Full Transcript:
Jane Goodall (00:04):
When I first got to Kenya, I stayed with my friend and somebody said, “If you’re interested in animals, you should meet Louis Leakey,” who is curator of the Natural History Museum, but spent his life searching for post-life remains of stone age people living across Africa.
Jane Goodall (00:22):
We used to go for three months, every summer to Olduvai Gorge. He was convinced, as was his wife, Mary Leakey, that there had been stone age people there.
Jane Goodall (00:33):
So Jillian and I shared a tent, and we spent all day digging for fossils. It was very hot and exhausting, but in the evening, we were allowed to walk out on the planes and all the animals were there. There were lions, and rhinos, and giraffes, just all around the gorge. They’re not there now, but they were then.
Jane Goodall (00:55):
And one evening I just felt something and I looked back and there was this young male lion, fully grown with mane sprouting on his shoulder.
Jane Goodall (01:06):
And Jillian and I were made to take Mary Leakey’s two dogs that always came on the expedition, Dalmatians.
Jane Goodall (01:14):
Well, as we were walking along the bottom of the gorge, a tiny little mouse ran across the trail and both the dogs took off. We didn’t have leads, or collars, or anything. That’s exactly when I felt this lion. So we were calling and finally, thank goodness, they came out. We had to climb up onto the open plain.
Jane Goodall (01:35):
So we did that. We get to the top. Jillian let’s go of Tuts, the champion of all breeds of Kenya, Mary Leakey’s beloved dog. And what does Tuts do? He races back down to look for the mouse. So we called and called, and I thought, “Well, okay.” I said, “Julian, I’m going to have to go down and find her.” But fortunately, at that moment, Tuts arrived. So I think it was that evening around the campfire that Leakey decided I was the person he’d be looking for to go and study chimps.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
I dreamed of seeing greener and happier planet.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
I want people to care more about climate change because it affects us.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
Our wisdom and the lessons we learned.
Speaker 6 (02:31):
I aspire to change the world too, because the hope she gave me.
Speaker 7 (02:34):
She devoted her life to this.
Speaker 8 (02:36):
Together.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Together, we can. Together, we can.
Jane Goodall (02:43):
What is your greatest reason for hope? I’m Jane Goodall, and this is the Hopecast.
Jane Goodall (02:52):
Today, I get to speak with someone whose work and influence inspires me, Lisa Jackson, the vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives of Apple.
Jane Goodall (03:05):
Lisa served as administrator for the United States Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration, where she managed US efforts to address climate change, reduce greenhouse gases and promote environmental education.
Jane Goodall (03:23):
Now at Apple, Lisa leads the company’s environmental initiatives, including efforts to use renewable energy and sustainable materials, while also leading Apple’s racial equity and justice initiative.
Jane Goodall (03:40):
I’m looking forward to our discussion about how one of the largest corporations in the world can have such a massive impact on the health of our planet. I hope you enjoy this hopeful conversation with Lisa Jackson.
Jane Goodall (04:00):
Lisa Jackson, I am so really thrilled to welcome you to this episode of Hopecast. And I think back to a short conversation we had what seems years and years ago in Davos and we haven’t really had an opportunity to talk again since then, So I’m looking forward to this for very much.
Lisa Jackson (04:21):
I am thrilled to be here. And I agree, we had such a moment of purpose and fun in Davos. So I hope we have the same thing here where we have real purpose, but we also take some time to recognize all you’re doing and how important it is to bring joy to this work.
Jane Goodall (04:40):
You know how I began, born loving animals and wanting to learn about them, which led, step by step, into what I’m doing now. How did it begin for you?
Lisa Jackson (04:51):
Very differently. So I was raised in New Orleans, on the Gulf Coast of the United States. Most people know a city that was devastated by a major hurricane Katrina in 2005. But when I was growing up, urban environment, sort of suburban, I really didn’t have that connection to the natural world. I always tell people, we lived on one of the most mighty rivers in the world, the Mississippi and I don’t remember the first time I saw it, but I wasn’t a kid. I didn’t see this as a resource. I saw it as a foul smelling place that needed to be stayed away from.
