by Connie O’Connor, Director of Applied Learning at Cincinnati Nature Center in Milford, Ohio
Most nature centers want people to enjoy, understand and protect nature. But how do we successfully motivate our visitors and members to develop the personal, public, and political will needed for systemic change?
At Cincinnati Nature Center (CNC), we’ve developed a plan to empower people to connect with their communities and local leaders, with the idea that their positive impact will ripple out from there. We continue to pilot and refine our work and are almost ready to offer our course to other nature centers. Our hope is that the next time an anxious guest or member asks one of your naturalists, “Should I choose paper or plastic?” or “Do my actions really matter?”, they will be able to say “It’s complicated, but why don’t you join me in a course that will help answer that question.” We provide course content and also guidance on how local nature center staff can use the material to deepen their connection to their own members, volunteers, and guests.
A Flawed Theory of Change
Many nature centers were founded in the early 1970s, riding a wave of bipartisan good vibes best reflected in the many environmental policies and agencies that sprung up around the first Earth Day. Examples include the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency. The term “environmental education” was used to describe ways we would prepare citizens to solve current environmental problems and prevent new ones. And the theory of change was often explained using a quote that, at its best, is an incomplete theory of change:
In the end, we protect what we love;
We love what we understand;
We understand what we’re taught.
This quote makes educators feel great but is mostly wishful thinking. Protecting what we love is often not simple nor easy, and therefore nature center guests are usually given simple suggestions like making better consumer choices or using less resources. Most people suspect that their private lifestyle choices cannot address the scope of environmental problems, but don’t know what else to do. And even the most well-intended nature lover is limited by real and imagined barriers to action, with perhaps the biggest barrier being a resistance to talking to others who have different opinions and priorities.
When we do manage to talk with others who see things differently, we might choose to “hold our ground,” “dig in our heels,” “speak our truth,” and “take a stand.” But this is often counterproductive. It’s nothing new to see people dogmatically stating their opinions as if they were facts, pointing fingers, passing judgements, and making assumptions about one another’s motives, values, and character. So much more can be accomplished when we start from a place of common ground, and in fact many Americans tend to overestimate the difference in ideology between their side and their opponents’.
Complex environmental and social problems can trigger people, since most of us tend to dislike ambiguity and uncertainty. We humans prefer to rush toward closure rather than remain open to new information. It takes self-awareness and intellectual humility to be willing to change one’s mind or compromise, and if we expect that from others, we need to practice it ourselves. This is how we stay connected when considering thorny issues.
To Protect Nature, We Must Connect With One Another
In his 1981 farewell address, President Jimmy Carter expressed concern that Americans were losing faith in their government’s ability to solve the country’s problems. He worried that citizens were turning to single-issue groups and special interest organizations to ensure that whatever else happened, their own views and private interests would be protected. When this happens, nobody wins.
At a time when the burden of trying to protect our country’s natural resources falls largely to “environmental” groups, Cincinnati Nature Center is working to help people assert that the environment is not a “special interest,” but a universal one. We all need clean air, water, soil, and food. It is possible to unify as we did in the past in a nonpartisan effort to ensure a thriving economy without poisoning ourselves and our loved ones. We can preserve the natural beauty of our communities and country while also enjoying a high quality of life.
To help people do so, our nature center has spent the past few years developing and piloting programs that give participants the knowledge, skills, and motivation to connect, not just with like-minded nature enthusiasts, but with local decision makers, neighbors, businesses, and community institutions. We are using the term “conservation civics” to describe the efforts of citizens to understand and work within the social, political, and economic structures of their communities to protect local natural resources. We are seeing how this approach empowers citizens to build bridges in divided times, healing both our environment and our communities.
Now More Than Ever, We the People Must Step Up
While some people debate the efficiency of government-led programs to solve environmental problems, the need for solutions is undebatable. Pollution doesn’t stay put, but moves through air, water, and soil, making it everyone’s problem. Microplastics in our lungs, chemicals in our food and water, and heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere have deadly consequences. As citizens connect with one another to discuss ways to improve the quality of their communities, part of the conversation must focus on a healthy environment and sustainable use of natural resources. And citizens who engage with and/or serve within their local political system can have real influence on conservation.
