An electronic heiress to Erin Brokovich’s legacy, Joy Towles Ezell uses a suite of Yahoo! groups to rally her neighbors and hound polluters in her rural Florida community. She’s today’s interview guest.

“I can build a following on the Internet where people can get the real truth… without it being whitewashed and without parts of it being left out.”

That’s the belief that has motivated Joy since the first days of the Internet in early 1990s. Today she maintains the “Hope for Clean Water” Yahoo! listserv and two others about environmental threats to her Florida community.

Joy turned to the Internet to connect with others who shared her interests as far back as 1991, when going online meant making a long distance call to California. The first issue to awaken her inner-activist was dioxin – which laced the effluent discharged by a local paper mill. As her neighbors started dialing in, she realized the Internet had become a viable alternative to her hometown newspaper, which treated this large employer with deference.

“The environmental movement has really evolved from… people talking to each other,” Joy says. And like other online community leaders, she sees great inherent value in dialogue and debate. “I like ‘em to be lively. I like people to post things and I like people to discuss different sides of an issue and really get it out in the open.”

“We know they’re watching, and this is good,” she says about polluters. She sees her thriving community as a show of community strength to “to scare the hell out of them.”

Joy feeds discussion on her listservs with an elaborate system of Google News alerts that she has set up. Each night, she spends an hour or more sorting through stories to share with her lists.

“It’s where democracy is really practiced now,” Joy says. “It used to be that to practice democracy, you had to go to the courthouse steps and get together with a bunch of people and you had to discuss things that way. Now you can still do that, but you don’t get to talk to as many people.”

Download or listen to the full interview: click here

To ask Joy a question, leave a comment below

I love hearing from Water Words readers, either by email or via the comment feature on the blog. In the past week, I received two emails conveying rather different perspectives on the challenge of science communications. Neither of them explicitly gave me permission to use their names, so I’ll just share excerpts.

The first viewer sent me email that included a letter to the editor that appeared in the Barre-Montpelier (VT) Times Argus on April 6. The letter author had written to protest the layoff of nine public affairs officers from state government:

“They are responsible for taking the often incomprehensible arcanum of state government and translating it into useful and easily accessible information for the public… Making the process and products of government more understandable, and thereby more accessible, might serve to re-engage in the democratic process an increasingly disillusioned citizenry.”

The letter writer seems to believe the onus falls on the government to take its message to the citizens. The second email was from a Department of Interior employee, who seems to believe that the citizens have at least some obligation to make an effort to understand the vernacular of these important issues. He wrote:

“…some words are the words to use regardless of the knowledge base of the audience… Either that insults the audience or they really are ignorant.”

This is a healthy debate for water experts to have – and coincidentally, it’s raging within the wider scientific community right now. Check out posts on these blogs: Mixing Memory, Nobel Intent, and The Loom to see what the buzz is about.

You all know where I come down: I’m way past “whether” we should make an effort and I’m all about the “how” to do it. But, I’m sure everybody that has and does visit this blog has their own views on the subject.

So what do YOU think: Should we go to the public, or expect the public come to us?

If you’re willing to share your views publicly, click on the comments button below. If you want to share it privately, drop me a note a eric dot eckl at water words that work dot com.

What would you have to do to achieve a 15% drop in excess fertilization? How about to save 1.8 million gallons of water? Or to protect almost all of the high priority streambanks in a farm community from overgrazing?

You might be forgiven for thinking you’d have to publish some new regulations, stir up hard feelings with a lawsuit, or pull strings in the legislature to secure a lavish subsidy. But some of your peers have secured these impressive accomplishments solely through the power of persuasion. And if they can do it, so can you.

That’s what Jack Wilbur believes. Jack works for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food is the author of the new report ““Getting Your Feet Wet With Social Marketing,” which combines case studies of successful efforts and how-to guides for those looking to undertake a similar effort. He’s today’s interview guest.

“Anybody can do this,” Jack says about the practice of social marketing, which he describes as campaigning to persuade carefully selected groups of people to voluntarily modify their behavior. “You do not have to have a degree in marketing or public relations or psychology, you just have to have the motivation to learn some of these skill sets.”

So what does he mean by “these skill sets?” Listening, for one.

“You kind of have to release, and disconnect yourself from the idea that because we are the topic experts… that that means that we know best about what’s going to motivate people to make changes,” Jack says. “The more you talk to the people whose behavior you’re trying to influence, the better chance you’ll have of actually understanding what it takes to influence their behavior.”

And recognizing the importance of peers in persuading people to change their minds or change their habits, for another.

“We tend to trust the words of our neighbors and our peers, even a little bit more than we do the experts…If you see one recycling garbage can on your street, you may not decide to recycle, but if you start to see two or three or five… even the most resistant people are going to start doing that.”

• Download or listen to the interview with Jack Wilbur (MP3 file, 32 minutes)
• Download “Getting Your Feet Wet With Social Marketing”
• Click the comments link below to post a question for Jack.