Krista Tippett: Welcome back to Hope Is a Muscle. Today, we are going to meet and be taught by another magnificent live human signpost, another life of applied hope, and that is the primatologist Jane Goodall.

There’s a phrase that I love that actually came from Albert Einstein, that there is such a thing as “spiritual genius” in the world. Einstein revered, actually, people like his contemporary, Gandhi, and the Buddha and Jesus and Moses and St. Francis of Assisi. And he said that what they represent as spiritual genius, a genius in the art of living, is as important as objective knowledge to the future of beauty and dignity and security in our world. And for me, although Jane Goodall is a scientific figure, she’s in this category of a spiritual genius.

I came to understand this a few years ago, when I met her in person for the first time at a gathering about the future of the planet. And of course, I knew about her epic career studying the chimpanzees of the Gombe forest, at first without even having a college degree, but then creating these scientific breakthroughs that ended up not just changing our understanding of primates, but the self-understanding of homo sapiens. She single-handedly recalled modern western science to a fact that it had forgotten — that we are a part of nature, not separate from it.

But what I’d never gleaned from all I’d read about her across the years but saw so powerfully when we met is how absolutely, mid-life, she had given her life’s work over to a new passion. She had seen that humanity had become a threat to its own kin in the natural world. She went to a scientific conference on deforestation, and she had what she would later call a “Road to Damascus moment.” She ended up leaving Gombe, and she ended up — with that same careful empathic eye she trained on the ecosystem of the forest, she trained that on the ecosystem of human beings. And she recognized human pain and misunderstanding that had led to her beloved chimpanzees suffering.

The project she started out of that was called TACARE, and it was a method of holistic, community-based conservation around Gombe. And what I delved into with her in this part of our interview that you’re going to hear is that three decades ago she also founded something called Roots & Shoots, which actually has become a global movement. Roots & Shoots started on her porch in Tanzania with her listening to 12 teenagers. So hear her talk about it.

Did Roots & Shoots emerge out of TACARE?

Jane Goodall: No, Roots & Shoots emerged because TACARE was expensive [laughs] to operate. We were already starting in some other African countries. So I was going around the world, gradually further and further around the world, talking to people about the problems in Africa and the reasons for them and hoping to raise, certainly, awareness, but maybe some money. And I kept meeting young people — this was in 1990 — young people who seemed to have lost hope. I’m talking mostly about university students, some high school. And they were mostly just apathetic, but some were depressed, really depressed, and some were angry.

And when I asked them why they felt that way, they all said more or less the same. And that’s in Asia, in North and South America, in Europe — and by then I hadn’t gone to the Middle East, but I know they say the same there now — “because,” they said, “you’ve compromised our future, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” So you’ve heard that saying, “We haven’t inherited this planet from our ancestors, we’ve borrowed it from our children”? But we haven’t borrowed, we’ve stolen. And we’re still stealing today.

Tippett: Yes, these themes are as alive now — more alive.

Would you — all of the nuance of the title, of the name Roots & Shoots, I think also really speaks to the philosophy of this. Would you just describe that?

Goodall: I’d love to, yes. I’ve already said how I love trees. I think probably my very favorite individual tree has to be Beech, in my garden. And when Beech began to grow — over 100 years ago, actually — it was from a pretty tiny seed. And if I had picked it up at that time, it would’ve seemed so small and weak, a little growing shoot and a few little roots. And yet, there is what I call magic. It’s a life force in that little seed so powerful that to reach the water that the tree will need, those little roots can work through rocks and eventually push them aside. And that little shoot, to reach the sunlight which the tree will need for photosynthesis, can work its way through cracks in a brick wall and eventually knock it down. And so we see the bricks and the walls as all the problems, social and environmental, that we have inflicted on the planet.

So it’s a message of hope — hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through and can make this a better world. And we’ve got members in kindergarten, university, and everything in between. And it’s my greatest reason for hope, because everywhere I go, these young people are telling me, showing me, shining eyes, what they’re doing and what they’ve been doing, what they plan to do, to make the world better.

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Tippett: I am so in awe of Jane Goodall’s core value of curiosity. You know, from her earliest life she likes to tell this story about how she was driven by curiosity. And in fact, one of her earliest memories and one of the earliest memories of all the adults around her is when she disappeared because she had hidden in the hen coop to understand how chickens lay eggs, because nobody had been able to explain it to her.

And then she became this scientist who reveres what is happening inside the human heart, the power of that, and takes that, as much as instruction and calling, as objective knowledge — her curiosity that she directed full-force on those teenagers on her porch in Tanzania and this incredible work that grew out of that conversation, that one conversation.

It’s also interesting, in other parts of her story, how she retained her core value of curiosity even in the face of what she abhorred and felt she needed to fight, even in herself, as much as in others. So, you know, again to underscore this, when she saw those images of deforestation around Gombe, her reaction was to take in that she had not been curious enough about the human ecosystem within the larger ecosystem. She had not been curious enough, she felt, about the despair and deprivation that led to acts which she abhorred. Jane Goodall brings home for me so much that we’re actually learning — again, on our scientific frontiers — about the power of the muscle of curiosity. Where experiences and responses like fear and anxiety tighten us up and close us off and shut us down, curiosity literally expands us, physically and emotionally, and it expands what becomes possible.

In the Pause, we are going to dwell, take as a meditative exercise, that image Jane Goodall gave us of the beech tree in her garden as a way to imagine the hope that we can be and create.

Enjoy being accompanied by Jane Goodall, and I’ll see you next time.