[Coral-List] On Science Communication about Coral Reefs

[tomascik at novuscom.net]

Hi Peter,

Thank you for all that food for thought that you have posted on your  
blog. Few nights ago I attended a lecture by Iain Stewart at the  
Resources for Future Generations 2018 conference that was held here in  
Vancouver. His lecture “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” addresses  
some of the communication issues that we are dealing with here and  
that you touched upon. That lecture is not on line yet, but I found a  
version of it from his talk in February at another event. For those of  
you who are interested in this topic please have a look at the  
following link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh31EoUIkZs


Cheers,
Tomas


Quoting Peter Sale <sale at uwindsor.ca>:

> Arianna,
> You may be surprised, but as an academic, engaged my whole life in  
> formal education I agree with you.  I?m not certain that everyone  
> has to experience a coral reef in order to appreciate what we are  
> doing to them, but I am sure everyone has to experience the natural  
> world directly in one way or other, in order to have any empathy for  
> or appreciation of it.  Our society is progressively moving people  
> away from any direct engagement with nature.  I advocate for  
> children eating dirt and climbing trees.  Snorkeling on a reef would  
> be great but most people never get that opportunity.
>
> Regrettably, even in ecology and other environmental sciences,  
> direct field experience is being greatly reduced in many  
> universities for reasons of cost & convenience, and because field  
> work is considered so old-fashioned by those who want all  
> environmental questions answered by some genetic test.
>
> Peter Sale
>
> From: arianna bucci <ariannabucci at yahoo.it>
> Sent: Monday, June 18, 2018 3:45 PM
> To: coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov; Peter Sale <sale at uwindsor.ca>
> Subject: Re: [Coral-List] On Science Communication about Coral Reefs
>
> 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.
>
>
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