AEEC Resource Reviews

Book Reviewed: Communication Skills for Conservation Professionals, by S. Jacobson
Video Reviewed: Forest Family Forever!, by the Rainforest Action Network
Resource Reviewed: Education for Sustainable Development Toolkit, by R. McKeown

Book Reviewed:
Communication Skills for Conservation Professionals
Author: Susan K. Jacobson
Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999
ISBN: 1-55963-509-6

When it comes to communication and environmental managers, complaints abound. “The public just doesn’t understand; how many times do I have to tell them?” “The media never print my information,” or worse, “They took a 10 second clip and distorted what I said.” In every field of natural resources, experienced managers instruct younger colleagues to learn how to talk to the public, to hone communication skills, and to figure out how to work with the media. There are still, however, plenty of people complaining.

Communication Skills for Conservation Professionals recognizes this growing deficit and works to correct it. It is first and foremost a readable resource for practitioners. Beginning with the basics of communication theory, influencing attitudes, and understanding the audience, the book sets the stage for effective, powerful communication strategies. Chapter 3 explains a step-by-step guide to launching a public communication campaign—from planning the objectives to testing the tools, implementing the program, and evaluating the success. Real cases from nature clubs, state and federal agencies, and environmental organizations provide concrete examples of how to discover what the audience knows, how to use advertising effectively, and what makes a good message.

In the next three chapters, Jacobson details how to use mass media, interpretation, and education programs to share a conservation message. Also known as informal, nonformal, and formal education strategies, these three approaches form the backbone of different ways to communicate. Each chapter provides background information, charts comparing strategies and tools, rules and guidelines for using the tools, quotes from conservation professionals, and myriad examples from conservation organizations and agencies around the world. Jacobson uses an informative and readable writing style, speaking directly to the reader: “Your challenge is to develop appropriate activities for specific target audiences.”

The last chapter explains how to use evaluation to improve programs or measure communication outcomes. In this era of accountability and external funding for many conservation activities, it is imperative to build evaluation strategies into communication programs. Jacobson offers time-tested tools, solid advice, and lessons from experience to guide conservation professionals through evaluation activities.

One component of communication skills not directly covered in this book is conflict resolution. Encompassing the art and science of negotiation and collaboration, resource managers may find themselves communicating to angry residents, explaining risks, defending species recovery plans that constrain traditional activities, or strategizing a long-term, multiparty, decision-making scheme. While the step-by-step instructions for situations like these are not included, the basics for any communication are: Know your audience, determine your objectives, use the most appropriate channels, simplify your message, and evaluate your products. With this foundation, amply illustrated and carefully explained, conservation professionals will stand a good chance of resolving a variety of conflicts.

Jacobson is well qualified to offer advice on all of these subjects. Her research interests cover international and domestic conservation activities, park interpretation, educational programs, and evaluation. Always seeking to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to educate and support conservation behaviors, Jacobson is an eloquent spokesperson for improved communication skills.

Review Author: Martha C. Monroe
School of Forest Resources and Conservation
University of Florida

Video Reviewed:
Forest Family Forever! Producer: Rainforest Action Network
Format: DVD or VHS
Ordering Information: Call 415-398-4404 or visit www.ran.org/ran/info_center/kidvideo.html

Forest Family Forever!, an award winning video, is billed as a “dynamic 14-minute video for grades 1–5,” guaranteed to “educate your students and to empower them with ways they can help save the rainforests.” The video relates a conversation between a thousand year-old tree in a temperate rainforest and his young sapling grandson. The trees are depicted using 3D computer animation that is augmented by video footage of rainforests around the world.

The discussion between the two trees begins with general information about rainforests. Grandpa tree describes the types of rainforests, temperate and tropical, as film footage depicts beautiful rainforest scenes. Grandpa provides delightful information about rainforest wildlife as the video footage shows spectacular images of panthers, mountain gorillas, bears, and threetoed sloth.

People are introduced as part of the rainforest as Grandpa enumerates the benefits rainforests provide. He explains that even people who live nowhere near a rainforest benefit from rainforest products like medicine, food, and services such as keeping the atmosphere clean and cool.

