Shifting Baselines

Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org

O.K., I know that "Politics Tuesday" is supposed to be about D.C. politics, not mass mobilization, but what's a political junkie to do when Congress is on vacation but think about how to move the masses who don't seem to care about your issue?

Congress is finally back in session today, and so hopefully we'll have some scoop to report next week. Word on the street is that we may start to see some action on OCEANS-21.

In the meantime, though, let's finish up the mass mobilization thread, because it's really a crucial piece of politics as it's practiced today.

Last Friday brought this thought-provoking piece in the Washington Post from Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute (a free-market think tank) about polling on global warming. Bottom line: people believe it's happening, but think that it's a "problem for the future."

More important to our discussion, Bowman writes that "[p]olling on environmental issues over the past several decades shows that people are usually most concerned about problems they can see in their communities."

This to me is our biggest problem in getting people activated on ocean issues: they have a hard time seeing or feeling most of the destruction that happens in the oceans, and so no matter how much we squawk about it, it's a "problem for the future."

It does explain, however, why people get a lot more worked up about a beach closure than the disappearance of blue-fin tuna, or the massive destruction of key ocean habitat by bottom-trawling: they simply can't see it or feel it, and so it's either not real, or it has less resonance.

I don't know how we solve this problem, and there are certainly more adept media minds than mine thinking about it constantly, but we'll always be constrained in what we can accomplish politically until we figure it out.

And I know we've made great strides in being able to get footage of bottom-trawling, but I still don't think it's the same as walking through a clear-cut and feeling that mix of sorrow, rage and impotence that only comes from first-hand experience of that kind of destruction. Those are emotions that can be channeled into action.

But I've never had a favorite spot in the ocean destroyed by bottom-trawling, so is it real?