New story in Science and Health from Time: How to Invest in Companies That Are Actually Helping the Environment How to Invest in Companies That Are Actually Helping the Environment

ESG funds—investment funds that are supposed to include companies that score the highest marks in environmental, social and governance factors—have become increasingly popular as more people look to put their money where their environmental concerns are. When BlackRock debuted a new ESG-aligned fund in April, investors couldn’t get enough. They poured $1.25 billion into the U.S. Carbon Transition Readiness ETF (stock ticker LCTU) on its first day. No ESG fund, or any type of exchange-traded fund (ETF) for that matter, had ever received that much investment so quickly.

But this wasn’t entirely a feel good story about investors betting on a more environmentally-sound future. BlackRock’s ETF included the pipeline company Kinder Morgan and oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron.
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It wasn’t all that unusual for an ESG. The story of LCTU and the companies within it is representative of both the immense popularity and the confusing and controversial nature of ESG funds. The amount handled by money managers in these funds has risen from roughly $569 billion in 2010 to $16.5 trillion last year, according to the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment. Yet ESG funds have risen to prominence without much regulation or requirements from the SEC, which has only recently started to develop a framework for handling ESG funds. So a company’s presence in an ESG fund does not guarantee it is a top steward of the environment, just as a fund being billed as an ESG does not guarantee it is filled with environmentally sound companies.

“There’s a fundamental problem, which is the SEC allows you to name funds that don’t necessarily reflect what’s inside the fund,” said Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, a nonprofit shareholder advocacy group.

So how can you tell whether you’re truly making a sustainable, green investment? TIME spoke with a variety of investment fund managers and presidents to get a sense of how they operate. Here’s a guide to help you learn the different ways various funds define ESG, how companies get vetted, and which companies are reaching the highest standards.

The limits of ESG funds

ESG generally entails “investing in the best of everything,” according to Leslie Samuelrich, president of Green Century Funds. Asset managers attempt to package a few dozen companies that rate better than their peers in various characteristics, ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to environmental racism, and have trustworthy corporate governance. Many funds use ESG ratings from MSCI to make determinations.

ESG does not automatically mean certain types of companies are excluded even if, Samuelrich adds, they are “what you would sort of think of as ‘oh those are dangerous companies.’” That’s why companies like ExxonMobil, which engages in activities like flaring and emits loads of greenhouse gases but is working to reduce its carbon footprint, can be found in BlackRock’s LCTU fund. BlackRock has specific funds that eliminate fossil fuel companies, but its general ESG-aligned funds contain fossil fuel companies it believes will most benefit from a transition to a low carbon economy. Funds with ESG or sustainability in the name from State Street, Fidelity, Vanguard, and other asset managers, also feature fossil fuel companies or utilities powered by fossil fuels.

It’s up to the asset managers to determine whether they want to screen out companies involved in fossil fuels, tobacco, guns, or other investment areas generally considered harmful to people or the environment. Green Century Funds, for instance, does not allow any fossil fuel companies in its funds, and Trillium Asset Management and Parnassus Investments have the same prohibition.

While ESG funds are based on relativity, Matthew Patsky, CEO and lead portfolio manager of Trillium, doesn’t believe companies like ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum should ever be included in funds billed as being good for the environment, regardless of how they stack up against competitors.

“The small independent is likely the dirtiest,” Matt said. “ExxonMobil is going to be cleaner than that.”

But, he added, “You can see they funded more of the misinformation campaign to declare that climate change was a hoax than any other corporate entity globally. Well, for me, that’s a non-starter. I don’t want to ever see it in a portfolio.”

How companies get vetted by ESG fund managers

Although standards for environmental care differ across industries, there are a few benchmarks ESG fund managers typically consider when vetting companies for the environment. For carbon emissions, for instance, they seek companies that have science based targets vetted by outside experts. They look for absolute goals because relative goals — such as reducing emissions on a per customer basis — don’t give a full picture.

And when it comes to net zero emissions promises, Julie Gorte, senior vice president for sustainable investing at Impax Asset Management, says there is “a ton of fairy dust,” referring to companies that claim they will eliminate carbon based on technologies that don’t exist yet. Gorte says companies that are the most serious about reducing emissions lay out specific plans for cutting not just their own direct and indirect emissions but for emissions created by other companies along its value chain, which are known as Scope 3 emissions.

“And if a target doesn’t say that then they’re probably just blowing smoke and hoping no one will notice,” Gorte said.

Gorte added that emission reductions were most important for a company trying to reach net zero, before carbon offsets, which can sometimes be used as a cover for keeping harmful environmental practices.

Fund managers typically delve deeper than the numbers available on public reports.

Before Parnassus invested in Digital Realty Trust, director of research Lori Keith visited some of their data centers with a few of her colleagues. The company, which has around 300 data centers worldwide, has set the goal of reducing its direct and indirect emissions by 68% by 2030 and increased their usage of renewable energy. At the data centers, Keith inspected Digital Realty Trust’s operations for herself and interviewed executives and frontline employees to validate whether the company was truly making progress and came away satisfied.