In this same discussion, Grandpa begins to talk about the different roles, attitudes, and actions of people in the rainforest. He says, “The people who live in the rainforest are known as indigenous people. They remember that we are all part of the same family. They haven’t forgotten that we (the rainforest) take good care of them.” As the video shows a logging truck dumping large trees into a river, the foundation is laid for seeing the rainforests as a place where the bad guys (money-making companies) are destroying the good guys (the indigenous people and the rainforests). The conversation continues as Grandpa tells the sad story of what happened to their great-great-great Uncle Douglas: “Back when you were still a seed in your father’s pine cone, some humans cut him down (sighs) and turned him into a pile of paper towels (said with disgust).” Grandpa goes on to tell how other family members have been logged by companies for access to oil and to create ranches for cattle that provide cheap meat. Admitting that there’s nothing wrong with companies making money, Grandpa states that it is a problem if they destroy the rainforest to do it.

Grandpa describes how some humans are helping the rainforests. People, including kids, are telling the companies to stop destroying the rainforests and are boycotting certain products. Instead of using paper made from virgin pulp, people are utilizing alternatives such as 100% recycled paper and tree-free paper made from kenaf. Plastic made out of plants other than trees is presented as another alternative. People are using mass transportation and bicycles more and are eating less beef, all in the name of helping save the rainforests.

The video concludes with a reminder that rainforests and people’s survival are linked. This message of interconnectedness between humans and the environment is an important one and the video does a good job of bringing the issue of rainforests closer to home.

The presentation of rainforest issues, however, is overly simplified. The audience is left with the impression that these issues, rather than being complex and intricate, are quite simple: a matter of good guys and bad guys. The suggestions for action are presented as easy, clearcut steps with no consideration to underlying consequences. Children should know that most environmental issues and their solutions are not simple but involve many different people, organizations, governments, and ideologies. Environmental issues are multidimensional and if a video for children is not the appropriate forum to dissect an enormous issue such as rainforest destruction, neither is it the place to propagate the myth that environmental issues can be solved by eliminating the bad guy.

The video implies that if children mimic the action steps provided, they too will save the rainforests. The connections between action and the anticipated result are not well explained. Nor does the video clarify that not all oil comes from beneath a rainforest and not all paper comes from rainforest trees. Before children become activists, they should learn to find out where their resources originate. Young people in the southeastern United States may stop using paper products, believing that these products come from rainforests; however, in that region, a great deal of paper comes from fastgrowing plantations that did not replace a rainforest.

The video was accompanied by a Forest Hero Action Packet, which includes a lesson plan, Action Alert, student fact sheets, and student activity sheets. The activity sheets, “Use Less Wood,” “Use Less Oil,” and “Eat Less Beef,” are an extension of the action steps suggested in the video. The fact sheets discuss wood, oil, beef, and the Rainforest Action Network’s Protect-an- Acre Program. The Activity Alert encourages kids to write to Boise Cascade, a producer and distributor of paper and pulp products, and ask them to stop logging old-growth trees and selling old-growth wood products. The Rainforest Action Network has made Boise Cascade one of the main targets of its action campaigns and a heated imbroglio between the two organizations has resulted. All the components of the Action Packet are fairly text heavy and would be more appropriate for older students.

While the video and accompanying Action Packet are certainly well made and pleasing to look at, they should not be the only activity used to present rainforests to children. Perhaps, as the introductory letter that accompanies the video suggests, these materials are best used in conjunction with a rainforest unit. Unlike what the letter suggests, the video may be more useful for older kids and might best be supplemented with a discussion about the complexity of environmental issues.

Review Author: Alison W. Bowers, Program Assistant
School of Forest Resources and Conservation/IFAS
University of Florida

Resource Reviewed:
Education for Sustainable Development Toolkit
Author: Rosalyn McKeown
Format: Self-published Web document at www.esdtoolkit.org

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a popular phrase without a common definition or widespread understanding. Arising from international conferences and reports, it provides a vocabulary for government delegates to discuss what citizens need to understand and how we need to reorient every aspect of our societies to move toward more sustainable ways of living. But it doesn’t help the teacher know what to say or do differently in the classroom.