Lisa Jackson (05:29):
And as I grow older, I wanted to be a doctor. I was very good in school. I wanted to be a doctor. My pediatrician was a doctor. So I always say being able to see someone doing what you want to do is important, so the role model that you are, Jane is so important.
Lisa Jackson (05:47):
And when I was in third or fourth grade, we all became aware, through a youth led movement, of what we were doing to the environment. People were marching in Washington D.C. and around the country. The Santa Barbara oil spill had happened. And I just became very worried about the environment.
Lisa Jackson (06:07):
I remember writing a letter to the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, and saying, “Do something. Do something.”
Lisa Jackson (06:16):
And later, that same year or a year later in 1970, the President did do something. He formed the Environmental Protection Agency.
Lisa Jackson (06:23):
But I think wanting to be a doctor, I was going to be a doctor until I got to high school. And I went to a program that was designed to expose kids to this field of engineering. I didn’t even know what an engineer was when I went to the program, but I came out saying, “I’m going to try being an engineer. I’ll still go to med school after, but I’ll be an engineer.”
Lisa Jackson (06:43):
And I went to college and I majored in chemical engineering. And for me, what happened was, if you know engineering at all, we do these big diagrams and in the diagrams, it’s material flows and there would always be arrows where the material went off the page. Well, that was the waste and the waste was going somewhere. It was either being vented into the air, or into the water, or into a landfill, in someone’s neighborhood. And I started to think, if engineers are going to be responsible for making all this material, and coming up with these processes, and these arrows that go off the page, we should also be responsible for taking care of that waste. We should do something. We have the knowledge, we just aren’t thinking of it that way.
Lisa Jackson (07:32):
And of course, the world came to understand the importance of dealing with waste. There was a time when rivers were catching on fires and smog was a way of life. And so, I always tell people, I didn’t come to the environment from the beautiful side. I wasn’t inspired by nature. I was activated by the lack of care for people. Fine particulate matter in the air shortens people’s lives, causes asthma. Heavy metals in the water and in the atmosphere ending up in our food cause major impacts on children, on the development of their minds.
Lisa Jackson (08:09):
And so, I always tell people I’m an engineer by training and profession, but I feel like I have a little of that medical doctor in me as well.
Jane Goodall (08:27):
Well, I know, Lisa, that Apple under your guidance is really working towards being a very, very environmentally friendly organization. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Lisa Jackson (08:41):
I joined Apple eight years ago. I found a company that was already on the road to making significant investments in clean energy, had made some real changes that were around the materials that we use in our hardware, but we took all that and we put it on a much faster pace because time is super important.
Lisa Jackson (09:05):
And Apple is a carbon neutral company. We achieved that milestone last year, I’m happy to say. A lot of times you hear companies say we’re carbon neutral, but they’re buying offsets. And that might work for some companies. But to me, the bigger we are, the more responsibility we have that that carbon neutral is actually clean energy.
Lisa Jackson (09:25):
So about 80% of all the energy we use is clean, which means that most of the energy that we need, we had to build on grids around the world. So that clean energy, almost 80% of it, represents new clean energy projects that Apple had to invest in.
Lisa Jackson (09:44):
And then, yes, of course we have to offset things like travel and logistics, but we’re in the midst of this horrible pandemic. It’s an opportunity for us to even rethink those things. So we’ve promised to now take our entire supply chain to be carbon neutral by 2030, and to help our customers get to carbon neutral for their Apple device use as well.
Lisa Jackson (10:09):
So we see climate change as; we started at home with our own kernel, but this really has to ripple out into the world and we have a role to play in helping our suppliers, we have hundreds and hundreds of suppliers, as well as our customers get to carbon neutral as well.
Jane Goodall (10:29):
My job is to give people hope and inspire, particularly young people, but everyone to live in such a way that we are not harming mother nature as much. And the more that we can inspire people to live carbon neutral lives and to think about the environment, the more help you’ll get, because all your customers will want you to move in that direction. That can make quite a difference.
