Mission Accomplished?

The always expansive thinker, Mark Powell of blogfish, has posted a link to an interesting editorial in the Seattle Times. The writer of the piece suggests that we environmentalists have already won the battle in convincing the public of the severity and multitude of environmental problems. Her suggestion? Since everyday is Earth Day, it's time to have a one-day hiatus from gloom and doom and collectively relax our guards. She (jokingly?) suggests, "we'd turn on all the lights and crank the A/C and heat simultaneously. And just for a while it would be morning in America, when green was just a color and everything was free."

Mark thinks she has a point. I agree with Mark. But I also disagree, with both the Seattle Times writer's premise and part of Mark's conclusion.

Let's take a look at the premise in the Seattle Times piece. Has the environmental movement sufficiently conveyed the severity of threats? To answer this, you need to survey public perceptions. This also means you need to select your questions and select your intended respondents carefully. To get anything resembling an honest and meaningful answer that approximates reality requires more than just stopping people randomly on the street for their opinion. How a 20-something San Franciscan might respond to questions about environmental awareness might be very different from those obtained from a Baby Boomer interviewed in Chattanooga, or a line cook in Savannah.

And for which environment or threat do you wish to measure public awareness, perceptions, and attitudes? Surely people are to some degree a product of, and influenced by, their local environments. So I might expect a Seattleite (Seattler?) to perhaps have more to say about salmon and boreal forests than a resident of Sedona, Arizona. I'm personally neither familiar with salmon nor boreal forests. But I am familiar with some recent attempts to characterize the US public's perceptions and attitudes regarding ocean environmental issues.

Tonight We're Gonna Survey Like It's 1999
In 1999, The Ocean Project completed what remains the most comprehensive opinion research on public attitudes, perceptions, and knowledge of the ocean ever conducted. In a national telephone survey, they sampled 1,500 Americans across a broad gender, racial, age, educational, socioeconomic, and geographic spectrum. Respondents represented coastal and land-locked lifestyles.

The Ocean Project research summary report indicated that Americans are unaware of the threats to ocean health and they greatly underestimate their own role in damaging the oceans. The public primarily values the oceans for their recreational and emotional aspects, but their understanding of why we need the oceans is superficial. Consequently, while many Americans express an emotional connection to the oceans, awareness and concerns about the oceans’ health are low. Most ocean environmental awareness and understanding that was demonstrated was confined to impacts to beaches and other coastal habitats which respondents could visit.

In findings that no doubt give the Deep Sea News boys a case of the night sweats, nearly half of all Americans are not familiar enough with the open, deep oceans to even form an opinion of ocean health.

Not surprisingly to me as an ocean-lover who grew up nowhere near a coastline, The Ocean Project found that the vast majority of Americans hold a strong emotional connection to the ocean irrespective of their proximity to it.

What perhaps may have come as a shock, however, is that there was no demonstrable correlation between factual knowledge of oceans across respondents and their overall level of concern. In other words, people who knew more facts about the ocean demonstrated no appreciably greater concern for that environment.

The findings from this survey were a wake-up call to those of us in the ocean education and conservation communities. It showed that Americans possessed a superficial knowledge of the oceans. The public knew in general terms that the oceans are essential to human survival and that we need to protect them. However, many were unaware of the specific functions of the oceans and their own part in damaging the health of the oceans. While most Americans acknowledged that oceans were vulnerable to harm, oceans were not perceived to be in immediate danger, and the need for action to protect the oceans was not readily apparent.

I was teaching at UC Berkeley at the time, and this report became the catalyst for at least a year of state and national conferences and meetings in an attempt to formulate a response to our failure at successful environmental communication. One outcome that was a direct result of the findings from The Ocean Project report was the creation of a national network of NSF-funded Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence (COSEE's) to bridge greater public understanding of oceans. It may be too early to say if this effort has been successful. By 2010, The Ocean Project will complete a revised survey and release its findings to measure changes that have occurred in public perception and attitude over the past ten years.

But back to Mark's post and suggestion that perhaps the Seattle Times writer is, in part, correct. Is there a lot of gloom and doom and negative environmental news out there? Of course. But an unasked question is equally important to consider: Despite the volume of grim news, is the public aware of the level of environmental threats? Focusing just on ocean issues, I think we can agree that the data would indicate a resounding NO: the American public is unaware of both the level of crisis and the need for immediate action.

