Good News in Case The Plight Of The Koala Has You Down
Tag Archives: optimism
Good Ecological News In Case COP26 Had You Feeling Down
Another year has passed, and once again we’ve seen many world leaders make weighty promises to do better in their efforts to help the climate, only to do sharp about-faces once they’ve returned home. In an attempt to put aside some of the frustration that inevitably results from such grandstanding, let’s go through some of the more positive news stories that have popped up over the last month.
Read moreGood News in Case Mass Species Extinction Has You Down
At the end of last month, the natural world was hit with (yet another) deluge of bad news, what with 23 species newly classified as extinct. But as always, I believe it’s important to remember that there’s always good news out there, whether you need it for inspiration, hope, or just plain relief in the face of humanity’s apparent war on the planet.
Read moreGood News In Case Environmental Anxiety Has You Down
Image Credit: Peter Trimming, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped
With the constant deluge of environmental disasters and newly endangered or extinct species, it’s sometimes easy to think there is only ever bad news when it comes to nature. But there is good news lurking out there, and it’s a source of hope, inspiration and action for many. So let’s have a look at some success stories from the past month.
Read moreGood News In Case The IPCC Report Got You Depressed
Image Credit: Charlie Marshall, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped
I’ve spent the last few days churning through the IPCC report and by jove, it is BLEAK. I’ll have a summary up soon in some format for those of you who find even the 42 page summary a bit daunting, but don’t look forward to it… But because it’s important to share hope and stories of real progress, I thought I’d churn through the news cycles and find some cases of things going well in the natural world.
Read moreGood News In Case Watching the Ocean Burn Got You Depressed
Image Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped
It’s been an awful week for the environment. If you’ve missed some of the news from the past four or five days, congratulations. But since climate-related depression is a very real thing, and there ARE always some success stories out there regarding the climate and our planet’s biodiversity, I thought I’d take this chance to share some positive stories from around the world.
Read moreFeeding the Flames
When I recently set out to see what science has to say about the likelihood of more giant fires in the western U.S and Australia, I found repeated predictions of deep droughts and epic fires. Don’t worry, instead of explaining the sad science of chronic presses and acute pulses, anomalies, chronologies, and trajectories, I’m instead going to talk about the hope right under our feet.
Read moreFocus on Brexit at BES2019: Resigned But Resolute
Image Credit: Marco Verch, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped
I’m in Belfast this week for the British Ecological Society’s Annual Meeting. Whilst I’ll write a more comprehensive summary of the event next week, for now I want to talk (again) about the looming fragmentation that Brexit represents, its impact upon British ecology, and the ecological community in general.
I took a tour of the city on my first day here which focussed on Belfast’s history of violence, and I don’t believe this conference could have had a darker backdrop with regards to Brexit. Fears of a no-deal exit from the EU are sparking worries of the return of a border wall with southern Ireland, which could lead to local redeployment of the British army. Public opinion is starting to sway towards reunification with southern Ireland.
Nancy Knowlton: The Importance of Earth Optimism
Whilst it might seem like little guys like this don’t have much to smile about these days, being optimistic about the state of the environment is more important than ever, according to Nancy Knowlton (Image Credit: Rosalyn Davis, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, Image Cropped)
At the very beginning of my PhD, I was in the audience at the STARMUS Festival when American reef biologist Nancy Knowlton gave a talk about Earth Optimism. It came just after the American President had withdrawn his support for the Paris climate agreement, and smiles regarding the state of the planet were hard to come by. So seeing an esteemed member of the scientific community give a reminder that there was hope for one of the earth’s most vulnerable ecosystem was inspiring.
At this year’s International Barcode of Life Conference in Trondheim, I had the chance to sit down with Nancy and talk about why optimism is so important in the face of the many ongoing problems that the planet faces.
Dag Hessen: Advancing the Teaching of Ecology
Dag Hessen (second from right) believes that the teaching of ecology needs to move forward, better integrating our impact on the planet (Image Credit: paal @flickr, Image cropped, CC BY 2.0)
Ecology for the Masses 