The World's Fair

In the scientific literature, the use of characters from the Pokemon franchise has been suggested as a possible way to broach biodiversity and conservation challenges.

True.

Specifically, this is in reference to a short letter that was published in Science in 2002 (29 March 2002. Vol 295: 2367) and entitled "Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon."

It starts:

According to E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis, humans have an innate desite to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life-forms. This in turn provides a powerful aesthetic argument for combating the present extinction crisis. Yet, as industrialization and urbanization reduce our direct interactions with nature, our interest in the variety of living things is perhaps becoming redirected towards human artifacts, with potentially grave consequences for biodiversity conservation.

Which simply means that if you stick a picture of some local flora or fauna (and we're talking common flora or fauna) iin front of your average 8 year old, you might be surprised at how seldom a correct identification is garnered, whereas under the right circumstances, you stick the below picture in front of that same 8 year old...

...and you find that they can identify and often spew out attributes for about three quarters of these characters. Here's how the authors of the paper put it:

Our findings carry two messages for conservationists. First, young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or man-made), being able to at age 8 to identify nearly 80% of a sample drawn from 150 synthetic "species." Second, it appears that conservationists are doing less well than the creators of Pokemon at inspiring interest in their subjects: During their primary school years, children apparently learn far more about Pokemon than about their native wildlife and nter secondary school being able to name less than 50% of common wildlife types.

As Confucius might say, "Holy freakin' moly! That can't be right." And so, the paper ends:

People care about what they know. With the world's urban population rising by 160,000 people daily, conservationists need to resetablish children's links with nature if they are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation. Is Ecomon the way ahead?"

And here's the thing - Ecomon? That's a cool idea. And really now - how hard would it be to produce such a character set, especially in this day and age of Web 2.0 and its sprawling network of graphic designers out there wanting to make a difference.

I'm actually reminded of a similar venture promoted by Boingboing a while back that called on this very community to provide images for the 700 Hobo Names Project. Boy, did they ever deliver!

So people, couldn't we do something similar for our kids and natural wildlife?