A Couple of Conservation Communication Notes

I love some of the new web sites and tools that are being devised to improve communication of environmental issues to the masses.

Here's a new sustainability tool kit for marketing and advertising courses that "offers all kinds of pedagogic resources - short presentations, campaign analyses, exercises, web links, bibliographies and more than 300 downloadable documents - to encourage students and communication experts to think about and involve themselves in" sustainability.

Even whole countries are working to improve communication of the science of sustainability to everyday folk. Here is an article about Zimbabwe urging its researchers to simplify scientific terms so they can be understood by ordinary people. "We need simplified language so that everyone benefits from the knowledge," the country's environment and tourism minister said.

The issue is urgent. For if scientists cannot relate the importance of our findings to the (voting) public and decisionmakers, then the science won't be properly used to make our world better. Imagine this was happening with medical science to the same degree it's happening with environmental science!

Speaking at the same event in Zimbabwe, the country's Science and Technology Development Minister, Cde Olivia Muchena, called on stakeholders to increase dissemination of information to raise people's awareness about environmental issues.

"Let us raise levels of awareness until there is a flood," she said.

Here here!