Seeds of Hope

by Jane Goodall

  During one of my visits to Nepal, I was privileged to witness such a ceremony, arranged by one of my friends, Narayan Pahari. He wanted to ensure good fortune for a small weekend cabin that was being built for visitors and Roots & Shoots leaders to escape the terribly polluted air of Kathmandu. We climbed to the building site—a lovely place, nestled on a very steep hillside with a view across the Himalayas.

  The “bride” and “groom” were waiting for us, standing there in their earthen pots decked out in their wedding finery of white and yellow silk ribbons. The holes to receive them had been decorated with intricate geometric patterns around the rim, crafted from red and yellow pastes made from crushed flower petals. And amazingly, down in the bottom of each hole, which was perfectly round with straight walls like a well, the same pattern was repeated. An array of symbolic objects was laid out ready for the ceremony—marigold petals, special seeds, and a jar of orange-red vermilion.

  The Hindu priest and his five acolytes arrived and began their chanting. One of the plant pots was ritually smashed and bar was placed into his waiting hole. I approached. The senior priest dabbed a vermilion bindi in the center of my forehead, then placed a small amount of the same red paste in my outstretched hands, which I smeared on bar’s leaves. Next he gave me red and yellow petals: after holding them briefly between my hands, pressed together in prayer, I scattered them over the tree.

  Next peepal was released and planted in her hole, about eight yards away. The priest blew a conch shell, the acolytes chanted. And then it was over.

  By then it had turned very cold, and we returned to the lodge where we were staying, to a lovely warm wood fire and supper. We talked about the ceremony and the way trees can help us connect to the spiritual world. And I dreamed, that night, of how I stood in a forest and one graceful tree bowed down and encircled me with its branches.

  Special Friendships with Trees

  No one is surprised to hear about close and loving relationships between a human being and an animal such as a dog or cat. But a person and a tree? Surely that is a stretch of the imagination? Or perhaps not. I have described the closeness I felt with Beech when I was a child—it was something over and above my love for other trees. It was up Beech that I climbed when I was sad, and in the long hours I spent among his branches I came to think of him almost as a person with whom I shared my most-secret thoughts. And I listened to his voice in the wind, and even if I could not understand his actual words, who knows what I may have learned?

  I think perhaps many people, especially children, develop close feelings for a particular tree. One of my heroes, Richard St. Barbe Baker, whom I shall mention later, devoted his life to protecting and restoring forests. He grew up close to a British oak-and-beech-wood forest. When he was a very small child, about five years old, he went off into the forest alone, and thus began a special relationship with one particular beech tree. She became, he says, a mother confessor to him, his “Madonna of the Forest.” He would stand close to her and imagine he had roots digging deep down into Mother Earth, and that up above were his branches, reaching up to the sky. After such an experience he believed he was imbued with “the strength of the tree.”

  And a friend of mine, Myron Eshowsky, who developed shamanic powers later in life, had a dream as an eight-year-old child in which a tree told him it was his brother and they would grow old together. Myron went out searching for that tree until he seemed to hear a young maple, taller than him, calling to him, “I’m here.” Myron managed to dig up the tree, and replanted it at home. But he had damaged the roots, and the leaves began to droop. If my brother dies, he thought, I shall die too. And he would creep out each night crying, praying, and begging the tree to live.

  Fortunately his tree brother survived and grew strong, and every so often during the past fifty years, Myron goes to visit that so-special tree.

  It is not only as children that we form special bonds with trees. There was, for example, the intense relationship between Julia Butterfly Hill and a redwood called Luna, who was two hundred feet tall and approximately one thousand years old. It all started when Julia joined a group that was protesting the clear-cutting of the redwoods in California in 1997. They were taking turns staying up in Luna—Julia was not initially affiliated with the group, and only went up the first time because no one else was volunteering. And she was both scared and exhausted by that first climb. But she soon fell under the spell of the magnificent tree and she stayed up there for a total of 738 days.

  Some people form special bonds with trees. Hoping to prevent the clear-cutting of the ancient redwoods, Julia Butterfly Hill spent 738 days living up in the branches of Luna, a 200-foot-tall redwood. Luna, photographed in May 1999, is located in Stafford, California. (CREDIT: SHAUN WALKER)

  She defied harassment from the lumber company, who buzzed her with helicopters. She endured torrents of rain, terrifying gale-force winds, and freezing temperatures that gave her frostbite during the coldest winter in northern California’s recorded history. She did not leave until the loggers agreed to spare Luna and her grove of companions.

  When Julia finally set foot on the ground again, she felt joy for having saved Luna, but she also felt an inner sadness. Leaving Luna, she said, was like leaving the best friend and teacher she’d ever had. And when, years later, a vandal wounded Luna, she felt deep pain as well as anger.

  I recently read an interview with Julia in the January 2012 Sun magazine, where she said she goes back once or twice a year to visit Luna. “The experience taught me that every living thing can communicate,” she told the interviewer. “So I return to let Luna know that I still care.”

  Communicating with Trees

  I have already written about the ways trees communicate with one another through leaves and their root systems. But can trees communicate with us? It seems absurd to even ask the question—but maybe not.

