The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

“It was David Greybeard who Jane first observed using grass stems as tools to fish out termites from a termite mound—their earthen nest. And then she saw him stripping leaves from a leafy twig to make it suitable for the purpose. At the time Western science believed only humans were capable of making tools and that this was a main reason why we were separate from all other animals.”

Doug’s first-person narration recounts a story Jane tells about her breakthrough discovery. A chimp named David Greybeard was the first chimp ever observed making and using tools. Jane counts this remarkable discovery as a moment that gave her hope after repeated failures in gaining the chimps’ trust. For Jane, this was an early lesson in The Nature and Power of Hope.

“I did some research into the relatively new field of hope studies. I was surprised to learn that hope is quite different from wishing or fantasizing. Hope leads to future success in a way that wishful thinking does not. While both involve thinking about the future with rich imagery, only hope sparks us to take action directed toward the hoped-for goal.”

This quotation characterizes Doug and contrasts him with Jane. Doug gravitates toward academic studies and quantitative research while Jane gravitates toward anecdotes and stories as evidence for The Nature and Power of Hope. In this quote, Doug’s research-based inquiry backs up Jane’s observational inquiry about how hope necessitates action.

“One of the other girls in the death camp was very ill. Every morning Dr. Eger expected to see the girl dead in her bunk. Yet every day she managed to raise herself off her wooden bed and to work another day […] The girl said, ‘I heard we’re going to be liberated by Christmas.’ The girl counted down each day and each hour, but Christmas came and they were not liberated. She died the next day.”

Doug tells an anecdote to Jane about the life of Dr. Eger, who was imprisoned in the Auschwitz death camp as a young girl and went on to become a hope researcher. Dr. Eger meets a sick girl whose hope of being rescued keeps her going; Dr. Eger thinks that the loss of her hope led to her death. For Jane and Doug, this provides a moral about the life-or-death nature and power of hope.

“Indeed, all that Jane had said represented steps forward toward a better global ethic. But I couldn’t help thinking about how many steps backward we have taken in recent years, and how much further we still had to go.”

In a dialogue genre book, discussion between characters primarily advances the plot. Doug often voices his relative skepticism about the subjects Jane discusses, though he never disagrees with her. This conflict pushes their discussion forward and grounds it in serious, real-world contemporary events rather than theoretical discussions.

“I was intrigued to hear that Jane believed that language had led to the explosion in the human intellect. Because interestingly, while researching hope, I discovered that language, goal setting, and hope all seemed to arise in the same area of the brain—the prefrontal cortex, which is right behind our forehead and is the most recently evolved part of our brain. This region is larger in humans than in other great apes.”

One of the other themes Jane and Doug discuss as they debate The Nature and Power of Hope is The Interrelation of Plant and Animal Species, and whether there is anything about humans that sets them apart from other animals. Jane thinks that spoken and written language is one of these things. Doug compares Jane’s anecdotal musings with his independent research.

“I had once asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose stand against apartheid had bent the arc of history toward justice in South Africa, what he thought of human progress. It was just after the Paris bombings, and many people were despairing about humanity. He said that history takes two steps forward and one step back. Almost exactly a month later the world came together to ratify the Paris Climate Agreement.”

Doug’s narration alludes to the first book in the Global Icons Series, where he spoke with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Rather than thinking about his and Jane’s conversation in isolation, Doug compares the conversations to analyze how they complement one another.

“‘What have we forgotten? Or chosen to ignore?’

‘That there’s intelligence in all life,’ Jane said. ‘I think that indigenous people sense this when they talk about animals and trees being their brothers and sisters. I like to think our human intellect is part of the Intelligence that led to the creation of the universe. Take the trees! We now know that they can communicate information to one another through underground networks of roots and the thin white threads of the microfungi that are attached to them.’”

Jane refrains from grouping all humans and their actions together. She points out that many Indigenous communities in North America and elsewhere have different ways of engaging with the planet and thinking about The Interrelation of Plant and Animal Species. She also references how science has proven the interconnectivity between species via studies on mycorrhizal networks––“the thin white threads”—whose scientifically-proven connectivity mirrors many pre-existing Indigenous beliefs about the same subject.

“All animal life ultimately depends on plants if you think about it. It’s a kind of amazing tapestry of life, where each little stitch is held in place by those around it.”

Jane stresses The Interrelation of Plant and Animal Species by using the metaphor of a “tapestry.” While she characterizes humanity and its intellect as unique, she is clear that the human species still deeply relies on the natural world for all its goods and is not separate from this “tapestry.”