“Those (visits and interviews) are really important for us to make sure that anything that they’re putting out there is of serious intent and that they are genuinely moving towards those targets,” said Keith, who is also portfolio manager of Parnassus’s $8 billion Mid Cap Fund.

At Vanguard, Yolanda Courtines, portfolio manager of the Vanguard Global ESG Select Stock Fund, says she tries to meet with the executive team and board of every company on her fund at least once a year and sometimes five or six times.

“It’s asking simple questions. ‘Are you working with your supply chain? How are you helping them reduce their environmental footprint? Are you putting solar panels on the roofs of your suppliers?,’” she said. “That’s the sort of questioning level that you kind of really want to get into to understand what’s happening.”

Relying purely on data, according to Patsky, does not always provide an adequate portrayal of a company. And he admits that Trillium’s vetting process, which involves everything from talking to current and former employees to checking with NGOs familiar with companies’ labor conditions in China, still can’t uncover everything.

“I don’t want to lead you to believe that we have perfect insight, because if we had perfect insight, we’d have the equivalent of inside information that we don’t,” Patsky said.

The companies that stand out to fund managers

There are no perfect companies in ESG funds, either. Fund managers think of them as leaders and laggards, with plenty of space in the middle. Investors who are conscious about the environment will likely find their best choices in leaders who are making environmental gains beyond most of their peers but still have flaws.

Behar, the CEO of As You Sow, gave Kellogg’s as an example of a leader on the food supply chain. Like most companies, it used wheat and oat crops that had been treated with the herbicide glyphosate, a known carcinogen. After being pressured by lawsuits and activists that included As You Sow, Kellogg’s made a plan in 2020 to phase out glyphosate by 2025. Companies like General Mills and PepsiCo have also recently made regenerative agriculture plans.

“A company like Kellogg’s is being a leader. General Mills is also being a leader,” Behar said. “And now the whole industry has to follow because of competitive pressure.”

Courtines highlights Michelin, the tire company. “That’s a tough industry to be in,” she said, “but they are very, very responsible owners of managing the rubber supply chain and in helping build the tires that are going to be the best tires for electric vehicles that will help reduce carbon footprint on the roads in the future.”

Two companies that came up in conversations with multiple fund managers were Microsoft and Google. Both are already carbon neutral. Google has eliminated legacy carbon, and Microsoft has a plan to do the same by 2050. “Their initiative is to remove everything that they’ve emitted since they started, and hopefully that leads to other companies taking a similar approach,” said Iyassu Essayas, director of ESG at Parnassus.

But, as Patsky points out, Google is being investigated for anti competitive practices. Still, he believes its environmental record outweighs those concerns enough to include in Trillium’s funds, highlighting Google’s 100% usage of renewable energy and even its purchase of the smart thermostat company Nest.

“That’s just one of their many products, but it’s one of the products where I’m like, ‘All right, that’s just brilliant,’” he said. “It’s like a self learning device that’s trying to improve environmental outcomes by moving people toward recognizing that they can be comfortable with the temperature being a little warmer in the summer and colder in the winter.”

How to examine companies and ESG funds yourself

Retail investors can investigate specific funds by reading through their prospectuses. Of course, that involves lots of fine print. As You Sow has an online tool that provides more digestible information on where dozens of ESG funds stand on fossil fuels, guns, gender equality, and other issues.

To study individual companies, fund managers recommend average investors research annual sustainability reports, which you can usually find by searching the internet for a company’s name and “sustainability report.” Companies with legitimate environmental progress will have reports with absolute goals and statistics and not just anecdotes. (Look for concrete numbers with specific deadlines.) Average investors could also check whether the corporate governance structure has enough people concerned with the environment, by searching for whether board members and upper level executives have ever talked about prioritizing the environment or come from previous jobs and companies concerned with the environment.

It can get complicated, so Samuelrich, from Green Century, recommends investors first consider a company’s core business.

“What is the company sort of set up to do, and is it doing something this harmful? Is it doing something that’s neutral? Or is it doing something that’s inherently positive?” Samuelrich said.

From there she said investors should hone in on one or two issues most important to them and search for information in news articles or on companies’ websites and in their sustainability reports.

“What you’re looking for is things like, are they trying to reduce their carbon emissions? Do they say that on their website? Are they trying to reduce their plastics use? Are they trying to minimize their water use? Do they have a policy around supply chain labor standards, for example?…Do they have women or people from diverse backgrounds on their board?”

New story in Science and Health from Time: What We Have In Common With Humans Of 23,000 Years Ago What We Have In Common With Humans Of 23,000 Years Ago

A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up to get a new edition from Susanna every Saturday.

Recently, researchers reported that they’d found the oldest human footprints in North America. These fossilized tracks were made more than 21,000 years ago in what is now the White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

It’s hard to comprehend that span of years and how many generations of humanity have come and gone since then. These were the slighted impressions on the earth—trace markings made by bare human feet pressing into the pliant mud of ancient lake. Yet they survived the Ice Age and everything since to represent people who left hardly any indications that they existed.
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I think about the mountain of documentation we each have of our lives in comparison to those ancient footprints. We’re sure we’ll leave acres of personal history when we go—thousands of photos on dozens of platforms capturing our lives minute to minute. Plus millions of words in emails and texts spooling out every minor thought.

