[Coral-List] On Science Communication about Coral Reefs

[arianna bucci]

 Dear Peter, 
I could not agree more about your analysis. But in my personal opinion as an ex-researcher in marine bio, and a current educator in non-formal education and teacher (of marine bio), I think you (and the scientific community) are missing a fundamental thing: you cannot care about something you do not love, you cannot love something you don't know, and, most important here, you cannot know something you don't experience. And when I say experience, I mean it. Formal education is being traditionally highly focussed on the intellectual understanding of phenomena, and less on the whole experiential effects that, as humans/animals/living beings, they cause on us. We are dangerously getting apart from natural experiences.
A couple of examples: pick a random 8-year old kid, and ask him/her to name 3 brands of cars or mobile phones. Now ask him/her to name 3 plants they see everyday on their way to school (and produce the oxygen they breathe). Repeat the experiment with a random adult. It's highly probable that you will hear the answers to the first question, not to the second one (yet nobody would survive without...a cellphone!).I have been teaching to international students (14-18 years old) for 9 years. They come from top-international private schools, therefore I can assure you they are receiving a "good" education. In my courses, the class they like the most is when we visit the fish market and they dissect a fish to learn about anatomy and adaptations to the habitat. They have access to any kind of top-technology, educational resources, and expensive item, but in their all life, they have never seen, touched, and smelled a whole fish! and once they have done it, they will remember it, because they felt surprise, disgust, or even empathy.
The solution to involving the public in science-related and environmental problems has to pass through rediscovering that we are animals that experience the world through our senses as the first step, our emotions as the second step, and with our analytical skills, as the third step, and to rethink the educational system (formal, non-formal, family, community education).
Arianna Bucci, PhD


    Il lunedì 18 giugno 2018, 15:48:27 CEST, Peter Sale <sale at uwindsor..ca> ha scritto:  
 
 Regular readers of coral-list will know I periodically pipe up with some thoughts about how effective we are being in getting the news out about the serious decline of coral reefs.  Today, based on a very non-scientific Google surf of the media about a month ago, I have posted some observations on my blog.  The communication is so poor that the average person in the street would have to work quite hard to figure out what the science is telling us, and most average persons are simply not that committed to finding out.  Why not interested?  Because they don't depend on coral reefs directly, because they are not intensely interested in coral reef ecology, and because there is too much else happening to distract them.  I suggest the poor communication is partly the fault of us, the reef science community, partly the fault of the media.  A third part of the fault is due to the average person in the street who has failed to gain the skills to separate beliefs and facts, to recogniz
 e the difference between events, linear trends and exponential trends, or even to comprehend the magnitude of degradation represented in the phrase '50% of coral cover'.  We, the reef science/management community, cannot solve this communication problem alone.  But we can improve our share of it (and, in truth, there are valuable efforts being made to help us learn how to do a better job).  We need to work harder at communicating.

I am still perplexed at how the great wake-up call most of us anticipated following the 1997-98 circumtropical bleaching never really manifested itself.  I also fear that, in many countries, the ability of the average person in the street to follow a logical, science-based argument has deteriorated measurably since that time, making the challenge to communicate effectively even greater.  And yet I still believe we can get moving and keep the world not too far away from a Holocene state.  (Perhaps I am less rational than I believe!)  Anyhow, it's at http://www.petersalebooks..com/?p=2634

Peter Sale
University of Windsor
www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com>
sale at uwindsor.ca

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