Following my last post and after a quick search on the web, I found the following onlinegames related to conservation and environmental issues.
Can you think of another game that is related to nature conservation?
Videogames
Ecco: And in this time of crisis lived a young dolphin named Ecco. He was destined to become the only hope for humans and dolphins. Ecco, defender of Earth´s future. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJsB25fJOpk
Duck Hunt: One of the first Nintendo games. Produced on 1984, it is basically about killing as many ducks as possible, with a special Nintendo gun.
Online games
- Ecotopia: Advances the popular city-building game model as it aims to wrap fun and compelling gameplay with philanthropy and real-world involvement. Produced by Talkie in alliance with Conservation International.
- How wild are your guesses?: A WWF game to test your knowledge of the natural world and see if you can get to the end of the third level of our game. Play
- Bycatch Bonanza: Another WWF game. Move your boat using the arrow keys, and catch as many fish as you can. But be careful - the accidental capture of other marine animals such as sharks, octopi, turtles and dolphins is seriously damaging the world's marine ecosystems. Play Bycatch Bonanza and help protect the world's oceans
- The Seagull Strikes Back: Our oceans are being seriously over fished. So much so, that unless action is taken some of our favourite fish may disappear from the seafood counter and restaurant table altogether. But it is not just our supper that's at stake. Unsustainable fishing is decimating the world's fisheries, as well as destroying marine habitats and incidentally killing billions of fish and other marine animals each year. Play WWF The Seagull Strikes Back and help blast the unwanted politics out of fisheries management
- Toxic Blaster: Every person, every animal has been exposed to a cocktail of dangerous man-made chemicals. WWF, the conservation organization, needs your help now to fight the chemical threat. Available in English, French, Dutch, Danish, Polish and Finnish.
- Rescue the Russian Leopard: Your goal is to significantly increase the endangered Far Eastern leopard population from 30 to at least 100 animals, or ensure that several leopard families live in the Ussurian Range reserve. You will have 30 years of game time in which to achieve either of these objectives. The best player's strategies are able to be implemented by WWF for its real conservation activities. Play Rescue the Russian Leopard.
- Poacher Peril: Poacher Peril, the nail-biting game that puts you in the position of an endangered animal and challenges you to pit your wits against a dastardly poacher. The globetrotting chase is on as you and up to three friends try to keep one step ahead of the poacher. Play Poacher Peril
Games for smart phones and iPod applications
- Angry birds: A game that at the price of USD$0.99 has conquered the world, being the first paid application in most of the countries. Clothes, gadgets and even a Hollywood movie are based on the game. As stated in Rovio´s website: “The survival of the Angry Birds is at stake. Dish out revenge on the green pigs who stole the Birds’ eggs. Use the unique destructive powers of the Angry Birds to lay waste to the pigs’ fortified castles. Angry Birds features hours of gameplay, challenging physics-based castle demolition, and lots of replay value. Each of the 120 levels requires logic, skill, and brute force to crush the enemy. Protect wildlife or play Angry Birds!” Now also available on PCs and Playstation.
Environmental related videogames
• The Climate business game: CEO2 is a game that puts players in the role of a CEO of one of four major industries from 2010 to 2030. The game was produced by WWF and Allianz, the latter being a leading global financial services providers. It was developed by LGM interactive. The game offers options to decide the future of the company considering scenarios which include climate change as in important factor influencing the market. http://knowledge.allianz.com/ceo2/en.html
• World Without Oil: The players have to try to deal with an oil shortage and be able to survive. In order to vanish the line between the real and virtual world, gamers have to give personal information to make explicit our dependence on oil (eg. Type of cars used and average miles driven per day). Blogs and virtual forums were developed for people to exchange knowledge and experiences. The aim is to make that “virtual knowledge” become a “real world habit”.
• CityOne: IBM recently announced plans to release “CityOne,” a simulator aimed at giving gamers the chance to “discover how to make cities and their industries smarter by solving real-world business, environmental and logistical problems.” So think of it as “SimCity” with a serious makeover aimed at educating customers, business partners and students. Game missions will deal with stuff like managing strained, polluted water supplies and balancing the city budget. It’s not exactly “Gears of War 3,” but that’s the point. Video games are no longer a mere entertainment medium. You can see some gameplay footage toward the end of this video.
• Power House: This free game from Stanford University, Seriosity and Kuma Reality Games takes things down to the household level. Power House gives you the task of managing the power usage in a game world home and even incorporates your actual home’s utility data if you have smart meter technology such as Google Powermeter or TED 5000. By lowering your real energy consumption below the national average, you earn higher scores. Yep, your home essentially becomes the joystick for the onscreen gaming experience. Players can compete against friends’ households and earn their way onto the nationwide leader board. Here’s the official website.