  A couple of years ago I was spending the night in a friend’s house, and picked a book at random from the shelves for bedside reading. It was Under the Greenwood Tree by the British novelist Thomas Hardy, published in 1872. And this is how it begins:

  To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.

  Hardy knew what many people living close to nature, especially the indigenous people, have always known. My friend the songwriter Dana Lyons told me how, after spending a few days under an ancient tree in an old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest, he was suddenly filled with a song, which is called, simply, “The Tree.”

  Shortly after this he was asked to play the song at a Native American powwow. At the end he said how it had seemed as though the tree had “given” him the song—music, words, and all. “Of course,” said the chief, and not only told Dana the species of tree but that he recognized the individual tree and told him its exact location. “We know all their voices,” said one of the elders.

  Tuck is another good friend of mine who is familiar with tree voices. He works for the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden in Hong Kong. There is a little bungalow hidden away in the forest that clothes the slopes of a mountain rising up above the polluted air of the city below. When I have time, I like to walk along the steep trails, to visit the hidden waterfalls and other secret places. It is open to the public in daylight hours, and many people come—to photograph the diversity of trees and plants, or just to breathe clean air for a few hours. But it closes at sunset.

  After dark Tuck sometimes drives me around to look for porcupines, barking deer, wild boar, and the little leopard cat. The trees seem to acquire a new presence at night: they are stripped of color, and it is their shapes that one notices. Strange, gnarled, their branches reaching out ove
r the road like arms.

  During one such drive Tuck stopped the car beside a large tree whose roots were helping to hold the soil in place on the almost-perpendicular slope from which he grew.

  “This old tree has something to say to you,” said Tuck.

  I was not surprised by his remark, for I knew that he had attended seminars on listening to trees. When it was first proposed, he had thought the whole idea quite crazy, but he had gradually become a believer. He finds he can receive energy from certain trees when he stands near them and meditates.

  We sat in the silence that followed the cutting of the engine. There was the call of an owl. After some moments of deep attention to that old tree, I seemed to feel or sense a message—a sort of thinking that urged patience, endurance. I should not expect that the world could change quickly. I should just carry on, do all I could, and never lose hope.

  Perhaps I imagined it. Perhaps it was what I expected to hear from an old tree. But it left me with a tranquility of spirit, and I was grateful. It was not the tranquility that may come with fatalism. The old tree, most surely, was not suggesting we stop our efforts to prevent the felling of the forests, and the extinction of species. No, rather we must work harder, knowing it will take time, and never give up.

  Chapter 4

  Forests

  There is a spiritual energy at the waterfall in Kakombe Valley at Gombe. This is where the chimpanzees sometimes perform their spectacular “waterfall displays,” swaying rhythmically from side to side, stamping and splashing in the water. It can also be a very peaceful place, and I sometimes sit here quietly for hours. (CREDIT: © JANE GOODALL INSTITUTE / CHASE PICKERING)

  As a child, when I read the books about Tarzan, I was in love with the forest world in which he grew up as much as I was in love with the Lord of the Jungle himself. I was also entranced by the story of Mowgli in the Jungle Book, who was raised by wolves, and the descriptions of the mysterious Indian jungle where he lived with the other animals. I read about other habitats too, of course: the American prairies as they once were, stretching for countless miles over the wild central plains where the vast herds of bison roamed; the wetlands with their teeming bird life; the frozen Arctic home of polar bears.

  In my imagination I traveled to them all, but it was the forests that I was most in love with. I read voraciously about the jungles of the Amazon Basin, India, Malaya, and Borneo. One book described the Amazonian jungle as a “Green Hell,” populated by ferocious wild beasts, snakes that were meters long, a whole array of deadly spiders and insects, fierce Indians, and, of course, rife with all manner of deadly diseases. But the very difficulty of getting to such places, and the dangers that would be encountered, appealed to my adventurous spirit. The fact that I could see no way of attaining my goal made me more determined than ever, despite the fact that people laughed at me.

  I remember, vividly, a childhood visit to the Sherwood Forest, where Robin Hood and his merry men lived in the “greenwood,” robbing the rich to give money to the deserving poor. Much nearer home was the New Forest, a place of woods and bogs and wet heath and moors with heather. We went there a few times by train and walked and had picnics.

  It was in Bournemouth, however, on the cliffs overlooking the English Channel and in the chines that led down to the seashore, that my real apprenticeship was served. There, with Rusty, I learned to crawl through dense undergrowth, scramble up sheer slopes, and creep silently along narrow trails. In sunshine and rain, heat and cold, those chines were my training ground where I developed the skills that were to stand me in such good stead in the forests of Gombe.

  I learned the voices of the different birds—the haunting song of the robin, the sweet liquid notes of the blackbird, and the wild song of the mistle thrush (also known as the “storm cock”) as he sang from the very top of a tree when the wind was strong. I knew where many birds had their nests, and one spring I spent an hour most days watching, from behind a screen of bracken and brambles (Rusty lying motionless at my side), as a pair of willow warblers hatched and fledged their chicks. The squirrels gave me endless entertainment as they chased and challenged one another around and around a tree trunk, or sat hurling abuse down at me, their tails jerking with indignation. I loved the sunlight on the pink-gold trunks of the pine trees, and the sighing of the breeze through their leaf needles, and the eerie creaking when two big boughs rubbed against each other in the high wind.

