Jane Goodall on the Meaning of Wisdom and the Deepest Wellspring of Hope

“A great deal of our onslaught on Mother Nature is not really lack of intelligence but a lack of compassion… True wisdom requires both thinking with our head and understanding with our heart.”

Two and a half millennia ago, while devising the world’s first algorithm and using it to revolutionize music — that hallmark of our humanity — Pythagoras considered the purpose of life, concluding that we must “love wisdom as the key to nature’s secrets.”

Across the abyss of epochs and civilizations, Jane...