a musing medium

exploring the confluence of ideas in environment and communication. EECO500 and EECO503 posts are identified by their unique hashtags

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“That’s the end of the story?”

Clearly, I hadn’t thought carefully about where I was going with it—in fact, I wasn’t following any sort of plan.

My 6 year-old son rolled on his shoulder peered up at me from his bed. His cheeks were flushed, a sign that he was moments away from sleep. He was now wide awake, and practically yelled, “That’s the end of the story?” This is his signal of disapproval or confusion, but thankfully he and my other kids are gracious in their tolerance of nonsensical and poorly planned plots. But I know if I’ve made up a particularly good bedtime story, there will be a long pause and he’ll finally ask me to tell him another story. If he’s still awake.

The truth is, it’s not just my kids at bedtime. We all love narrative. I find myself particularly attracted to narratives that see its characters move through epic stories of formation, loss, rescue, and restoration. Although it’s not always in that order and sometimes there is some jumping around, I’ve been thinking about these as key themes that resonate deeply with people and their own experience.

Paul J. Zak makes a compelling case for the power of story in influencing “our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.” His article in the Harvard Business Review describes how stories of human struggle and triumph elicit empathy along with measurable increases in oxytocin levels. This state, he argues, increases motivation and cooperation. When we are hearing a captivating human narrative, our attention is coupled with a ready-to-learn state and the brain is ready to absorb more information.

So what?

Recently, my wilderness program included a new element on a multi-day backpacking trip. We tried eliciting “life story” from our teenaged participants. Every student had a chance to respond to  a guiding question like, “tell us a story about your life.” I was curious how it would go (or realistically, I was curious if would be a total flop) but I decided to wait until we were a couple days into the journey. I was hopeful that everyone would participate, and in the end everybody really enjoyed it. Interestingly, it was the listening the people mentioned, not just the chance to be heard and understood. The group seemed more comfortable with itself after the last student shared, and we were ready to go deeper with other elements of our program.

With some of my recent ambivalence in my position as wilderness guide and group facilitator, it was helpful to read Lak today and realize that I’m already making space for narrative. I recognize that I too, feel more engaged with people after hearing narrative about them. Even hearing speeches made by others in their honour can elicit a sense of knowing and empathy.

Now if I would only plan my made-up fantastical stories a little better, I may get some more sleep.

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Transforming Scale: Navigation, Perceiving the Biosphere, and Wonder

In less than a week, I will be teaching a group of university students who are learning to become outdoor leaders. I look forward to these opportunities for many reasons, and this year I’m happy to have a captive audience to apply some of my environmental learning theory techniques! 

This trip is special in that the focus is on building a strong foundation of personal wilderness travel skills, including a big emphasis on alpine navigation. My approach to framing navigation skill is to zoom way out and look at the very idea of staying oriented, and what mindset is required for this to occur more naturally. This is in contrast to approaching navigation through various tools and technology, which I have found doesn’t work as well.

Avoiding disorientation means staying attentive and perceptive to your immediate environment. Even subtle perceptions become cues to locate your position in space, and not just when you stop for a “navigation check” but rather all throughout the day. The most important and powerful tool in wilderness navigation is the brain of the traveller. And if its sensory power is to be used, it needs to be employed! An attentive mindset, willing to perceive its environment isn’t just important for the outdoor leader, it is a key element in fostering a sense of wonder.

Often, before I teach a navigation course, I ask students to “fly” our area of travel with Google Earth (GE) in order to start “seeing” terrain features and potential travel routes. If the student is not familiar with interpreting topographic maps, GE is the best way to start, and I will often drape a 2-dimensional topo map onto the digital elevation model in the 3D GE environment. Students can explore on their laptop screen, and the visceral, real mountains are reduced to pixels, and kilometres are traversed with keystrokes. The scale is completely transformed, and it is a lot of fun.

However, the real fun begins as students begin the planned route in the real world. Scale is transformed again, and it usually hits a few students by surprise. As we work between our topo maps and visible terrain, the navigator’s mind struggles to make connections, but when they do, it is exciting and rewarding. Pointing at wrinkles in contour lines on the map with a spruce needle, then up to a cliff band, students exclaim, “This here, is that, THERE?!”

So big deal, Mattias. This is that, there. 

I love these moments because students end up locating themselves in space by being attentive and interpreting clues, by using new skills that are difficult to learn. I see them begin to wonder, sometimes aloud, how big the planet is. Therefore, in keeping with cultivating a sense of wonder in my students, I am planning to blow their minds. With a golf ball, and a 15-foot diameter rock once carried by a glacier in the South Chilcotin mountains.