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Yet, our modern platforms will become extinct faster than a Pleistocene-era giant sloth. Digital media ages badly—technology leaping ahead so quickly that our pixelated past will be rendered unreadable before we get a chance to transfer it to a new system. Our memories and playlists are trapped in iPods, like uncrackable amber. And we have so, so much stuff, a vast record of us. I fear the meaning of what we leave behind is diluted by its volume, the sublime, and the ridiculous all stored on the obsolete devices.

Meanwhile, those ancient footprints tell their own tales without any cloud storage. Based on height and walking speed, this new research published in the journal Science suggests that the newly found tracks were from about 16 people, mostly teenagers, and children. Scientists theorize that adults handled skilled tasks while ‘fetching and carrying’ were delegated to teens, so the young left more imprints than adults.

And because White Sands National Park is such a rich site for archeology, there are other stories, only slightly less ancient and perhaps even more moving. The Park’s website describes a previous discovery of the tracks of a prehistoric woman, writing:

“Footprints show her walking for almost a mile, with a toddler’s footprints occasionally showing up beside hers. The footprints broadened and slipped in the mud with additional weight. This suggests that she carried the child, shifting them from side to side and setting them down as they walked.”

Oh, that hip-to-hip shift of a heavy, soggy kid. Is there anything more viscerally familiar? When I read that woman’s imagined history, I could feel the weight of my daughter as we slogged down along wet sand shore at the end of the day. For all of our 21st-century trappings, our human paths align across the millennia, and we all carry the primal memories of skin contact with the earth and each other.

Photograph by Dan Odess, courtesy of the National Park Service.

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GALLERY

A few images from the week.

Fall in the Berkshires includes these crazy trees.

Look at this tiny restaurant I found in the mountains of New Lebanon, NY. The KShack is indeed a funky little seasonal food shack in the mountains serving up dishes sourced from local farms and some staggeringly good all-natural soft-serve ice cream.

Kelly Hagan, owner and top chef of the KShack with her mesmerizing dog Ojas who is part huskie and boxer.

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THE ROUND-UP

Take the Kindness Test: The BBC just launched a global online public science survey in collaboration with the University of Sussex in the UK. The project builds on existing research showing that kindness is contagious—just hearing about someone else’s kindness motivates us to do the same. (Unfortunately, the reverse is true too, greed can beget more greed.)

Good COVID News (maybe, probably, hopefully): Modelers predict a steady decline in COVID cases through March. And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer COVID-19 booster shots for people 65 and older and others at risk for severe COVID-19, which may include those with conditions like diabetes or COPD.

The Pandemic Reminded Us: We Exist to Do More Than Just Work: In an essay adapted from a forthcoming book by Jonathan Malesic, he writes:

“As it is, work sits at the heart of Americans’ vision of human flourishing. It’s much more than how we earn a living. It’s how we earn dignity… In our dissent from this vision and our creation of a better one, we ought to begin with the idea that each one of us has dignity whether we work or not. Your job, or lack of one, doesn’t define your human worth.”

Can you detect your child’s emotional distress before the school’s AI does? Many school districts use software to scan students’ email and web searches for signs of self-harm, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and other mental health issues, according to a new report in the Wall Street Journal . School administrators say these tools are more important than ever in the wake of the pandemic.

Tabitha Brown Is the Gentlest Person on the Internet: Check out this profile of the unlikely social media star whose memoir Feeding the Soul (Because It’s My Business), is out on Sept. 28.

When someone you love falls down the conspiracy rabbit hole: This piece from The Prospect asks whether it’s possible to save someone from online disinformation when they believe they are battling to save you.

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EVIDENCE OF HUMAN KINDNESS

Here’s your reminder that creating a community of generosity elevates us all.

Back in April 2020, Heather Dechman, a resident of New Orleans, reached out to Shelly Tygielski, founder of Pandemic of Love to inquire about opening up a Louisiana chapter of the mutual-aid nonprofit after she heard about the organization on the news. Since then, Heather has been at the helm of the chapter, supporting her community—from lockdowns to storms.

When Hurricane Ida passed through devastating parts of the state earlier this month, Heather and her family evacuated their home and fled to Arkansas. Since then Heather and her team have been mobilizing to help families, with microgrants of between $250 to $750 per family to assist with gas, travel costs for those looking to leave the area for the short term, and food and essentials for those who are remaining in place. And thousands of families in the state were still without power three weeks after the hurricane hit.

“Even before the storm hit, the struggles we have seen in our communities due to the pandemic and now the most recent surge of the virus, we’re challenging to address.” Still Heather remains hopefully saying, “What I learned in the past year and a half by being involved with Pandemic of Love is that I have the power to do something and be the change in my own community. Through this experience, I’ve learned that we all need to rely on each other to not just survive, but to thrive. We can only do that together.”

Story courtesy of Shelly Tygielski, author of “Sit Down to Rise Up” and founder of Pandemic of Love, a grassroots organization that matches volunteers, donors, and those in need.

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COMFORT DOG

Our regular acknowledgment of the animals that help us make it through the storm.

