I want to believe there’s hope. I really do. But it’s so hard to muster that feeling sometimes. Perhaps, at age 66, I'm too young, for here is the 87 year old Jane Goodall offering to lift me up in The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, just published today.
The book was co-written with Douglas Abrams, who also wrote The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World, with the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. This new book employs the same technique as that earlier one: it is primarily written by Abrams, based on and using extensive quotes from conversations he had with his subjects. I admit to finding Abrams’ style a bit annoying, both in the previous book and the new one; he can inject himself too much in the conversation, or at other times adopt a gee-whiz attitude of adulation that feels a bit treacly. Still, he knows how to choose powerful voices to discuss urgent subjects.
After reading The Book of Hope, my admiration for Jane Goodall has only increased. Woven throughout the book is the story of her remarkable life. There is her courageous, improbable beginning, talking her way into working with renowned paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey in Kenya in her twenties, and gaining his trust for an assignment into the Tanzania wilderness to study chimpanzees, research she has continued for sixty years. There is her decades of activism on environmentalism and climate change, conservation, social justice, and animal welfare. There is her gutsy elderhood, constantly traveling the world to bring her message to different groups, always eager to be continually learning. There is her devotion to empowering the next generations, as with her Roots & Shoots Program, her activist training for youth operating in nearly 100 countries.
But do I feel any more hopeful? Not really.
Goodall knows it isn’t easy. In the introduction to the book, one of the few sections fully in her own words, she writes:
We are going through dark times.
There is armed conflict in many parts of the world, racial and religious discrimination, hate crimes, terrorist attacks, a political swing to the far right fueling demonstrations and protests that, all too often, become violent. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening and fomenting anger—and unrest. Democracy is under attack in many countries. On top of all that, the COVID-19 pandemic is causing so much suffering and death, loss of jobs, and economic chaos around the world. And the climate crisis, temporarily pushed into the background, is an even greater threat to our future—indeed, to all life on Earth as we know it….”Jane is almost ninety years old,” you may be thinking. “If she is aware of what’s going on in the world, how can she still be writing about hope. She is probably giving in to wishful thinking. She is not facing up to the facts.”
I am facing up to the facts. And on many days I admit that I feel depressed, days when it seems that the efforts, the struggles, the sacrifices of so many people fighting for social and environmental justice, fighting prejudice and racism and greed, are fighting a losing battle. The forces raging around us—greed, corruption, hatred, blind prejudice—are ones we might be foolish to think we can overcome….
I have met so many people who have told me they have lost hope for the future. Young people especially have been angry, depressed or just apathetic because, they’ve told me, we have compromised their future and they feel there is nothing they can do about it. But while it is true that we have not just compromised but stolen their future as we have relentlessly plundered the finite resources of our planet with no concern for future generations, I do not believe it is too late to put things right.
Probably the question I am asked more often than any other is: Do you honestly believe there is hope for our world. For the future of our children and grandchildren?
And I am able to answer truthfully, yes.
Goodall bases her hope on four broad themes: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit. And while I have enormous respect for those qualities, I struggle to transform that respect into hope.
Yes, the human mind is an amazing, powerful problem solver, but without the will to follow through and act on solutions conceived by that intellect, no amount of ingenuity will be enough.
Yes, nature is resilient, but some form of nature surviving doesn’t necessarily translate to a feeling of hope for humanity. Goodall offers the example of the Survivor Tree, a Callery pear tree that was recued from the rubble of the World Trade Center, and two camphor trees that survived the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and which continue to thrive. But for me, these miraculous survival tales of the resilience of nature do not change the fact that it is human folly that nearly destroyed them, a human folly which is equally resilient, and all too able to repeat itself.
Yes, I admire the power of young people, and yet...what is their choice. Young people are forced to act, to struggle and fight for change, and have to believe that they can make a difference. Otherwise, what is left but apathy, despair and dissolution.
And yes, the ability of the human spirit to cope is amazing. But just because we can grit our way to surviving concentration camps, homelessness, refugee flight, famine and so much else, does that really translate into believing in a better future?