• Power Planets: This free flash game from the Science Channel is quite addictive. It puts you in charge of a whole planet, where you build cities and power plants for an adorable little race of cartoon people. You can advance through more than 50 technologies and build various commercial, industrial and residential buildings. Will you be content to crowd every inch of your planet with super mansions and oil refineries? Or will you build solar plants, parks and universities? It’s a surprisingly robust game world for a free flash game. Explore it for yourself right here.
• Energy Elf: This U.S. Department of Energy game is just one of several aimed at children. You help a friendly elf fend off the energy-sucking ways of a villainous Power Goblin. In a race against time, you turn off lamps and use natural lighting to protect the homestead.
• Earth hour game: Produced by WWF as part of the Earth hour campaign. You have to run and jump your way along this scrolling game, switching off lights (and collecting points) as you go. Play the Earth Hour Game
• Switch em off: Also from WWF. Basically, dirty power stations are polluting our atmosphere, causing climate change and global warming. Switch them off as fast as possible to save our planet! Available in English, German, Spanish and Italian.
Other games online from WWF (but not very impressive)
• Clean Air Kids - 16 games and puzzles for 5 to 11 year olds
• Conservation / Environmental Issues - Java Games - 5 games by Mr. Bowerman
• Conservation / Environmental Issues Concentration Game - uses conservation terms and definitions
• Conservation / Environmental Issues Flashcards Game - java version
• Conservation / Environmental Issues Flashcards Game - non-java version
• Conservation / Environmental Issues Matching Game - match conservation terms to definitions
• Conservation / Environmental Issues Word Search Puzzle - find conservation terms from definitions
• Dumptown Game - learn about waste reduction and recycling
• Ecological Footprint Quiz - from Earthdaynetwork
• Ecology Strikes Back! - game from The Headbone Derby
• Environmental Science Education Quiz Activities & Games - 29 activities from Syvum
• Global Warming Games - 6 different games from the EPA
• Top 10 Countries - Cleanest
• Top 10 - Places (Polluted)
• WWF Quizzes - 24 animal quizzes
Wednesday 9 March 2011
Conservation and videogames: the overlapping of virtual and real world experiences and its implications for conservation
I am just one of a new generation that is growing up. A generation who may experience much more meaning through videogames than they will through the real world. (…) My virtual worlds are perfect, more beautiful and rich than the real world around us. I am not sure of the implications of my experience are, but the potential of using realistic videogames stimuli and repetition in a vast number world of participants is frightening to me. Today I believe (1984 Orwell´s) Big Brother would find much more success brainwashing the masses with videogames rather than just simply TVs. Videogames are fun, engaging and leave your brain completely vulnerable to reprogramming. But maybe brainwashing isn´t always bad, imagine a world that teaches us to respect each other, or to understand the problems we are all facing in the real world. There is a potential too good as well”
Michael Highland.
With more than half a billion people worldwide playing online games at least an hour a day -- and 183 million in the US alone, the “gamers community” has proven to be an important constituency to engage with. During the past decades, conservation organizations have paid marginal attention to the potential of online games as a means to promote nature-friendly attitudes. An exception is WWF, as it has developed a set of online games as part of its education strategies, but not appealing enough to attract the gaming community. But times are changing, and fast. Enthropia and Second Life offer the possibility to buy and manage landscapes in a virtual world, including the possibility of establishing restrictions to mining and regulating access to natural resources on your virtual land. On April 4th, Ecotopia –an online free-to-play game produced by Talkie in coordination with Conservation International- will be launched via the world’s largest social networking site: Facebook. Ecotopia, is advertised as a game with a social conscience, advances the popular city-building game model as it aims to wrap fun and compelling gameplay with philanthropy and real-world involvement.
Critical thinking on the potential and threats of videogames for the conservation agenda and better understanding of the videogame industry is needed, as several questions remain unsolved. How nature is framed in onlines games and what stories do they tell about our relationship with nature? Do experiences in the virtual world can affect real life habits and influence people´s attitudes -for instance towards nature conservation? Should conservation organizations invest in videogames as a mechanism to reach young people or to train future managers of protected areas?
Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken: How games make us better and how they can change the world, believes that videogames are a powerful platform to solve global problems. McGonigal argues that: “in today's society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not. And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we're fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games, creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds (McGonigal, 2011).” As time passes more people are living their lives in the boundaries between reality and virtual worlds, and considering that game developers are paying more attention on the use of emotion, purpose, meaning and feelings when creating these virtual worlds, the implications for conservation appear to be quite significant. After all, videogames have the power to break down reality, and introducing the ideology of endless restarts while confronting the “game over” discourse.
