Naturalist and activist Jane Goodall will join the LA Times Book Club on Feb. 25 to discuss “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.”
You can watch Goodall in conversation with Times reporter Dorany Pineda at 6 pm PT on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Sign up on Eventbrite here.
Jane Goodall is an anthropologist, activist and UN Messenger of Peace.
(Bill Wallauer/JGI)
Goodall will join book club readers from her family home in the south of England, where she’s been sequestered during the pandemic — far from Gombe National Park and her Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania.
Her latest book addresses this era of climate change and our collective grief over the state of the environment. It also takes readers back to the 1960s when Goodall, a young woman with no research experience and no college degree, spent months crawling through the forest to learn what wild chimpanzees could tell us about human evolution.
Goodall and co-author Douglas Abrams began working on “The Book of Hope” before the pandemic. As she notes in the introduction, she envisioned providing “solace in a time of anguish, direction in a time of uncertainty, courage in a time of fear” to people who, like her, found themselves disheartened by sometimes feeling that the fight for environmental and social justice is a losing battle.
In a recent Times interview, Goodall urged those disheartened by the past two years and continuing environmental decline to embrace their feelings and use that emotional energy to combat powerlessness and despair.
“You hear this expression all the time — ‘Think globally, act locally,’” Goodall says. “But it’s the wrong way around, because if you think globally, it cannot help but be depressed, with climate change, corruption, the rise of the far right, all these things. … You think, what can I do? And so you become apathetic and do nothing. But if you twist it around and say, yes, but what about where I am? Is there anything here I can do?”
Rescuing stray animals, growing organic food and working to help the homeless are examples of small-scale good deeds that can have an outsize effect if others join in, she says.
“The lucky thing is that when you make a difference, it makes you feel good,” she says. “And if you feel good, well, of course, you want to feel even better. So you tackle something else. It’s an upward spiral.”
Jane Goodall and members of her Roots & Shoots group celebrate the Day of Peace at the United Nations.
(Mary Lewis/Jane Goodall Institute)
Goodall’s life is the subject of the “Becoming Jane” exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which continues through April 17.
Created by the National Geographic Society and the Jane Goodall Institute, the exhibition debuted at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, DC, and will move to Chicago after Los Angeles. Here are five noteworthy displays to check out.
“Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall” is currently open at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
(Elon Schoenholz/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
Goodall says she plans to visit Southern California this spring to see the exhibition in person.
“The Book of Hope” is the book club’s February selection. In March, we’re reading “A Ballad of Love and Glory” by Reyna Grande, who joins Times readers on March 29.
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