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People + Science = Action

If you are a scientist, consultant, or someone in an NGO or international organization striving to get some real progress on environmental issues, if you have been wondering what happened to Agenda 21, and why there is such a poverty of action on real environmental issues, this is the time to think about getting help and you've come to the right web site to start.

The Tellus Consultant team members believe that expertise and knowledge isn't much good at changing the world if nobody knows or cares about the information.

We also believe that the process of doing research, especially in the great outdoors, changes people. Richard Stoll, who has done a wide range of scientific projects in the Pacific islands over the past 20 years, told me he felt the most effective moments of his career came when he was leading people on fishing expeditions, out in the wilderness. Something happens, inside us when we look very closely, or very broadly, at mother nature.

I agree. I conducted Earthwatch expeditions in island environments for nearly 20 years and have no doubt that when people really get involved in field science, they become dedicated to whatever it is they study - giant clams, coral reefs, octopus, butterflies, rainforests, rivers, deserts - whatever. Earthwatch was one of the first organizations to link scientists with volunteer field researchers. They started out in the mid 70's as "Educational Expeditions International." Today, many universities, government agencies (like the Park Service), and "ecotourism" enterprises bring people together with scientists for field research, but Earthwatch remains tops in the field.

This is great stuff, and everyone who goes along on an expedition comes back a changed person, including the scientist leading the team. But what does this have to do with Agenda 21 and our global environmental issues? We all realize that environmental problems are caused by individual habit patterns; overbreeding, overconsumption, littering, polluting, over-harvesting rain forest trees, eradicating oceans full of fish, you name it, people are doing it. Changing other people's behavior is an impossible task. People have to change their own behavior. Maybe, I thought, we could apply the Earthwatch principle to the educational system.

Are we imprinted on nature between the ages of 5 and 10?

Some friends of mine and I started a project called Seakeepers for Schools in New Zealand. The idea was to involve school children in doing field research. I was inspired by Vice President Al Gore's idea of a new "Mission to Planet Earth."

Perhaps, our group thought, we might interest scientists and teachers and students in working together on field research just by introducing them to each other. So the Seakeepers for Schools project, funded by the Telecom (NZ) Education Foundation, introduced people who were dedicated to the sea to more than 1,250 New Zealand schools.

In the process of setting this up, we made a very important discovery. The Seakeepers themselves, the people who had dedicated their lives to looking after oceans, estuaries and streams, inevitably had a deeply moving nature experience when they were between 5 and 10 years old. Professor Emeritus John Morton (past head of the Biology Department at the University of Auckland and one of the world's great experts on intertidal ecology and taxonomy) said he clearly remembered the moment that pivoted his life into natural sciences. He was 5 years old, walking with his dad on a rocky beach at low tide. He turned over a rock and a little crab ran out. He studied the strange little creature. He knew it was a crab but had never seen one like this one before. He asked his dad what it was. His father didn't know. That was the moment. It was the first time he had asked his father a question that this grand font of wisdom could not answer. It began his life-long interest in identifying and studying intertidal sea life.

I asked all of the 32 Seakeepers the same question, "can you remember what it was that made you take up this bizarre career?" Many of them had to think about it, often feeling that somehow they had always had an interest in the subject. "Not when you were two years old," I'd reply. Without fail there was an incident, an imprinting, and it changed them forever.This imprinting period is between 5 and 10. It is a profound moment when we suddenly look outward from ourselves (after our shocking self-centeredness between birth and 4 years old) and see the larger world, or some fraction of it, as the marvel that it truly is. We need to facilitate this moment of wonder by making opportunities for young children to bond with nature.