Statistics and relevant information:
• In total people around the world spend 3 billion hours each week playing online games.
• In 2005 video games became a $29 billion worldwide business. In 2010 was around $40 billion.
• Today 500 million people are gamers (this means that they play at least an hour per week), and the number is expected to grow to 1.5 billion in the next decade.
• On the contrary of what is assumed, games are not only for young people. While 97% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 report playing videogames regularly, the average age of gamers is 30. The people that buy more games are 37 years old and 43% of gamers are female (Perry, 2006).
• In a country with a strong “gaming culture”, the average young person racks up 10,000 hours of gaming by the age of 21, almost as much time as they spend in a classroom from fifth grade until they finish high school if they have perfect attendance. Most astonishingly, 5 million gamers in the U.S are spending more than 40 hours a week playing games, the same as a full time job (McGonigal 2011).
• Recent scientific research shows that the feelings and activities experienced in virtual worlds can trickle into our real lives. For example: kids who spend just 30 minutes playing a "pro-social" game like Super Mario Sunshine (in which you clean up pollution and graffiti around an island) are more likely to help friends, family and neighbors in real-life for a full week after playing the game. Also, people of all ages who play musical games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero report spending more time learning and playing real musical instruments than before they started playing the videogame (McGonigal, 2011).
• Games allow us to be more resilient in the face of failure. And when we play multiplayer games, we become more collaborative and more likely to help others (McGonigal, 2011).
• 83% of games have no mature content (including violence) at all (Perry, 2006).
Reference list
Perry, Davis. (2006) Are games better than life? TED.com http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/06/will_video_game/
McGonigal, Jane. (2010a) Gaming can make a better world. TED Talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html
McGonigal, Jane. (2010b) Reality is Broken: How can videogames save the world. Penguins press.
McGonigal, Jane (2011) Video Games: An Hour a Day is Key to success in Life. In: The Huffington Post, February 15th 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgonigal/video-games_b_823208.html
Schell, Jesse. (2010) "Design Outside the Box" Presentation. DICE 2010. http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/
Priebatsch, Seth (2010) The game layer on top of the world. TED Talk, Boston.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real_life.html
Michael Highland.
With more than half a billion people worldwide playing online games at least an hour a day -- and 183 million in the US alone, the “gamers community” has proven to be an important constituency to engage with. During the past decades, conservation organizations have paid marginal attention to the potential of online games as a means to promote nature-friendly attitudes. An exception is WWF, as it has developed a set of online games as part of its education strategies, but not appealing enough to attract the gaming community. But times are changing, and fast. Enthropia and Second Life offer the possibility to buy and manage landscapes in a virtual world, including the possibility of establishing restrictions to mining and regulating access to natural resources on your virtual land. On April 4th, Ecotopia –an online free-to-play game produced by Talkie in coordination with Conservation International- will be launched via the world’s largest social networking site: Facebook. Ecotopia, is advertised as a game with a social conscience, advances the popular city-building game model as it aims to wrap fun and compelling gameplay with philanthropy and real-world involvement.
Critical thinking on the potential and threats of videogames for the conservation agenda and better understanding of the videogame industry is needed, as several questions remain unsolved. How nature is framed in onlines games and what stories do they tell about our relationship with nature? Do experiences in the virtual world can affect real life habits and influence people´s attitudes -for instance towards nature conservation? Should conservation organizations invest in videogames as a mechanism to reach young people or to train future managers of protected areas?
Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken: How games make us better and how they can change the world, believes that videogames are a powerful platform to solve global problems. McGonigal argues that: “in today's society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not. And unless something dramatic happens to reverse the resulting exodus, we're fast on our way to becoming a society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes its greatest efforts to playing games, creates its best memories in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game worlds (McGonigal, 2011).” As time passes more people are living their lives in the boundaries between reality and virtual worlds, and considering that game developers are paying more attention on the use of emotion, purpose, meaning and feelings when creating these virtual worlds, the implications for conservation appear to be quite significant. After all, videogames have the power to break down reality, and introducing the ideology of endless restarts while confronting the “game over” discourse.
Statistics and relevant information:
• In total people around the world spend 3 billion hours each week playing online games.
• In 2005 video games became a $29 billion worldwide business. In 2010 was around $40 billion.
• Today 500 million people are gamers (this means that they play at least an hour per week), and the number is expected to grow to 1.5 billion in the next decade.
