The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times

Jane uses a rhetorical device called direct address to speak directly to her audience. Jane starts her letter by saying, “I am writing to you now from my home in Bournemouth on a very cold and very windy morning in February” (225). Jane shares personal details about her life and surroundings with the reader, as someone would in a letter to a friend. This sets the tone for the letter to come, which shares more about the global circumstances under which Jane is writing and includes Jane’s direct request to the reader for them to maintain hope and turn it into action for the planet’s betterment.

Most of the Conclusion discusses the global COVID-19 pandemic, which interrupted Doug and Jane’s writing. Jane calls the pandemic a “tragedy” due to the ignored “predict[ions] by those studying zoonotic diseases” (226). Jane uses this as evidence of what will happen when people do not take the warnings experts give them about how humans interact with the rest of the globe seriously, emphasizing The Interrelation of Plant and Animal Species with human civilization.

One of the recurring points Jane returns to in her stories is how people persevere and adapt amid great adversity. She uses the pandemic to highlight how “human intellect” leads to “adaptability and creativity” (228). She references an orchestra in Barcelona that performed to an audience of 2,000 plants. The plants were later donated to healthcare workers. Most concerts function as an intangible consumer good, as audience members pay to see a performance. A release on Liceu’s website said that they wanted the concert to reflect our relationship with nature, thus engaging the theme of The Interrelation of Plant and Animal Species.

Jane wants this shift in perspective to be the message people take away both from the pandemic and her and Doug’s book. At her time of writing in 2021, she acknowledges that the world is in dire straits. She has “never, ever been busier or more exhausted in [her] life” (229). As she writes, countries experience waves of “new, more contagious strains of the virus” (231), and the pandemic exasperated and revealed “far greater threat[s] to our future” (231), namely “the climate crisis,” “the loss of biodiversity,” and systems of disenfranchisement wound up within them (231). Jane is realistic about the state of the world. She tells her reader it “is no shame if you think about the harm we’ve inflicted on the world” (233). She wants her readers to know that while it might be painful to think about global issues, a feeling like “shame” holds people back from maintaining hope and acting for a better future.

Instead, she ends her direct address with a plea to the reader, asking them: “Please, please rise to the challenge, inspire and help those around you, play your part” (234). Jane once again absorbs the reader into her narrative by directly addressing them with the second person “you.” Jane has lived her life to “inspire” others, to “help” them, and to play her own part in ensuring a better global future. In asking this, Jane is asking readers to carry on her legacy.