Usually, when the media talk about environmental conservation and endangered species, the news they give is almost always negative: Everything is going very badly; there are ever more species at risk of extinction; human activities are corrupting the environment; our planet is in danger of becoming a wasteland incompatible with life… Actually, when we say the highlighted phrase, we are using the trope called synecdoche in the form called macrocosm, that is naming the whole by the part, because it is not the planet that is in danger, but us, human beings, along with many other living beings.
I have just read a book published in 2012, written by Andrew Balmford and entitled Wild hope: on the front lines of conservation success, which tries to emphasize the opposite: not all the news is negative; lately there have been a few successes in the conservation of animal species in danger of extinction, or of environments endangered by human voracity. His analysis of these cases points to shortcomings in environmental conservation processes led by politicians, which sometimes achieve exactly the opposite of what they intended, as I indicated in this blog in a post published almost six years ago, entitled The ecological ignorance of ecologists.