Jane Goodall (10:58):
I once had to talk to the executives of an oil company who were actually putting money into Roots & Shoots. And so it was just a small group of the very top people. This was in China. And so I said to them, “I’m really grateful that you are enabling these young people to do these environmental projects.” And I said, “I hope you realize that we’re actually teaching them not to buy your product.”
Jane Goodall (11:27):
And there was a dead silence. And afterwards, the CEO, he said, “Jane, thank you. You’ve made us think. You’ve really made us think about what we are doing about our footprint of the planet.”
Jane Goodall (11:42):
And so if you can get more and more CEOs… And I think Apple giving an example like this, I think there’s a lot of competition in your world, isn’t there? And if you can attract more customers by your attitude towards climate change and the environment, you’ll score. So they’ll want to score too. So you can lead the charge towards environmental responsibility, and I think it’s very exciting.
Lisa Jackson (12:09):
Oh, thank you.
Lisa Jackson (12:10):
Yeah, I love that word inspire. There’s aspiration in it. There’s this belief that there’s something new and better that we can all do together. I love that.
Lisa Jackson (12:21):
I work for a company that makes products that joins people together. We are speaking right now on FaceTime or through our technologies. I love that. But I also think you’re entirely right.
Lisa Jackson (12:34):
Look, I think first and foremost, as a company, we should focus on other companies. So Apple has a role and a responsibility to play in showing other companies, “This can be done. It can be done in a way that’s good for your bottom line. It can be done in a way that gets you more customers.”
Lisa Jackson (12:53):
And so we’re spending a lot of time helping. We have well over a hundred companies that have pledged to go a 100% clean energy just like Apple. And they’re all our suppliers.
Lisa Jackson (13:06):
So that’s our main thrust. It has been for several years now. Almost eight gigawatts of clean energy coming online to make the pledges come true.
Lisa Jackson (13:15):
But we also don’t want to leave out our customers because our products have always been about empowering people. You mentioned young people and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Young people are dragging us along in some ways, and so your words were so prescient because you educate on why certain products, oil and gas are not good for the climate, but they are now saying, “We connect to each other and we are not going to take this anymore.” So you were giving them a warning and it turned out to be very, very true, I think, and we’re seeing that right now.
Jane Goodall (13:52):
I think you’re right. The other thing that’s happening because of what you are investing in helping the planet, is creating a lot of jobs. A lot of young people, some of them are working in areas which are gradually losing popularity, like in oil and gas companies. And the writings on the wall, quite honestly. There’s not so much support anymore for buying oil and gas. They want clean green energy. So to think that they can come and work for a company like Apple or another such organization that you’ve perhaps inspired, that’s very encouraging for them. Because I’ve talked to young people who say, “Well, I’ve been working on this all my life and what’s going to happen is that company collapses, because people don’t buy their products anymore, because they’re not environmentally friendly?”
Lisa Jackson (14:46):
This transition that has to happen, first off, it has to be just. We don’t want to see only people who have means, are invested in the clean economy, do well. We should all be part of the clean economy because it’s the economy of the future.
Lisa Jackson (15:04):
That’s why we want to spread this idea of, “You can be a part of the clean energy and the low carbon economy,” to our suppliers, because they’re all employers in their individual regions of the world. And so they have to see another path forward.
Lisa Jackson (15:20):
The other thing I say to young people when I speak to them is, “You can be that force for climate change where you are.”
Lisa Jackson (15:30):
So what was extraordinary about your words to those executives where you were ploughing a field for the people in that company who agree with you, but maybe never had a sympathetic ear.
Lisa Jackson (15:43):
Part of what we have to do is say to even the tough ones, and there are tough sectors out there, steel manufacturing in general, of course, the energy sector and you’re starting to see some energy companies saying “We’re going to become an energy company, not just a fossil energy company,” because they see the writing on the wall.
Lisa Jackson (16:04):
Well, how extraordinary that when they do, not just young people, but people who’ve been in this field for a long time, are there, inside those companies, ready to help the transition happen.
Lisa Jackson (16:16):
As important as it is that you work in a clean energy field, in some ways, it’s more important if you work in a traditional one, because you can help to make the change that will really, really matter.