At one point, young climate activist Greta Thunberg’s speech to the World Economic Forum is quoted:
“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
It really becomes a question of defining hope. Goodall distinguishes it from mere optimism, a psychological trait in which one believes all will turn out okay in the end. Hope is the desire for a positive outcome, but it is a desire that needs to be worked for, not simply wished for. (And even here she offers shades of meaning; for example, a prisoner may hope for release but lack any concrete way to act on that hope.) Hope and action are mutually reinforcing. Hope is keyed to a sense of agency, to believe that your actions can make a difference. Hope is a trait of human survival.
It feels like circular logic: act on your hopes in the hope that your actions can bring hope. And yet, in the end, what else is there? The idea of simply giving up in the face of the overwhelming problems we face is too devastating to consider. And so, we bring to bear our intellect, our resilience, our adaptability, our belief, our power and our spirit to fight for change. What gives us the courage to do so? Well, that, I guess is hope, and perhaps Goodall has helped me find some embers of it within myself after all.
This Week’s New Hardcover Releases
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Bots and Beasts: What Makes Machines, Animals, and People Smart? by Paul Thagard. A philosopher ponders twenty characteristics of human intelligence to evaluate the smartest machines--including Watson, AlphaZero, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars--and the most intelligent animals--including octopuses, dogs, dolphins, bees, and chimpanzees, as well as hotly debated issues concerning bacterial consciousness, fish pain, and dog jealousy. It’s a book that fits in well with Jane Goodall’s life story. From The Book of Hope:
Jane wasn’t an established scientist. She did not even have an undergraduate degree. [Paleoanthropologist Louis] Leakey wanted someone whose thinking was not already compromised by too much academic prejudice or preconceived beliefs. Jane’s breakthrough discoveries, especially about animal emotions and personalities, might never have been possible if she had been trained to deny that animals could have these, as was common in universities at the time.
- The Digital Silk Road: China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future, by Jonathan Hillman. An expert on China’s global infrastructure expansion provides an urgent look at the battle to connect and control tomorrow’s networks.
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The Plant Hunter: A Scientist's Quest for Nature's Next Medicines, by Cassandra Leah Quave. This ethnobotanist recounts her adventurous travels around the world in search of plants that might hold the next useful medicines for humanity.
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Gentrifier: A Memoir, by Anne Elizabeth Moore. An intriguing intersectional memoir by a queer, chronically-ill white woman who was awarded a free house in a majority-Bangladeshi neighborhood in the majority-Black city of Detroit. The book interrogates the relationships between class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, economics, love, community, and the medical industrial complex.
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Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America, by Ryan Busse. A former firearms executive pulls back the curtain on America's multibillion-dollar gun industry, exposing how it fostered extremism and racism, radicalizing the nation and bringing cultural division to a boiling point.
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Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit. An unusual look at Orwell, reflecting on his passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and the natural world illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.
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Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History, by Alex von Tunzelmann. Exploring the rise and fall of twelve famous, yet now controversial statues, she takes us on a fascinating global historical tour around North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, filled with larger than life characters and dramatic stories. Von Tunzelmann reveals that statues are not historical records but political statements
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Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare, by Paul Lockhart. A history of warfare told through the evolution of weaponry.
- Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, by Wil Haygood. A timely companion to the new Black Film Archive website, this book covers an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America.
- Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, edited by Bryant Terry. Terry captures the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora through the prism of food. With contributions from more than 100 Black cultural luminaires from around the globe, the book moves through chapters exploring parts of the Black experience, from Homeland to Migration, Spirituality to Black Future, offering delicious recipes, moving essays, and arresting artwork.
- The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle, by Myisha Cherry. The philosopher makes the case for rage as a valid response to racism, despite a cultural bias against rage as an acceptable emotion in general, and a social stereotype that it is a dangerous one when expressed by people of color. Today is its release date, though it has yet to hit the distributor warehouses.
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Now available in paperback: the Pulitzer prize-winning The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by Les and Tamara Payne.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
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