You aren't going to save the world on your own. But you might inspire a generation of kids to save it for all of us. You would be amazed at what inspired children can do.
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.
Children can change the world.
One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.
One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children.
I get upset when so many people say there are all sorts of problems in Africa and India where they have these big families. They don't realize that 10 children in rural Tanzania will use less natural resources in a year than one middle class American child. People don't think like that.
....I understood why those who had lived through war or economic disasters, and who had built for themselves a good life and a high standard of living, were rightly proud to be able to provide for their children those things which they themselves had not had. And why their children, inevitably, took those things for granted. It meant that new values and new expectations had crept into our societies along with new standards of living. Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States.
As a child, we couldn't afford holidays overseas, so instead I travelled through books. I was inspired by Dr Dolittle and Tarzan.
When I was a child, the African forest sounded like a dream to me, because it was full of animals and it was wild.
People say, "Oh, we ought to fight for animal rights." We fought for human rights, but even if humans have rights, they can still be horribly abused and are every day. You don't have to go to some far off land, far away place; we have a lot of child abuse in our own society.
Language allows us to talk about the past and plan the future. We can teach children about things that are not present. And above all, we can bring people with different backgrounds and different knowledge together to discuss our problems. This actually gives me hope. I still think we are smart enough to not destroy planet Earth, our only home.
When you borrow you plan to pay back. We're stealing from our children - so many people have no intention of paying back.
You know the old expression "We haven't inherited the world from our parents, we've borrowed it from our children"? Well it's just not true. We haven't borrowed anything.
It's the bond between mother and child, which is really for us and for chimps and other primates, the root of all the expressions of social behavior.
Terrorism is fueled by hate. The tragedy is that there are countless young children who are being taught to hate. Terrorism is usually fueled also by poverty.
If we allow the destruction of the environment, we can see the terrorists have utterly won, and are destroying the future of our children and grandchildren. We must not let that happen.
