
Jane Goodall often finds herself looking up at the moon.
Eighty-five years she’s been on this planet, and still, she’s in awe of it.
Hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, the moon is the constant between us and every other thing that’s ever found themselves on earth.
But we – human beings – are the only creatures clever enough to have landed there; to explore its craters with our own feet, and to hold its rocks with our own hands.
“It’s bizarre,” Jane Goodall tells Mamamia, before pausing for a moment.
“That the most intellectual creature is destroying its only home.”
Jane Goodall on leaving a better world for our children. Post continues below.
For Goodall, the world’s most prolific expert on chimpanzees, the environment is not an election issue, to be weighed up alongside the economy.
It is not something to be prioritised by men in suits, sitting in parliament and around boardroom tables.
The environment is it. All we have. And we’re running out of time.
“The window is closing,” she says.
“I don’t know how big a window of time we have, and some scientists think it’s too late.”
If we continue on ‘business as usual’, Goodall says, then “I would not want to imagine the desert world my great-grandchildren will be born into.”
It is not a world, Goodall knows, that will resemble the planet she grew up in.
In 1960, she first started studying the interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania – work which would ultimately change how humans understood our closest living relatives.
But even since then, weather patterns have dramatically changed. She’s spoken to people all over the world who do not recognise the place they’ve lived their whole lives. It won’t stop raining. Or there is no rain. Now, some tell her, there are no seasons.
Goodall quotes Mahatma Gandhi, “The planet can provide for human need, but not human greed.”
We’ve become too materialistic, she laments. We’ve “lost connection with the natural world,” while we strive to get bigger and more and more successful, at the expense of our environment.
Top Comments
Well, if you’re serious and not virtue signalling, a global shift to nuclear power and pressuring 3rd world nations to bring their birth rates to sustainable levels akin to those in the west will each do a Hell off a lot more than switching off a light during earth hour and trying to get rid of the coal we use here whilst ignoring the magnitude greater amount of coal we export overseas. But I doubt people calling for action on climate change would actually bite the bullet on the hard but effective actions.
Everything we do currently takes us further away from nature so our disconnection from our source of life, the planet is inevitable. We are so stupid that we confuse profit-making with what is good for us. An example, we all accept as ‘science’ the injection or consumption of man-made chemicals into our bodies to keep us ‘well,’ rather than grow and eat nutritious food. We have outsourced one of our most important basic needs, food, to industries that are driven by their own profit-making rather than our wellness. We are so easily hoodwinked by them with our herd/sheep mentality. To think we could come together and unite our entire species, when there are profiteers striving to prevent us doing so, and work to fix our mess the planet is probably ludicrous. The earth may just be better off without us.
Gee, that cheered me up.
Have you ever tried to make your own food, at the levels available at the supermarkets?
Greed driven corporations are much cheaper and less labour intensive.
Not sure nutritious foods can cure / prevent a lot of the diseases that are around.