The most successful environmental education program I know

So how did Renato do it? He had some terrific ideas and is a great organizer. One of the first things he did after a trial of the project with a Sydney high school was to get Streamwatch put into the NSW Science curriculum. That was important. Most of the Streamwatch work involves "training trainers," giving the educators and coordinators the necessary group skills and scientific knowledge to train more people to organize schools and community groups for taking water quality measurements. He had a reasonable budget from the Sydney Water Corporation, he had a tightly focused project, he focused on training trainers, but what is most important is that he is a very nice guy. People like Renato. He makes you feel respected, because, quite simply, Renato respects other people. He provides opportunities to people to lend a hand. And that's the key. Renato didn't do it, a whole lot of people did it, each taking their own initiative but staying in touch, making sure the data is good and is collected using the same methods and materials so it can be compared with any other water quality data in Australia.

This points to the essence of what participatory research is all about. Respecting other's abilities. Renato was willing to accept the idea that a high school student is perfectly capable of taking high quality, meaningful scientific measurements, given some training and supervision. Most scientists are not willing to accept such an idea - at first. Renato was willing to accept the idea that people really do care about the health of the streams and want to do something constructive to help our planet recover. Again, most professionals think people don't care, are not trained, and are the source - not the solution - of our environmental problems.

There are other, and older, programs that link school children and community groups with water quality studies. The best known is GREEN, The Global Rivers Environment Education Network. The project began in the US and is popular in many other countries. The GREEN teams do some terrific activities, interesting enough to be on national and international news from time to time. While the volunteer science movement is large and growing in the US, its my impression that the ties to government and commerce are a bit weak. Al Gore's inspired program, now called GLOBE, is growing rapidly and is starting lots of projects - like SParCE. that are reaching out to the Pacific islands. And GLOBE seems to have closer links to government and policy issues.

The Australian Waterwatch project really excells at cooperation and partnership. The effort spans national and state governments, private water boards, schools, and community groups. It's that kind of partnership that the Tellus Consultants team believes can make a real difference to environmental improvement in the Pacific islands.

A fashionable trend in Aid Circles

Throughout the Pacific islands, Participatory Research, Action Research, Participatory Rural Assessment (PRA), and Community Participation, are hot items. Examples of "Bridging the Gap" between Government and Communities are becoming more common. Regional organizations are promoting workshops and conferences on it, Government officers are learning about being Facilitators, and international organizations are realizing that the Agenda 21 insistence on participation of the community is, after all, pretty important.

But as with all things, there are winners and losers. The participatory examples presented in this web site are, for the most part, one-shot projects funded and run by foreigners. They are neither home grown nor very well understood. Problems abound. One government planner in Vanuatu told me they have yet to see any community plans that were at all useful to the national planning office. A UNDP review of the participatory land survey project in Vanuatu was a litany of disasters. The deluge of participatory projects in the Pacific islands has a very real chance of turning into a drizzle. I spoke with the head of one forestry program who felt that they were (thankfully) beyond the participatory phase. After a little more questioning, it turned out they were actually just getting started. What they were past was the jargon and the routine of PRA. They had reached the stage where their extension agents were just being nicer, more open, and concerned about the people in the communities. Making a real change means forging real partnerships between government and community teams, and GIVING THEM BOTH SOMETHING TO DO.

That's where science comes in.

Anyone with long experience in the Pacific region will quickly see how participatory techniques fit in well with the strengths and weaknesses of the island system (SWOT analysis). There are also some serious problems;

• Social, political and economic constraints to information flow in Oceania.

• Many (most?) scientists don't want to get involved with other people and are not trained in group interaction processes.

• Communities have good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys always seem to grab onto any project that looks like it might be to their advantage.

• Governments, scientists, and communities in the Pacific islands have been trained since childhood in dependency . Motivation for involvement is directly proportional to the amount of money available, and when something new is to be tried, foreign "experts" paid by somebody else, are called in to try it.

Act Locally, Think Globally

Think Globally, Act Locally is the essence of the scientific spirit. Science untangles the threads that create the tapestry of our living world and tries to work out how the treads merge in the overall ecological networks creating and maintaining us and our thoughts. I believe it is also the spirit needed to reverse the steady downward spiral of our world's health.

When scientists investigate the global patterns of ecological processes, they investigate our individual and collective interactions with the environment. International organizations and government agencies use the scientific information to arrive at policies, laws, and regulations to control the way we use of natural resources. Or at least that is the general idea. In practice, it runs into some major problems. There are many parallels between environmental problems and other behavior disorders, like alcoholism. Getting addicts to change their behavior is never an easy task.