Kathleen wrote to us in March about her accidental pandemic comfort animal, Buddy the cat: “Buddy’s mother went to California [last] August to visit her children and grandchildren. She had a heart attack while there. I was caring for Buddy while she was away for a few weeks that turned into months. He was my companion and love!”

 

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New story in Science and Health from Time: Workers Speak Out About Alleged Sexism and Safety Risks at Jeff Bezos’ Rocket Company Blue Origin Workers Speak Out About Alleged Sexism and Safety Risks at Jeff Bezos’ Rocket Company Blue Origin

A group of more than 20 current and former employees are accusing Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket ship company of being a toxic work environment and not adhering to proper safety protocols.

The workers claim in an essay that there’s sexism at the Kent, Washington, company. The employees, led by former head of Blue Origin employee communications Alexandra Abrams, state that “numerous senior leaders have been known to be consistently inappropriate with women.” They also claim that many company leaders were “unapproachable” and showed clear bias against women.

There were also safety concerns, with the group stating that Blue Origin seemed more focused on beating billionaires Richard Branson and Elon Musk to space rather than tackling safety issues that would have slowed down the schedule.

Bezos blasted into space on July 21 on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a date he selected for its historical significance. Bezos held fast to it, even as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson pushed up his own flight from New Mexico and beat him to space by nine days.

The group said that last year company leaders seemed impatient with New Shepard rocket’s schedule of a few flights per year, instead wanting more than 40. “Some of us felt that with the resources and staff available, leadership’s race to launch at such a breakneck speed was seriously compromising flight safety,” they said.

Blue Origin said in a statement that it has no tolerance for any kind of harassment or discrimination and that it stands by its safety record. The company said it believes “New Shepard is the safest space vehicle ever designed or built.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: U.S. Fishermen Are Making Their Last Stand Against Offshore Wind U.S. Fishermen Are Making Their Last Stand Against Offshore Wind

A few hundred yards south of the fishing boat docks at the Port of New Bedford in southeastern Massachusetts, workers will soon start offloading gigantic turbine components onto a wide expanse of gravel. Local trawlers and lobster boats will find themselves sharing their waterways with huge vessels hefting cranes and massive hydraulic jacks. And on an approximately 100-square mile patch of open sea that fishermen once traversed with ease, 62 of the world’s largest wind turbines will rise one by one over the ocean waves.

Known as Vineyard Wind, the project is set to be the first-ever commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the United States, generating 800 megawatts of power, or enough to power about 400,000 homes. Dozens of other offshore wind projects are in development up and down America’s east coast. But some in the fishing industry, including many New Bedford fishermen, are concerned that the turbines will upend their way of life.
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Earlier this month, a coalition of fishing industry associations and fishing outfits, including 50 New Bedford fishing boats, filed a lawsuit against several U.S. agencies, including the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which approved Vineyard Wind in May, alleging that they violated federal law in allowing the project to go forward. The fishing groups frame that fight as a matter of survival, a last ditch effort to slow down a coalition of banks, technocrats and global energy companies set on erecting multi-billion dollar projects that they worry could devastate their livelihoods.

Money is certainly a big issue for many of those behind Vineyard Wind—backers like Bank of America and J.P. Morgan have pledged about $2.3 billion in funding for the project, and they’re looking for returns on that investment. But there’s also a societal imperative to push ahead with such projects, with many green energy proponents saying there is little choice but to get offshore turbines built as soon as possible if the U.S. is to have any chance of meeting its obligations under the Paris Agreement and averting the worst effects of climate change. The Biden Administration is counting on such turbines to produce about 10% of U.S. electricity by 2050, and in coastal, population dense states like Massachusetts and New York, leaders view sea-bound wind farms as a lynchpin of their net zero ambitions.

Read More: Biden Is Pouring Billions into Offshore Wind Energy. Will It Be Enough?

Fishing industry interests have long been opposed to offshore turbines elsewhere in the world. In France, for instance, fishermen helped sink an early offshore wind project back in 2004. In the U.S., however, much of the early opposition to offshore wind came from wealthy homeowners opposed to turbines that they thought would mar their ocean views. (A coalition of Cape Cod residents led an effort championed by billionaire businessman Bill Koch and the late Senator Ted Kennedy that, after years of legal opposition, in 2017 helped torpedo what might have been the U.S. first major offshore wind project, known as Cape Wind.) Many subsequent offshore wind leases were extended in waters farther offshore, where turbines would be out of sight of land. Beachfront homeowners could rest easy. Instead, fishing interests worried about hits to their business became offshore wind’s primary opponents.

Some of those fishing operators have been fighting offshore wind long before Vineyard Wind was approved. Scallop fishers on New York’s Long Island, for instance, sued BOEM in 2016 over a proposed wind area lease that they said would hurt their industry. A federal judge dismissed the case the following year, saying that the project still faced years of federal review before anything would be built. Other proposed projects have caused concern for fishermen in North Carolina and Maryland, while a planned 1.1 gigawatt wind farm off the coast of New Jersey has worried some fishers, though the project is largely steering clear of traditional fishing areas. This March, 80 lobster crews in Maine held a boat protest over the planned construction of a single floating wind turbine off the state’s Monhegan Island.

