Archive for January, 2008

According to a recent mailer, “Environment America” is “the new home of U.S. PIRG’s environmental work.” At first glance, the relaunch/rebranding excercise is impressive — appealing colors and a tasteful contemporary design, but upon closer scrutiny, some old bad habits from the environmental movement are still quite evident.

The new slogan is a good place to start the critique –”Clean Air, Clean Water, Open Space” — a striking combination of words that work and words that don’t. As you know, clean air and water are terrific words to use in all circumstances, words that everyday citizens and voters understand and use themselves. But “Open Space” … not so much.

In their landmark study “The Language of Conservation,” Lori Weigel (Public Opinion Strategies) and David Hart (Fairbanks Maslin Maullin and Associates) were quite explicit about the shortcomings of this term:

DO NOT say “open space.” “Open space” is not one of the better terms to use in the vocabulary of conservation, and “urban open space” is even worse. In focus groups, voters perceived “open space” as empty land, not near them, and did not necessarily see how they benefitted from it or could use it. “Urban open space” was perceived as a bench between sky scrapers or an abandoned lot.

Put another way, while Environment America means one thing with the term “open space,” some everyday citizens will understand somthing else entirely. My spidey senses are tingling here and they tell me that “Environment America” might get more of the reaction it is looking for if the slogan was something like “Clean Air. Clean Water. Healthy Nature” or “Clean Air. Clean Water. Natural Areas.”

So I’m really quite curious about this. Did U.S. PIRG go to the effort and expense of launching a whole new brand for itself without showing it to people outside the office first? Or did the organization show the slogan to people, who had a different reaction that participants in previous efforts?

Because if they did, I’d sure like to get my hands on that work.

…information campaigns, which are typically focused on changing attitudes by enhancing knowledge or demonstrating the financial advantages of a particular activity, are often not enough to motivate individuals or groups to change their behaviors on the ground.”

That’s a promisingly insightful excerpt from a chapter in the forthcoming desk guide, to be published later this year by the National Riparian Service Team, a cooperative venture between the Interior and Agriculture departments.

I say it’s promising because the authors reference a lot of factors that nature protection and pollution control experts tend to underestimate: “lack of knowledge, cultural practices, social interactions, human feelings, structural (or organizational) norms, and a variety of material constraints such as lack of money or time.”

Click here to download a copy of “Full Stream Ahead,” the group’s newsletter, and keep an eye out for their upcoming deskbook.

Mark over Blogfish has an interesting post about a seafood chef who has decided to revisit the definition of the term “sustainable seafood.”

Which seems like a good opportunity for me to call attention to a report released just last year:

… just over half (54%) of consumers claim any familiarity at all with the term “sustainability” and most of these consumers cannot define it appropriately upon probing.

Source: Hartman Group, 2007

Of course, “sustainability” is a true and worthy goal, and it is perfectly appropriate for fisheries professionals to debate what makes a “sustainable” harvest. But problems arrise when scientists and policy professionals debate it so long they lose sight of the fact that the term carries little weight in the consumer market. The term ”sustainable” simply won’t move many consumers to buy one fish over another, at least until somebody pours hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting the term, a la “organic.”

But why bother? I can think of much more urgent things to do with hundreds of millions of dollars. So here’s a better idea — let’s call “sustainable seafood”… drumroll please…
“Responsible Seafood”

No, it’s not John Stewart funny fake news, it’s scary fake news – click the image above to see National Guardsmen handing out bottled water in a drought-stricken Southern California of the not-so-distant future. It’s an ad for an upcoming National Geographic Special on global warming. Social research suggests the producers have chosen their message well. As the chart below reveals, setting this up as a looming crisis makes the whole thing more believable.

(Click the chart to download the full poll, note how the reference to future generations causes the sense of urgency to spike. That’s why it’s a word that works!)

And by depicting the rationing and lines for water, the producers convey how droughts and global warming can affect them, without hosing viewers down with a lot of hard-to-parse scientific jargon. So I’m confident this fake news story will do a good job building interest in the upcoming TV special. But will the TV special move us in the direction of solutions?

That will depend on the degree to which the producers have gotten over the antiquated notion that “awareness = action” and use their airtime to address the concerns that really hold viewers back. “I’m not sure what to do.” “I don’t think my efforts amount to anything.” “I can’t solve this problem by myself.” “I don’t see anybody else doing their part,” etc… etc…

We can’t move people past objections like this with scare tactics. Fear is a poor remedy for ignorance and lack of confidence. We have to help them out by showing them role models doing things they can do, and demonstrating that others are doing their part. We have to encourage them that we’ll all be working together and it’s not too late to make a difference. It’s as important to prove to people that they can save money by conserving water and energy as it is prove that global warming is real.

Thanks to Aqua Blog Maven over at Aquafornia for the tip! Feels great to be back in the blogging saddle.

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