LIVE BLUE: Emotion + Reason for our Ocean
Lots of conversations I’ve had recently hinge around the apparent need to pit emotion against reason. My academic and capitalist friends promote the later and my activist friends, through their words, actions and body language, the former.
I hear professors guiding their students to beware the pitfalls of advocacy and to employ unbiased science. And business-minded, invisible-hand worshipers implore that the free market is the solution to all of our woes.
Looking back on our environmental and political history, we seem to be failing with this divided approach we’ve taken. At least steadily losing ground.
Perhaps a marriage of emotion and reason could serve us better. In fact, recent neuroscience research suggests that emotion springs from and contributes to reason.
Consider the ocean. For many people the ocean and coast are a place where their emotions can be freed from the confines of the daily grind. A walk on the beach, a swim, a paddle, a fishing trip, a sunset. Fresh air. Fresh seafood.
When I tell about what I do for a living, I often notice that people wander off to that ocean in their mind. It’s a place they like. I frequently hear: “I wanted to be a marine biologist...but...” When I listen to fishermen around the world I hear a common story, one full of nostalgia for a time when the fish were bigger and more numerous.
If we can connect to this emotional place, held by many in many different ways, and bring to it accurate information and solid recommendations, the way forward is full of possibilities. Those wishing to hold on to the status quo and ride it to the bottom will have a hard time spinning our message. And, perhaps, will find their own truth in it as well...and join our cause. Which is, in fact, their cause too.
To create political change, David Brooks suggests that we “offer people an accurate view of the world and a good set of policies that seem likely to produce good results.”
The recent eco-documentary by Leo DiCaprio and a cast of more than 50 experts achieves just that, beginning with life and evolution and ending with dance-powered night clubs.
Rather than rely on spin and over-simplified (and potentially inaccurate) clichés, we can harness the clarity and synergy of emotion, intuition and reason to build a stronger ocean conservation movement. Direct, appealing language based in rational thought and our best science, wielded wisely to create alignment with nature’s realities.
In other words: LIVE BLUE.
August 31, 2007