“It’s gonna mess with the ocean and our way of life,” one fisherman told NBC’s local affiliate. “This one off Monhegan, I truly believe, is the foot in the door to get more than one out there.”

In Massachusetts, the fishing advocates who sued BOEM say that the federal government ignored their requests for more rigorous scientific study of offshore wind turbines’ effect on fishing, as well as their concerns over wind turbines making it harder to traverse to fishing grounds, among other grievances.

“This project is really important because it is the first one,” says Annie Hawkins, executive director of the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), the coalition suing the federal government. “We need to make sure that the government and the offshore wind industry aren’t just paying lip service to other ocean users.”

Representatives from BOEM and Vineyard Wind declined to comment on the case. Claire Richer, director of federal affairs at the American Clean Power Association, a green energy trade group, pushes back at the notion that local fishing interests were left out of the planning process, citing the fact that millions of acres were cut out of Massachusetts’s wind energy lease area in large part due to fishing industry concerns. In 2019, wind energy developers in the region also changed the orientation of their turbines in order to make it easier for fishing boats to traverse between them, alterations that the companies say cut about 30% of the future wind farm’s potential generation capacity, though an upgrade to newer, more powerful turbines made up the difference.

“The offshore wind industry has made an effort to be a good player, and has made a lot of compromises in this space at the request of fishermen,” says Richer. “There’s momentum that might have caught some folks by surprise. But there has been a process, and there’s been some real changes made.”

That development momentum has been largely caused by rapidly shifting political realities. Under the Trump Administration, Vineyard Wind was stalled for months. Emails released under an E&E News Freedom of Information Act request showed that BOEM was prepared to make a decision on the project starting in 2019 before the administration delayed it for more than a year, along with the rest of the country’s planned offshore wind projects. And after Joe Biden was elected, the outgoing administration issued a legal memo designed to make it especially difficult for wind developers to get a leg up on fishing interests in the federal approval process. But after Biden was inaugurated, federal policy on offshore wind snapped back. New Interior Department officials issued their own memo to cancel out the Trump Administration’s brief, while the new administration pushed hard for rapid offshore development, pledging in March to have 30 gigawatts of wind power installed off U.S. coasts by 2030. Its first approval, for Vineyard Wind, followed soon after.

That new speed reflects the urgency of an accelerating climate crisis. The U.S. is running far behind other nations in efforts to build out offshore wind power, and faces a rapidly shrinking window of time to decarbonize its still largely fossil fuel-powered electricity sector. Fishing industry representatives say the current administration is overemphasizing offshore wind in decarbonization efforts when it should be pushing more into other renewable energy options. But in some sense there isn’t much choice but to build out large amounts of offshore wind as soon as possible. Clean-energy experts say other renewable energy sources, like land-based wind turbines and solar fields, often run into vehement political opposition of their own, and in many cases offshore wind is one of the only realistic options to provide renewable power for densely populated shoreline states.

Moreover, concessions to the fishing industry, like wind area reductions and turbine arrangement changes, may result in less energy production and higher costs, says Alison Bates, an environmental studies professor at Colby College who researches interactions between offshore wind and local communities. The fact that fishermen have traditionally been primary users of coastal waters, she adds, doesn’t mean they have a right to block projects that would benefit others.

“The oceans are commons—they don’t belong to the fishermen,” Bates says, referencing an economics term used to describe natural resources from which all citizens are supposed to benefit. “We as a society have an equal share in what happens in ocean space.”

Read More: This Vermont Utility Is Revolutionizing Its Power Grid to Fight Climate Change. Will the Rest of the Country Follow Suit?

There’s another broad issue with the fishing industry’s demands: Before turbines go in the water, fishermen want more research into how offshore wind installations could affect their livelihoods. But the unfortunate reality is that the climate clock for such investigations may have already run out—at least with respect to these first early offshore wind projects.

“For us to collect all of the information that we need, we’re going to be so far into this climate crisis that it’ll—I mean it’s already irreversible,” says Bates. “The amount of emissions reduction that we need to get to to even stabilize and have anything that even resembles the world today in the future, it’s dramatic, and we don’t have time.” Erin Baker, the director of UMass Amherst’s Energy Transition Institute, says we’re better off moving ahead with building offshore wind farms and then studying what happens, and make necessary adjustments for subsequent projects. “We’re never gonna learn what we need to learn if we don’t get started at least putting some offshore wind in the water,” she says.

As for the hundreds of families in New Bedford and other ports south of Cape Cod that rely on fishing, the immediate effects of building Vineyard Wind might not be devastating: the impact will be “moderate,” according to BOEM’s environmental impact statement, potentially making it harder to access some fishing areas, for instance, or causing losses of fish populations. But the report warns such impacts are likely to get much more severe if other proposed offshore projects in the area end up being approved and constructed. Still, offshore wind industry representatives have insisted that their industry can coexist with traditional fishing, pointing to concessions like transit lanes between turbines and plans to hire local fishing boats to help collect data on wildlife and warn away potential trespassers.

