Conservation Appeal

In this speech, given in 1950 at the dawn of the television age, Sigurd discusses the difficulty of getting adequate media coverage of environmental issues. Despite the immense changes in media technology over the decades since he made these remarks, many of the same problems exist today. The photo at right was taken in 1950.

A short time ago, I talked with the manager of a lecture bureau on the possibilities of conservation. After I had explained, the manager said, "Conservation is not sufficiently appealing to our audiences. People will not pay for something that sounds like a government bulletin."

Later, I talked to the chairman of a program committee. Again the answer, "When we advertise a conservation program, no one comes." I asked why. "Because," the chairman answered, "it sounds uninteresting. People want to be entertained, not preached at."

Anyone attending any major conservation conference has noted the appalling lack of news coverage. Reporters invariably admit the stories are not there, that there is nothing to make headlines. One of them told me, "You can't make an exciting story out of game or fish propagation, or about the planting of trees, or the evils of erosion. While important, those things are prosaic, not the sort of thing we're looking for."

During the last Wildlife Conference at the Statler Hotel in Washington, a banquet was held for the purpose of making awards in a nation-wide essay contest. Time Magazine was there, so was Life, and most of the newspapers. Flash bulbs were popping, wires speeding the great news to all parts of the country. That banquet was front page news and Time devoted more space to it than to the entire proceedings of the Wildlife Conference.

Why this lethargy in reporting the conservation story, why the apathy and lack of interest by the public? In the same breath we might ask, and why such excitement over a boy and girl receiving a national award? How could such an event crowd from the pages of a great magazine information that was of vital importance to the welfare and happiness of millions?

From an editorial standpoint, the answer is simple. People make news. That boy and girl made news. The average reader is interested in what means something to him personally, in what he can understand and enjoy. He is stimulated by whatever stirs his emotions, shies from anything boring or impersonal.

People still do not feel the relationship of conservation to their lives and never will until writers bridge the gap. This cannot be done until the writers themselves feel deeply about it, have the knowledge necessary and emphasize the all important angle of human interest.

Americans are prone not to move until their very existence is threatened. We are a nation of procrastinators, always hoping for the best until faced with catastrophe. Then when forced, we plunge in with everything we've got and usually win out in the end. But it is a dangerous formula and some day it might fail.

We watch with vague misgivings the formation of a dust bowl, our wildlife, our forests vanishing before our eyes, see our rivers in silt-choked annual flood, know the water table everywhere is dropping so fast that important areas are facing disaster. Our experts warn and quote statistics, but no one gets excited, except perhaps those immediately affected, and even they have too much faith in our ingenuity to be overly worried.

New York with its recent water shortage came close to making the public think, but when a temporary solution was proposed, people went back to their complacency. The real solutions, reforestation of the watershed, pollution abatement, and the initiation of a thousand schemes to conserve water and reduce consumption would have taken time. Like most resource failures, this, too, was beyond the realm of personal responsibility. Any immediate expedient was preferable.

Every year we watch Congress quibbling over the small appropriations to our conservation agencies, watch billions being allocated for every conceivable purpose but the all important one of keeping America's natural resources in a healthy condition. We see these agencies fighting for their very existence, pleading for the niggardly amounts they need to carry on research and their programs of conservation. We watch them year after year trying to make ends meet, doing a magnificent job in the face of limited budgets and slashed personnel. If this is the will of the people, then we have work to do.

What will it take to make America conservation conscious? What will it take to make Congress stop its quibbling over conservation budgets? How can the message of our resources be told so that the people will recognize its importance and demand action? When will conservation make the headlines?

These questions may seem impossible of immediate solution, but there is a growing conviction that conservation will become important news only when human interest is recognized as the key, when the story of natural resources is linked with people's inherent feelings toward the out-of-doors, when it is told so simply, forcibly, and dramatically, that it will appeal to everyone. This is not the first time such an idea has been broached, nor will it be the last. Others have emphasized it, but it is so vital, that only through constant repetition in which its many aspects are explored, will its real meaning ever become clear.

Any outdoor writer knows that a man will get excited if he is told he can't go duck hunting in his favorite slough, or that fishing in his trout stream is through, or that a bottomland for pheasants is to be flooded. When he hears that sort of thing, it strikes home in a way that hurts. He wants to fight back and do something about it because it affects him personally. This type of threat is something he understands. It means more than talk of erosion, dropping water tables, annual increments, or sustained yield. This he can see and feel. That duck marsh means more than ducks, it means the whistle of wings at dawn, the sight of a flock heading into the sunset. That trout stream means the song of a whitethroat at dusk, a speckle taking a fly, the swish of water around his boots. What does that old bottomland mean? Not only a bag of pheasants, but the quivering of a dog at point, the nerve-tearing sound of a rooster taking to the air, the sound of guns in the morning. Such personal threats awaken a thousand memories woven together into a subconscious pattern that means happiness and fun and worthwhile living. When conservation stories tap such a base of feeling, not only in cases like this, but in all problems of resource management touching the lives of all, then they will have the appeal they need to put them across.

