Rethinking how we talk about conservation—and why it matters

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

For a movement so often framed by loss—and confronting a particularly difficult moment—conservation is relearning how to talk about itself. This shift may signal something deeper than messaging: a recalibration of what persuades people to care, to fund, and to act, especially as the world edges toward 2030 amid ecological strain, political volatility, and thinning public trust.

A few months ago, I put out an invitation to the conservation sector: share how you are navigating this moment, which many have described as a period of crisis. That invitation resurfaced recently when Crystal DiMiceli referenced it during a fireside chat with me at the Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders’ 20th anniversary event in Washington, D.C.

DiMiceli asked what lessons are emerging so far. One of the most consistent responses has centered on communication: “Less crisis, more agency.”

Not because the crisis has abated, but because alarm on its own no longer mobilizes as reliably as it once did. If anything, it exhausts. Years of grim headlines have revealed an uncomfortable truth: when people are offered only catastrophe, many disengage. They stop reading, stop caring, and, in some cases, stop believing that anything meaningful can still be done.

What seems to be gaining ground instead is a focus on success—often partial, sometimes fragile, but demonstrable. Not triumphalism, but optimism grounded in evidence. Conservation framed as something people actively do, rather than something that merely happens to nature.

This reframing has another effect: it broadens the constituency. When conservation is presented solely as the protection of pristine places or distant species, it can feel remote, even exclusionary. When it is tied to livelihoods, rights, health, and local resilience, it becomes more immediate and more widely owned.

What makes conservation efforts take root and scale

That shift necessarily includes Indigenous peoples and local communities, long treated by mainstream conservation as stakeholders and only belatedly recognized as rights-holders and decision-makers. Initiatives that scale tend to share a simple, if demanding, feature: genuine local leadership. Not consultation after the fact, but ownership from the outset. Programs designed externally may pilot well for a time; they are far less likely to be sustained long-term or adapted elsewhere. Those rooted in place often spread precisely because they are not generic.

Scale, in this sense, is not synonymous with size. It more often emerges from accumulation: many small successes building momentum over time. The idea sounds modest, but it reflects how change actually spreads. Adaptation depends less on grand design than on transparency, data, narrative clarity, and continuous learning. Successful initiatives can point to visible benefits—for example, more fish on the reef, steadier incomes, or safer water—and explain how those outcomes were achieved. They show their work: documenting evidence, acknowledging failures, and describing what was adjusted along the way. That openness builds credibility locally and makes the work easier for outsiders, including funders, partners, and peers, to understand and adapt.

The importance of diversified funding has surfaced repeatedly as well. Conservation efforts tethered to a single donor, funding stream, or specific political moment tend to be brittle. Initiatives supported by a mix of philanthropy, public finance, community enterprise, and earned income are more likely to absorb shocks. In an increasingly volatile funding environment, that diversity functions less as a luxury than as a necessary form of resilience.

The next five years will test whether the sector can meaningfully internalize these lessons. Integrating people and nature is no longer rhetorical garnish; it increasingly shapes whether conservation efforts are perceived as legitimate or extractive. Rebuilding trust through transparency may, in some contexts, matter as much as the number of hectares protected. Narratives are beginning to shift toward agency, though doing so responsibly requires resisting the temptation to overstate what is possible. Technology, deployed with care, can help by lowering monitoring costs, improving access to data, and linking local efforts to wider audiences. Rights and environmental justice will shape outcomes whether or not they are acknowledged. Treating them as secondary concerns is not a neutral stance; it carries consequences that are often both predictable and expensive.

When human well-being and conservation align

One model that illustrates how these threads can come together is Health in Harmony’s “health for forests” approach in Borneo. Rather than asking communities to stop logging because forests matter globally—an argument common in external conservation narratives and one that can feel abstract—the organization begins with a more proximate question: What do you need? Frequently, the answer is access to affordable, reliable health care.

Health in Harmony responds by providing tiered health services, sometimes at no cost, in indirect exchange for verifiable conservation actions such as monitoring forest boundaries or restoring degraded land. The exchange sets clear expectations, but the deeper dynamic is relational rather than transactional. By working from community-identified needs, this approach clarifies how human well-being and forest health reinforce one another. Conservation actions that benefit the forest also support the social and economic stability that communities prioritize. That alignment—rather than the exchange mechanism alone—is what makes the model durable, especially as the sector works toward a target to conserve and restore 30 percent of the planet by 2030.