Doctors can do diagnostic tests on addicts forever and hospitals can treat addicts endlessly without getting them to change their self-destructive habits.

Information - a wide range of it - really is needed to manage our use of this living planet. Assessment, evaluation and monitoring are all part of any management process. But it is not the scientists or the politicians who need to do the management, it is the people who USE the resources, the people who pollute their own environment, who, in the end, make the key decisions on how they will use - or abuse - the living systems. Again, using our addict parallel, it is important that the addict be able to self-test the effects of their addiction on their family, social and working environment. Just putting out posters and pamphlets on the perils of addictions or preaching about it does not, never has, changed an addicts behavior; because true addicts don't believe they are addicts.

Getting an addict to "see" the effects of addiction is not an easy task. The addict is already aware on some level of the effects but tucks this information down deep under many layers of self-justification. We are all good at excusing our own bad habits, and when a bad habit actually is our way of making money (as by clear-cutting a rain forest or dumping pesticides over an export crop of pumpkins) excuses are even easier to dream up. We need to reality-test. We need to measure and examine. And sometimes we need to come at these understandings sideways, so the addicted part of us does not realize it is being threatened.

That's why projects like Streamwatch, or the Giant Clam Sanctuary Project, or any field research project involving people who are addicted to bad environmental behavior, are so valuable. Rivers are like the arteries of the earth. Whatever dumb things we do to the land is quickly measurable in the rivers. Just as doctors can detect alcohol levels in blood, researchers can detect the impact of poor agricultural, forestry, or mining practices in the streams. When the addict takes the time to learn to detect the impact and the social process of correcting the problem has begun.

WHY people become involved in a project is perhaps the most critical phase of any project. This is so important I've included motivation on the list of the top 10 tips for successful environmental improvement projects.

Agenda 21 repeatedly calls for the involvement of all concerned parties in the research, evaluation, monitoring and policy making processes. We need to follow that advice.

A real need

In the Pacific islands, information is often non-existent, blurred, or hidden, resulting in false assumptions about what resources are available, how they will withstand the pressures of use, what the resource users want or don’t want, and what markets are or are not actually available. The improbable number of conflicts in resource policy and planning in the Pacific islands are a chaotic manifestation of the poor flow of information from the resource base through the people who use the resources to the entire network of local, national and regional governmental systems.

Even though Agenda 21 refers to the need to involve all interested parties in policy and planning processes in almost every chapter, few international, regional or national organizations and even fewer scientists have managed to form meaningful interactions with people outside their own narrow specialties. The problem is that most international agencies are decidedly autocratic and the colonial-styled governments of the Pacific Island countries grew from a non-participatory seed. Even the older traditional governing systems of the Pacific islands tended to segregate information availability and participation in decision making. So while the need for broad community participation is recognized as a good idea, very few scientists, UN agencies, or government personnel are trained in how to accomplish this, nor inclined to share their information or control. Scientists and technical professionals often feel participatory activities are a threat; to their own funding, their prestige, and the quality of their research. Government officers often view the "public" as the problem, not the solution, and public (Non Government Organizations) as an infringement on their own authority.

But when scientists and professional technicians involve schools and communities in their research they experience just the opposite to their fears. Their prestige grows - maybe not admiration from their esteemed colleagues with whom they argue and fight at every opportunity - but with the children and people who work with them in the field. Their research quality improves, because they are forced to think very carefully about quality control and how to do the field research using people outside their own field (who may themselves be scientifically trained). In addition, if they are successful in getting people involved, they are suddenly in a position to gather more data from a wider area at less cost than ever before. And best of all, the people and communities and governments who participate actually want the results of the data. The scientists go from collecting a meager amount of information at great cost that nobody is interested in, to collecting huge amounts of data at low cost that everyone is interested in.

And the best part is that people are more likely to act on information they collect and help analyze themselves.