In the short space of this paper, it is impossible to more than hint at how such appeal can be achieved. Its solution is a challenge to every writer in American and will take the best thinking and correlation of the experience of many before it will be found. The ways of finding it will not doubt be as diverse as the individuals trying. Many are working on it now and some have shown the way, but not until thousands begin to concentrate their best efforts on every conceivable phase of public relations work will its effect be appreciable.

During the past two years, two conservation issues have received the kind of coverage that indicates emotional appeal—the Jackson Hole controversy and the matter of the Air Space Reservation over the Roadless Areas of the Superior National Forest. Why were these issues hot news stories? Because a great many people were interested in them personally. To many they were private and personal wars and the outcomes exciting. To the Jackson Hole group, it meant packhorses, mountain meadows and snowy peaks; to the people who knew the canoe country, vistas of wilderness lakes, ancient portages, and the haunting cry of the loons. These two problems, both terminated successfully during the past few months, point up the truth that such questions can be appealing if feelings are stirred sufficiently. They show what might happen in any major conservation issue if somehow it can be tied up with people's personal experience.

The man who writes an outdoor column meets this challenge of human interest every day of his life. The easy way is to tell how Ed Smith caught a string of bass on Wampus Creek and forget the pollution that is destroying the fishing there. He knows such crepe hanging is never popular reading. If, however, during the years past, he could have told the real story of Wampus Creek, its history, its ecology, its effect upon the happiness of everyone in the community, cultivated by constant repetition an appreciation and understanding of it, then the growing pollution problem would have been news and his readers ready to do something about it. It doesn't have to be a Jackson Hole, or a wilderness canoe country, or any other romantic or superlative region. It can be Wampus Creek or any close-to-home, commonplace little area, any one of the hundreds of thousands of intimate little corners or this continent where the average man has his fun.

Arthur Carhart stated recently, that there are between twenty and thirty million people interested in hunting and fishing and that the outdoorsman spends annually between six and eight times the amount of the gate receipts for all spectator sports combined. In view of this information, it is difficult to understand why the out-of-doors and conservation problems get little coverage while spectator sports always make the headlines. It points up a cold fact, however, that so far writers have failed to tap a real source of interest latent in a great segment of our population, have failed to put in the kind of appeal needed in writing about the out-of-doors to merit more space.

How can editors be blind in the face of such figures? How can writers fail to make the necessary shift in emphasis? One of the answers may be sheer inability to put the story across. While it is within the realm of possibility for any reporter who has a real feeling for the out-of-doors to do this sort of thing, it may also take actual study and a background in conservation knowledge.

In recognition of this need, Iowa State has made a move in the right direction by offering course work in conservation journalism. Minnesota has also begun tying in the study of journalism with a solid background of wildlife and resource management. Such writers may be able to do at a conference such as this what reporters have failed to do in the past, translate scientific research into stories that can be understood by the public. Other universities will no doubt follow suit and, eventually, a group of young writers will be ready who may know how to make conservation hit the headlines. The stories are there but it will take writers with the know-how and the understanding to breathe life into them and give them appeal.

It is encouraging that there seems to be a growing agreement as to what is needed. Those who are writing now must try to fill the gap immediately and some are doing an excellent job, but they are far too few in number.

Mike Hudoba, Washington correspondent for Sports Afield, pounded this truth home at Lake Success last August. "Conservation," he said, "is one of the last untold stories of journalism, a challenge for the young writer, an opportunity for the established journalist. The training of conservation scientists must be down to earth, including public relations and practical journalism if the public is to become conservation minded."

Magazines as a whole have done a better job than the newspapers. Witness the series on pollution in Sports Afield by Bill Wolff, the old game warden stories by Harold Titus in Field and Stream, Harold Martin in the Saturday Evening Post, Arthur Carhart in the Atlantic Monthly, Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman in the last American, the editorials in Collier's and you see enlightened policy. Such magazines have shown what can be done, have demonstrated that conservation stories can be written with enough dramatic appeal so that people will read them. It takes skill to do this sort of thing. It takes imagination and knowledge of how the average reader feels about the out-of-doors, but it also takes an understanding of what conservation means and a background of factual information.

