The 5 R's
Way back twenty-five years ago, I saw Jane Goodall at a bookstore in Larkspur, CA. At the end of her talk someone asked her how she remained so energetic. She replied, “I eat as little as possible.” Always thought that was such a great answer, especially to a group of Americans.
In one of the obits I was reading, they pointed to her having added two more “R’s” to the old ecological adage of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” She started with Refuse and ended with Rot:
"REFUSE means being considerate of what you consume/buy and not getting new unnecessary items.
REDUCE means limiting the amount you consume/buy.
REUSE means making old things new to cover for the functions of things you would ordinarily buy new.
RECYCLE means turning old things into new things by properly recycling used goods.
ROT means turning your food scraps and other waste into soil through composting! "
All five are eminently un-industrial and un-hyper-consumption America.
"There's already more people on the planet than our natural resources can even support, and if everybody were to have a high standard of living, we need three or four or five new planets to provide the resources. And this cannot be, so something has to change."
“People 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, you see.”
“If people could just spend time, a bit of time each day thinking about the consequences of their choices. Like what do you eat? Well, that may seem simple, I ate this or that today - but where did it come from, how many miles did it travel, did it harm did the environment, how much pesticide was used, was it child slave labor? If it was intensive farming, how did that affect the animals? How did it affect the environment, and how did it affect your health? The same with what you wear, how you travel, how you connect with people - if people would just start thinking about the consequences of all these small actions. (Instead), it becomes mindless, people don't think.”
"Everyone of us makes an impact on the world every day. And so it's helping individuals to understand that though they may feel their small actions don't make a difference - which if it was just them, they would be right probably. But it's not just them and cumulatively our small decisions, choices, actions, make a very big difference."
"This very, very clever brain, if it's disconnected from the human heart to speak of love and compassion, then we get this individual with complete lack of caring, lack of foresight, just cunning."
Jane Goodall was truly radical, from the Latin, “to the root.” She had a wonderfully democratic ethic deriving first and foremost from her understanding we are all, at root, members of one species on what in the end is a tiny planet. Saving the apes is about saving us. If we all spent every day thinking a little more and talking with each other about the life we’ve created and organizing change, it’d go a long way to creating a more meaningful and beautiful life for all, chimps included.
