Feeling Hopeless? Get Out Into Nature

04/01/2026 45 Views

If you drive a car at rush hour in a city like Phoenix, Arizona, or read the news about the latest antics of the anti-environmentalists and climate change deniers who currently hold substantial power in the U.S., it is easy to feel as if all is lost.

But if you turn off the news and instead use your smartphone to search for someplace nearby to go for a hike, you may be pleasantly surprised.

After a visit to the awe-inspiring cloud forests of Costa Rica, I wrote an essay about the psychological benefits of birdwatching. Research in social psychology has long shown that when we write out an argument and make it public, we convince ourselves (e.g., Kiesler & Zanna, 1969). So, when I returned to Phoenix, I was committed to making birdwatching a regular part of my life back here.

Just this morning, I drove to a nearby spot, at the confluence of three desert rivers, where several of the cities in the Phoenix area have re-established a wetland with native trees and bushes, using reclaimed wastewater. Within just a mile of a busy freeway, I was amazed to find beautiful trails, surrounded by cottonwood trees, running alongside a creek and ponds, populated by ospreys, great blue herons, ladder-backed woodpeckers, and yellow-rumped warblers, with cloud-covered mountains visible in the distance (see the pictures below).

A few days ago, I drove a short distance from my house in the other direction to another wetland established by the city of Gilbert. Besides being a beautiful place to walk among the trees and ponds, that lovely riparian spot has attracted over 300 species of birds, including graceful avocets, black-crowned night-herons (also pictured), Townsend’s warblers, lark sparrows, and yellow-headed blackbirds.

One day, on a walk in that same nearby spot with my friend John Alcock, an expert birdwatcher, Alcock pointed out the rare red-necked phalarope—one of the rare species in which the females are more colorful than the males, for reasons having to do with a reversal of the usual sex-specific balance of parental investment.

I didn’t even need to get into my car to find a nearby park with lots of trees and a big lake. On another day this week, I biked down to a city lake where I found a flock of ring-necked ducks, as well as vermillion flycatchers and peach-faced lovebirds perched in the nearby trees.

All of these attempts to preserve and recover natural areas have made a difference. Going online, I discovered that a number of bird and mammal species have, after heading in the direction of extinction, experienced great recoveries in recent decades. It’s now easy to spot a bald eagle in many areas of the Western U.S. Those recoveries are attributable both to restoration of natural habitats, as we are seeing in the area surrounding Phoenix, and to reductions in the use of insecticides such as DDT (thanks to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962).

And it’s not just tree-hugging Nature Conservancy types who are enjoying these restored areas. In all my recent jaunts, I have bumped into people from a wide range of demographics, including lots of folks carrying fishing poles and tackle boxes from their Ford pickups rather than upscale binoculars from their Subaru Outbacks.

This is not to say we have nothing to worry about with regard to the beautiful natural places on our planet. But it is to say there is still room for hope. And hope is probably critical to getting us to move toward positive changes.

So, to the 7 benefits of becoming a birdwatcher I listed recently, I will add another: Going out to look for the birds around you might just make you more hopeful about the future of the planet.

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