If it can be done in the magazines, then it can be done in the newspapers. The gap between the scientist and the public can be bridged. The ability to translate figures, statistics, and graphs into ordinary language and vitalizing the story with universal appeal can usher in a new era for conservation. It doesn't take a genius to do this sort of thing, but it does take conscious effort. While it is important for scientists to write so that others in related fields can benefit by the results of their research, it is just as important that their findings eventually reach the public who in the last analysis controls the purse strings of government and who determines whether or not such information will be used.

Robert Beatty, conservation director of the Izaak Walton League, in speaking before a Midwest conference, said, "I am convinced that until the public is informed, the conservation movement will continue to be a voice crying in the wilderness; of immediate concern to a handful, but of almost no interest to the millions."

One cannot speak of public relations today without considering the possibilities of moving pictures and television. These media are wide open, fields we have just begun to develop. Nothing tells a story as simply or as powerfully as a picture and the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is certainly true.

Last year, the Quetico-Superior Committee made the documentary film, "Wilderness Canoe Country," to tell the story of the many battles to save this area from exploitation. To be successful, it had to be more than just another travelogue, had to have the right kind of appeal. The long conservation effort was woven therefore around the story of a canoe trip of a father and his son, the attempt of the father to show his boy the kind of wilderness he had once known. The thread of human interest carried the message, meant audience participation for every father and son who say that film.

The U.S. Forest Service, the Fish and Wildife Service, and other agencies have done valuable pioneering in the field of the documentary. Their films, the Living Earth series by the Conservation Foundation and the New York Zoological Society and others are indicative of what has been done. If short documentaries of not over ten to fifteen minutes in length could be produced for theater use, the possibilities would be infinite. Moving pictures and television are waiting for something new, something that will stir the hearts and imaginations of their ever hungry public. These media will reach into every community in America for people will look at screens who cannot be driven to read. The conservation story, properly handled could be the answer and it it were, nothing would so swiftly educate the public.

While conservation education in the schools may seem removed from other fields of public relations, the same identical concept of appeal must be adhered to if it is to become really effective. Without it understanding is impossible and conservation course work runs the risk of becoming just more subject matter to be endured.

Quoting Bertrand Russell, "Spontaneous delight is no longer felt as something which is important to enjoy. As man grows more industrialized and regimented, the kind of delight common in children becomes impossible to adults."

In conservation education we can play on the development and retention of this inherent capacity of children to find delight and enjoyment in simple and natural things. With adults who have lost it, it means trying to recapture the old receptiveness, but with children it is merely a question of how to use it to best advantage.

In everyone there is a nostalgic remembrance of things past, but in children impressions are still alive and dominant. With them it is not nostalgia; it is the present vibrating and real. They still have their capacity for whole souled enjoyment, their original sense of awe and wonder. Natural phenomena live and pulsate before young eyes. No child need be told of the wonders of the out-of-doors. This sense of living awareness until killed by dry statistics and uninspired teaching may be the surest way of approach. Conservation must first be interpreted in the only way a child can really understand, not through facts, or logic, or reason but through the senses and emotions. Failure to recognize this premise and the opportunity of developing permanent enthusiasm may be lost.

There has been much done by the National Committee on Policies in Conservation Education, by such agencies as state planning boards, the 4-H Club Program and others. It is not the purpose of this paper to even begin to comment on the splendid progress they have made in many different fields. In surveying the growing literature of recommendations and studies, it is encouraging to note an increasing emphasis on the principle of physical participation in conservation projects and teaching out-of-doors. This indicates recognition of the basic premise of appeal through individual experience. Children remember field trips and practical projects and through them conservation is inevitably associated with woods and waters and open fields, memories that never fail to stir their emotions. The real success that has already been achieved proves that any program based on a child's inherent love of nature and sense of spiritual oneness with the out-of-doors cannot help but be fruitful.

Here again is the identical challenge confronting speakers, writers, scientists, the entire public relations field. If conservation is ever to become part of everyone's thinking, if in the words of Aldo Leopold, everyone is to develop an instinctive "ecological consciousness," then the issue must be met. We can no longer evade it, but the solving will take vision, imagination, and hard work. The very fact that many recognize what is needed is encouraging, but still more important is the growing evidence of actual accomplishments in the many diverse fields attempting to popularize and interpret conservation.

In spite of the bridges to be crossed and a public still largely unaware that America's leadership depends upon a healthy and sound base of natural resources, there seems to be a definite glow on the conservation horizon. This glow may be the dawn of a new era, one in which an aroused people will at least understand the conservation story. When that time comes, the public will make its wishes known. Congress will stop quibbling and the out-of-doors will get the coverage it deserves.

That can happen if we develop the ingenuity to tell our story, if we can weave into conservation an appeal based on inherent appreciation and love of the out-of-doors, if we can translate facts and figures into human interest, breathe life and warmth into the complex problems confronting us.