• On the contrary of what is assumed, games are not only for young people. While 97% of boys under 18 and 94% of girls under 18 report playing videogames regularly, the average age of gamers is 30. The people that buy more games are 37 years old and 43% of gamers are female (Perry, 2006).
• In a country with a strong “gaming culture”, the average young person racks up 10,000 hours of gaming by the age of 21, almost as much time as they spend in a classroom from fifth grade until they finish high school if they have perfect attendance. Most astonishingly, 5 million gamers in the U.S are spending more than 40 hours a week playing games, the same as a full time job (McGonigal 2011).
• Recent scientific research shows that the feelings and activities experienced in virtual worlds can trickle into our real lives. For example: kids who spend just 30 minutes playing a "pro-social" game like Super Mario Sunshine (in which you clean up pollution and graffiti around an island) are more likely to help friends, family and neighbors in real-life for a full week after playing the game. Also, people of all ages who play musical games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero report spending more time learning and playing real musical instruments than before they started playing the videogame (McGonigal, 2011).
• Games allow us to be more resilient in the face of failure. And when we play multiplayer games, we become more collaborative and more likely to help others (McGonigal, 2011).
• 83% of games have no mature content (including violence) at all (Perry, 2006).
Reference list
Perry, Davis. (2006) Are games better than life? TED.com http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/06/will_video_game/
McGonigal, Jane. (2010a) Gaming can make a better world. TED Talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html
McGonigal, Jane. (2010b) Reality is Broken: How can videogames save the world. Penguins press.
McGonigal, Jane (2011) Video Games: An Hour a Day is Key to success in Life. In: The Huffington Post, February 15th 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-mcgonigal/video-games_b_823208.html
Schell, Jesse. (2010) "Design Outside the Box" Presentation. DICE 2010. http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/
Priebatsch, Seth (2010) The game layer on top of the world. TED Talk, Boston.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real_life.html
Monday 13 December 2010
A matter of congruence
One of the main issues faced by conservationists in the 21st century is to be more coherent and practice what we preach. Despite the gloom of sustainability and its use at a global scale, most of environmentalists and conservationists are still trying to figure out how to be more sustainable on a daily basis.
A recent article by Giovanni Bearzi, titled When Swordfish Conservation Biologists Eat Swordfish and published in Conservation Biology, tackles this issue. Here we present some fragments of his article to promote reflecton and the exchange of ideas on how conservationists and conservation organizations can be more sustainable.
"In our work as conservation biologists, we often pretend we are the good guys and problems are created by bad guys elsewhere. Is this a fair representation of reality? Does this take into account all the complexities? It would be fair to acknowledge that we, too, contribute to problems. For instance, the fancy laptop on my desk was made in China, perhaps at high environmental and human costs. Once trashed it may end up being burned by minors in Ghana to retrieve its valuable metal components.
We think of ourselves as professionals who are aware of environmental problems and work hard to solve them, but we pay little heed to what we do, buy, and consume. Some of my reputable colleagues drive SUVs to the office every day, possibly where they write about climate change. I know excellent biologists who spend much of their professional lives condemning unsustainable fisheries or reporting high levels of toxic contaminants in marine megafauna, yet when eating at a restaurant they order swordfish or tuna from overfished and declining stocks. At this point their study subjects cease being endangered wildlife and become food. Although most conservation biologists probably behave noticeably better than most uninformed citizens, it is disturbing to see the hypocrisy of avowed conservationists, as if monks advocating poverty were to wear jewelry and expensive silk robes.
Some of us have started to realize our current lifestyle is inconsistent with the message we voice. We wonder how we can ever stop contributing to global problems and eventually become part of the solution, at least in the areas we are most passionate and concerned about. Would that imply giving up comfortable life standards? Does that mean never again savoring that melt-in-the-mouth delicious fillet of Mediterranean swordfish, “just because” (apart from being loaded with mercury and PCBs) members of this shrinking population are caught in pelagic driftnets that incidentally kill thousands of cetaceans, sea turtles, and other endangered wildlife?
(...)
Although generally speaking people are unlikely to ever become virtuous unless they are forced to do so, there are growing sectors of modern societies that look for alternative models and seek inspiration from less consumptive patterns of behavior.
(...)
Personal examples matter, particularly by those closer to our heart. Calling for top-down enforcement will not bring us far without much bottom-up consensus, and this kind of awareness must be created step by step starting here and now.
