Last summer, a post in this blog posed the question “how do you handle the constant stream of discouraging environmental information?” Shortly afterwards, I saw an article in Grist titled, “Do environmentalists need shrinks? Apparently, I am not the only one thinking about this issue – although I suggested that designers are natural optimists (feel free to disagree) and less likely to be consumed by the pervasive environmental negativity. Now there is an article in New Scientist that boldly states “Ecologists Should Look on the Bright Side.” Is this even possible? (Colleagues at SUNY-ESF, what do you think?)
A key graph, also the introduction, states:
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.”
As someone who once had a job writing obituaries for beautiful places (called environmental assessments (EAs) and environmental impacts statements (EISs), I know how that feels!
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.”
What do you do when you hear bad news all the time? Turn it off. Pessimism leaves little room for action.
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.
Fuel creative responses to what is, yes, a bad situation by giving people a reason to think that there is hope. This is a message that is especially important for young people. My children are growing up in a world where they are told that the planet is dying (and that somehow they are charged with saving it). Even if they watch a beautiful sunrise over the Atlantic, there is a little voice in their heads telling them that the oceans are dying. What an oppressive thought! We have to preserve the sense of awe, wonder, and love of the Earth if we are going to motivate people to act on its behalf. IMHO.
Praxis in Landscape Architecture 
Margaret-
I’ve encountered this issue in some of my courses (as well as in discussions with my son!), particularly a couple of years ago when I taught a seminar on sustainable design & development. My regular response to many of my students (who began to get openly depressed reading all the doom & gloom!) was to share my own perspective of 50+ years to compared with their more limited 20 something view (really less than a dozen years, as who among them was really paying attention until they were into their teens?). For me, I remember growing up near here in the 1960’s and 70’s, before we had sewage treatment plants in every community, before we had catalytic converters on every car, and scrubbers on every smokestack, and when landfills didn’t often bother with the fill– they were just “dumps,” and anything could get tossed into them!
I’ve seen the gradual changes in the landscape over this period of time, and while there are still plenty of annoyingly negative aspects (particularly sprawling suburban and exurban development), the trend in many aspects is notably positive. I never saw a turkey or a beaver growing up in central New York, much less an osprey or bald eagle, and now each are quite common. The changes in wildlife and the habitat available to them here are dramatic, but only visible over larger lengths of time. I’ll never suggest we should rest on our laurels on this topic (at least not as long as we have the real impacts of climate change looming ever closer on the horizon), but there’s a lot more good news than many young people realize!
While in Virginia, I ran across some old film footage produced by the Isaak Walton League from perhaps the 1940s. It featured a couple of people floating down a creek, peering over the edge at the bubbles rising to the surface – methane from rotting sewage. I wish that I had that bit of film in my possession because it makes the same point that you do. The Clean Water Act was transformational in a way that even people our age cannot quite comprehend. There’s no reason that creeks have to be named “Bubbly” any more, at least in this country!
RE: Clean Water Act. I once worked on a project that involved looking through old files in the offices of the Greenville, SC water department. That’s when I learned that the Clean Water Act was a Communist plot! An old newspaper article from around the time of the law’s passage warned of the dire consequences.