The basic problem is that long-term solutions to broad societal change are best fabricated to meet local needs by communities of educators, leaders, and parents. At the same time, local leaders usually don’t have the ability or mission to retool their educational programs. National leaders then become frustrated that nothing happens. Consequently, efforts to implement Education for Sustainable Development are stymied before they are started. There is no automatic advocate who can be trained to prod and push the power structure.

If visionary teachers or program administrators ever wished to start a process to change their educational system toward ESD, however, this manual will help. It offers a brief, simple background in the ESD story to help communities understand what ESD is and why it is important. Always careful to avoid prescriptions, the tone of the material is politically safe but not specific. The basic message repeated in many contexts is that communities need to work together to determine their vision of sustainability, their goals for ESD, and the curriculum that will meet those goals. No one will do it for them.

The first five pages of this toolkit provide a short history and background to the confusing organizations, terms, and international lingo that accompany ESD. McKeown begins with the Brundtland Commission’s work on sustainable development, the Earth Summit’s Agenda 21, which describes efforts to achieve sustainability, and efforts to review progress in Chapter 36 of the Agenda—the section that focuses on promoting education, public awareness, and training. This chapter defines ESD with three major elements: (1) improving basic education, (2) reorienting education, and (3) increasing public understanding, awareness, and training. McKeown explains each very briefly, then dives into elements and challenges associated with one of these elements: reorienting education.

In explaining what is meant by reorienting education, McKeown provides lists of what knowledge could be included, what skills could be taught, what perspectives could be shared, and what values are appropriate for ESD. It is just enough to help the educator realize what ESD would look like in his or her community.

More depth (ten pages) is offered to explain a series of 12 challenges that plague efforts to implement ESD in every country. These twelve issues offer insight to the challenges of sweeping change efforts at the federal level; the implied answer is that communities must figure it out on their own. Although the list is excellent and no doubt accurate, it is unclear if this is McKeown’s personal reflection or an internationally sanctioned set of concerns.

The most valuable contribution of the toolkit is a set of 16 exercises that community leaders and educators can use to launch the conversations needed to build an ESD curriculum. A few are adaptations of familiar icebreakers or activities, but most provide a framework, handout, or discussion questions to address the essence of ESD. By using these exercises, educators should be able to build consensus around the goals and curriculum elements that should be included to help their communities approach ESD.

This toolkit is woefully short on case studies, examples, and imagery about what can be achieved in community-based ESD efforts, but there is one. The Board of Education in the city of Toronto, Ontario, recently orchestrated a massive effort to create an outcomes-based curriculum. The board involved over 7,000 people through focus groups and public meetings in reflecting on the question, “What should students know, do, and value by the time they graduate from school?” The answer is a concise framework of six goals that eloquently speaks to what every parent probably hopes for his or her child; what every community hopes for its next generation. Educators in Toronto used this framework to review the curriculum, build courses, tweak programs, and alter activities.

This is a wonderful example of a process of asking a community to participate in an important exercise, and using the information to redevelop education. Though sustainability was not part of the discussion, it is evident in the outcome, as thinking participants cannot help but reach a sustainable end.

One of the weakest elements of the toolkit is the lack of references to additional background material or to other programs, national efforts, or resources that could help guide the novice with ideas, strategies, or examples. Is it really necessary for every community to launch a public examination of curriculum, or could some communities begin with an assessment of Toronto’s outcomes? Smaller communities may be able to short-circuit the process by reflecting on how they are similar to and different from a town that has already invested in this process.

The Web-based format makes this toolkit available to all at no charge, but it also omits transitions from one section to another, as well as graphics to illustrate the text. For those who are looking for some handy ideas to motivate community members to consider their future, however, this toolkit offers an excellent point of departure.

Review Author: Martha C. Monroe
School of Forest Resources and Conservation
University of Florida