Only 2 km away from one of my field sites in Greece there is an open-air dump. It is often in flames and sometimes I can distinctively smell its smoke, which I know includes dioxin, an extremely toxic chemical. Although it is terrible that in a country like Greece tons of garbage are still routinely dumped close to houses and schools, I know my garbage is there too. The plastic bag I trashed yesterday is burning today in that dump just around the corner. In addition to blaming others for dumping and burning and doing my best to document and stop this practice, shouldn't I also try to reduce my input of rubbish? That is where I get stuck because when I wake up in the morning it is nice to drink my tetra-packed grapefruit juice and have my plastic-cased yogurt for breakfast. Even if I am informed about the hazards posed by garbage incineration, I find it hard to give up my little comforts.
As conservation biologists, we often expect others to modify their behaviors or quit a job based on evidence that it has negative impacts on the environment. Nevertheless, we are rarely willing to change our own habits, even when we are fully aware of the detrimental effects of our actions. A plush life is pleasant, and we see it as our right, yet we demand others to become virtuous for the sake of conservation. We blame others, but find it hard to realize what is wrong with our own behavior and to change it. I suspect that an important part of the challenge is to be a good example in the first place, no matter what others do. It is striking to see how many people committed to conservation have not abandoned a single consumptive pattern, despite the eco-drama before our eyes.
For instance, fisheries scientists advocate for stricter quotas, which would therefore limit consumption, yet they themselves may practice little restraint in their personal consumption of seafood. If we take the premise that the individual does not matter, this is not an intellectual contradiction. We may also argue that if we do not eat swordfish, someone else will. Jennifer Jacquet, a talented PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, makes a provocative analogy: “Is this not like an early abolitionist owning a slave?” Jacquet, whose published work offers a brilliant analysis of the marine fisheries crisis, contends there is little accountability in conservation science for practicing what one preaches, and she thinks this may be linked to an overall hesitation to criticize consumption of any sort in the Western world.
Credible criticism of this kind would imply endorsement of counter-current choices and detaching from some of our dearest consumptive habits. This is something few of us are ready to do, but possibly something that some of us should consider doing at least to the extent possible, while carefully avoiding extremism and polarization. Being consistent with our ecological theories in daily life does not need to entail moral or religious harshness. It may be seen simply as an application of judgment and free will or a way of acting as responsible citizens of this planet.
As articulated in joint work by Jacquet and Pauly, a system of management or conservation based exclusively on purchasing power will not adequately address the problems facing the world's fisheries (or any other global problem) because of corporate skillfulness in dodging consumer choices. There are no simple solutions to the global crisis and even doing the right thing in daily life requires much pondering and learning. Irremediable as they may seem, problems may only be solved when individuals start addressing them. As highly educated conservation biologists who are aware and supposedly clever, aren't we good candidates to kick-start the process? Aren't we some of the best candidates to provide imaginative and appropriately informed examples of sustainable (and still enjoyable) living?
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” If we cannot manage to embody our teachings at least in part, it may be unrealistic to expect that others will change anything in their life, whether it is to stop eating whale meat or to refrain from hunting endangered wildlife for sport. This is not meant to be a recipe to save the planet. When conservation biologists stop ordering swordfish and opt for organic chicken or vegetables, the world will not be substantially different. The immense, complex, and global problems of our times will not disappear by the time all the members of our conservation elite have abandoned their unsustainable habits. Yet, only then will there be convincing evidence that responsible individual behavior can spring from science-based understanding of cause–effect relationships and only then will there be any hope that, beyond theory and preaching, the inspired and knowledgeable choices of a few visionaries may affect a larger community in a growing spiral of understanding."
Click here to read the complete article online or to download the article in PDF.
A recent article by Giovanni Bearzi, titled When Swordfish Conservation Biologists Eat Swordfish and published in Conservation Biology, tackles this issue. Here we present some fragments of his article to promote reflecton and the exchange of ideas on how conservationists and conservation organizations can be more sustainable.
"In our work as conservation biologists, we often pretend we are the good guys and problems are created by bad guys elsewhere. Is this a fair representation of reality? Does this take into account all the complexities? It would be fair to acknowledge that we, too, contribute to problems. For instance, the fancy laptop on my desk was made in China, perhaps at high environmental and human costs. Once trashed it may end up being burned by minors in Ghana to retrieve its valuable metal components.
We think of ourselves as professionals who are aware of environmental problems and work hard to solve them, but we pay little heed to what we do, buy, and consume. Some of my reputable colleagues drive SUVs to the office every day, possibly where they write about climate change. I know excellent biologists who spend much of their professional lives condemning unsustainable fisheries or reporting high levels of toxic contaminants in marine megafauna, yet when eating at a restaurant they order swordfish or tuna from overfished and declining stocks. At this point their study subjects cease being endangered wildlife and become food. Although most conservation biologists probably behave noticeably better than most uninformed citizens, it is disturbing to see the hypocrisy of avowed conservationists, as if monks advocating poverty were to wear jewelry and expensive silk robes.