Lisa Jackson (16:28):
And so for young people, I say, “Don’t feel like there’s any position or place where you’re like, “No, I can’t do that job,” because that might be the one place where you make the most difference in the whole world.”
Jane Goodall (16:40):
That’s absolutely right. And when I began our program, I began it in Tanzania in 1991. So why did I begin it? Because at that time, before COVID restrictions grounded me here in the UK, I was traveling about 300 days a year. And I think, you know that because that was how it was when we met in Davos.
Jane Goodall (17:04):
So all around the world, I was meeting young people who seemed to have lost hope. A lot of them were just apathetic. They didn’t seem to care about anything. But some of them were really depressed, and others were angry.
Jane Goodall (17:19):
And so, I began talking to them and they all said, more or less the same, “We feel like because you’ve compromised our future and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Jane Goodall (17:28):
So you know, Lisa, we have compromised the future in many, many, many ways, for years, and years, and years.
Jane Goodall (17:36):
When they said there was nothing they could do about it, I thought, “That’s not right.” We have a window of time, and if we get together, then we can at least start to heal the harm we’ve inflicted. We can slow down climate change. We can slow down loss of biodiversity.
Jane Goodall (17:55):
The main message is, every single one of us matters, has a role to play, makes an impact on the planet every day. And some of us, like you and me, we can choose the kind of impact we make. We can choose what we buy. We can choose not to buy it if it was made in an unethical way.
Jane Goodall (18:18):
But before we can have enough people involved in that, we have to alleviate extreme poverty, where you destroy the environment, you cut down the trees because you’re desperate to get a bit more fertile land because your land is over-farmed and infertile. And if you’re in an urban area, you don’t have the luxury we have of choosing what to buy and what not to buy. You just buy the cheapest because you have to.
Jane Goodall (18:45):
And I think Apple can truly help by sharing the fact that these changes are not impossible. There’s enough money out there to alleviate poverty.
Lisa Jackson (18:59):
It’s so profound, what you just said.
Lisa Jackson (19:01):
One of the things I always say, and I think when I say it, some people hear it and some people, they hear the words, but they don’t really get at it, is that actually alleviating poverty, giving people what they need to have dignified, productive, fully realized lives, which is what each one of us has the right to, in my opinion, is not at odds with treating our planet and it’s incredible wealth of resources and diversity.
Lisa Jackson (19:34):
One of the things we did is, this past year we launched something called the Restore Fund. Our thought was, “How do we get resources, corporate resources right now into the game of protecting these places that support so much more, in terms of communities that rely on them?”
Lisa Jackson (19:56):
We had done some work with Conservation International, where they were putting real resources into protecting mangrove forests in Columbia.
Lisa Jackson (20:06):
But what we showed with that work, what they showed was, these mangrove forests were much more and about, “Oh, we’re preserving a beautiful place.” They supported the local fishing economy. People were able to feed their families and live if those mangroves were there.
Lisa Jackson (20:22):
So we started to think about what if we did the same kind of thing, but commercially, with working forests. So forests are actually an amazing thing. Having a forest that is thoughtfully and sustainably harvested. So cutting down trees, in and of itself, is not a bad thing, but preserving the habitat and ensuring that you preserve certain habitats as working forests, but others as more natural forests for biodiversity, those things can live in harmony.
Lisa Jackson (20:54):
So we actually have a $200 million fund. We invest money into the fund. It’s managed like any other money fund out there, meaning the whole point of the fund is that you make money on the money you put in in. But you also make negative carbon off of the money you put in.
Lisa Jackson (21:13):
So this fund has two types of returns, financial and planet. And we want to show if we can make that work, just think about how extraordinary it is if every company is investing in a fund that doesn’t pay dividends that are only money, the dividends are also sustainable ones. And it’s exactly what you’re talking about. We have to find a way, a new way to think about capital and putting it to use in more than, “Any way to make money is okay.”
Lisa Jackson (21:50):
And we owe it to those young people who are looking at us to help find those new ways to prosper.
