We are drowning in bad news. Two pages into the (1000pg) United Nations Global Assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services and you’ll be pleading for Tolstoy. Even David Attenborough is depressing these days. To save you days of morbid reading, I’ll provide a short and cheerful summary of the global extinction crisis, including Australia’s prominent and expanding role in species’ extirpation. To live without hope is to cease to live (Dostoyevsky). And so, I will celebrate the hopeful and crucial role that ecologists can play (and are playing) in co-designing and implementing solutions to the extinction crisis in partnership with private land conservation organisations, Indigenous land managers, developers, and governments.