By Elin Kelsey
World Oceans Day, June 2015
A Twitter storm of Ocean Optimism
My first hint of the extent to which kids feel hopeless about the environment came as a
surprise. For years, I had worked with aquariums, museums and international
environmental organizations. As an academic, I studied public engagement with the
environment. I understood the national statistics about what people in many different
countries knew and what their attitudes were toward specific environmental issues. But
how all that “knowing” felt was nowhere to be found in that vast pool of information.
I realized the impact of that omission when I was invited to speak with kids attending a
United Nations children’s conference on the environment in 2008 in Stavanger, Norway.
The participants, who ranged in age from 10-14 years old, came from dozens of countries
and a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds. As a professional environmental
educator and communicator, I was eager to learn how their perceptions might vary across
culture and context.
“How do you feel when you think about the environment?” I asked. I don’t remember
what I expected them to say, but so many of them expressed such a chilling sense of
dread that I felt powerless to comfort them. Moreover, as they spoke, I felt a rush of
familiarity. I too often felt overwhelmed by grief for the planet. I just never imagined
such feelings were shared amongst hundreds of children living in vastly varied
circumstances.
There is a strange silence about all this emotion. We have media ratings to protect
children from sex or violence in movies, but we think nothing of inviting a scientist into a
second-grade classroom and telling the kids the planet is ruined. According to an article
in the International Journal of Mental Health Systems, “A quarter of [Australian]
children are so troubled about the state of the world that they honestly believe it will
come to an end before they get older.”
As a children’s book writer, I set myself the goal of writing a hopeful book about the
environment. I started collecting conservation successes: hopeful solutions that pass the
scientific criteria of peer review. At first they were difficult to find because even our
scientists have been more focused on recording losses than gains. As Nancy Knowlton, a
preeminent marine scientist puts it: “An entire generation of scientists has now been
trained to describe, in ever greater and more dismal detail, the death of the ocean.” A few
years back, Nancy started hosting what she called “Beyond the Obituaries” meetings at
major international scientific conferences. Scientists were invited to come and share only
conservation success stories. She thought they might get a few people showing up, but
they were inundated.
The more I looked for conservation successes, the more I found, particularly in the
marine environment where the growing incidence of establishing marine protected areas
was starting to show how resilient ocean ecosystems were. Scientists report more fish,
bigger fish in just three to five years after establishing “no-take” marine reserves. I wrote
the scientific brief for a campaign that led former President George Bush to declare the
Mariana Trench as the world’s largest marine protected area in 2009. (I am pleased to
report that several other larger MPAs have since been established.)
In 2012, I reached out to Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian Institution, Heather
Koldewey of the Zoological Society of London and Cynthia Vernon of the Monterey Bay
Aquarium, three powerhouses in ocean conservation who I had discovered shared a
passion for increasing access to ocean successes. I simply invited them to my house for
the weekend and they generously came. As we walked the beaches of Monterey and
chatted on my front porch, we began to put a collective plan in place.
Soon we were joined by Elisabeth Whitebread, a global marine community organizer,
and in the May 2014, we co-hosted a small retreat with scientists, journalists, and
environmentalists on the outskirts of London, England. We challenged ourselves to use
the 48 hour workshop to create and pilot a social change project to engage people with
ocean conservation successes and shift the environment beyond doom and gloom.
Together, we set about to populate and crowd share stories about marine conservation
successes by focusing on World Oceans Day, an international event scheduled for June 8,
2014 (just two weeks after the workshop). We invented a #OceanOptimism hashtag and
encouraged others to share their good news stories for our seas.
In the year since it's inception, #OceanOptimism has been seen by over 21 million twitter
users, with over 8,000 different accounts actively using the hashtag. It’s an astonishing
international outpouring of ocean conservation successes. Tweet the site to a kid you
love. I cannot imagine a better gift for World Oceans Day 2015.
Author bio:
Elin Kelsey, PhD is an award-winning author, academic and environmental
communicator. Her work on hope, resilience and the environment has garnered her
fellowships with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment
and Society, and the Cairns Institute. See more at www.elinkelseyandcompany.com