5 Pieces of Good News From Planet Earth

Most news from nature is depressing—species extinctions, changing climate, dying oceans. Yet it's not all bad... though we might never know it, since positive news is underreported.

I wrote about this tendency in my latest MoJo print piece about my old friend Enriqueta Velarde and her work to save an island and a whole ecosystem called Can One Incredibly Stubborn Person Save a Species?

That article grew from a call-to-arms in a science paper in TREE last year: Conservation science must engender hope to succeed. The authors persuasively argued that by not reporting good conservation news, both the media and science journals facilitate a climate of despair and pessimism and create a self-defeating positive feedback loop. They suggested we work harder to broadcast successes stories and the people behind them.

So what works and where? Here are a few stories that caught my eye recently.