The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times(4)

“You were saying that hope requires us to work hard to make what we want to happen actually happen.”

“Well, in certain contexts it is essential. Take this dire environmental nightmare we are living in today. We certainly hope that it is not too late to turn things around—but we know that this change will not happen unless we take action.”

“So by being active, you become more hopeful?”

“Well, you have it both ways. You won’t be active unless you hope that your action is going to do some good. So you need hope to get you going, but then by taking action, you generate more hope. It’s a circular thing.”

“So what actually is hope—an emotion?”

“No, it’s not an emotion.”

“So what is it?”

“It’s an aspect of our survival.”

“Is it a survival skill?”

“It’s not a skill. It’s something more innate, more profound. It’s almost a gift. Come on, think of another word.”

“‘Tool’? ‘Resource’? ‘Power’?”

“‘Power’ would do. ‘Power’—‘tool.’ Something like that. Not a power tool!”

I laughed at Jane’s joke. “Not a drill?”

“No, not an electric drill,” Jane said, laughing, too.

“A survival mechanism…?”

“Better, but less mechanical. A survival…” Jane paused, trying to come up with the right word.

“Impulse? Instinct?” I offered.

“Actually, it’s a survival trait,” she finally concluded. “That’s what it is. It is a human survival trait and without it we perish.”

If it was a survival trait, I wondered why some people had more of it than others, if it could be developed during particularly stressful times, and whether she had ever lost it.





Have You Ever Lost Hope?



Jane has a rare blend of qualities—a scientist’s unflinching willingness to face the hard facts and a seeker’s desire to understand the most profound questions of human life.

“As a scientist, you—” I began.

“I consider myself a naturalist,” she corrected.

“What’s the difference?” I had always assumed a naturalist was simply a scientist who went out into the field.

“The naturalist,” Jane said, “looks for the wonder of nature—she listens to the voice of nature and learns from nature as she tries to understand it. Whereas a scientist is more focused on facts and the desire to quantify. For a scientist, the question is, ‘Why is this adaptive? How does it contribute to the survival of the species?’

“As a naturalist, you need to have empathy and intuition—and love. You’ve got to be prepared to look at a murmuration of starlings and be filled with awe at the amazing agility of these birds. How do they fly in a flock of several thousand without touching at all, and yet have such close formations, and swoop and turn together almost as one? And why do they do it—for fun? For joy?” Jane looked up at the imagined starlings, and her hands danced as if they were a flock of birds rippling through the sky.

I could suddenly see Jane as a young naturalist full of awe and wonder. When the rain started to pour down loudly, pausing our conversation, it was not hard to imagine her back in those early days when her own hopes and dreams seemed so distant and so difficult to realize.

When the rain quieted, we resumed our conversation. I asked Jane what she remembered about her first journey to Africa. She closed her eyes. “It was like a fairy tale,” she said. “There were no planes flying back and forth in those days—it was 1957—so I went by boat, the Kenya Castle. It should have taken about two weeks but ended up being about a month because there was a war between England and Egypt, so the Suez Canal was closed. We had to go right around the whole African continent, down to Cape Town and up the coast to Mombasa. A magical voyage.”

Jane was in pursuit of her dream to study animals in the wild, a dream that had been born as a child reading Doctor Doolittle and Tarzan stories. “Tarzan clearly married the wrong Jane,” she joked. The improbability of Jane’s life has inspired many across the globe. At the time, women did not travel halfway around the world to go into the jungle to live with and write books about wild animals. As Jane said, “Even men were not doing that!”

I asked her to tell me more about those early days.

“I did very well at school,” she said, “but when I graduated at eighteen there was no money for university. I had to get a job, so I did a secretarial course. Boring stuff. But Mum had told me that I would have to work hard and take advantage of opportunities, and not to give up.

“Mum always used to say, ‘If you’re going to do a thing, do it properly.’ I think that’s been a cornerstone of my life. You don’t want to do it, you want to get it over with, but if you’re going to do it at all, then put the best you have into it.”

Jane’s opportunity came when a school friend invited her to visit her family’s farm in Kenya. And it was during that visit that she heard about Dr. Louis Leakey, the famed paleoanthropologist, who had spent his life searching for the fossilized remains of our earliest human ancestors in Africa. At the time he was curator of the Coryndon Museum (now called the Nairobi National Museum).