Fishing representatives are skeptical that such programs will provide the employment they need, and many fishing families may look askance at the idea of giving up a trade often passed down through several generations for the chance to become ocean-faring security guards. But as ocean temperatures rise due to climate change, many fishing families’ traditional way of life may be threatened whether offshore wind moves in or not, especially in the waters off New England, which are warming faster than anywhere else in the U.S..

Climate change has given fishing workers an impossible choice: Either fight offshore wind while bracing for a warming climate, or embrace an encroaching industry that’s part of the climate solution. Baker, of UMass Amherst, says that the huge overall societal benefits of offshore wind are clear, and that climate change will ultimately hurt fishermen vastly more than would offshore wind development. But for fishermen, it’s hard not to see the skyscraper-sized towers and long, swinging blades of offshore turbines as the more visible and immediate threat to their way of life. “There is always going to be conflict between offshore wind and commercial fishing,” says Hawkins of RODA. “They are, in some sense, mutually exclusive.”

New story in Science and Health from Time: The Enduring Hope of Jane Goodall The Enduring Hope of Jane Goodall

In the early years of World War II, when Jane Goodall was around 6 years old, she was often woken from her sleep by the blare of air-raid sirens. The sound warned that Nazi planes were flying over Bournemouth, the English seaside town where Goodall’s family had moved at the outbreak of the war. Her younger sister Judy would be up like a shot, bounding down the stairs to the bomb shelter. But Goodall refused to budge. “I did not want to leave my bed,” she says. “They had to take me down with all my bedclothes.”

Eight decades later, Goodall, now 87, is standing in the living room of the same house, an imposing redbrick Victorian building with cavernous ceilings, thick carpets and heavy armchairs. The bomb shelter is still here, now home to a washing machine and a fridge. In the rest of the house, wooden shelves are crammed with books, figurines and photographs—souvenirs from Goodall’s life as the world’s best-known naturalist. Her grandmother bought the house in the 1930s, and it has the thick layer of bric-a-brac of a home occupied by the same family for many years.

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The new occupants on this late September morning are a camera crew, moving between rooms in search of furniture to take to the garden for a photograph. Goodall, though, is still, arms crossed and eyebrows raised. Her voice cuts through the commotion. Speaking softly yet with conviction, she suggests the crew try her preferred location: her attic bedroom. She exudes the same stubbornness as the girl who clung to her bed in wartime, then leads the group upstairs, victorious.

Goodall’s quiet determination has powered her through a lifetime of waiting for others to come around. In 1960, at 26, she sat for months in the forests of Tanzania, biding her time until chimpanzees accepted her presence and she could observe them up close. When she finally did, she made the seismic discovery that they use tools, transforming our understanding of the relationship between humans and animals and catapulting her to global fame. In 1962, while pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in the study of animal behavior, when professors criticized her for using human names and emotions to describe chimps, she says, “I didn’t confront them. I just quietly went on doing what I knew was right.” Although she learned to couch her observations in more scientific language, her contention that chimps are intelligent social animals is now widely accepted and has paved the way for much tighter restrictions on their use in lab testing.

Photograph by Nadav Kander for TIME

Buy a print of The Enduring Hope of Jane Goodall cover

After Goodall shifted from research to activism in the 1980s, her steady, non-confrontational approach allowed her to become one of the most prolific environmentalists in modern history. She leveraged her own life story—drawing on the powerful image of a lone woman living among the animals—to get people excited about environmentalism in an era when it was a fringe activity. Through the Jane Goodall Institute, which she founded in 1977, she fundraised for habitat conservation projects, poverty-alleviation programs and animal sanctuaries. The JGI now has chapters in 24 countries, from the U.S. to the United Arab Emirates. In 2004, she became a Dame Commander of the British Empire.

And as she traversed the world, she added countless new stories to her repertoire: on history, animal behavior, human ingenuity and more. These, rather than protest, became her campaign tools. “If I’m trying to change somebody who disagrees—I choose not to not to be holier-than-thou,” she says, perched on a well-loved armchair. “You’ve got to reach the heart. And I do that through storytelling.”

Before the pandemic, Goodall traveled 300 days out of the year to speak to school assemblies, at conferences and on talk shows in an effort to instill some of her determination in others. Through her stories, she has built a popular brand of environmentalism centered around hope—a word that has appeared in the titles of four of 21 books for adults Goodall has published since 1969.

A fifth comes in The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, co-authored with Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson, a memoir cum manifesto on the centrality of hope to activism. The book, coming Oct. 19 in the U.S. and next year in the U.K., documents three sets of interviews between Abrams and Goodall. In their conversations, Abrams questions Goodall on how she can remain hopeful despite the environmental destruction and violent human conflicts she has witnessed, as well as the grief she has experienced, in her lifetime. (Goodall lost her second husband to cancer, less than five years after marrying him, in 1980.) She gives four reasons: “the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power of young people and the indomitable human spirit,” fleshing out these concepts with the color of her life.

Something about her—her enthusiasm, the brightness of her eyes, the detail in her unusual experiences—leaves readers and audiences feeling hopeful that it’s possible, with enough effort, for us to save the planet, and ourselves, from environmental destruction. “She’s an amazing woman,” naturalist filmmaker David Attenborough told TIME in 2019, praising her ability to inspire. “She has an extraordinary, almost saintly naiveté.”

