<
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/09/the-need-for-success-stories-in-conservation/>
"The gorilla should have vanished. In the late 1980s, the mountain gorilla
clung to survival in the misted borderlands of Rwanda, Uganda, and the
Democratic Republic of Congo. Poaching, snares, and civil conflict made
extinction feel like a timetable. What changed was not a miracle but a grind:
rangers risking their lives to keep snares out of the forest, communities
earning a stake through carefully managed tourism, and governments that held a
fragile line. The population remains small and the work costly, yet numbers
have climbed. It is a recovery measured in steady hands rather than headlines,
and it offers a simple proposition. Optimism, properly understood, is not a
mood. It is a method.
Conservation suffers from grim arithmetic. Loss can be swift, while recovery
takes years of money, attention, and political luck. In such a field, optimism
is often dismissed as naivete. That is a mistake. Jane Goodall has long argued
that conservation depends on hope. The Smithsonian’s Earth Optimism summit, the
Conservation Optimism movement, and IUCN’s
Green List of Species have carried
that conviction into institutions and practice. The right kind of optimism is
disciplined. It begins with the premise that action changes outcomes, then
organizes institutions, incentives, and narratives to make that premise true.
The first reason to defend optimism is cognitive, not ecological. People do not
decide in spreadsheets. They respond to stories that link values to visible
results. Decades of accurate warnings have not, on their own, produced
commensurate action. That gap is not proof that facts are futile; it is proof
that facts need carriers. Call it narrative transportation if you like: when a
story is grounded in a real place, with real people and checks against reality,
the idea travels further and lodges deeper. The mountain gorilla’s climb from
the brink is compelling not because it flatters sentiment, but because it shows
a line of causation that readers can follow and, crucially, imagine joining.
The second reason is political. Doom is demobilizing. Faced with
planetary-scale charts and acronyms, many people conclude that their choices
are too small to matter. Opponents of environmental action thrive on that
paralysis. Optimism counters it by shrinking part of the problem to a human
scale. A no-take zone that yields fuller nets just beyond its boundary does
more than help fish. It helps a community believe that rules can work, that
cooperation can pay, and that tomorrow’s sacrifice might bring tomorrow’s
return. Hope, in that form, is habit-forming.
A third reason is strategic. Optimism directs attention toward levers that
multiply impact. It is not a call to cheerlead, but to locate where effort
tilts systems. Consider the Mesopotamian Marshes, once drained as a tool of
repression and long thought unrecoverable. Engineers and local communities
challenged that fatalism. Through the dull arts of hydrology and the stubborn
arts of coalition, water returned, reed beds spread, and people reestablished
lives in a place many had written off. The result is partial and fragile, as
recoveries often are, yet it proves a larger point. Institutions that assume
improvement is possible invest in feedback loops, learn from setbacks, and stay
long enough to compound gains."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-new-york-rent-freeze-housing-crisis/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
