The educated, the enlightened, the self-aware and the well informed — those who care about the planet, in other words — are often sad, to paraphrase Nancy Mitford, because they care so much about their causes, and their causes “are always going so badly.”

That sadness has seemed relentless lately, director of the NGO Women for Refugee Women Natasha Walter wrote this past weekend in The Guardian newspaper.

There’s no need to parse the reasons why, she added. It’s enough to simply remind ourselves — not that anyone needs reminding — that the headlines are relentlessly grim, “and the unreported detail often worse.”

Well-intended campaigns tend to start with energy but are soon bogged down by the sheer scale of the problem at hand, before splintering into separate factions with their attendant taunts and mud-slinging. Keeping hope alive is as daunting a challenge as any existential crisis facing humanity today.

We can’t give up, though.

“I spend my life working alongside refugee women,” Walter writes. “And being with marginalized women teaches me that stepping (away) would be a terrifically privileged step to take.”

None of us can walk away, in other words. We don’t have the right. “Stepping away from activism completely doesn’t feel OK, not when so many people are teetering on the brink of disaster. I don’t want to lose touch with the possibility of a better future, even if the change each of us can make is very limited right now.”

She suggests three small things anyone can do, “three things I’ve learned that help me to stay in touch with hope.”

1. Get out of the online swamp. “Instead of being active online, be active in everyday life,” Walter writes. “Sitting with people rather than their online avatars helps you to see what you can do together, despite your differences. You learn to shift your point of view rather than entrench it.”

2. Think locally. That can be something as simple as forming a coffee group where people can share ideas, support each other and provide a different narrative from the political talking points of the day. “While we mustn’t mistake sticking-plaster solutions for real change,” Walter writes, “it’s heartening to see how people are getting together to show that another world is possible.”

3. Recognize small steps. Even a small victory, whether borne from a simple, individual act of kindness or a tiny cog in the wheel of a much larger campaign, is something from which to take heart.

When Oregon-based conservation biologist Laurie Marker founded the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia in 1990, she vowed that saving one cheetah at a time is every bit as important as spreading the wider message of cheetah conservation to the world at large. Just 7,000 cheetahs remain in the wild, judging from the most recent estimates. According to a joint study by the Zoological Society of London, Panthera and the Wildlife Conservation Society in 2016, the species could decline by an additional 50 per cent in the next 15 years. Given those numbers, one cheetah at a time might not sound like much, but every individual counts, especially when extinction is facing them squarely in the face.

Progress is progress, in other words, no matter how small. We must never lose sight of that. We need to celebrate the wins, however small they may seem. Positive stories in and of themselves won’t counterbalance the sheer onslaught of despairing headlines, but they’re worth knowing about.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

Martin Luther King said that. And it’s as true now as it was then.

Where special requirements meet spacial requirements, it’s the poorer countries that do more for the conservation of large mammals, not the wealthy western nations.
That, at least, is the conclusion of a recent survey by the respected Panthera organization, a respected NGO renowned for the scientific study of the world’s remaining big cats, and Oxford University.
Of course, one can say that the world’s remaining critically endangered large mammals — from rhinos and elephants to lions, leopards and cheetahs — are more apt to be found in African countries than those in the northern hemisphere.
Even so the idea that, say, Tanzania has done more for its indigenous wildlife — in terms of setting aside wide open spaces for the animals to roam— than the U.S., which is considering removing protections from several national monuments, many of them established under Barack Obama, is not just sobering but worrying to anyone who cares about the planet.

Recent surveys show that 59% of the world’s remaining predators and 60% of the world’s largest herbivores are facing extinction square-in-the-face.
You can argue the numbers if you want, but some truths are obvious to anyone willing to look past next quarter’s profit statements.
Large herbivores like rhinos and elephants need large spaces in which to find enough water and food to sustain them. Rhinos have a gestation period of 16 months, and only give birth to one calf at a time; it’s easy to see how their numbers could dwindle rapidly in a relatively short period of time, even without the recent spike in poaching that has seen their numbers crash in just the past five years.

Apex predators such as lions and tigers need both space to find enough prey animals to hunt, but also find suitable mates that are genetically diverse enough that inbreeding doesn’t become a problem.
Naturally, the bigger or more dangerous the animal, the harder it can be for people in the area to live with them. Human-wildlife conflict is inevitable where towns, villages and big cities rub up against ecologically sensitive wilderness. Carnivores and herbivores alike can and often do pose a direct risk to human life, crops and livestock.
Panthera researchers created a “megafauna conservation index” in which to measure 152 countries, based on three factors: the percentage of land occupied by large species; the percentage of that land set aside for protected, officially recognized conservation areas; and the amount of money spent by each country on conservation, relative to that country’s GDP.
Interestingly — crazily, you might say — African countries in general make more effort toward the conservation of large mammals than any other region on the planet, despite facing, in many cases, poverty and social instability, whether caused by drought, famine, flooding, tribal conflict, war or bad governance.

Of the five top performing nations, four are in Africa: Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe.
There’s a lot of negative reportage about conservation efforts around the world, and with good reason: The planetary environment is a mess, and the current U.S. administration is going to do little to change that.
Even so, the Panthera survey found small but bright beacons of hope. The survey isn’t just an exercise in numbers crunching: Researchers sought to find out why the top-performing countries are doing as well as they are in the battle to save the planet’s remaining megafauna.

These beacons of hope include “rewilding” of landscapes, by reintroducing large mammals to areas where they had disappeared — the desert-adapted rhinos and elephants of Damaraland in northwestern Namibia, for example, or Kenya’s recent reintroduction of critically endangered rhinos into Lake Nakuru and Nairobi national parks.
Other beacons of hope include setting aside more land as protected areas — in other words, the exact opposite of what the current U.S. administration is considering — and investing more in conservation, both at home and abroad. (Germany and the U.K., despite facing ecological and environmental pressures of their own at home, have always punched above their weight overseas; many of the most pro-active conservation organizations in Kenya and Tanzania are financed in large part from northern Europe.)

Yes, planet Earth is a mess right now — there’s no way top sugarcoat it — but as the Panthera survey points out, and as Jane Goodall keeps saying, there’s reason for hope.

More information about the Panthera-Oxford study can be found here, and by following Panthera on Twitter at @PantheraCats:

https://www.panthera.org/affluent-countries-commit-less-conservation-large-mammals-rest-world-panthera-and-oxford-university

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen