Shifting Baselines

Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org

I'd like to go a little farther with points that both Dave and Randy have made in the last week, and that's the relationship between a mobilized constituency and our ability to achieve real political change for the oceans. I'm fond of saying that politicians need two things - money and votes - and if you can't get them either of those things (and preferably both), then there's a limit to what they will do for you.

One of the reasons that Dave and I started Ocean Champions was to be able to participate in the political game, and to give politicians what they need to get re-elected. Not on a quid pro quo basis, obviously, but with the understanding that politics has certain rules, and you have to play by them if you want to win.

Well, making contributions to politicians is one thing, but being able to turn out votes for them is quite another. Randy's focus on mass motivation is directly related to Dave's point about building the army. The public doesn't realize what a world of hurt the oceans are in, and therefore they're not communicating a high level of concern to their politicians. Those politicians keep track of the issues constituents contact them about, and therefore know what the hot buttons are, and thus what might cause them to lose an election.

Unfortunately, the oceans aren't one of them.

And it might be even worse than I thought. Ocean Champions last week launched an insight survey, and our early results indicate that even the people on our own email list (who all signed up voluntarily) don't rate "ocean health" as one of the "top 3 urgent environmental conservation issues."

We'll release the full results in a couple of weeks, but the answers to this question definitely point to a lingering problem: even the environmentally-aware public doesn't understand the problems with the health of the oceans, and that directly affects our ability to mobilize voters to elect politicians who give a damn.

But there's a huge disconnect here, however, because something like 70% of our population lives within a hour of the ocean, presumably because they like it so much. And yet they remain largely oblivious or apathetic about its fate. Short of running around like Chicken Little, how are we going to crack this nut?

This reef can't call its Representative when it needs something.