The tenacity of Goodall’s hope, in the face of the crises we now endure, might seem naive. Despite decades of institutional efforts and dedicated activism by millions across the globe, humans have driven the planet to the brink of ecological and climate catastrophe. With a long-awaited U.N. climate summit just weeks away, scientists say world leaders have failed to even pledge enough carbon-emissions cuts to make a livable future, let alone begun to deliver on their promises. The situation has led a younger generation of activists to take a much more confrontational approach than Goodall’s.

Goodall says she understands the bleak projections from climate scientists and the economic and political structures that hinder change. But she argues that hope, and her mission to spread it, are nothing short of necessary for the survival of humanity. “If you don’t hope that your actions can make a difference, then you sink into apathy,” she says. “If young people succumb to the doom and gloom—if they lose hope—that’s the end.”

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In March 2020, Goodall had just climbed into a car on the wide, tree-lined street outside the Bournemouth house, the first step on her journey to an event in Brussels. It was one of dozens of trips she had planned for the year, which would take her to cities and forests all over the world, to her house in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and back to Bournemouth to meet with Abrams. But then her sister Judy ran out of the house and told her to come back inside: the event had just been canceled. It was the start of COVID-19 shutdowns in the U.K. and an abrupt end to Goodall’s life on the road.

The 19 months Goodall has now spent in her family home, accompanied by Judy and Judy’s daughter and grandchildren, amount to the longest time she has lived there since school, and the longest continuous period she has stayed in any one place in decades. Over the past year and a half, she has traded hotels and auditoriums for her bedroom, a narrow attic room with a low ceiling, crowded by chests and bookcases, littered with gifts and mementos: a long gray Andean condor feather, a brightly printed South American cloth, dozens of old photos. In the corner, there’s the single bed where she sleeps, and within arm’s reach, a narrow desk, which holds the only two totems of our time: a laptop and a ring light.

Goodall’s determination to spread her message has kept her up here for hours each day, doing, on average, three virtual lectures or interviews between breakfast and bedtime. “That’s including weekends,” she says, both proud and a little weary. “I even had something on Christmas Day and on my birthday.” It’s been hard, she says, to stare into the tiny green light of her laptop camera all day. “When you’re giving a lecture to 5,000, 10,000 people, you say something funny and people laugh, or you say something moving and you see eyes being wiped,” she says. “But if you don’t get the same energy into it, there’s no point doing it.”

If she’d had the option, Goodall says, she would have spent the pandemic period completely alone. “I’ve always loved being by myself,” she says. “If I could have chosen, I would have been in a house with nobody else, and a dog.” She pauses to look disapprovingly at Bean, the gray whippet snoozing on a chair nearby. Occasionally Bean looks up, then noses back beneath a leopard-print blanket to keep the light out of his eyes. “Not a dog like that,” Goodall says, chuckling. “A proper dog. He’s more like a cat.”

NBC/Getty ImagesDuring the pandemic, she has maintained an intense schedule of video appearances to spread her message

Goodall originally wanted to spend her life alone with animals. It’s the dream that sent her to Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in 1960. Although she had no formal scientific education, Goodall had managed to impress Louis Leakey, a renowned paleo-anthropologist, with her passion for animals on a trip to Kenya with a school friend in 1957. Leakey secured funding to send Goodall to Gombe. Her observations of the chimpanzees there dispelled a then widely held belief that humans were the only animals who used tools, or had emotions or personalities. After the tool discovery, Leakey famously wrote to her, “Ah! We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as human!”

Goodall’s mother Margaret came with her, answering a demand of the British research body that funded her trip for her to have a companion, and supported her daughter through the frustrating months in which the chimps ran away whenever she approached. But it was when she was alone, crawling through undergrowth or climbing mountains, that Goodall says she experienced a “spiritual connection” with the forest and its animals. “If you’re alone, you feel part of nature,” she says. “If you’re with one other person, even somebody you love, it’s two human beings in nature—and you can’t be lost in it.”

Goodall was among the last generation of researchers to spend time in the natural world before the scale of humans’ impact on it became a major topic of discussion in the scientific community. In 1986, at a primatology conference she helped organize in Chicago, she attended a session on habitat loss around the world. “After realizing what was going on, it was never quite the same, because then I felt I’ve got to try and save it,” she says. She still feels the spiritual connection when in nature, but there’s something else there, too: “There’s a little plea in it—a plea for help.”

That new understanding would transform Goodall’s life, taking her from the isolation of field and library research to a frenetic schedule of travel, charity work and activism for the next 35 years.

She describes in The Book of Hope an essential realization: if she wanted to protect nature, she would have to take a humanistic approach, striving to alleviate the conditions that drive people to hunt vulnerable animals or cut down trees. In 1991, she set up Roots and Shoots, a youth-activism program that now has local groups across 60 countries, in which young people are running more than 5,800 community projects to support people, animals and the planet. Three years later, she launched the Jane Goodall Institute’s flagship conservation program, which invests in social programs in villages in Tanzania, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond, and then enlists villagers to help with tree planting and forest monitoring. Goodall also began advocating for widening access to birth control in order to prevent population growth from putting too much pressure on natural resources.

