#120) Sawing Logs on a Burning Planet
March 10th, 2011
It’s so boring. I’m sorry. I’m just going to keep on saying this. It’s the 500 pound gorilla nobody wants to talk about. Everyone would rather get together at their environmental film festivals and coo over the latest majestic environmental home movies about climate change than admit it’s a deadly boring subject. Why is this on my mind? I heard another data point this week to add to the pile.
What if “THE END OF THE WORLD” was too boring for anyone to take an interest in it?
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#119) Climategate and Al Capone’s Vault: Same Story
March 9th, 2011
I knew I’d heard the Climategate story before, it just took a while to finally make the connection. The basic story is, “Big, suspenseful media event produces huge audience, but in the ends everyone is forced to admit, ‘There’s nothing here.'” But it doesn’t matter because the event itself becomes the story and produces that most cherished resource in today’s society — ATTENTION!
LOTTA NADA. Geraldo Rivera held the world in suspense in 1986 as he blew open the doors of Al Capone’s vault and found … nuttin’. Same thing happened with the stolen emails of climate scientists in 2009, which proved to be smoking gunless.
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Something has to change. You can’t just keep sounding alarms. The public isn’t responding. They are saturated. “But it’s the truth,” might work for you, but it’s not enough for them. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. There are basic storytelling dynamics behind much of the problem. So what do you do when you need new approaches?
THE BIG “SO WHAT.” The environmental movement put a lot of chips on the Tennessee Snail Darter in the 1970’s and lost. Then they put their chips on “An Inconvenient Truth,” and lost. Now they can’t figure out why their predictions of future doom, such as the demise of coral reefs, are going unheeded.
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Oh, what’s that deranged idiot Charlie Sheen talking about now? And how come everyone in this country would rather listen to him than Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy. I just don’t get it. Why are people so stoooopid.
WHO’S HARDEST TO TAKE YOUR EYES OFF?
IRRATIONALITY WINS
He stole the limelight from the Oscars. The biggest night of awards on the planet. But the morning after, more people were talking about Charlie Sheen and his IRRATIONAL behavior than they were about the big show.
What does this tell you about human nature? Very simple. Irrational behavior is endlessly fascinating. Rational behavior isn’t.
#116) “Science Home Movies”
February 24th, 2011
Home movies. Parents make them. Neighbors hate them. Why? How could everyone not love something that someone is so passionate about? The time has come to talk about the concept of “Science Home Movies.” Same for environmental ones as well.
HOME MOVIES. Here’s Dad with his movie projector. He’s getting ready to show movies of the kids on vacation, at the park, riding their bicycles, splashing in the pool. His neighbors are coming over for the evening. They don’t know that after dinner Dad will be pulling out the projector. Dad is sooo passionate about his kids. Surely the neighbors will love the movies as much as he does. Maybe he’ll also talk about his scientific research on bopyrid isopods. He’s passionate about that, too.
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#115) The Communications-impaired Brain of a Scientist: More is more, less is less
February 22nd, 2011
You can file this under, “It takes one to know one.” Try coming to the Q&A of one of my talks where I go on and on and on, until I can finally see thought bubbles above the crowd saying, “Is he really only going to let us ask one question?” I’m as bad as any scientist, but at least I know it’s a problem.
Wouldn’t you think the President’s Science Advisor would have a team of assistants to help him make a great presentation?
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#114) On the Stupidity of Hating “Climate Deniers”
February 17th, 2011
Last Thursday night, I drank a couple of cocktails and woke up in the belly of the beast at the back of the ballroom for the opening night of CPAC, the Tea Party party in D.C. They are a case study in the limited power of rage-based motivation. It doesn’t work in the long term. And the climate crowd shouldn’t let themselves fall victim to it.
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HOMO AND HOMOPHOBE – In 2001, at the height of Eminem’s perceived homophobia, openly gay musician Elton John performed with him at the Grammy’s. Why would he do such a thing?
#113) NORWAY POSTSCRIPT: AROUSE, FULFILL, AND FOLLOW THROUGH
February 16th, 2011
Last month I AROUSED the videomaking interests of 25 Norwegian science graduate students at University of Tromso with our three day videomaking workshop. They, in turn, FULFILLED my hopes and dreams by doing the best job ever of producing 5 one minute videos in just 48 hours of effort. And now they are doing the magical third part — actually FOLLOWING THROUGH with their newly aroused interests by keeping the flame going after I’ve left.
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DOESN’T GET MUCH BETTER THAN THIS. I have to post this video again. I really can’t get over the motivation level of the Norwegian students. While doing our videomaking workshop they had a friend shoot “the making of” footage, then after I left they put it together into this amazing video. That’s never happened before in the 8 previous runnings of this workshop in the U.S.
LIGHTING BRAIN FIRES
In the beginning, as an “educator” (blah, what a foul tasting term) you hope to light fires in minds. But then, over the years, as you see how hard it is, you eventually let go of that crazy notion and just hope you can do something that the students will at least not hate.
At Scripps we have definitely lit some fires in minds with our videomaking workshop over the past 6 years. A number of students have gone on to produce their own videos as part of their science work, or gone entirely into video production. For pretty much all of them the workshop was their first experience with making videos. So we’ve seen some flames ignite.
But what’s happened in Norway has turned into a bonfire. Yesterday the students copied me on yet another email about their on-going meetings with administrators at the University of Tromso. They’re locking in funds for further workshops, courses and films. I’m too swamped right now to follow the details (just back from Puerto Rico where we had a great “Video Analysis” workshop at the Aquatic Sciences Meeting), but I can see from the level of activity there’s no sign of the fires subsiding.
What more can you ask for.
#112) SOAPBOX CITY: Two editorials from me last week
February 11th, 2011
In The Solutions Journal and on The Huffington Post — both of them revolve around the importance of trust. And now that I’ve posted these two essays, I’m really expecting the entire world to change.
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What are words for, when no one listens any more? And why do I bother writing editorials? Probably the same reason I feel the need to get exercise. Just part of keeping active. In 2002 I published my OpEd on “shifting baselines,” in the LA Times. That piece had an enormous impact — reprinted on dozens of websites, several magazines and three college textbooks. It launched our entire Shifting Baselines project and was widely talked about. But that was a different world. There were NO BLOGS back then. Blogging began to emerge in the environmental world towards the end of 2003. I started my initial Shifting Baselines blog in 2004 and went to the Surfrider 20th Anniversary Conference in 2005 and they were just starting to open up blogs for their chapters.
Super Bowl ads are THE cutting edge of mass communication in our society. If you want to think of it in genetic terms, think of a chromosome — feature films and television shows are the conserved region, commercials are the hyper-variable region, and the Super Bowl is the epicenter of mutations. All science and environmental communicators should watch and learn from Super Bowl ads each year. Here’s a few thoughts.
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“Can you really tell a whole story in just sixty seconds?” I hear this question all the time with the students at the start of my 3 day workshops where they make 60 second videos. This wonderful Super Bowl commercial from Coke answers the question clearly.
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