Jane Goodall (21:56):
We desperately need a new relationship with the natural world because we’re part of it. We depend on it, but you know what? We depend on healthy ecosystems. And I like to think of the Gombe Forest, which I know so well. The ecosystem of the Gombe Forest. And so I see it as this interconnected, beautiful. I think of it as a tapestry of wonderful life forms, plant and animal, and each little species has a role to play. And so if you think of it as a tapestry, a glorious, wonderful, living tapestry, a little species goes extinct, and when he goes extinct, a thread is pulled from the tapestry.
Jane Goodall (22:48):
Well, maybe another species depended on that one for food. So pull out another thread. And this can have a ripple effect, and in the end, with enough species of plant and animal become extinct, tapestry will hang in tatters. And what we depend on for clean air, for clean water, for food, for shield, for everything, is healthy ecosystems.
Lisa Jackson (23:13):
Yes, absolutely. When you translate that beautiful tapestry metaphor over to the work we do here at Apple, we make hardware, we make the iPhone, we make iPad, we make wonderful tools. I will actually go so as far as to say, you need to be connected. In this day and age, everyone, from activists, to teachers, to healthcare, lives in a connected world. But can we make those products with less and less of an impact on the natural world? Can we make it in a way that at a minimum, we do no harm? And maybe in some cases, we do good at the same time.
Lisa Jackson (23:53):
Another great example, we talked about the Restore Fund, but a few years ago, our CEO, Tim Cook announced that Apple’s goal was to make all of our products using only recycled material or renewable material.
Lisa Jackson (24:07):
At the time he said that, there was nowhere in the world you could go and just buy recycled, rare earth metals to use in consumer electronics. So that one setting of the direction, that north star, which is now a north star for all; every engineer at Apple knows that’s what we’re shooting for, means all of a sudden, we’re in the market for recycled materials. We’re out talking to companies, small companies, startups, big ones saying, “Okay, how can we get recycled materials?”
Lisa Jackson (24:42):
We started with some tough ones, like rare earth elements because it’s a little bit of a misnomer. People think rare means there’s not enough of them. In many cases, there’s enough for many, many decades, but they’re in very small percentages of the crust. And so you have to process a lot of material to get small amounts that are needed for our products. What if we can take that all away if we’re using recycled because that material has already been extracted from ore? So we are now shipping products with recycled rare earth elements in our magnets and tactic features.
Lisa Jackson (25:20):
We’re shipping products with recycled copper and tungsten. Of course, we use recycled aluminum, which is something that the world has been doing for a while, but we also use low carbon aluminum. We look for aluminum that is smelted, when it is smelted with hydropower.
Lisa Jackson (25:38):
So from the engineering need, that’s some of the most interesting work we’re doing because we’re pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of recycling. And we have a ton more to do. And there’s folks listening who will say, “I think Apple should be doing more on this and that.” And I would say, “I agree with you, but we started. And we’re pretty far along at this point, and I think there’s no going back.”
Jane Goodall (26:03):
Have we talked to you about our Roots&Shoot program that’s spreading around the world, of collecting up used cell phones so that they can go to a center to have these minerals extracted from them like coltan? The reason Roots & Shoots began, it is because coltan comes from an area in DRC where there are guerillas and chimpanzees. The people are mining this coltan, and so many of the mines are illegal and children are being forced to borough into the ground to get the coltan. So working with you to spread this, “Let’s recycle,” not just cell phones and smart phones, but laptops and everything so that the minerals can be extracted from them.
Lisa Jackson (26:55):
From batteries.
Lisa Jackson (26:56):
Well, we haven’t talked about Roots & Shoots, but I’m not surprised to know that any program you’re affiliated with is tackling that really significant problem. It is something we’ve been aware of for years here. They call them conflict minerals, because they’re also, in many cases, involved in human to human conflict.
Lisa Jackson (27:16):
But I think you bring up a good point. There’s the conflict aspect, there’s the labor aspect, there’s the environmental aspect. And look, we’ve also heard the reverse argument that look, these recycled materials are taking away opportunities for people to make money. It cannot be that it requires exploitation in so many different sort of venues, human and ecological, and ethical as well. So I’m proud that we lead there, and we need to continue to push the boundaries and do that work because it’s super important.
