Archive for the ‘Interview-Guest’ Category

This month, I am hosting the Carnival of the Blue — an online smorgasbord of recent posts from bloggers around the world who write about the ocean. It’s a chance for loyal readers of this blog to find some new bloggers to check out, and for readers of other blogs to discover mine. Here is a sample of some writing worthy of your precious reading attention:

1. Squirm of Worms on Wandering Weeta’s blog. A moving tribute in words and pictures to that most humble of coastal inhabitants.
2. Eight Ways Elephant Seals Have Evolved on Kind of Curious. The blogger explores some of the unique adaptations of the elephant seal, and posts some terrific photos of these odd animals at the Piedras Blancas State Marine Reserve in California.
3. Tuna and Reflections on the Gulf Oil Spill – Conversations With My Grandpa on Observations of a Nerd. Christie Wilcox contemplates the art and science of cleaning up oil spills.
4. Conquest of the Land, A La Chubby Checker on NeuroDojo. Zen Faulkes introduces readers to the terrestrial escapades of a fish, the blenny.
5. The Mangove Land Crabs of Punta Santiago and The Dolphins of Punta Santiago on the time traveling blog. The author introduces readers to the animals he encountered while exploring the coast of Puerto Rico.
6. A Drop in the Ocean, on the of winds and water blog. Blogging sailors Darcy and Kyle report on their experience breaking free of the ICW and sailing the open oceans.
7. Gulf Oil Spill Disaster: Spawn of the Living Dead for Atlantic Tuna on the Living the Scientific Life blog. GrrlSientist warns of the devastating consequences that the Deepwater Horizon spill will have for the beloved (and delicious) Atlantic Bluefin tuna.
8. Humpback Whales Realize the Importance of Girl Power, on Dr. Carin Bondar’s blog. Dr. Bondar explores the friendly and durable relationships that female humpback whales develop with each other.
9. The Water is Alive and Why is a Cooked Lobster Red? on Deep Type Flow. Blogger Alistair Dove answers a pair of question that I had frankly never bothered to ask myself!

Enjoy the carnival!

This week, I am writing a guest column over the Great Lakes Town Hall, an online community for conservationists along America’s northern coast. Today’s post riffs on a survey about global warming that J.D. tipped me off to!

Click here to visit the Great Lakes Town Hall.

“Would you be willing to post our brochure on the blog and get some feedback?,” wrote Heather from the Upper Neuse River Basin Association in an email last week. But of course!

The brochure is called “Keeping Our Waters Clean” and it’s intended to introduce landowners to the concept that they can restore streams and wetlands on their property — and that financial assistance is available to help them do so. For the most part, this is a piece of work you should strive to emulate. Heather has done a terrific job incorporating many words that work in the draft and the image selection is absolutely spot on.

But I will highlight an issue for readers to weigh in on — the prominent use of the term “watershed.”

So here are three questions to kick this off:

• Do you believe that providing a definition of the term “watershed” increase the likelihood that a landowner will look into restoring a stream or wetland on their property?
• If so, why?
• If not, what would be a better use of the extremely limited space in this brochure?

Click here to download a draft version of “Keeping Our Waters Clean.”

Here’s a story that a reader shared with me a couple ofmonths ago. I finally figured out what I want to do with it. The reader sees it as a story about everyday citizens’ ignorance. But I think it reveals how we overestimate the importance of education and underestimate the power of peer pressure. Here’s the story:

I was walking through my subdivision in northeastern Illinois. It was a trash/recycling day, and noticed that a homeowner had placed several 4-foot fluorescent tubes (T12F40′s) in his recycling container on the curb (we utilize the least-common-denominator method: single-stream/commingle).Just then, the garbage/recycling truck turned the corner, so I decided to linger and confirm that the garbageman would reject the tubes.To my surprise, he threw them in the hopper with all of the other recyclables – glass, newspapers, and plastic. I approached him and asked, “You threw fluorescent bulbs into your recycling hopper??”He laughed and said, “Yeah, we do it all the time. We recycle everything!”

I asked the reader what they thought this story revealed, and they replied:

…it points to both carelessness and a broad lack of education – among consumers and haulers – in the recycling arena.

I disagree. Social and scientific research is most conclusive that educating individuals about environmental problems simply does not move many to participate in the solutions.

Doug McKenzie Mohr, dean of the “social marketing” movement, writes:

“While education and advertising can be effective in creating public awareness and in changing attitudes, numerous studies show that behavior change rarely occurs as a result of simply providing information.”

Social or community context appears to be one of the key factors that can motivate people to take pro-environment actions, writes the Roper Starch research firm in their 2005 report Understanding Environmental Literacy in America. One of the most important determinants of behavior change is not information/education, but people’s beliefs about the pro-environmental behavior of others.

Spitfire Strategies, in their study, Discovering the Activation Point, concurs, but puts it more succinctly, writing it is more comfortable for most people to try something they have already seen someone else doing.

If we apply the insights from these studies to the situation at hand, what would seem to be a better solution to increase the rate at which the refuse workers properly handle  flourescent bulbs?

• Schedule a workshop to explain to workers (one more time!) about the dangers of mercury in the bulbs and how to identify which ones are recyclable and which aren’t
• Create a public display in the refuse workers’ office that shows how most of the workers are properly sorting the bulbs out of the recycling — signaling to those who don’t that they are in a minority