Some of us have started to realize our current lifestyle is inconsistent with the message we voice. We wonder how we can ever stop contributing to global problems and eventually become part of the solution, at least in the areas we are most passionate and concerned about. Would that imply giving up comfortable life standards? Does that mean never again savoring that melt-in-the-mouth delicious fillet of Mediterranean swordfish, “just because” (apart from being loaded with mercury and PCBs) members of this shrinking population are caught in pelagic driftnets that incidentally kill thousands of cetaceans, sea turtles, and other endangered wildlife?
(...)
Although generally speaking people are unlikely to ever become virtuous unless they are forced to do so, there are growing sectors of modern societies that look for alternative models and seek inspiration from less consumptive patterns of behavior.
(...)
Personal examples matter, particularly by those closer to our heart. Calling for top-down enforcement will not bring us far without much bottom-up consensus, and this kind of awareness must be created step by step starting here and now.
Only 2 km away from one of my field sites in Greece there is an open-air dump. It is often in flames and sometimes I can distinctively smell its smoke, which I know includes dioxin, an extremely toxic chemical. Although it is terrible that in a country like Greece tons of garbage are still routinely dumped close to houses and schools, I know my garbage is there too. The plastic bag I trashed yesterday is burning today in that dump just around the corner. In addition to blaming others for dumping and burning and doing my best to document and stop this practice, shouldn't I also try to reduce my input of rubbish? That is where I get stuck because when I wake up in the morning it is nice to drink my tetra-packed grapefruit juice and have my plastic-cased yogurt for breakfast. Even if I am informed about the hazards posed by garbage incineration, I find it hard to give up my little comforts.
As conservation biologists, we often expect others to modify their behaviors or quit a job based on evidence that it has negative impacts on the environment. Nevertheless, we are rarely willing to change our own habits, even when we are fully aware of the detrimental effects of our actions. A plush life is pleasant, and we see it as our right, yet we demand others to become virtuous for the sake of conservation. We blame others, but find it hard to realize what is wrong with our own behavior and to change it. I suspect that an important part of the challenge is to be a good example in the first place, no matter what others do. It is striking to see how many people committed to conservation have not abandoned a single consumptive pattern, despite the eco-drama before our eyes.
For instance, fisheries scientists advocate for stricter quotas, which would therefore limit consumption, yet they themselves may practice little restraint in their personal consumption of seafood. If we take the premise that the individual does not matter, this is not an intellectual contradiction. We may also argue that if we do not eat swordfish, someone else will. Jennifer Jacquet, a talented PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, makes a provocative analogy: “Is this not like an early abolitionist owning a slave?” Jacquet, whose published work offers a brilliant analysis of the marine fisheries crisis, contends there is little accountability in conservation science for practicing what one preaches, and she thinks this may be linked to an overall hesitation to criticize consumption of any sort in the Western world.
Credible criticism of this kind would imply endorsement of counter-current choices and detaching from some of our dearest consumptive habits. This is something few of us are ready to do, but possibly something that some of us should consider doing at least to the extent possible, while carefully avoiding extremism and polarization. Being consistent with our ecological theories in daily life does not need to entail moral or religious harshness. It may be seen simply as an application of judgment and free will or a way of acting as responsible citizens of this planet.
As articulated in joint work by Jacquet and Pauly, a system of management or conservation based exclusively on purchasing power will not adequately address the problems facing the world's fisheries (or any other global problem) because of corporate skillfulness in dodging consumer choices. There are no simple solutions to the global crisis and even doing the right thing in daily life requires much pondering and learning. Irremediable as they may seem, problems may only be solved when individuals start addressing them. As highly educated conservation biologists who are aware and supposedly clever, aren't we good candidates to kick-start the process? Aren't we some of the best candidates to provide imaginative and appropriately informed examples of sustainable (and still enjoyable) living?
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” If we cannot manage to embody our teachings at least in part, it may be unrealistic to expect that others will change anything in their life, whether it is to stop eating whale meat or to refrain from hunting endangered wildlife for sport. This is not meant to be a recipe to save the planet. When conservation biologists stop ordering swordfish and opt for organic chicken or vegetables, the world will not be substantially different. The immense, complex, and global problems of our times will not disappear by the time all the members of our conservation elite have abandoned their unsustainable habits. Yet, only then will there be convincing evidence that responsible individual behavior can spring from science-based understanding of cause–effect relationships and only then will there be any hope that, beyond theory and preaching, the inspired and knowledgeable choices of a few visionaries may affect a larger community in a growing spiral of understanding."
