 We're going through very dark times as this COVID-19 pandemic sweeps around the world. So much suffering as people fall sick, including doctors and nurses on the front line, working selflessly to help others. The tragedy is that we've not learned from past pandemics of this sort, even though we know how they originate, even though the one we are experiencing now has been long predicted. As we destroy the natural world, we bring animals into closer and closer contact with each other and enable viruses to spread from one species to another. The meat markets where wild animals are sold for food create conditions that enable viruses to jump from an animal to a human and creates a new mutation, such as COVID-19. And epidemics have been created also by close contact between people and domestic animals in confined conditions. During my 85 years on planet Earth, I've witnessed the horrific harm we've inflicted on the environment and the terrible cruelty we've inflicted on each other. I've seen how wealthy countries have raped poorer countries for their natural resources, often leading to corrupt leaders becoming wealthy while vast numbers of the population fall ever deeper into poverty and desperation, so that many, including children, are forced to work long hours in the field or making garments or working in dangerous conditions in the mines. They make just enough money to keep them alive so that we can buy cheap goods and the rich can get richer. Today we should think about the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, the crippling poverty, not just in the poorer countries but in the wealthiest. Homeless people in London and New York sleep on streets where the wealthy walk past without a thought, whilst they ride the elevator to luxury apartments and champagne dinners. So many of us take things for granted. We buy food in the supermarket and waste a lot. There's always water in the tap or to flush the toilet. Yet there are millions of people living close to death from lack of food, getting sick from contaminated water, fleeing from parts of the world that have become uninhabitable because of climate change, and the climate crisis is having the most devastating effect on the poor. It is not only from war and persecution that refugees flee today. Millions seek refuge from an environment that has become increasingly hostile and so often meet hostility of an even crueler kind in the places where they finally arrive. On this first International Day of Consciousness, let us realise we're not the only sentient beings on the planet. In 1962 I was told there was a difference in kind between us and other animals. Even between us and our closest biological and behavioural relative, the chimpanzee. Only we humans, I was told, had personalities, minds and emotions. Fortunately I'd been taught as a child that that was simply not true. My teacher was my dog Rusty. Today science acknowledges that humans are not the only sentient beings and that animals too can feel pain, fear, joy and grief. And we continually learn more about the amazing intelligence shown by animals from chimpanzees to octopuses. Knowing this, let us pause to think of the billions of animals hunted in the wild, trafficked to be sold for food, for entertainment, to be tortured in medical and pharmaceutical research laboratories. And let us realise that each of these animals is a sentient being. Each one has his or her personality and emotions and can feel pain, fear, despair. Let me end with my reason for hope. We will get through this pandemic as we have got through others. Many of us will have realised as we are confined to our houses, as we face shortage of supplies, especially toilet paper, that we should no longer take our freedom and health for granted and that we should have more respect for the natural world. Then we shall be better people, more understanding, more compassionate, more respectful of each other and of the animals with whom we share this planet. This is the first international day of conscious. But let it be a wake-up call so that every day of every year we try to find ways to address inequality and make ethical choices in what we buy and eat and wear. We must allow that still small voice of consciousness to sound louder and louder until, when head and heart work in harmony, we shall finally attain our true human potential. I'm going to do two things now. First, redo the paragraph before the end because I missed something out. Knowing this, let us pause to think of the billions of animals hunted in the wild, traffic to be sold for food or for entertainment or to be tortured in medical and pharmaceutical laboratories and of the billions of animals treated as walking food in factory farms. And let us realise that each of these animals is a sentient being. Each one has his or her personality and emotions. Each one can feel pain, fear, despair. And then at the beginning they start off, Hello, this is Jane Goodall. Greetings to everyone around the world. And let me bring in a voice to represent the billions of animals who are not referred to in the UN Charter. And the greeting of the chimpanzee, the animal I know best, the animal most like us.