Much of the pollution that is slowly choking the life out of the Chesapeake Bay originates far upstream, in communities where people have little emotional attachment to the bay and probably don’t even realize that their rivers and creeks end up there. The same goes for the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, Puget Sound in Washington, San Francisco Bay, and so and so forth. There’s basically two approaches for addressing this challenge:
- Approach #1: Make extraordinary efforts to get through to upstream residents that pollution from their community ends up downstream in some famous body of water
- Approach #2: Emphasize the immediate consequences of water pollution, and de-emphasize the famous body of water downstream
Today’s video, suggested by C.K., takes the first approach and does a helluva good job with it. It is almost 100% environmental message method compliant:
- Step One: Begin With Behavior. Check. The ad clearly highlights several steps everyday citizens can take to do their part
- Step Two: Foolproof Photos. Check. I love the shot of the family looking at oil stains on a piece of cardboard. Genius!
- Step Three: Swap the Shoptalk. Check. All swapped.
- Step Four: Insert Words That Work. Half Check. The word “future” is in there, and the piece clearly nails the “what you can do” idea.
So here’s my thought provoking question, though. Is evoking the connection between local behavior and Puget Sound the most effective way to get people to fix their cars, use less fertilizer, and pick up after their dogs? Would it be more powerful to make the connection to the local creek, instead? Like this video below?
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Thought provoking indeed. I think it is difficult for the “public” to thoroughly make the jump from headwaters to Puget Sound or Gulf of Mexico, etc. A mindset is that something or “someone else” will fix it as it goes downstream. Both videos are powerful, the paint in the stream and little girl would work really well in the Puget Sound one.
What about combining approaches? Spend most of your effort on connecting people to their local waterbodies but every now and then making the connection to the famous downstream waterbody? I think it’s important that people know what they’re ultimately impacting even if the local connections are what get them to change behavior.
I like the slogan ‘Puget Sound Starts Here’ — it’s much more accessible than ‘watershed’ while getting the same message across. The thing I don’t like about the paint one is that it has a strong visual of a behaviour we do not want, and that can backfire. People tend to remember seeing someone dumping paint in a storm drain, but might not remember that was a bad thing. Also, if they dyed the stream for the ad, it must not be such a big deal, right?
It’s the constant conundrum of how to show the impact without providing a norm for negative behaviour.
What about something that starts at the creek and traces it back to the source? Say, a family finding playing in the creek that suddenly turns yellow, and as they leave they walk by a guy about to dump more paint in the drain. They stop him just in time! Yay! You get the cause-effect, but you also work with normative behaviour cues to show that people will disapprove of you if you do this.
I think the first step is to help people get to know and understand the body of water in their ‘back yard.’ This is the waterbody that their at-home actions will affect first, so it’s the most obvious conection for them to make.
Once they make that connection, then demonstrate the connection to the bigger picture. In the Samish watershed we are currently coordinating the installation of a series of signs with a consistent straightforward message of the presence of streams and their conenctions to the local bay.
Not many people in Skagit County think of themselves as living on Puget Sound, but I do see the value of sending a consistent message, and I think the images in these ads are doing that.