Click here to read the complete article online or to download the article in PDF.
Tuesday 12 October 2010
El tic-tac de los conservacionistas - The conservationists tic-tac
Bill Adams, is a challenging and insightful person that I recommend to be read, as he always brings to debates a critical perspective over issues encouraging reflection. This fragment of the preface of his book Against Extinction. The Story of Conservation is a must.
"If conservationists have a consistent and shared sense of time, it is one that is oddly broken-up. In my experience their awareness of time falls into three discrete categories. The first might be called, with apologies to Charles Lyell, "deep time". I mean by this, time measured on the geological timescale of millions of years. This scale of time makes humans as a species seem rather trivial arrivists in the long, teeming prehistory of life forms; a steady evolutionary game of planetary proportions in which Homo sapiens appears as a late, sudden and rather destructive disruptive force, whose effects Agent Smith, in the film The Matrix, rather nicely captures when he describes humans as a virus on Earth. Conservationists do this idea of time very well. They understand, through books like Edward Wilson´s The Diversity of Life , the astonishing diversity generated by evolution in the water-thin living skin of the Earth. They also respond in both an intellectual and emotional way to the enormity of the extinction spasm of the last two centuries in the light of previous episodes of destruction through the depth of geological time.
The second scale at which conservationists understand time is their own experience. Those who love nature tend to explain conservation themselves in terms of things they have actually experienced. Mosts conservationists can trace their passion for living things to particular places and times, when they engaged with other species or with landscapes, when what is often called "the wild" reached into the mundane and urban world and touched them. Conservationists remember childhood engagements with nature, and note how they have been sometimes beyond all recognition: lost under tarmac and concrete, devoid all too often it is one of degradation. Scratch a conservationist, and beneath every upbeat line about success stories, there is usually a depressingly downbeat assessment of the retreat of nature over their lifetimes.
The third scale at which conservationists think of time is in the immediate present. It seems that conservation problems are always urgent; everything is a crisis. In books and films, and in the minds of conservationists, nature often faces catastrophe, usually at humans hands. Something always needs to be done, and done at once.
Whatever sense of time conservationists times have, I suggest that they rarely have a good sense of history. They think they know what needs to be done, but in thinking things through, they tend to jump from deep time to their own lives´experience, and then again to the immediate challenge of today without much pause for thought. Often they have little understanding of the way in which problems have come about, or how their predecessors understood similar problems and tried to tackle them. Conservationists often know very little of their own history.
(...)
Conservation debates are not really arguments about nature, but rather about ourselves and the way we choose to live. They are moral debates, about the way we cope with our own demands of each other and the biosphere."
Sunday 10 October 2010
Phenomenology
DARK SIDE OF THE LENS from Astray Films on Vimeo.
One of the aims of this blog is to "inspire people to open our eyes and hearts to the world" as said in the video presented in this post.
Thus, the inspiration section will contain anything that promotes major awareness of our surroundings, including the paths and thougths of those people that can inspire us, promoting further momentum and reflection regarding what we pursue on life. Creativity and passion, are maybe one of the most important elements required for leadership, so they will be represented in this blog.
Besides the wonderful music, framing and photography in this video, there are certain quotes that are worth remembering.
"I have never set out to become anything in particular, only to live creatively and pursue the scope of my experience for adventure and passion."
"I never want to keep this for granted so I try to keep motivations simple, real and positive.
"Fires of happiness, waves of gratitude, for everything that brought us to that moment in time to do something worth remembering."
Why “Candy”?
As Ed Templeton says in Beautiful Losers, one of the tragedies we face as we grow up, as we turn into adults, is losing the joy of creating and being happy that appeared to be the ultimate goals in life when we were kids. Ironically -a sweet finding based on personal experience- our passion for candy is much more difficult to lose in spite of years flowing by.
Considering the power of candy, I decided to name this initiative Candy for Conservationists. Candy appears as a metaphor for what I think conservationists - people who have a passion for life, a passion for nature and for the diversity of people who are part of this world- need to overcome the complex challenges we are facing in the 21st century. Candy is a metaphor for inspiration, for creative ideas, and for the tools and knowledge that we require to make things happen.