To me, this doesn't paint a compelling picture of "mission accomplished." Kicking-back on the couch and channel surfing until a fire truck shows up is perhaps not the best option when the house catches fire. Alright, bad metaphor I know. But I'm having trouble even concocting a decent metaphor that describes a comparable situation where your surroundings are crumbling around you, alarms are blaring, yet people fail to respond.

Pessimistic? Optimistic? Realistic?
But what about Mark's second point. He suggests that the reason we have failed in communicating urgency that translates into action is because our news and messages are not just overly grim but also lacking hope. Coining this week's best original alliteration, Mark calls these messages dire doses of doom. Mark writes, "What drives this gloomy approach? Is it a desire to infect everyone with the sad pessimism that pervades the environmental movement? (I know about that pessimism, I'm part of the movement and I hear it every day.)"

I'm a day-in, day-out ocean conservationist too. And while I agree with Mark that there is no dearth of bad ocean news these days, I don't necessarily agree that pessimism is rife. Considering my branch of coral reef conservation, I get asked a lot by the media how, considering the state of reefs globally, I can stay motivated and hopeful. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it's not the pay that gets me out of bed. And I've not the personality to be a Pollyanna. I remain hopeful because, quite simply, there is hope.

Coral reef news is bad. No doubt about it. But to these eyes and those of other coral reef scientists and conservationists, it's realistic, not pessimistic. The reason we keep working is not just to slow an inevitable death sentence but because solutions are still within our capabilities and we see a better future. It's not like we don't know what it takes to keep reefs alive. It's quite simple actually: sunlight for photosynthesis, clear, warm water, clean substrate, low levels of nutrients in the water, and the presence of algal-grazing species. We know that when actively managed, marine protected areas are our best defense for long-term reef conservation. And we know that because healthy systems require healthy parts, we can't simply focus on reef protection alone but also must consider it's associated ecosystems.

We know what must be done. But our response thus far has been too slow and our scale too small. For me, the truly frightening proposition isn't the current headlines. It's the thought that should we delay our response for too long, the window of opportunity and hope for coral reefs and the human communities they support closes for good--or at least for our or our children's lifetimes.

Hard News To Hear
Consider for a moment Mark's call for softening the blow when it comes to environmental news. I agree with Mark that it's hard to motivate people with pessimism. If we offer no hope, what could possibly compel an already unmotivated public to change unsustainable behavior? Maybe I'm stretching the comparison here, but as a thought experiment, consider a report that was released this week by the American Society of Clinical Oncology. In it, the authors compare the net outcomes from two different forms of messaging to advanced cancer patients who have exhausted all treatment options.

The researchers looked at patients who received optimistic or sugar-coated messages and compared their outcomes with patients who are given straight talk from doctors. The conventional approach has held that doctors who maintain optimistic prognoses even after exhausting all options are still doing patients a favor by keeping hope alive. This new research shows they are wrong. Patients who had these frank talks were no more likely to become depressed than those who did not, the study found. They were less likely to spend their final days in hospitals, tethered to machines. They avoided costly, futile care. And their loved ones reported being more at peace after they died.

Now I'm not bringing this up to suggest our environment is the equivalent of a terminally-ill patient (though there are those who certainly take that approach.) Nor am I urging the masses to make peace with their most loved environment before it fades away. But maybe there's something to this straight talk in environmental messaging too.

A Key Recommendation
As a final thought, I want to return to one of the key findings from The Ocean Project survey. As I mentioned earlier, in 1999 the vast majority of Americans were found to hold a strong emotional connection to the ocean. If I might hazard a guess, I don't think this fact will change significantly when the 2010 revised study is released. We love the ocean, are fascinated by the life found within it, and are drawn to the mysteries it still holds. This attraction and allure was not lost on The Ocean Project team in formulating their communications recommendations.

Top of their list for increasing the urgency of ocean protection was a recommendation to combine emotion with our information. Makes sense to me and certainly supports everything I've been learning about public relations and communications strategies over the past few years. And if this is what everyone means by "framing," then so be it. But what I'd also urge is that we not be afraid of the straight talk either. A lot of the news is tough to hear. That's the reality. But if paired with the appropriate emotional connection and appeal to values, our audiences won't simply "tune-out" or feel too small to act. Hope for reef conservation is still within our grasp. I'd just hate to think we miss our chance at it while patting ourselves on the back before the hard work is finished.