To solve environmental problems and prevent new ones, citizens need the knowledge and motivation to address conservation in their communities through better relationships, respectful discussions, community organizing, and collective problem solving. Public schools seldom teach these topics, nor things such as intellectual humility, values-based communication, mindfulness or even an understanding of municipal political structures. Adults at our nature center often say they feel unprepared to engage in civic life, and this barrier prevents them from effectively advocating for nature.
The Power of The Ripple Effect
One of CNC’s primary programs in conservation civics is The Ripple Effect, a six-week course where students watch video lectures and do their readings on a digital learning platform before meeting live on Zoom or in person. The students are adults, many in their 50s and older, but some as young as 25. They often arrive curious, confused, frustrated, or scared. They graduate determined, hopeful, and ready to engage for the greater good. The material is presented as a series of actions and behaviors that ripple outward from personal to public to political will.
Building Personal Will and Growing Public Will
In our course, we begin by examining what it takes to maintain the personal will to do hard things on a regular basis. We focus on values and identities and examine barriers to action. We look at the top personal lifestyle and consumer actions that Project Drawdown and the United Nations emphasize to address both climate change and loss of biodiversity, and participants discuss what stands in their way.
We then move on to examine ways to mobilize others to join us. We discuss what is not helpful (fact dumping, judging, preaching to the choir) and what is helpful (seeking first to understand and appeal to the other person’s motivations and barriers, offering assistance, storytelling, making change fun and social). We explore the power of social diffusion and why we should make our actions visible.
Influencing Political Will
Through civic engagement, we can move the needle toward more pleasant, healthy, and life-affirming communities. We might want to walk or bike to work, but there are no sidewalks or bike lanes. We want less development and more greenspace but have no right to tell others what to do with their land. We want downward-facing lights to protect dark skies, native plants along roadsides, or an aggregated price for green-sourced electricity, and aren’t sure how to help decision makers prioritize these things.
The trustees, commissioners, mayors, administrators, planners, and/other decision makers in our communities are real people doing their best and giving their time for the common good, or at least we hope they are. While national politics feels out of reach, local politics is absolutely within reach. We invite course participants to attend public meetings, volunteer for committees and advisory councils, and help out at elections and other municipal events. We explain that as they start to reliably and respectfully show up and offer help, they’ll meet new people and become known as someone who cares and can be trusted. People, even those in public office, are more likely to be influenced by those they know and trust.
As they discover the complexity of local issues and the various perspectives needed to address them, course participants start to question the common narrative of polarization and mistrust. They come to have less moral outrage and more empathy, because most folks are doing their best– often with different priorities and life experiences.
While helping make their communities an economically and environmentally healthy place to live, play, and work, we remind students that they might also come to experience a stronger sense of belonging, connection, and purpose. Nature and people may thrive as goodwill ripples out to state and eventually national decision makers. The “ripple effect” describes our theory of change about how to influence big improvements for the environment and society by moving the needle locally.
We’re All in This Together
So far, Cincinnati Nature Center has offered The Ripple Effect online for use at two organizations beyond our own, and will soon make it available for nature centers everywhere. Feedback from participants includes, “If you can only take one course this year – take this one!” and “This course was so engaging and empowering – just what I needed!” There is a fee to host the course on our digital learning platform, and you can pass this fee directly to the students themselves. The live follow-up can be done with or without CNC involvement, depending on your budget and preferences. In other words, the course is flexible in how it can be used. Please contact me directly if you have an adult audience that might benefit from your nature center’s use of this course.
Together, we can help people strengthen and broaden social networks, adopt an attitude of intellectual humility, and use their words carefully to build bridges for better conservation outcomes. As we help people rediscover the skills of civil discourse, collective action, and civic engagement that made the first Earth Day successful, we might find that our daily lives are enhanced not only by our connections to nature, but also to one another. Join us!
—
Connie O’Connor can be reached at
Advertisements