  When Dreams Came True

  I cannot count the number of times that I have taken the boat from the little town of Kigoma and traveled the twelve miles or so along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika to the tiny Gombe National Park. It is only thirty square miles as the crow flies, but if you ironed out the rugged terrain, it would be more than double the size. The beach that fringes the lake has been formed by the endless movement of the waters of the great lake into a series of bays between rocky headlands. The mountains rise up to the peaks of the Rift Escarpment—Lake Tanganyika is the flooded western branch of the Great Rift Valley.

  The lower slopes along the shore are covered with deciduous woodlands intersected by narrow valleys supporting dense tangles of riverine forest that is almost impossible to move through unless one follows the trails used by bushbuck and bushpigs, baboons and chimpanzees. In the rich, fertile soil of the lower valleys, giant forest trees have found a foothold, and here, where the canopy overhead inhibits the undergrowth, it is possible to make use of our bipedal posture. The upper slopes, often very steep and treacherous, are covered by open woodland interspersed with stretches of grassland that become pale and brittle during dry season. Up high the trees are mostly small, save where the hills are bisected by the upper reaches of the valleys. Where the Rift Escarpment is highest, around five thousand feet, the trees are sometimes festooned with lichens that hang like beards from the branches.

  These days my crazy travel schedule only allows me to get to Gombe’s forests twice a year, and only for a few days at a time, but one of those days is always set aside for me to be quite alone in the forest, and it is those precious hours that, more than anything else, replenish my energy.

  I love to sit by the small, fast-flowing streams and listen to the sound of their gurgling as they tumble past on their way to the lake. Or to lie on my back and gaze up at the canopy, where little specks of captured sky twinkle like stars as the wind stirs the branches and leaves high overhead. I become deeply aware of the voices of the forest—the soft rustling of small creatures going about their business, the buzzing and whirring of insect flight, the shrilling of the cicadas, the calls of birds, the distant bark of a male baboon—and all the other sounds that are as familiar to the forest dweller as the squealing of tires skidding around a corner, the revving of engines, and the drunken shoutings are to those who live in the city. And there are those times when it is raining and I can sit and listen to the pattering of the drops on the leaves and feel utterly enclosed in a dim, twilight world of greens and browns and soft-gray air.

  When I am alone and quiet and still, animals will sometimes come very close, especially birds and squirrels feeding in the trees. Very rarely I have been able to watch a checkered “sengi,” or elephant shrew (which is not a shrew at all), hunting insects on the forest floor. It has a long snout and squirrel-like body and is very shy. I have never seen one except in thick undergrowth, given away by the rustling of dead leaves. Every so often it slaps the ground with its ratlike tail—I cannot find reference to this, but I wonder if it startles insects so that the sengi can more easily detect them.

  Life and Death in a Forest

  During all my years in Gombe, I came to realize, in the most vivid way, that the forest is a living, breathing entity of intertwining, interdependent life-forms. It is perfect, complete, a powerful presence, so much more—so very much more—than the sum of its parts. One comes to understand the inevitability of the ancient cycles, life gradually giving place to death, and death in turn leading to new life. It is illustrated every time a tree
falls. I was once caught in a sudden and violent thunderstorm during the rainy season. Huge tree trunks bowed before the force of the wind as whole branches were torn off. And I actually witnessed the event as one of them, a species of fig, lost its grip on the rain-softened earth of the forest floor and, with a great rending sound, crashed to the ground. I can never forget that experience, for I was almost crushed by one of the outstretched limbs.

  Over the following years I went to visit that tree each time I returned to Gombe. It was not long before the first mosses and lichens and fungi appeared, growing on the fallen trunk. And then came the ferns and small flowering plants. Later, young seedlings sprouted close by, growing up from fruits that had been produced before the tree’s death, making the most of the sunlight that shone down through the recently created gap in the canopy. One or more of them would take the place of their decaying parent. Not surprising that these fallen trees are known as “nurse trees.”

  Year after year, the variety of life around my fallen tree increased, as more and more plant species appeared, as well as all manner of invertebrates. Small mammals made their homes there. And eventually it was difficult to see that it had ever been, so perfectly had it dissolved into the forest floor—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”—where the “ashes” and “dust” were the rich loam that helped to ensure the future of the forest.

  It was to the forest that I went after my second husband, Derek, lost his painful fight with cancer in 1981. I knew that I would be calmed and find a way to cope with grief, for it is in the forest that I sense most strongly a spiritual power greater than myself. A power in which I and the forest and the creatures who make their home there “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). The sorrows and problems of life take their proper place in the grand scheme of things. Indeed, with reality suspended by the timelessness of the forest world, I gradually came to terms with my loss and discovered that “peace that passes all understanding” (Isaiah 26:3). And I knew my task was to go on fighting to save the places and animals that Derek and I had both loved.