During the pandemic, the famed ethnologist and conservationist Jane Goodall sequestered herself in her childhood home in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England. Goodall, who first stepped into Tanzania’s Gombe National Park to observe chimpanzees just more than 60 years ago, was hard at work, broadcasting her mission to millions of viewers across the globe. In a teleconference interview with Vogue, she talked about how she was putting the finishing touches on her new collaboration with the wellness brand Forest Remedies: a kit of four essential oils—ginger and ylang-ylang from Madagascar, citronella from Togo, and frankincense from Somaliland—of which a percentage of the proceeds will be donated to the Jane Goodall Institute. “The more we can provide people with products that they want to use that are produced in a sustainable way, the better,” Goodall said at the time. She turned 89 on April 3, just 20 days ago.

Earth Day is acknowledged once a year, but in truth — especially now, in 2023 — every day should be Earth Day. “I understood why those who had lived through war and economic disasters,” Goodall wrote in Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. “and who had built a good life and a high standard of living for themselves, 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 crept into our societies, (leading to) the materialistic lifestyle of so many people in the Western world today.” Our onslaught on nature is not down to a lack of intelligence but rather a lack of compassion for future generations and the health of the planet: greed and selfishness for short-term personal gain. The rest is thoughtlessness. We can do better, Goodall reminds us. We must do better. It is well past time.

Seemingly ages ago — though in truth it was no more than 20 years — David Attenborough told the US news program 60 Minutes that no one sitting at home wanted to be told that the world is going to hell and it’s all their fault. In his older age — Attenborough was born in the same year as Queen Elizabeth II — he has changed his tune somewhat. His most recent programs, from Our Planet to A Life on Our Planet, have marked a pronounced shift toward environmentalism and the existential issues of humankind’s impact on the natural world, from climate change and habitat loss to overpopulation, dwindling biodiversity, species loss, overconsumption, and the looming Sixth Mass Extinction. Over a broadcasting career that spans half a century, he has witnessed the decline of the living world.

“I would much prefer not to be a placard-carrying conservationist,” he has said. “My life is the natural world. But I can’t not carry a placard if I see what’s happening.” He is now an activist, ardent and committed, the voice of conscience for a Westernized society driven by profit and the need to consume more and more with each passing tick of the doomsday clock. Attenborough: “Immensely powerful though we are today, it’s equally clear that we’re going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what’s more, there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly, we could devastate the world. As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands.” #truth

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen