Those of us who work closely with nature know well the bittersweet taste of this work. One day, we celebrate the consolidation of a protected area or the birth of a new sustainable initiative; the next, we are confronted with the helplessness of watching wildfires advance and devour the landscape.
Faced with this duality, an unavoidable question arises for those of us who bear the responsibility of informing and raising awareness through spaces like El Chajá: How should we tell the story of what is happening to our land? Should we be the bearers of tragic reality in order to awaken the world, or should we be the guardians of hope so that people do not lose heart?
To find the answer, it is sometimes useful to look toward literature and history.
The Macondo Syndrome: When Tragedy Becomes a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
In one of his most revealing short stories, “Something Very Serious Is Going to Happen in This Town,” Gabriel García Márquez tells how the mere premonition of an elderly woman unleashes uncontrollable collective panic. The rumor of an imminent tragedy spreads from mouth to mouth, growing with each retelling. In the end, seized by fear of the unknown and of the catastrophe they themselves have magnified, the townspeople destroy their own homes and flee. The tragedy occurs not because of an external force, but because it is brought about by the people’s own fear.
In environmental communication, we often run the risk of becoming the inhabitants of that town. If our only message is that the climate crisis is irreversible, that the Chaco is drying out beyond remedy, or that fires have already consumed everything, we are planting a kind of panic that paralyzes. Psychology calls it “eco-anxiety.” When the narrative is purely catastrophic, the natural human response is not action, but resignation. People disconnect because the problem seems impossible to overcome. If we constantly repeat that “something very serious is going to happen,” we run the risk of abandoning the struggle and allowing our world to burn before our very eyes, paralyzed by our own prophecy.
King’s Lesson: Mobilizing Through Vision, Not Through Nightmare
Does this mean we should ignore the fire and paint a rosy picture? Absolutely not. Concealing the gravity of deforestation or biodiversity loss would be an act of negligence. This is where the second perspective comes in.
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a crowd in Washington in the midst of a context marked by deep injustice, pain, and segregation. He had every reason to focus his speech on the tragedy of his people. He could have cried out, “I have a nightmare.” And yet King knew that fear and pain can denounce, but they cannot build. To move an entire nation toward historic change, he spoke the words that would echo through eternity: “I have a dream.”
King did not ignore the brutal reality of his present. He described it with stark honesty, but his call to action was a clear and inspiring vision of what people could achieve together. In conservation, we need our own “I have a dream.” We cannot lead a social movement toward sustainability if all we show is apocalypse. We need to articulate what success looks like: living forests, thriving communities living in harmony with their surroundings, self-governed territories wisely managing their land, and sustainable economies that protect life.
Active Hope: Our Commitment
At El Chajá, we believe the answer is not to choose between painful truth and comforting hope, but to weave both together. We call this “Active Hope.”
We need the honesty of diagnosis to understand what we are up against, but we also need King’s dream to have the strength to walk toward the solution. Our commitment is to refuse to flee in terror like the townspeople in García Márquez’s story, and instead to have the courage to look devastation in the face, to feel the pain of that loss, and to use that energy not to mourn passively, but to organize, educate, and restore.
Nature teaches us that after even the most devastating fire, the first seeds still find a way to germinate among the ashes. Our communication should be exactly that: an honest reflection of the flames, but above all, a tireless catalyst for the forest we dream of seeing born tomorrow.
Written by: Iván Arnold
