November 23, 2004
11/24 - Coral Reef Chaos: Exactly what is the correct headline, and can we have just one?
"Nobody seems to be listening to us," is the standard ocean conservation complaint. But is it possible that some of this is due to the lack of single clear messages? In the case of coral reefs, there are countless percentages thrown around about how many are dying, declining, threatened, at risk, etc.
And so here's yet another coral reef percentage -- IUCN says that...FIFTY EIGHT percent of coral reefs are "endangered." Are we sure it's 58? Sure its not 59? What about 57? How in the world do you get such a precise number for the term "endangered" which almost certainly has a vague definition to start with?
More importantly, how about ONE SINGLE POWERFUL NUMBER, namely "The Percent of Coral Reefs Worldwide that have DIED." The point is that a single widely agreed upon number is needed to bring the coral reef crisis into focus. Myers and Worm did this for over-fishing last year with their "less than 10% of big fish remain." A paper in Science did it last year for Caribbean coral reefs with, "over 80% have died." But no one has come out with this single powerful number for coral reefs worldwide. And in the meanwhile you see numbers ranging from 10% to "a third" for statements on what percentage of coral reefs have died.
That's called ineffective mass communications.
Coral reefs in crisis: Name your percentage.
You've hit on a great need for the environmental community. A clear message that is marketed effectively as opposed to the sheer mass of numbers and apocalyptic messages that make the average citizen numb and tuned out. Any thoughts on how you make that happen?
Posted by: jeff at November 27, 2004 08:23 PM
Slowly, slowly. By building a solid mass movement that is broad enough and sufficiently distanced from irrelevant politics to be able to unify a wide range of people (regardless of political party) based on the shared goal of halting ocean decline.
I think there's a lot of similarity in orientation between what we're saying with Shifting Baselines (we're strictly a mass communications project) and what Ocean Champions is beginning to do with the politics of ocean conservation.
The most important thing we've faced with Shifting Baselines from the start is having to deal with all the short attention span "we want results now!" people who have, whether they realize it or not, bought into corporate thinking.
It's very interesting to look at the pattern of our web traffic over our first 1.5 years. I was warned in the beginning by several "communications experts" that "you're only going to get one shot at the general public, if they don't all join in after you launch your project, you'll never get 'em."
What we can see in our web traffic is an initial spike of almost 1000 visitors a day, then a plummet the next month to 100 visitors a day, then a slow, steady climb to where we are now -- we have finally climbed back up to exceeding that first month -- for the past three months have been getting very close to 1000 visitors/day.
It just took time. Ocean decline today is the result of 500 years of mismanagement. I don't know why some people think its possible to come up with some explosive concept that will solve the problems overnight. Ain't gonna happen.
So the solution is to begin by communicating "The Truth About Ocean Decline" (which was our subtitle for our first year), which hopefully helps motivate the public to get behind a well thoughout political effort like Ocean Champions.
There's definitely hope. Just takes time.
Thanks for your comment.
- Randy Olson
Posted by: Randy Olson at November 28, 2004 09:58 AM