyles of the affluent; 3) “Third, we must eliminate corruption, for without good governance and honest leadership, we cannot work together to solve our enormous social and environmental challenges.” 4) face up to human overpopulation (and effects of their livestock).

Jane’s second reason for hope is “the resilience of nature.” She emphasised plants, pointing out that “without flora, there would be no fauna.” Why does the resilience of nature give her hope? She says she will answer with a story and adds: “I’ve found that stories reach the heart better than facts or figures. People remember the message in a well-told story even if they don’t remember all the details.” She tells the story of the Survivor Tree found at Ground Zero after the attacks of 9/11. It was just half a trunk with one surviving branch and would have gone in the dumpster – but for the fact that “the young woman who found her, Rebecca Clough, begged that the tree might be given a chance.” The tree was cared for in a nursery in the Bronx and survived. “And once she was strong enough, she was returned to be planted in what is now the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. In the spring her branches are bright with blossoms. People know her story now. I’ve seen them looking at her and wiping away tears.” A similar story of a tree that survived the bombing of Hiroshima is also included. And Jane does not fail to mention that even if we are driving ourselves to extinction, “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.”

Then there’s the third reason (see above) and her fourth reason, “the indomitable human spirit.” She mentions famous people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. However both she and Douglas Abrams (and you and I) know people who are not famous but have risen to meet seemingly insurmountable odds. One thing that helps is the support of others, and Jane mentions the example of traumatised chimpanzees whose mothers were shot in the wild. If immediately given love and care at one of the sanctuaries built for them, they tend to recover.

The pandemic emerged and forced Jane and Douglas Abrams to cancel the meeting they had planned at Jane’s childhood home in Bournemouth. Their work on the book continued with virtual meetings. In Section III, “Becoming a Messenger of Hope,” we learn of Jane’s childhood and youth, how she became the person we know as Jane Goodall. We also learn about the suicide of Abrams’ college roommate after the pandemic led to his loss of employment and depression. The interview turned to Jane’s belief in a spiritual power, and she made reference to an observation from Albert Einstein based on his own exploration of how the universe works: “The harmony of natural law…reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”

In her conclusion, “A Message of Hope from Jane,” she notes that warnings of a pandemic had been ignored – warnings from scientists who study zoonotic diseases – and describes the conditions that can be expected to give rise to such pandemics – including how we keep domestic livestock and how we destroy the habitats of wild animals. The pandemic has forced us to rise to challenges. She had been forced to cancel in-person tours, had set up a “Virtual Jane,” and as a result is reaching far more people than she would have on her tours. She concludes with this: “Please, please rise to the challenge, inspire and help those around you, play your part. Find your reasons for hope and let them guide you onward.”