I'm an ecologist. As you can imagine, that's not exactly a very fun profession to be in right now. Every day I have to deal with multiple different crises on multiple fronts- coral reef bleaching, extinctions, habitat destruction on unprecedented scales, and governments that don't really seem to be giving a single shit about any of it.
Do you have any advice for staying resilient and optimistic about the future?
First, I can't express how much I resonate with the way you are feeling. My educational background and career have all been in either biology/ecology or closely adjacent work—and I currently work with a lot of folks doing ecology research.
Here are some other posts I’ve made about this topic that might also be helpful to you. (X) (X)
When I was freshly graduated with my ecology degree, I had a long period where I couldn’t look at a beautiful landscape or endangered animal without prematurely grieving its loss. How much longer until this forest is clear cut or degraded beyond recognition? Will this species be to my kids what the thylacine was to me? I saw only the damage, the invasive species, found flaws in any news of progress. I believed the conservation and environmental work was worth doing for its own sake, but deep down I often did not truly believe it would ever be enough to slow or push back the tide of destruction.
But the thing is, I was wrong. Not just philosophically, but my belief that everything was just circling the drain and not enough people cared to make any meaningful progress was demonstrably, factually wrong. Things have gotten better and they can continue to get better in the future, even though it doesn't always feel that way.
Here are some tips that have helped get me out of that hopeless place:
1. Consciously look for and give attention to the good news. Yes, there is damage and backsliding and grief, but I also have stories come across my feed ever day of dam removal, rewilding and reintroductions, species being spotted in places they were previously wiped out for decades, ecosystems bouncing back after receiving protections, grassroots restoration efforts, the list goes on. It’s easy to have a knee jerk “it’s not enough” or “what about X, Y, Z?”, but you do really need to stop and actually feel the hope, joy, and pride when progress is made instead of immediately moving on to the next crisis—no one can live in crisis mode forever without burning out. “Things are a long way from where they need to be” and “we are making progress” are two thoughts that can both be true at the same time.
2. Zoom out and look at the bigger picture. It often takes a lot longer to fix things than break them, and I think that can sometimes make ecological work feel like banging your head against a wall with nothing to show for it. But much like the starlight we see now can be hundreds of years (or much more!) old, in many cases we are just now seeing the major payoffs from decades of previous conservation work. Many of the known and unknown heroes who quietly, patiently did that work did not live to see the full extent of their impact. The light from the work we are doing now—the work you are doing now—may not be visible yet but it’s coming and it will be so bright when it gets here. Just because you’re not seeing it right away doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
3. Look back at historic environment wins. Remember that we used to spray DDT on children at picnics because of how “safe” society considered it. We fought and won against acid rain and chemicals burning a hole in the ozone layer. “Save the Whales” was a pejorative for “naive, unrealistic environmentalist” fifty years ago and now many whale populations are headed towards or even exceeding per-commercial-whaling numbers. Even within my own lifetime, it wasn’t all that long ago that I had never seen an electric car and renewable energy was considered impractically expensive—now I see many electric cars every day and solar is the cheapest energy on Earth. There are species that were fully on life support when I was born that are now surviving and repopulating without human intervention. Things have looked insurmountably bad before and they have gotten better—and the progress we have made today looks a lot more encouraging when you look back at where we started.
4. Tell yourself hopeful stories. I’m sure this one is going to make some people raise their eyebrows because it sounds a bit cheesy, but it really does help to imagine the world you are working towards instead of just what you are fighting against. This used to make me super uncomfortable, it felt almost wrong or painful to imagine things actually getting that much better. But it gets easier. Imagine the cheering and celebration when we close the last coal plant. Imagine a little girl many generations in the future, about to snorkel a coral reef, with her dive instructor telling the story of all the people and all the work it took for that reef to still exist. I used to imagine how special a day it would be when it was finally safe to release frog species decimated by chytrid back into the wild—but it turns out we are already working on that decades earlier than I would have expected!
5. Recognize that hope is a more effective psychological strategy for progress than cynicism. Research has found that our society tends to view cynicism as a more rational and even sometimes more moral worldview, but the opposite is true. Cynics actually perform worse on cognitive and social tasks and they are less likely to vote, protest, or take positive action. Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki is a really excellent book about this. Sometimes on bad days I have to remind myself that hope is a strategy and to act as if my actions will make a difference even if I'm not really feeling it that day--if you act that way long enough your brain will start to believe it.
6. Speaking of books, I personally find it really helpful to read books by smart and qualified people who work in the interface between climate/environmental science and psychology/hope. I’ve been meaning to make a post with my ever growing book list, but Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie and A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety by Sarah Ray are two excellent ones off the top of my head.
I really hope this is helpful to you. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the work that you do. I can almost guarantee it is having a bigger impact than you know. <3
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