Great speakers have always been able to read an audience. But in the world of science, we have often believed that an audience can be moved, as scientists can (or should) be moved, by new information in reports and graphs. We have scratched our heads in disbelief at the many times we have explained the climate and biodiversity crises to different groups, only to watch them shake their heads in despair, walk away and carry on.
In this century, social scientists like Shalom Schwartz have helped us to better understand our audiences. Their work teaches us that people’s reactions to facts are governed by attitudes, which are in turn underpinned by values. Understanding these values, and how they relate to each other, can help us to understand better our audiences, and thus help us inspire them towards more sustainable action.
The Common Cause Handbook, which delves more deeply into the ideas on human values and communication discussed in this blog.
One of the most powerful tools in the world of communication is storytelling, and there are now many ways available to learn this important art. Storytelling is not just a nice way of communicating, it is the main way that people understand the world. We learn our world in narratives, and then we sleep and dream stories. Mary Catherine Bateman once said that ‘the human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.’; Steve Jobs said ‘the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come’.
I attended a communications workshop last year where a campaigns specialist from a major international NGO gave an excellent presentation on how to use storytelling to make people feel engaged in a campaign and thereby inspire action. He described how such stories have heroes and villains; they evoke our emotions, inspire strong feelings, and galvanise action. Most of us do not respond emotionally to facts and figures, but a good story can fill us with joy, break our hearts, or inspire us to fight to the end.
But there’s a word of warning here: we must remember that stories are also usually simplifications, and the strong emotions they evoke can be blunt instruments. For example, few people and no countries are all good or all bad, yet our political storytelling often paints whole societies as heroes or villains. Simplicity is powerful, but we must be careful with it: it has a limited shelf-life in a complex world, and the simple loses its power if it becomes simplistic.
Global environmental issues are highly complex: they can rarely be boiled down to good guys and bad guys. We must harness the potential of powerful communication, but we must not surrender truth, however annoyingly complex it is, for the sake of a good story.
Another powerful tool, and one very relevant to Conservation Optimism, is framing: the words, attitudes and ideas with which a situation or event is expressed, which can influence how it is perceived. Daniel Kahneman’s classic example of framing in his brilliant book Thinking, Fast and Slow is ‘the medical procedure that you’re about to undergo has a 90% survival rate’ vs ‘the medical procedure that you’re about to undergo has a 10% mortality rate’. Both are the same, of course. But the first statement is likely to trigger the amygdala to produce ‘happy hormones’ – dopamine, serotonin and others, whilst the second is likely to trigger a ‘fight or flight’ response – pumping the body full of cortisol and adrenalin! Framing is so powerful because, like storytelling, it produces a strong emotional response in most people.
Deforestation in Indonesia. (Image credit: Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay)
Many people and organisations use the framing of ‘biodiversity crisis’ or ‘climate emergency’, sometimes because drama appeals to readers, but often also to inspire action of an appropriate scale and speed. What we often don’t consider is that we are using this language to provoke a ‘fight or flight’ response. This is a totally reasonable approach for a local disaster; if the local river is about to flood, we do not knock politely on our neighbour’s door: we shout and wave our arms in alarm to convey the urgency of the situation and the need for immediate action. Hopefully the appropriate hormones will will kick in, and they will move quickly to higher ground.
But it is less simple when the threat is global. We are biological creatures, and our bodies and brains are wired to respond to the threats with which we evolved. We can respond very quickly to the sudden appearance of a tiger, or the neighbouring tribe on the warpath. But we are less able to respond to more distant threats that we can envisage only intellectually. The normal human responses to perceived threat are ‘fight, flight, fawn, faint or freeze’. Most people do not feel they can fight climate change and biodiversity loss, the challenges are too vast. Nor can they flee from a global threat: there is nowhere to go. There is no option to fawn, global environmental threats cannot be appeased, and fainting, whilst possibly tempting, is hardly helpful. So the majority of people freeze: they feel that there is nothing that they can do, and so they do nothing. We should consider this before we use ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ framings; there are consequences to invoking fight or flight responses when people can do neither.
Jon speaking at the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) Conservation Forum in 2024
The many people around the world who don’t freeze and who try to do something, conservationists – professional and amateur, continue to fight a threat that most reasonable people have already judged to be unfightable. Under these circumstances, overwhelm, hopelessness and despair are perfectly reasonable responses. The role of Conservation Optimism is to reframe these challenges, not as ‘emergencies’, nor as anything less than the global crises they are, but as great challenges against which we have some reasonable hope of success. As I often tell audiences, using a mountaineering metaphor, ‘the challenge that we have to scale is bigger and more complex than anything we have scaled before, but we’re getting pretty good at climbing’.
One common framing that Conservation Optimism often challenges is ‘People and Nature’. Many organisations talk about People living in harmony with Nature, or about getting the balance right between biodiversity and development. It may well be that Nature has its own way of seeing the world, that elephants and rhinos and rocks have a worldview. But we can never see and understand that worldview; the only lens we have is our own human lens. Most of us do not protect nature because it has rights or a worldview of its own; we protect nature because it is of enormous value to us and to our own wellbeing, in myriad ways. If People and Nature are presented as separate entities, then, when times are hard, people will perceive a need to choose between them, and they will not choose Nature over People. The ongoing effort to protect our natural world needs to be presented, correctly, as a completely human effort, a choice between short-term exploitation and long-term sustainability. We do not need to see ‘People and Nature thrive’, we need to see People thrive, which is dependent on Nature thriving. Any other framing is both unhelpful and inaccurate.
In the last part of this blog, I will discuss the great value of these powerful communication tools to the global conservation mission.
