By Alyson Lundstrom
(Originally published for Zero Me Sustainability)
Whether you are a card-carrying earth warrior or someone just trying to get through your work day alive, Jane Goodall has probably shaded the way your future will look.
While most people will recognize Jane Goodall as a 1960s National Geographic cover girl, surrounded by the chimpanzees she gave voice to in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, she has gone on to become one of our most essential conservation advocates, our living, breathing Mother Earth.
Approaching 90 years old, and having spent her entire life moving people to care, her message has expanded and risen above endangered species to tackle the planet's decline. For, after all, what is an endangered species worth if there is no planet?
Dr. Goodall’s has again changed her primary focus in her last chapter and her primary message is to spread hope in a fight against earth apathy. She told the New York Times in 2021:
“Yes, we absolutely need to know all the doom and gloom because we are approaching a crossroads, and if we don’t take action it could be too late. But traveling the world, I’d see so many projects of restoration, animal and plant species being rescued from the brink of extinction, people tackling what seemed impossible and not giving up.
Those are the stories that should have equal time, because they’re what gives people hope. If you don’t have hope, why bother? Why should I bother to think about my ecological footprint if I don’t think that what I do is going to make a difference? Why not eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die?”
Her newest endeavor, Roots & Shoots, aims to go where she believes the heart of change lies; with the youth. Her strategy to reach out to future change makers is one every person can apply where change needs to be seen.
Her words are a carefully crafted masterclass of empathic persuasion where if you weren’t already on board with being a part of positive change before hearing her, at the very least you’ve decided not to part of the problem after.
Here are six of Jane Goodall’s greatest tokens of wisdom to inspire hope and action in all of us. May we read them now and take action or regret our ignorance later.
1. “Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, yet we’re destroying the only home we have.”
2. “Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we help. Only if we help, we shall be saved.”
3. “Lasting change is a series of compromises. And compromise is alright, as long your values don’t change.”
4. “The greatest danger to our future is apathy.”
5. “We could change the world tomorrow if all the millions of people around the world acted the way they believed.”
6. “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
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