The planet is in a bad state but remorseless pessimism is a turn-off. It’s time conservationists talked up their successes

IT’S hard to spend your working life charting the demise of the things you love. Ask an ecologist why they chose that career, and you will often hear a tale about being mad about animals as a kid. These days, they are more likely to spend their days modelling how quickly their favourite species will disappear. As Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC puts it: “My whole generation spent our lives writing obituaries of nature.”

Despair about the planet has many labels, among them “eco-fatigue” and “ecophobia”. In 2004, Glenn Albrecht of the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, coined the word “solastalgia” – a combination of the Latin solacium (comfort) and the Greek algia (pain) – to describe the anguish people feel when the place they live is under threat. When I mentioned the term at a science festival in New Zealand in November, a crowd swarmed the stage, hungry to know more.

The trouble is, of course, that gloom is justified. The planet is in a bad state.

Even so, conservationists are starting to worry that their message is counterproductive. In a 2010 editorial in BioScience (vol 60, p 626), Ronald Swaisgood and James Sheppard of the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research wrote: “We contend that there is a continuing culture of hopelessness among conservation biologists… that will influence our ability to mobilize conservation action among the general public.”


There are signs that the narrative is changing. Household names including Jane Goodall and David Suzuki have recently written hopeful books about the environment, while organisations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation are rebranding themselves to convey a more optimistic message.

Some conservation biologists are also preaching hope. Last year, a team of distinguished rainforest biologists, including the late Navjot Sodhi of the National University of Singapore, published a groundbreaking article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution (vol 26, p 585). “Widespread pessimism prevails,” they wrote. “What successes have been won are rarely highlighted or fail to attract wide attention.”

Debates continue to wage between those who argue that doom needs to be leavened by hope and others who maintain that an optimistic message plays down the crisis and justifies business as usual.

This argument misses a crucial point. What’s at stake is more than what makes the best message, it’s what makes the best conservation strategy. Chronicling demise offers little guidance. But if we tell stories about positive outcomes and share details of how they are achieved, the likelihood that they will be replicated will increase. Hope engenders conservation success, and success breeds more success.