In a new interview with Earth Island Journal, Jane Goodall talks about people around the world who are working to pull species back from the brink, from children in her Roots & Shoots program to a man in New Zealand who wouldn’t let the last two Black Robins on earth go to the wall:
“I’m meeting people all over the world who are doing this kind of thing. Nature is really resilient when you give her a chance, and all around the world people are now beginning to admit that we’re right – there is global warming….So you can’t give up. With our backs to the wall, we’ve always done pretty well as a species.”
At the end of the exchange with Michael Shapiro, she recalls a story told her recently by a schoolteacher in war-ravaged eastern Congo, whose students—Roots & Shoots members living in a refugee camp—convinced a group of fellow youngsters to free a bushbuck fawn they’d caught:
“And the teacher who told me, the Congolese teacher, he was crying. He couldn’t have imagined hearing this from a Congolese child. He said you couldn’t imagine how extraordinary this is. So those are the stories that give hope. It shows that you can change – people say you can’t change the culture. Well you can.”
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