I have been pondering some ideas for an article I am working on about optimism in conservation, and one of them is the idea that bad news is ‘sticky’ and creates a frame that means people tend to discount ‘good’ news stories.

This idea comes from psychological research, and I first heard of it when I was reading more writing by Nancy Knowlton, the distinguished scientist who effectively began the optimism movement in conservation story-telling. She had been teaching young marine scientists in California in the early 2000s when she realized that the way environmental issues were being taught was more like reading the obituaries section than the births section of a newspaper.

As she pondered this more, she discovered that one of the reasons was because the people she would have expected to be informed about achievements in conservation, didn’t know about them. Part of the answer, she said, was to create a database where people could easily find these stories, and to share them widely with the public.