Abstract
For millennia, stories have been central to conveying human experience—a tradition through which communities continue to share lessons, knowledge, and cultural values. Now, conservationists are beginning to harness the power of telling stories to achieve conservation goals. We introduce the past stories hypothesis, in which we argue that existing conservation storytelling practices can be improved by incorporating the longer term perspectives available from geohistorical records, such as sediment cores, fossils, and other natural archives of the past. Contextualizing conservation problems on timescales beyond years or decades presents the opportunity to tell different stories about how biodiversity is currently changing and equips conservationists with the conceptual toolkit necessary for unshifting previously unrecognized shifted baselines by changing when the story starts. Geohistorical data sets thus provide an opportunity to restore lost environmental memory—collective observations or records of past environments—and avoid unintended biases. When the ethics, potential outcomes, and diversity of backgrounds and beliefs represented in each audience are considered, incorporating the past can result in compelling stories with the power to engage and persuade an individual or community to support conservation goals while maintaining credibility and trust. An inclusive storytelling approach anchored by geohistorical data may help conservationists tell stories more effectively in the service of identifying or adapting specific conservation goals. These new perspectives (provided by starting stories with new temporal baselines) may also bring new people to the discussion table and allow for a broader range of entry points to conversations and, thus, potential conservation actions.