The trip around Savai’i Island passed through dozens of small villages that intercept the single road that largely follows the coastline. Each village had one to several large churches with immaculately kept grounds and a painted empty propane tank hanging out front. The propane tanks serve as the church bells to call people to the [...]
Continue Reading »
Samoa is broken up into American Samoa and Samoa (formally known as Western Samoa). The islands are volcanic in origin, formed by a ‘hot spot’ of tectonic activity below the Pacific tectonic plate which is moving from east to west. The last volcanic outburst was on Savai’i, the largest island in the archipelago, in the [...]
Continue Reading »
At the invitation of Drs. David Haynes and Tim Carruthers, I visited the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) offices in Apia, Samoa. I had previously met David Sheppard, the Director of SPREP, when he visited Washington, D.C., but David was away on travel when I visited Samoa. The SPREP offices formed a [...]
Continue Reading »
On Monday, I went to the University of Queensland to meet with a former student, Dr. Chris Roelfsema and his student Mitch Lyons. Chris and Mitch, who are part of Professor Stuart Phinn’s remote sensing group, had worked up a seagrass risk map for Moreton Bay, based on light attenuation from the flood plume, bathymetry [...]
Continue Reading »
PART 8; Communicating Science Effectively poster In real time, as the plenary talk was being delivered, Dr. Charlotte Young from Envision Synergy quietly recorded the seminar as a story board on a large colorful poster in the back of the room. Following the seminar, I was able to view her graphical interpretation of the talk. [...]
Continue Reading »
PART 7; O Canada! So my conclusions are that conservation deals with complex problems. I think of it as simple problems are like following a recipe. Complicated problems are like building a rocket to the moon. It’s complicated, but you can do it over and over again if you do the equations and follow them. [...]
Continue Reading »
PART 6; Five step program for environmental report cards Let me go through five steps of generating Report Cards that we’ve generated. And they are relatively simple and straightforward. First is to draw it, to create the conceptual framework. Second, is to choose the indicators. Third is to define the thresholds. Fourth is to calculate [...]
Continue Reading »
PART 5; Report card examples Another aspect that I think has a lot of similarities to Ontario right now with your thirty-six conservational authorities doing these Report Cards, is that first in some areas where you don’t have a lot of resources, that citizens and scientists become a really powerful tool. And we’ve developed a [...]
Continue Reading »
PART 4; Environmental Report Cards Let me talk about one science communication tool that we’ve been developing, that we think is really powerful, and this is the Environmental Report Card. They’re really powerful for three big reasons. One is they are a really good peer pressure motivator, because peer pressure motivates human change. The story [...]
Continue Reading »
PART 3; History of Science Communication There is a history of effective science communication that actually changed the world. If we think about the Copernican Revolution, Copernicus was a Polish astronomer, who published a book in 1543 on the movement of the Earth around the Sun, not the Sun around the Earth, which was the [...]
Continue Reading »
Subscribe