Foundation uncovering the keys to saving the sea

One theory goes that human beings are psychologically incapable of caring about an event they’ve been told will be catastrophic but will happen far in the future. Without the tangible and the immediate, most of humanity muddles along and doesn’t fret about the future because the brain is wired to help us survive in the moment and can’t compute distant consequences.

That’s deeply unhelpful in the age of climate change and especially when it comes to protecting the health of the ocean, which is literally and figuratively the lungs of our world. As Dr Judy Mann-Lang, executive for strategy at Cape Town’s Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation points out, the ocean produces almost every second breath we take. It provides more oxygen than all of the world’s trees combined.

But for those who haven’t seen below the surface, the ocean is an abstract place. How do you get people to care enough about the overfishing, plastic pollution, ocean acidification, warming and other threats to make the necessary behavioural changes that will mitigate the harm to the sea?

Start with your end goal, says Mann-Lang, who is part of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Behaviour Change Task Force and has been researching how people use knowledge about the ocean since she started with the South African Association for Marine Biological Research in Durban way back in 1992.

An example she gave was to do with saving turtles. Plastic pollution kills many turtles because they mistake plastic for jellyfish. So your end goal could be to have people recycling effectively. To get there, understanding that human beings are emotional, not rational, is important, says Mann-Lang, so you’re going to need some sort of introduction to turtles in a movie or a book or an aquarium to stir the emotions so that people want to save them. And before you can get to the emotions, you’ve got to work on informing people about the turtles in a language they can understand and in a way that’s empowering, not blaming.

“If you keep on saying to people ‘you must do this, you mustn’t do that,’ people are starting to switch off. They’re getting tired of being told what they should not do, they want to know what they can proactively do to make a difference ,” says Mann-Lang.

“So how do you change a system so that you can give people alternatives?” Mann-Lang adds as part of her example. For her, it comes down to wider systems. There have to be systems in place that will enable the behaviour change before attempting to change the way people behave.

As a real life example, the People and Oceans unit of the Foundation is involved in a project with the V&A Waterfront to try to ensure that the dozens of restaurants in its precinct and in the new Granger Bay expansion are serving sustainable seafood.

Following two panel discussions and much behind the scenes research, next year the sustainable seafood programme will launch in earnest. “But what we’re looking at is not just saying to visitors ‘choose sustainable seafood,’ because when they walk into a restaurant they’ve got a whole lot of unsustainable choices.”

To take the next step, by going backwards in the chain of events, “what are we going to do with the chefs?” Mann-Lang says. “How are we going to persuade the chefs to sell primarily sustainable seafood? And that’s hard because they’re dealing with customer demand and also with their suppliers. So now what we’re saying is that we need to work with the suppliers and that’s going to be one of our focus areas for next year.”

If the suppliers can facilitate the chef’s choices and make it easy for the chefs to provide what the customers want at the right price, in the right season and of the right quality and it’s sustainable, then we’re starting to close that gap, says Mann-Lang. “So at the Foundation we’re thinking a lot more about how we can use our position to facilitate system changes that make it easy for people to make the right behavioural choices.”

There’s still got to be a knowledge component, though, she says. “You’ve got to know that something exists before you can even start to engage.”

Then comes the strong emotional component “and that’s getting out into nature, that’s seeing a fish, that’s experiencing whatever it is that helps people realise their interconnectedness with nature and the ocean. And sometimes that emotional component is a video of a straw coming out of a turtle’s nose. And you know how effective that was,” Mann-Lang says.

“But we have to start looking at enabling systems for the changes that we want. So if the only straw I ever get offered is a plastic straw, then I’m still probably going to use plastic straws. But we’ve got to move to the point where the plastic straw is not the default option.”

While Mann-Lang is a scientist of more than 30 years, president of the International Zoo Educators Association, on one of the UN Ocean Decade’s committees, the chair of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums Conservation Committee and the founder or co-founder of endeavours including MPA Day, the Marine and Coastal Educators Network and the #NotOnOurWatch African Penguin survival campaign she dares to do what others won’t. Mann-Lang talks about emotions and uses words like “love,” typically a big taboo in the scientific community. And she emphasises the role of community – none of us can do this alone. “Conservation is a team game”, she says and she is positive that together we are making a difference for the ocean.

But as she said when she gave the opening keynote address at the 7th International Marine Conservation Congress earlier this year, to care for the ocean, you need to care about people first and people are emotional. If you start with the end in mind, then understanding your audience, using the right language, building from the familiar to the unfamiliar, sharing the value of the ocean with people and preaching love, not loss and working together, you have some of the keys to unlocking the behaviour changes our seas so desperately need us to make.