Going from Google Earth to real-life is one thing. I’m going to blow them into outer space. If earth were the size of a golf ball, then the sun would be a sphere measuring 15 feet in diameter! The scale is mind-numbing. But wait, there’s more. That evening, with a look into the stars and the universe beyond, I hope to point out Orion. One of its stars, Betelgeuse, is even bigger than the sun. In fact, if earth were the size of a golf ball, Betelgeuse’s diameter would be the height of six empire state buildings stacked. --source wikipedia

Cue dumbstruck wonder. Hopefully we will be able to speak in the morning. 

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Google Earth users: you already know that, depending on which layers you select on the left sidebar, Google Earth offers an amazing, immersive and interactive rich-media map experience. 

In this screenshot, there are over 12 ocean-related layers you can turn on. You can even track pelagic predators like the tagged great white sharks off the California coast! Just think of all the place-based narratives that belong to all the photos people have taken on the coast or while on the ocean.

It’s really too bad that there isn’t an opportunity for ordinary people to share their place-based narratives in a media-rich, interactive map format. It seems that we’re only left with people’s sunset photos and stories of ocean science. There certainly is room for the human stories, to increase awareness and engagement with our oceans. Oh well.

Interestingly, the white line on this screenshot is Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

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Deconstructed Meatball Sandwich: A Self-Reflective, Sociocognitive Perspective

By Mattias Morrison, EECO503

Suppose you were hungry for a saucy meat sandwich. If you were to find this sandwich board reading, “Come in and try the WORST meatball sandwich that one guy on yelp ever had in his LIFE,” you would likely have some interesting thoughts before making a decision.

Seen from a sociocognitive perspective, these thoughts inform your action in that moment, and WAY more is happening in your mind than a simple decision to order a sandwich or continue walking. Social cognition theory wants to understand how and which social factors shape cognitive function, ultimately determining behaviour. 

Since our sentient species has capacity for self reflection, Albert Bandura (2001) explains the types of thought verification processes that you, as a hungry sandwich-seeker, may employ in the moment:

Social thought verification - since you haven’t experienced the meatball sandwich yet, you check your thoughts against what society thinks about the sandwich, perhaps the collective Yelp rating.

Vicarious thought verification - the “one guy on Yelp,” experienced the sandwich to be the WORST. Will his experience be an analogue for yours? Is it correct for you to order the sandwich? Is anyone else inside throwing a meatball sandwich in the bin?

Enactive thought verification - you choose to order and eat the meatball sandwich and match up the correctness of your thought to act based on the consequences of acting. You decided to take action, eat it, and interpret the results for yourself. Was it the WORST?

Logical thought verification - following your eating experience, you find the sandwich to be very satiating and tasty, and you check your thoughts for errors. Was it wrong to consider vicarious verification? Was it wrong to consider Yelp or some guy’s sandwich experience? 

Wow. With all due respect to the field of psychology and Bandura, I am thankful to only briefly engage with this level of cognitive theory breakdown-- what an onerous task!

I do, however, find humour in one shop owner’s rejection of an individual opinion about a humble sandwich. It’s almost a dare to enact individual experience without consulting what other people think. How audacious! 

As I lean towards experiential education naturally, I say, “Be a boss. Eat the sandwich!” 

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selfiecity

Investigating the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world.

By Mattias Morrison, EECO 503

The Age of Personalization: The Importance of Beautiful and Immersive Data Visualization 

A diverse team of researchers representing neurosciences, cognitive science, data management, programming, design and visualization converged on what I think is a fascinating topic, especially considering our present age of personalization (and narcissism?). The selfie.

This team used academic research methods for a selfie photo dataset and discovered interesting findings such as head-tilt angle by city, smile distribution, demographic metrics and more. Authors reflected on these data and findings and wrote essays, one notably titled, “The Selfie: Making sense of the “Masturbation of Self-Image” and the “Virtual Mini-Me”

These findings are interesting, yet I am more intrigued by how wonderfully this website allows for an immersive user experience, and how beautiful data is visualized. By contrast, many of the academic articles I have been reading during this MAEEC residency do a terrible job of displaying data, utilizing only ASCII text and greyscale bar and line graphs. The capital letter X makes many sad appearances in data tables. I don’t even try to visually interpret these data; I feel forced to rely on the author’s written interpretation, which makes me feel less engaged as a learner. Shouldn’t authors care about how their precious, hard-won data is visualized? My sense is that academics need to consider visual design because it impacts reader engagement.

The SelfieCity website is clean and beautiful to look at, but the real experience is exploring the data collected from the 3200 selfies from 5 international studies. Click here for the experience.