Lisa Jackson (28:02):
I think it’s important for people listening to realize the kind of resilience it takes to stay hopeful.
Jane Goodall (28:08):
To be honest, if you lose hope, if our young people lose hope, that’s the end. Because if you don’t hope that the actions that you are taking are going to make a difference, why bother?
Jane Goodall (28:22):
Nurturing hope in young people, especially in some countries, is so desperately important. And Roots & Shoots is helping them to have hope.
Jane Goodall (28:34):
Because you know this expression: “Think globally, act globally?” Well, it’s wrong? Because once you think globally, you are depressed, you can’t help it. You must be. I must be. If you think about what’s going wrong all around the world, it’s jolly depressing. Face it.
Jane Goodall (28:52):
But if you then say, “Okay, but I’m living here in Burma and I care about what’s happening here.” For me, it was having people cement up all their gardens so that the hedgehogs were disappearing and that sort of thing.
Jane Goodall (29:10):
So get together, form a little group and fight for what you think is the right thing to do. And my goodness, you can usually win that fight and you see change happening. And then when you realize, and this is Roots & Shoots, they realize all around the world, there are young people who care about the same kind of things as we do, then you dare think globally.
Jane Goodall (29:34):
So twist this around. Act locally, then you dare think globally.
Lisa Jackson (29:40):
I love it. Yes. I love it. I think you’re right. Otherwise you get caught in the problem of the comments. You’re sort of stymied in place.
Lisa Jackson (29:49):
It’s not numbers. It’s commitment. It’s passion. I like what you said, form a little group, start where you are.
Jane Goodall (29:58):
The other thing is to share the good news stories. There are so many, Lisa. And it’s not just that I’ve heard about them. I’ve seen them. I’ve met the people tackling what seems impossible because they’re so passionate that other people joined the cause and the impossible becomes possible.
Jane Goodall (30:16):
Inca, Costa Rica, they were almost totally deforested, and because they worked out this system of paying people to protect the trees, instead of making money from cutting them down, biodiversity has come back. Endangered species are being rescued from the brink of extinction.
Jane Goodall (30:36):
Give nature a chance, and she can reclaim places you’ve destroyed.
Lisa Jackson (30:42):
Before I joined Apple, I was at the Environmental Protection Agency, working for President Obama, and you would talk to places around the world. Actually, I talked to a guy that worked here at Apple when I was interviewing, and he said, “I grew up in Pittsburgh. It was a steel town.” He said, “I remember we used to play a game when I was little. We would drive downtown and see who could first spot a skyscraper. And sometimes we would have to be almost across the street before we could see anything.” That’s how much smog was in the air.
Lisa Jackson (31:17):
In the period of his lifetime, the skies in major cities in this country, and others have gone from deathly dangerous to healthy. There are still pockets where they’re not, and they tend to be in poor communities and around highways. There’s a whole justice component.
Lisa Jackson (31:36):
But think about our major cities now, whether it’s Delhi, or Beijing, or cities that are… Looking at it, mother nature will work with you. I’ve always been amazed at how quickly there seems to almost be a bias towards healing in nature. That if we make one step, nature seems to come around and try to make five. And that gives me incredible hope because just like we’re seeing nature, say, “Look, I’m magnifying the results of climate change because it’s just getting worse,” it would magnify the efforts of ending climate change if we do it.
Jane Goodall (32:13):
When I went to Africa to learn more about why chimpanzees were disappearing, how the forests were being destroyed, I realized a lot about what was happening to the chimps, but also the problems faced by so many of the people living in that [Oranjeni 00:32:29] habitat and the crippling poverty, the lack of health and education, the degradation of the land. And it came to a head when I flew over the tiny Gombe National Park. And what had once been surrounded by forest, was now a tiny pocket of protected forest, surrounded by bare hills.
Jane Goodall (32:50):
And that’s when it hit me. If we don’t help these people find ways of making a living without destroying the environment because they’re trying to live, then we can’t save chimps, forests, or any of the hills. And so we began our Take Care or TACARE program, which is the Jane Goodall Institute’s method of community led conservation.
