Saving the oceans requires working backwards from the required goal to the real heart of the matter.
One theory goes that human beings are psychologically incapable of caring about an event they’ve been told will be catastrophic but will happen far in the future. Without the tangible and the immediate, most of humanity muddles along and doesn’t fret about the future because the brain is wired to help us survive in the moment and can’t compute distant consequences.
That’s deeply unhelpful in the age of climate change and especially when it comes to protecting the health of the ocean, which is literally and figuratively the lungs of our world. As Dr. Judy Mann-Lang, executive for strategic projects at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation, points out, the ocean produces almost every second breath we take. It provides more oxygen than all of the world’s trees combined.
But for those who haven’t seen below the surface, the ocean is an abstract place. How do you get people to care enough about the overfishing, plastic pollution, ocean acidification, warming, and other threats to make the necessary behavioural changes that will mitigate the harm to the sea?
Start with your end goal, says Mann-Lang, who is part of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Behaviour Change Task Force and has been researching how people use knowledge about the ocean since she started working at the South African Association for Marine Biological Research in Durban way back in 1992.
Facilitate connection
“If you keep on saying to people ‘you must do this, you mustn’t do that’, people start to switch off. They’re getting tired of being told what they should not do, they want to know what they can proactively do to make a difference,” says Mann-Lang. There have to be systems in place that will enable the behaviour change before attempting to change the way people behave.
As a real-life example, the People and Oceans unit of the Foundation is involved in a project with the V&A Waterfront to try to ensure that the dozens of restaurants in its precinct and in the new Granger Bay expansion are serving sustainable seafood.
Following two panel discussions and much behind-the-scenes research, the sustainable seafood programme is launching in earnest. “But what we’re looking at is not just saying to visitors ‘choose sustainable seafood,’ because when they walk into a restaurant they’ve got a whole lot of unsustainable choices.”
To take the next step, by going backwards in the chain of events, “What are we going to do with the chefs?” Mann-Lang says. “How are we going to persuade the chefs to sell primarily sustainable seafood? And that’s hard because they’re dealing with customer demand and also with their suppliers. So now what we’re saying is that we need to work with the suppliers, and that’s going to be a focus.”
There’s still got to be a knowledge component, though, Mann-Lang says. “You’ve got to know that something exists before you can even start to engage.”
Then comes the strong emotional component “and that’s getting out into nature, that’s seeing a fish and experiencing whatever it is that helps people realise their interconnectedness with nature and the ocean,” Mann-Lang says.
Text | Renée Bonorchis
Photography | BearFotos
For more information, go to aquarium.co.za/foundation.