“Recently I got an email from Sarah telling me that Methuselah had turned out to be a splendid partner, fertilized Hannah, and she had produced dates. Huge, luscious dates. Sarah sent me one—it arrived in a little cloth bag—and I was one of the first people to taste a date from the reincarnation of two Judean date palms from the long-gone forests of forty-foot palms that once grew throughout the Jordan Valley. The taste was utterly fantastic.”

Jane tells an anecdote about the resilience of nature. Her friend, a scientist named Sarah, successfully germinated date palm seeds that dated from a forest in the time of King Herod, which had since been cleared. The seeds had survived thousands of years; they found a way to live and reproduce new dates.

“‘There’s a famous saying,’ Jane continued. ‘“We have not inherited the Earth from our ancestors, but borrowed it from our children.” And yet we have not borrowed it from our children. We’ve stolen it! When you borrow something, the expectation is that you will repay. We have been stealing their future for countless years and the magnitude of our theft has now reached absolutely unacceptable proportions.’”

One of Jane’s deepest investments is in the theme of The Significance of Youth Activism and Education. She wants to empower youth climate activists but not make them feel as if the success or failure of climate activism is entirely on their shoulders. She thinks that since older generations have “stolen” the earth from future generations, it is necessary for older generations to also work toward climate solutions.

“I received a letter from a visitor to this camp. It was depressing, he said—bare earth, people with vacant expressions, children sitting listlessly outside their huts. He continued walking through the camp, and then suddenly, he came to a section of the camp where the atmosphere changed. Children were running around and laughing. Hens foraged in a patch of land where grass had been allowed to grow. A few teenagers were working in a small vegetable garden. The visitor asked his host why it was different there. ‘Well, I don’t really know. But it’s something called Roots & Shoots.’”

With this anecdote, Jane demonstrates The Significance of Youth Activism and Education and the success of her group Roots and Shoots. She discusses a visitor to a Congolese refugee camp, who compares the difference in hope between most refugees and those who participated in Roots and Shoots. Stories like this show how Jane’s initiatives are making tangible differences in peoples’ lives and helping them rediscover The Nature and Power of Hope.

“From talking to Jane and doing my own research, I was starting to see that hope is an innate survival trait that seems to exist in every child’s head and heart; but even so, it needs to be encouraged and cultivated. If it is, hope can take root, even in the grimmest of situations, one of which Jane witnessed firsthand.”

Jane and Doug discuss at length how to ensure that people have hope, which Jane thinks is necessary for human survival and the collective action people need to take to help the environment. They determine that it is necessary to nurture hope from early childhood. This stresses The Significance of Youth Activism and Education.

“‘Another inspiring example is Standing Rock,’ I said, referencing the 2016 protests to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline that would likely threaten the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation’s primary water source and desecrate their holy sites. ‘The police used pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and even sprayed the protestors with water in the freezing winter, and still the protestors stayed. Thinking about it now, it was the young people of Standing Rock who emerged as leaders in that occupation.’”

Jane and Doug discuss the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline on Standing Rock Sioux land. This movement is commonly known by the hashtag #NoDAPL. They discuss The Power and Nature of Hope by recounting the violent treatment meted out to the protestors, and how the protesters stood firm anyway.

“That is why I travel around the world—trying to wake people up, make them aware of the danger, yet at the same time assure everyone there is a window of time when our actions can start healing the harm we have inflicted.”

This quotation characterizes Jane’s hope and perseverance toward a better future. At almost 90, Jane has spent the majority of her life fighting for the betterment of the planet and those who live on it. She wishes to foster hope and a sense of urgency in others.

“There was one female, who every so often would stare off into the distance and scream and scream hysterically. She had been separated from her mother as an infant and raised in a lab setting where she had been deprived of love. By contrast, when traumatized infants whose mothers were shot in the wild arrive at one of our sanctuaries and are immediately given love and care, they usually bounce back fairly quickly.”

Jane rose to prominence as a primatologist, studying the behavior of chimps in Gombe. Many of her stories refer to this experience and the similarities between chimp and human behavior. Here, Jane tells Doug about the importance of nurturing and supporting children, using chimp infants as a comparison. A child who experienced intense trauma can still maintain hope in their life if they’re nurtured and loved afterward, while a child who experiences trauma and is given no love or support is often affected by hopelessness and grief for life. Jane wants her story to show both the resilience of chimps and humans as we live through difficult circumstances, and the importance of loving and supporting one another.

“Jane pointed out that the land of Middle-earth was polluted by the destructive industry of that world in the same way that our environment is devastated today. And she reminded me that Lady Galadriel had given Sam a little box of earth from her orchard.”

