My mission is to create a world where we can live in harmony with nature.
I urge you to read Eternal Treblinka and think deeply about its important message.
It is these undeniable qualities of human love and compassion and self-sacrifice that give me hope for the future. We are, indeed, often cruel and evil. Nobody can deny this. We gang up on each one another, we torture each other, with words as well as deeds, we fight, we kill. But we are also capable of the most noble, generous, and heroic behavior.
Every individual matters and has a role to play in this life on Earth.
The only possible way to get somebody to change is to reach into their hearts.
I have found that to love and be loved is the most empowering and exhilarating of all human emotions.
Chimps are far too much human to be my favorite animal.
We could change the world tomorrow if all the millions of people around the world acted the way they believe.
I don't have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that's bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it's enough for me.
The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.
It's easy to become hopeless. So people must have hope: the human brain, the resilience of nature, the energy of young people and the sort of inspiration that you see from so many hundreds of people who tackle tasks that are impossible and never give up and succeed.
I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.
Be assured that our individual actions, collectively, make a huge difference.
That's what keeps me going. Everywhere I go there are young people with shining eyes wanting to tell me, "Dr. Jane, we're going to make the world a better place."
To reconnect with nature is key if we want to save the planet.
Cultural speciation had been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth. It had hindered freedom of thought, limited our thinking, imprisoned us in the cultures into which we had been born. . . . These cultural mind prisons. . . . Cultural speciation was clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we would propagate prejudice and ignorance.
Become as knowledgeable as possible.
People say to me so often, 'Jane how can you be so peaceful when everywhere around you people want books signed, people are asking these questions and yet you seem peaceful,' and I always answer that it is the peace of the forest that I carry inside.
We are unique. Chimpanzees are unique. Dogs are unique. But we humans are just not as different as we used to think.
If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution - and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity.
Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutan shave been living for hundreds of thousands of years in their forest,living fantastic lives, never overpopulating, never destroying the forest. I would say that they have been in a way more successful than us as far as being in harmony with the environment.
It would be absolutely useless for any of us to work to save wildlife without working to educate the next generation of conservationists.
Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right.
The voice of the natural world would be, "Could you please give us space and leave us alone to get along with our own lives and our own ways, because we actually know much better how to do it then when you start interfering."
I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees. The feel of rough sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling, gave me a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead.