It is my belief that one of the problems undermining conservation efforts are the ways we interact with each other and approach conservation challenges. Instead of sharing the joy of working together for a meaningful purpose that transcend our existences, ego and institutional battles have become the norm rather than the exception. We pay too much attention to the labels and roles (academic, governmental officer, practitioner, biologist, lawyer) that we are supposed to comply with, and as a result, start pretending and playing an endless games with no possible winners. It is no surprise that some of us forget what drove us to work in conservation in the first place. Thus, we experience a lack of passion. We seem tempted to do things in ways that are just acceptable and mainstream, therefore maintaining the status quo so that our comfort zones are not threatened. We need to regain perspective, walk two steps back, and remind ourselves that we are all humans trying to deal with coexistence in a unique biosphere. And that unfortunately we are far from doing it right.
By inspiring each other and challenging the way we are thinking and framing issues, clarity and creativity could overcome the dangers of assumptions, stereotypes and prejudices. The “Candy” that you will find in this blog seeks to make people think outside of the box, to interact differently within conservationists, and to engage with people outside the conservation community. The challenges for conservationists in the 21st century are so complex and significant that I really believe we need to put our efforts towards a global movement; we need to feel momentum and remember that we are not alone.
This blog will serve as a bridge: to improve communication among conservationists, especially between academics and practitioners, as well as between professionals in the Global North and the Global South; to promote a better understanding, among these fragmented groups; to be a place where ideas in academic papers will be shared in a way that anyone can read them, challenge them, and add to them constructively. Posts will be in Spanish and English because one of the factors that drove me to start this project was to share the ideas and information that I am being exposed to during an MPhil in Conservation Leadership at the University of Cambridge, with people who have not had this unique opportunity.
I hope to engage the passionate (and especially young) conservation leaders who are willing and committed to this challenge, one which involves promoting conservation in an ethical and coherent way. I hope to engage people who share the idea that it is important to love something worth sacrifice and those who believe in collective action. Despite the morality promoted in today´s world, I hope to engage people who still want to just live simply and pursue happiness. I hope to engage people who have the energy and vision required to make things happen. Everyone is invited to be a part of this movement.
Bruno Monteferri, 2010.
Considering the power of candy, I decided to name this initiative Candy for Conservationists. Candy appears as a metaphor for what I think conservationists - people who have a passion for life, a passion for nature and for the diversity of people who are part of this world- need to overcome the complex challenges we are facing in the 21st century. Candy is a metaphor for inspiration, for creative ideas, and for the tools and knowledge that we require to make things happen.
It is my belief that one of the problems undermining conservation efforts are the ways we interact with each other and approach conservation challenges. Instead of sharing the joy of working together for a meaningful purpose that transcend our existences, ego and institutional battles have become the norm rather than the exception. We pay too much attention to the labels and roles (academic, governmental officer, practitioner, biologist, lawyer) that we are supposed to comply with, and as a result, start pretending and playing an endless games with no possible winners. It is no surprise that some of us forget what drove us to work in conservation in the first place. Thus, we experience a lack of passion. We seem tempted to do things in ways that are just acceptable and mainstream, therefore maintaining the status quo so that our comfort zones are not threatened. We need to regain perspective, walk two steps back, and remind ourselves that we are all humans trying to deal with coexistence in a unique biosphere. And that unfortunately we are far from doing it right.
By inspiring each other and challenging the way we are thinking and framing issues, clarity and creativity could overcome the dangers of assumptions, stereotypes and prejudices. The “Candy” that you will find in this blog seeks to make people think outside of the box, to interact differently within conservationists, and to engage with people outside the conservation community. The challenges for conservationists in the 21st century are so complex and significant that I really believe we need to put our efforts towards a global movement; we need to feel momentum and remember that we are not alone.
This blog will serve as a bridge: to improve communication among conservationists, especially between academics and practitioners, as well as between professionals in the Global North and the Global South; to promote a better understanding, among these fragmented groups; to be a place where ideas in academic papers will be shared in a way that anyone can read them, challenge them, and add to them constructively. Posts will be in Spanish and English because one of the factors that drove me to start this project was to share the ideas and information that I am being exposed to during an MPhil in Conservation Leadership at the University of Cambridge, with people who have not had this unique opportunity.
I hope to engage the passionate (and especially young) conservation leaders who are willing and committed to this challenge, one which involves promoting conservation in an ethical and coherent way. I hope to engage people who share the idea that it is important to love something worth sacrifice and those who believe in collective action. Despite the morality promoted in today´s world, I hope to engage people who still want to just live simply and pursue happiness. I hope to engage people who have the energy and vision required to make things happen. Everyone is invited to be a part of this movement.
Bruno Monteferri, 2010.
You Are What You Do from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)