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 on Friday when Crystal DiMiceli referenced it during a fireside chat at the Emerging Leaders in Wildlife Conservation 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—or fails to happen—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.

That shift necessarily includes Indigenous peoples and local communities, long treated 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 buy-in. Not consultation after the fact, but ownership from the outset. Programs designed externally may pilot well; they are far less likely to replicate. 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, repeated and adapted. The idea sounds modest, but it reflects how change actually travels. Replication depends less on grand design than on transparency, data, and narrative clarity. Successful programs can point to visible benefits—more fish on the reef, steadier incomes, 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—like 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 a 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 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 seen 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 without drifting into fantasy will require discipline. 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 regardless of whether they are explicitly acknowledged. Treating them as secondary concerns is not a neutral stance; it carries consequences that are often both predictable and expensive.

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 that can feel abstract or even alien—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. What emerges is not a transaction so much as a shift in how the forest is perceived. It is no longer framed as a global asset preserved at local expense, but as integral to community health, security, and dignity. Crucially, the conservation solutions themselves are developed by the community, ensuring genuine ownership rather than compliance. The model aligns environmental outcomes with immediate human well-being—a linkage that feels increasingly central as conservation looks toward 2030.

In this context, the parallels with journalism are hard to miss. Journalism’s role can appear almost old-fashioned: to check abuses of power, inform the public, and offer ideas that expand what people consider possible. Yet the conditions under which it operates may be harsher. Disinformation spreads faster than corrections. Resources are shrinking across much of the media landscape. Civic space is narrowing in many 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 local 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 has 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. Black-footed ferrets, kākāpō, and saiga antelopes have returned with sustained conservation effort. 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 moving; they are instructional. They offer concrete lessons about what made recovery possible and how similar conditions might be recreated 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. So 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 a growing share of people – about 40% on average – 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 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 engaged. Optimism, in that sense, is an antidote to paralysis.

What sustains my own optimism? Mostly evidence. People doing extraordinary things with modest resources. Recovery demonstrated rather than promised. Enough is now known that ignorance is no longer a plausible excuse. A constituency for conservation that is widening—slowly, unevenly, but perceptibly. And time spent in nature itself, a reminder of both what is at stake and what still endures.

That impulse is also why I’ve been writing more tributes to those we’ve 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.