Clearly, the fact that I was so thrilled by an opportunity to manipulate data emphasizes the fact that I am affected by our age of media personalization. I want to understand and interpret the findings through my own experience. My second self-observation underscores the added value of not only making data interactive or immersive, but making it beautiful and understandable. Clear organization by tabs, artful and accurate representation without appearing cluttered or busy.

In our culture of individualization and personalization, my sense is that mediated experiences that are beautiful may lead to higher levels of engagement. Academics involved in quantitative research methods could learn how to respond to this new environment.

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Maybe educators need to be more like tour guides on the Wonder Bus

me, recognizing the implications of perceiving, cultivating and facilitating a sense of wonder in my students. Credit to Thomashow, Kelsey and the MAEEC 2015 Cohort! 

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On the Appeal of Authentic Experience Part 1

It was a convergence of flavours that felt, If I’m honest, too good to be real. We chewed slowly, smiling, wide eyes fixed on our sandwiches. It was the day in September 2010 when I accepted a (previous) challenge from food author Michael Ruhlman to make a home-grown BLT. 

We made crusty sourdough from wild yeasts blowing through our neighbourhood. I made mayonnaise from our hen’s eggs and the lettuce and tomatoes came from our new garden. I took the challenge a step further by raising a pig and used it’s belly for bacon. This involved a salt cure and using alder and maple wood from our property to hot smoke the bacon. And, oh, the TIME to do it!

Why did I bother with all of that? Why also, have I endeavoured to make a ball of mozzarella cheese when I easily buy it? Why have I spent hours tending to my planted “heritage” barley, then malting the grain, growing hops and crafting an estate beer? Why did I wander through Victoria’s Chinatown last week looking for an authentic plate of noodles?

(I found them... I think.) And I know that I require a little strolling through space to synthesize and metabolize new ideas and understanding, so I pondered and walked, and found this plate. 

Elin Kelsey, one of our MAEEC professors at Royal Roads, introduced me to the idea of autoethnography. It’s a qualitative research method and “a form of self-reflection and writing that explores the researcher's personal experience and connects this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.” --wiki

I’m interested in exploring why certain people, including myself, have a deep desire to experience “the real thing” and why we do seemingly crazy things like hand-building furniture or roasting coffee beans. I feel more deeply rooted and connected when I can connect my activity’s trajectory to some original source, and I think this evokes a sense of wonder, which creates the capacity for gratitude and connection beyond the self. Even worship: “Thank you, Creator! You are GOOD!”

As if we were high on ecstasy, we chewed and moaned and tomato water dripped from our elbows, then the sandwiches were gone. Like a perfect dream that can’t be chased after waking.

Having insight into my desires and biases on the appeal of authenticity is important. There are implications for me as an educator and communicator because I facilitate experiences that seek to connect students and foster a sense of wonder. I wonder how to move forward . . . see Part 2 here

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Pathetic Fallacy

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MAEEC residency art from my classmate Marc.

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China has been feverishly piling sand onto reefs in the South China Sea for the past year, creating seven new islets in the region. It is straining geopolitical tensions that were already taut.

This story underscores the fact that homo sapiens has a penchant for moving land and sea in the Anthropocene. Or, as Thomashow succinctly put it, “we like to move shit around.” 

Setting aside the profound political showdown in this disputed territory, I encourage you to click the link just to see the incredible before/after photos of island building in the South China Sea. These opposable thumbs and keen intellects are indeed getting things done.  dun dun dun . . .

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Whom do we trust? Interpretation forthcoming.

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Black-Backed Jackals Seek Asylum In Wildlife Preserve As Preventative Measure

SKUKUZA, SOUTH AFRICA—Traveling hundreds of miles across the African continent in search of a safe haven, the world’s black-backed jackals began seeking asylum in Kruger National Park as a preventative measure, sources confirmed Friday.

This satirical article from The Onion, complete with a talking Jackal, appears to provoke thought through humour. While the story itself is sad, I found it interesting that the author chose to give the Jackal a voice. Shifting perspective to species without a voice makes for interesting communication; our cohort listed various news headlines from the other-than-human perspective and the results varied from entertaining to profound. 

Care to comment with a headline of your own?

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Creative Writing Exercise

Last week saw us end a long day with a creative writing exercise which was to describe a particular place that held significance. Here’s what I wrote:

Right brain, oh no. like slow honey from a tipped teddy bear it’s there. 

I know.

Three days in I’m struck by the gift of time and space to observe and listen. Space to breathe and hear. And even feel awake.

