It all begins with One.
Renowned primatologist and environmentalist Dr. Jane Goodall shared her message of hope and encouraged global conservation efforts Friday afternoon at the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup of Humber Bay.
“Our little bit seems so small, we know what we should do, but is it worth doing, really? Just me?” Goodall, 75, asked the crowd gathered just west of the Humber Pedestrian Bridge. “It ain’t just me. It’s all of us. We all get together and do the right thing. And certainly, we get the kind of change that the world needs.”
Goodall was in Toronto last week to promote her new book, Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species are Being Rescued from the Brink.
In her book, the famed primatologist tells the stories of several species saved from the brink of extinction: the black robin, giant pandas and the Vancouver Island marmot.
Community volunteers, Roots Canada employees and Roots and Shoots’ youth collected 285 pounds of garbage and nearly 200 pounds of recycling in three hours Friday, Sept. 25 along the windswept Lake Ontario shoreline at Humber Bay.
This year, more than 57,000 Canadians will clean up shorelines at 1,600 sites across the country as part of the TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup.
“I’m disgusted,” roared Ling Chow sporting a “Roots” ball cap. “It’s a global problem. We’ll all got to chip in and get it fixed.”
Chow and four of her Roots Canada colleagues collected five bags of garbage from the shoreline rocks along one small inlet in just two-and-a-half hours.
Five syringes. Baby socks. Underwear. A fishing lure. A soccer ball. “Tons” of plastic forks and spoons. Tiny pieces of waves-mashed Styrofoam and plastics.
Volunteers bagged it all.
Roots Canada and its national Roots Cares committee is a partner with Roots and Shoots, The Jane Goodall Institute of Canada’s network of youth taking action to improve the planet for people, animals and the environment.
“There’s such a difference between people who talk about the environment, and there’s so much talk about the environment, and so few people are really doing something about it,” said Don Green, co-founder with partner Michael Budman of Roots Canada in 1973 in Algonquin Park, as he lauded cleanup volunteers.
The cleanup is part of Roots and Shoots’ Project Blue Canada Water Campaign, launched in January.
Born in London, Goodall developed a fascination for animals at a young age. At 23, she moved to East Africa — first Kenya, then Tanzania — and worked as an assistant to great paleontologist Louis Leakey.
In 1960, Leakey encouraged Goodall to study chimpanzees at Lake Tanganyika in north Tanzania. There, Goodall witnessed chimps making and using tools, previously believed to be only the work of man.
Able to make the chimps comfortable with her presence, Goodall discovered their gentleness with her, and one another, and that chimpanzees live in a complex social structure.
Today, Goodall still travels approximately 300 days a year to spread her message and to encourage a new generation to protect species and the Earth.
At the cleanup, Goodall issued an impassioned call to action to cure the globe of its pressing humanitarian and environmental crises.
People starving. People without fresh, clean water to drink. Forests razed, replaced by deserts. The loss of animals, biodiversity, in endless regions around the world. Pollution of air, land and water. Climate change and global warming.
“We’ve got to get out of this mess we’ve made,” Goodall proclaimed. “...I was just in Greenland. I heard and watched huge slabs of ice break off an ice cliff when never before was there melting, even in the summer. I saw the Inuits weeping because there land was crying out in pain. Already, some people have been declared environmental refugees because their lands are drowning.”