The World has many champions for the Olympics, economists have champions for free trade, physicists have champions for the Hadron Collider, astronomists for space telescopes, but who are the champions for the environment?  We have many environmental scientists who try to focus the public’s attention on endangered species, the state of agriculture, pollution of air and water, and the sustainability of marine fisheries, but they are too much ignored. Why do we have this puzzle that the health of the world we all live in is too often ignored when governments release their budgets?

There are several answers to this simple question. First of all, the ‘jobs and growth’ paradigm rules, and exponential growth is the ordained natural order. The complaint we then get is that environmental scientists too often suggest that studies are needed, and the results of these studies produce recommendations that will impede jobs and growth. Environmental science not only does not produce more dollar bills but in fact diverts dollars from other more preferred activities that increase the GDP.

Another important reason is that environmental problems are slow-moving and long-term, and our human evolutionary history shows that we are poor at dealing with such problems. We can recognize and adapt quickly to short-term problems like floods, epidemics, and famines but we cannot see the inexorable rise in sea levels of 3 mm per year. We need therefore champions of the environment with the charisma to attract the world’s attention to slow-moving, long-term problems. We have some of these champions already – James Hansen, David Suzuki, Tim Flannery, Paul Ehrlich, Naomi Klein – and they are doing an excellent job of producing scientific discussions on our major environmental problems, information that is unfortunately still largely ignored on budget day. There is progress, but it is slow, and in particular young people are more aware of environmental issues than are those of the older generation.

What can we do to change the existing dominant paradigm into a sustainable ecological paradigm? Begon (2017) argues that ecology is both a science and a crisis discipline, and his concern is that at the present time ecological ideas about our current crises are not taken seriously by the general public and policy leaders. One way to change this, Begon argues, is to reduce our reliance on specific and often complicated evidence and convert to sound bites, slogans that capture the emotions of the public rather than their intellect. So, I suggest a challenge can be issued to ecology classes across the world to spend some time brainstorming on suitable slogans, short appealing phrases that encapsulate what ecologists understand about our current problems. Here are three suggestions: “We cannot eat coal and oil – support agriculture”, “Think long-term, become a mental eco-geologist”, and “The ocean is not a garbage can”. Such capsules are not for all occasions, and we must maintain our commitment to evidence-based-ecology of course (as Saul et al. 2017 noted). That this kind of communication to the general public is not simple is well illustrated in the paper by Casado-Aranda et al. (2017) who used an MRI to study brain waves in people exposed to ecological information. They found that people’s attitudes to ecological messages were much more positive when the information was conveyed in future-framed messages delivered by a person with a younger voice. So perhaps the bottom line is to stop older ecologists from talking so much, avoid talking about the past, and look in the future for slogans to encourage an ecological world view.

Begon, M. 2017. Winning public arguments as ecologists: Time for a New Doctrine? Trends in Ecology & Evolution 32:394-396. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.03.009

Casado-Aranda, L.-A., M. Martínez-Fiestas, and J. Sánchez-Fernández. 2018. Neural effects of environmental advertising: An fMRI analysis of voice age and temporal framing. Journal of Environmental Management 206:664-675. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2017.10.006

Saul, W.-C., R.T. Shackleton, and F.A. Yannelli. 2017. Ecologists winning arguments: Ends don’t justify the means. A response to Begon. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 32:722-723. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2017.08.005