What journalism reveals about agency and accountability

In this context, the parallels with journalism are hard to miss. Journalism’s core role remains remarkably consistent: to check abuses of power, inform the public, and expand what people consider possible. The conditions under which that work is carried out, however, have grown more demanding. Disinformation spreads faster than corrections. Resources are shrinking across much of the media landscape. Civic space is narrowing in many of the places where environmental stakes are highest.

Still, journalism remains a public good that underpins nearly every other intervention, in conservation and beyond. Without credible information, policies misfire, markets distort, and communities are sidelined. Accountability begins with facts that can be trusted. So, often, does hope.

At Mongabay, our response has been to move closer to the ground: establishing autonomous regional bureaus, expanding multilingual reporting, and deepening partnerships with local journalists. We have tried to pair investigative reporting with solutions coverage, on the premise that exposing wrongdoing matters but so does documenting what works. Not as advocacy, and certainly not as cheerleading, but as evidence. Tracking how information is used—who it reaches, how it circulates, and what it influences—adds another layer of accountability.

This thinking sits behind a phrase that can sound suspect until unpacked: optimism is a strategy. It is not blind positivity. It is deliberate: a form of realism that recognizes despair as paralyzing and treats hope, when grounded in evidence, as a catalyst for action. Hope untethered from facts quickly curdles. But when anchored in proof, it sustains effort. Jane Goodall long articulated this idea, often describing her role as that of a messenger of hope.

There is no shortage of examples. Mountain gorillas have recovered against the odds. Species like the black-footed ferret, kākāpō, and saiga antelope have returned where sustained conservation effort has been possible. Entire island ecosystems have rebounded following the removal of invasive species. Forest loss has slowed in places once written off entirely. These stories are not just inspiring; they are instructional. They offer concrete lessons about what made recovery possible and how similar conditions might be adapted elsewhere.

Telling these stories has become a more intentional part of journalism’s contribution. I was told more than once that Mongabay was among the most depressing sites on the internet, chronicling species loss, forest destruction, and the rising toll of environmental defenders killed for their work. The description stung because it was not entirely wrong. We made a conscious decision to expand our solutions reporting—not to dilute the gravity of the crisis, but to pair it with verified accounts of progress. Not ignoring what is broken, but insisting on documenting what is being repaired and how.

That effort has taken shape through series on Indigenous-led conservation, conservation technology, agroecology and regenerative landscapes, and women at the forefront of community conservation, among others.

This evolution has coincided with another trend: news avoidance. Research from the Reuters Institute suggests that about 40 percent of people actively tune out the news. The reasons vary, but two categories of reporting consistently retain their attention: solutions-focused stories and positive news. That finding loops back to the same insight emerging in conservation conversations: agency matters, even for reader engagement.

Narrative, in the end, is not incidental. Facts alone rarely move people. Stories do. The challenge is to tell stories that are honest about the scale of the crisis while remaining faithful to evidence about what works. If people conclude that nothing can be done, they will not try. If they see that effort yields results, even incremental ones, they are more likely to stay or become engaged. Optimism, in that sense, is an antidote to paralysis.

What sustains my optimism

What sustains my own optimism? Mostly evidence. People doing extraordinary things with modest resources. Recovery demonstrated rather than promised. And a level of awareness we simply didn’t have a decade ago. Thanks to satellite monitoring, bioacoustic sensors, community-generated data, and tools that turn raw information into something visible and undeniable, we can now see environmental change in near real time. Ignorance is no longer a plausible excuse—not because people should have known better, but because the world is now measured and monitored in ways that make the trends unmistakable and clarify what actually works. We can see, for example, where territorial rights reduce deforestation, how local stewardship improves biodiversity, and why Indigenous- and community-led governance is essential for durable outcomes. This transparency is widening the constituency for conservation. As governments, businesses, and new sectors gain clearer insight into how ecosystems function—and how their own well-being depends on them—the case for protecting nature grows stronger. This shift is visible in policies linking ecosystems to human health, the surge of interest in nature-based solutions, and the expansion of forest protection beyond NGOs and forestry agencies into finance, agriculture, consumer-goods companies, and more. And then there is time spent in nature itself, a reminder of both what is at stake and what still endures.

That understanding, and the optimism it makes possible, is also why I have been writing more tributes to those we have lost: people who quietly carried conservation forward, often without recognition or institutional backing. Their passing is a loss, but the purpose of remembering them is not elegy alone. It is to show what one person can do and to leave readers not only saddened, but asking a simple, generative question: what might I carry forward?

Hope, grounded in evidence, is not a mood. It is a method. In conservation, as elsewhere, it is increasingly clear that lasting change depends on it.

Header image: Misty morning in Borneo. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler

Credits

Rhett Butler Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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