ASSIGNMENT WEEK 5: COMPARATIVE POLITICS
Source #3: Excerpt from a book called The Future of Peace: On the Front Lines with the World’s Great Peacemakers, from the chapter entitled: “Jane Goodall and Fight for the Planet.” Published by HarperSanFrancisco, paper back edition, 2004, written by Scott A. Hunt. (Hunt is a well-known journalist. He studied government and political philosophy at Harvard and is one of the only journalists in the world to have interviewed a group of exceptional peacemakers such as Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama, Thich Quang Do, Dr. Jane Goodall, Noble Peace Prize Laureate Oscar Arias, and Maha Ghosananda. Dr. Goodall is a world famous scientist in primate studies, and an activist for animals and the environment.]
[p. 309, from an interview by Hunt, with Goodall]
[Hunt speaking] “It strikes me that in our destruction of the environment, we are destroying peacefulness as well. We are destroying places of refuge, places where we can restore our inner peace. And on a societal level, environmental destruction leads to incredible social instability and even conflict. I think the connection is particularly apparent in Africa these days, is it not?”
[Goodall speaking] “That is really true,” she said. “But I must add that there is hope. The first jointly managed cross-border national park – the first in the world – just opened between South Africa and Namibia.” She paused before adding slowly, “It is such a beautiful idea.”
[Hunt speaking] “I’ve heard that you travel virtually all the time – over three hundred days a year – and that you have not spent more than a few weeks in one place for the past ten years – I can only imagine the toll that takes on your body and mind. Don’t your close friends ever tell you to slow down?”
[Goodall speaking] “Yes, all my friends tell me I should slow down, but how can I? You know, everywhere I go my visit seems to start some new initiative – some good initiative. Like when I was in China for the second time, all I had done was visit a few schools and I got this summons from the vice minister of environment. I had to change the whole schedule just for a ten-minute appointment. But, we ended up meeting for one and a half hours, and he said ‘I would like you to introduce your institute’s program into my schools.’ I toldhim that would mean setting up a little office in Beijing and he said ‘Do that.” So, we set it up. And within a year something like fifty Chinese schools joined the institute’s project. People don’t think of China as a place where people care much about the environment. But, the children there are beginning to care as much as they do elsewhere. There is such a difference in one year and those little kids were all telling me what they had done for the environment. There are a lot of people who say why bother to promote conservation and environmental awareness in a place like China because it’s against their culture. Well, in England, we used to have public hanging as part of our culture, but we eventually stopped it. If you look around the world, cultures have changed as understanding grows.”