Most news from nature is depressingâ€"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.