Jane talks about how fictional stories like Tarzan and Jane have affected her outlook. Here, she discusses how she takes inspiration and hope about the resilience of nature from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The elf Galadriel gives rich earth to the hobbit Samwise, who is a gardener. After the main action of the trilogy, Samwise uses this earth to make fields fertile and rich again, helping nature bounce back from devastation as he “rewilds” Middle-earth.

“By now, the virus had caused an enormous amount of economic and emotional hardship and left death and devastation in its wake. Just days earlier, I’d attended the funeral of my college roommate. At the beginning of the pandemic he’d lost his job and become depressed. Another college friend and I were trying to support him through his disorientation and loss, when we finally discovered how despondent he’d become. He’d seemed to be doing better and told us he didn’t need us to come to him or send him help. But two days after our last conversation, he shot himself.”

Mid-way through their discussions, Jane and Doug’s communication is affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, which spread rapidly in early 2020. Doug details the recent death of his close friend, which makes it difficult for him to have hope. Doug says his friend was so “despondent” that he died by suicide. In general, the pandemic heightened the adverse circumstances that lead to hopelessness.

“When I was a baby—perhaps about one year old, my nanny used to push me around a park in my pram. Apparently, many people would stop to greet us—everyone knew everyone back then. But there was one elderly woman who refused to look at me. ‘It’s her eyes,’ she told Nanny. ‘She looks as though she can see into my mind. There is an old soul in that child, and I find it disturbing. I don’t want to look at it anymore.’”

One of the characteristics Doug constantly notices about Jane is her timelessness. Early in the book when Jane references being an old woman, Doug is shocked because he never thought of her as old. In this quotation, Jane tells a story about how when Jane was a baby, an older woman was perturbed by the wisdom of her eyes. Jane often discusses the timeless wisdom in the eyes of animals, which makes her feel The Interrelation of Plant and Animal Species.

“‘The visit was even more heartbreaking than I expected—and it made me even more determined to do all I could to help those poor prisoners,’ Jane said. ‘I decided to use similar tactics to those I used with the Cambridge scientists—I talked about the behavior of the Gombe chimps and showed them films. I truly believe that a lot of what I perceive as deliberate cruelty is based on ignorance. I wanted to touch their hearts—and for some of them, anyway, it worked.’”

Jane discusses the situations she’s faced which have tested her ability to have hope. One of those was visiting labs where chimps were “prisoners” subject to medical experiments. Jane draws upon The Significance of Youth Activism and Education, humanizing the chimps and educating the young scientists experimenting on them until her own students are allowed to enter the labs and help the imprisoned animals.

“‘Did you really think you could make a difference?’

‘Oh, Doug! I really didn’t know if I could! It was after that conference in 1986, the one where I saw the secretly filmed footage of chimps in labs. I didn’t see how I could help them, but, as I told you, I knew I had to try.’”

Doug pushes Jane on the question of whether, as a young naturalist, she “really” thought she could make a difference in the world. Jane’s exclamation, “Oh, Doug!” as well as her admission that she had doubts reveals her own struggles with hope at times. Jane is a mentor and role model to many, but in her dialogue with Doug, she also characterizes herself as fallible and human.

“I paused as I thought about it. It gave me a sense that I was part of a long lineage of love and heartbreak, longing and suffering that puts my own struggles into perspective. It helps me to feel that I am not alone and that I am not just living for myself.”

Doug ponders The Interrelation Between Plant and Animal Species, in reaction to something Jane said to him. This quotation shows how Jane’s words often push Doug outside his comfort zone to think about his place in the universe in ways he never has before.

“Shakespeare says it beautifully when he talks of seeing ‘books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.’ I get a sense of all of this when I stand transfixed, filled with wonder and awe at some glorious sunset, or the run shining through the forest canopy while a bird sings, or when I lie on my back in some quiet place and look up and up and up into the heavens as the stars gradually emerge from the fading of day’s light.”

Jane quotes Shakespeare’s As You Like It to illustrate the power of natural spaces and how they affect human nature. She also illuminates her own perspective on spirituality, and how a spiritual connection to a greater “Intelligence,” as Jane calls it, can form via nature.

“‘I always enjoy talking with you,’ she said. ‘I like to have my brain challenged.’

‘I’ve had my brain challenged, my heart opened, and my hope renewed,’ I replied.”

As Jane and Doug say their farewells, they each give a brief comment on how their characters have grown since the beginning of their conversation over a year and a half prior, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Doug’s inquiries have “challenged” Jane while her outlook has “renewed” his hope. This transformation is particularly noteworthy for Doug, who at the beginning of the book considered himself a “skeptic” about The Nature and Power of Hope.