Over the years, elements of Goodall’s philosophy have attracted criticism from some in the environmental movement. Some disagree with her focus on voluntary population control in developing countries, for example, when the wealthy contribute so much more to climate change and pollution. Others see the individual lifestyle changes that Goodall cites as inspiring examples of how “everyone can do their bit”—such as adopting a vegetarian diet or using less plastic—as a distraction from the much bigger changes that businesses and governments need to make, and a little hypocritical, given how often she flies.

Reflecting from her chair in Bournemouth, Goodall says she sees her ideas and her career as a pragmatic response to the crises. “We need to address it on every single side we can,” she says. “I try to be as environmentally friendly as I can with the life that I was sort of forced to lead.”

Chris Steele-Perkins—Magnum PhotosGoodall, pictured in Tanzania in 1989, has long valued solitude: “If you’re alone, you feel part of nature,” she says

There’s a hint of martyrdom in Goodall’s use of the word forced. In reality, although she romanticizes the solitude she had in Gombe, she acknowledges that connecting with people gives her energy. Her eyes light up as she picks up the objects she has collected on her travels, using them as prompts to tell stories. And she says she has “five to 12” friends in every big city around the world.

There’s no denying the success of her efforts in spreading hope. Per the JGI, at least 100,000 young people are currently engaged in activism or restoration projects through the Roots and Shoots program. Vanessa Nakate, a prominent 24-year-old climate activist from Uganda, says she read about Goodall’s life online a few years before she began her own work. “Long before I learned about how bio-diversity loss is linked to climate change, I took from Jane’s work an instinctual understanding that protecting our ecosystems is so important,” she says.

For Abrams, Goodall’s co-author, one moment from their talks explained the appeal of her brand of hopeful activism. He asked her if, from what she had seen, she believed humans tended more toward good or evil. She responded that they have equal capacity for both. “The environment we create will determine what prevails,” she told him. “In other words, what we nurture and encourage wins.”

Her hope isn’t a denial of reality, Abrams says. It’s more of a choice: “Whether we focus on the devastation or the regeneration. Whether we focus on the possibility for good, or the inevitability of evil.”

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The devastation of the planet increasingly demands our focus. Extended droughts, destructive storms and unprecedented wildfires are fast becoming part of the daily news cycle. Climate scientists say these events are just the warning shot, with climate-change impacts set to become more frequent and intense—even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow. In November, world leaders will gather for COP26, the U.N. climate conference, where they are due to scale up their emissions targets. Expectations are high, but many activists fear the conference will end without strong agreements.

As usual, Goodall is determined to find hope. “I won’t say I’m optimistic, but I have all my fingers crossed,” she says. “The positive thing is that there’s so much more awareness. There’s so much more pressure from the public.”

But the urgency of this moment has led many activists to doubt whether heightened consciousness will be enough to trigger the drastic changes we need. Kumi Naidoo, a South African anti-apartheid activist and former Greenpeace director, says Goodall was “ahead of her time” on raising awareness and that her present-day work is unquestionably valuable. But, he adds, “All of us in the environmental movement, especially those of us who have been around for a while, must acknowledge that notwithstanding our best efforts, our sacrifices, our hard work, we have not delivered the results we set out to deliver.”

A younger generation of activists has taken up more aggressive strategies to demand radical, systemic change, focusing more on the stakes for humans than for wildlife—an approach Naidoo argues is essential for forcing action. International networks such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion have blocked roads, occupied buildings and created disruptive spectacles in city centers. Millions of students are regularly skipping school to protest, bearing slogans that excoriate adult politicians.

Goodall says she can understand why young activists feel they need to be more assertive. Still, for her own part, a softer touch has always felt best, she says. “But then I’ve never tried the aggressive route. I couldn’t—it’s just not me.” She believes confrontational tactics can backfire, prompting those in power to pay lip service to demands without actually changing their minds. “If you can get into the heart with a story, you may not know at the time, but people will go on thinking.”

Her own story, meanwhile, continues—although not exactly in the same way as before. She will begin traveling again next year but says she will never resume the “crazy” schedule she maintained before the pandemic, having found she can reach so many more people online. “At 87, one never knows quite what the future holds. Still, I have good genes for a long life on both sides of my family.” She’ll work to spread hope and inspire people for as long as she can, for the sake of future generations. “I’m about to leave the world, and leave it behind me with all the mess,” she says. “Young people have to grow up into it. They need every bit of help they can.”

As if remembering her mission, Goodall picks up her laptop. “I want to read you a poem,” she says, enlarging the text so she can see it. The piece she chooses is by Edgar Albert Guest, a rhythmic, staccato quasi nursery rhyme titled, “It Couldn’t Be Done.” She reads with the joyful, kindly spirit of a grandmother speaking to a child, and it’s hard not to feel warmed by the encouragement. “Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing that ‘cannot be done,’ and you’ll do it.” She looks up, eyes flashing. “Don’t you love that?”

With reporting by Alejandro de la Garza and Julia Zorthian/New York and Dan Stewart/London