Jane Goodall (33:12):
We picked a tiny team of local Tanzanians, and they went into the 12 villages around Gombe. Instead of being a bunch of arrogant white people saying, “Well, we’ve come to tell you what to do,” it was local people that they trusted saying, “What can we do to help?”
Jane Goodall (33:32):
So we began how they wanted with restoring fertility to the overused farmland, with no chemicals, by the way, better health and education working with the Tanzanian authorities. And then as they came to trust us, we could introduce scholarships to keep girls in school and micro credit based on my beloved Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank, so that groups, especially women, could choose their own environmentally sustainable small businesses.
Jane Goodall (34:04):
This program is now in 104 villages through the whole chimpanzee range in Tanzania and from each of the villages where most of the chimps live in their village forest reserves unprotected, and they’ve all provided volunteers who come to workshops and learn how to use smartphones, monitoring the health of the forest, all of it going up to a platform in the clouds.
Jane Goodall (34:31):
So this has been so successful that the people are now our partners in conservation because they understand fully that protecting the environment isn’t just for wildlife, it is their own future as well.
Lisa Jackson (34:47):
Do you think that same model could work for climate change, where communities are activated to find the solutions that work for themselves, and so they have a stake in this future? Part of climate is it feels like these big issues of transportation, or food, or the built environment, are someone else’s issue. But how can we get communities to be as active in climate as they are in conservation? This wonderful model, just something for us all to think about. Because I try truly believe in my heart that the more communities are engaged, the more likely we solve this problem. Because communities at that level, some of the noise falls away and people come together to solve a problem.
Jane Goodall (35:35):
Yes, indeed. And we’re just about to publish a book called TACARE. So this book will provide a blueprint that’s ready to be scaled up.
Lisa Jackson (35:49):
Yeah. I can’t wait to see it and to talk to you some more about this. You just gave me a whole big chunk of hope.
Jane Goodall (35:57):
Well, we all need it. We all need it. We all need it.
Jane Goodall (36:00):
Usually, talking to people like you gives me hope, so it’s a quid pro quo. I give you hope, you give me hope. And then our joint improved hopes, inspire many other people to be hopeful. That’s how it works.
Lisa Jackson (36:15):
I’m so inspired by you, Jane.
Lisa Jackson (36:17):
The women who, early on, realized that we have to step up and see things as not linear, as part of a system, as part of a much bigger opportunity, if we’re going to talk about hope, I can’t tell you how much that’s meant in my life. And we don’t know which one of those Roots & Shoots, or maybe you already know, but which one of those students will be the next person who will carry the torch into the future?
Lisa Jackson (36:44):
But I just want to thank you for everything you’ve meant in my life and to so many lives, and for your leadership, and your concern, and your care, and your love.
Jane Goodall (36:54):
Well, I can equally thank you for taking the role you’ve taken and I’m truly appreciative of your time because I know how busy you are.
Lisa Jackson (37:04):
Oh, are you kidding? I’ll do anything for you. You’re the busy one. We know you’re the busy one. So thanks for having me.
Jane Goodall (37:27):
Sometimes people don’t understand how terribly, terribly important it is to recycle old cell phones. There are hundreds and thousands of cell phones lying around. They have coltan in them. Coltan is often illegally mined. It’s leading to the destruction of the rainforest, the death of gorillas and chimpanzees and other animals, and immense hardship for the people. So please recycle your cell phone. It really will make a difference.
Jane Goodall (38:04):
Feel hopeful and inspired to act with the Jane Goodall Hopecast by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and anywhere podcasts are found.
Jane Goodall (38:22):
I’m your host, Jane Goodall. The Jane Goodall Hopecast is produced by the Jane Goodall Institute. Our production partner is FRQNCY Media. Michelle Khouri is our executive producer, Enna Garkusha is our producer, and Matthew Ernest Filler is our editor and sound designer. Our music is composed and performed by Ruth Mendelsohn with additional violin tracks from Angie Shear. Sound design and music composition for the Conservation chorus is by Matthew Ernest Filler.