Like the spot we called “paradise place” on the margin of our nine year-old scope. Tightly squeezing under lanky alder reaches, blackberry thorns picking at dirty t-shirts in August. Distant grown-ups walking, talking by the edge of the pond and the certainty of their unawares. Us, alive in the grass and shrouded by thickets next to the trickle of water winking over quarried grey slabs. Awake and aware. And a little bored.

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Much like this tree, I lean. I have always leaned towards an understanding of environmental education within a context in the natural environment. Does the wilderness experience model make sense in light of the reality of a quickly urbanizing population? 

I was challenged last week as my small group set about the task of looking at environmental education and communication for city folk. The discussion uncovered how much value I assign to “the real thing” and the importance I place on natural environment experiences. 

If homo sapiens is in fact blurring and blending the margins of natural and built environment, then I need start valuing in-city experiences for environmental ed. For instance, this pine tree in Victoria’s Chinatown isn’t an ornamental oddity (seemingly driven into the sidewalk like a pile-driven post) but an opportunity. It’s the real thing as an organism, and it is an opportunity for a real experience.

My walk down this alley in Victoria also found me seeking “authentic” Chinese noodles. Why am I so concerned with authentic and “real” experience? I’m writing another journal entry that hopes to uncover the reason, and its implication for my work in environmental education.

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As Thomashow teaches me new ideas about the Anthropocene, I teach Microsoft Word all the new and exciting terminology.

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Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

C.S. Lewis

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Environmental impact of pets may mean it's time to 'eat the dog'

Are pets our loyal companions or lunch? We hear from a climate scientist who says our cats and dogs are methane-producing, meat-eating monsters and as such a major environmental concern. He says it's time to rethink our relationship with our pets and maybe even time to eat the dog.

Hyperbole and jarring drama for an attention-grabbing headline? Absolutely. Poor framing of the real environmental issue? Probably.

I heard the interview with climate researcher and epidemiologist, Robbie Parks, on CBC a few weeks ago. During the interview he stated that he was in fact using a dramatic idea in order to communicate his findings-- that our pets’ resource consumption is measurable, and alarming. I thought this to be a clever technique to be heard amidst the general background noise of other environmental impact studies and headlines. But is this method effective?

After reading an article on communication framing, I have understood that framing a message with an extreme headline may not provide the right context or tone for the primary message.

Samy Kamkar, a notorious hacker and whistleblower, was recently recruited by Tim Ferris, author of various life-hacking books, to help him figure out a better approach to online dating. Apparently many dating site users receive hundreds of personal messages, and only select a few to actually open and read. Kamkar wrote software to detect when a message had been opened, and along with Ferris, they studied which subject lines were opened the most by recipients. 

What worked? The jarring, dramatic, (and insulting) subject lines. Specifically, “F*** You!” Considering Kamkar and Ferris were only interested in opening a line of communication, the message content itself was dissimilar with an opening like, “Now that I have your attention...”

I believe there are risks to this attention-getting strategy, principally a perceived lack of trustworthiness in the messenger because of the bait-and-switch. Secondly, in the CBC headline example, the suggestion to eat your pet frames the wider environmental issue in a narrow and personal context, perhaps obscuring the broad scope of the issue or other presented (realistic) system-wide solutions.   

Tim Ferris never disclosed if his extreme statements resulted in any effective communication.

Dwight Schrute from NBC’s The Office on his love of animals that provide resource utility. ;-)

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Introducing Myself Through a Meaningful Example of Environmental Communication

In 2010 filmmakers from the Portland area released their documentary, Play Again, which explores "the consequences of a childhood removed from nature." The film suggests that we are at a point in history where the virtual world, particularly screen time, is weakening children's perceived connection to the natural world because they spend less time in natural environments. Various experts are interviewed, (they paint a bleak picture for societal and cultural consequences) and emphasis is given to the importance of playing outside:

"Children are born with incredible capacity to play ... it nurtures problem solving, creativity, empathy ... creative play creates the capacity to make meaning in life ... [children] play less creatively with media-linked toys." --Susan Linn, Psychiatrist, Play Again (2010)

I was especially moved as I watched the six featured youths attend a multi-day outdoor education program because through their new experiences, they progress from feelings of disorientation in their new environment to a place of familiarity, ultimately, a feeling of connection.

After I ordered a DVD of this film in 2011 I immediately set up a home-screening for friends and family because I felt the burden of sharing the film's important message. I was basically shouting, "this is a big deal, people!" At the time I was working as a contract guide for outdoor ed programs with private schools, and many of my trips were with students who had literally never stepped in mud before, or never collected drinking water from a creek, or with students who suffered significant symptoms of video game withdrawal. (Once, as we crested a snow-dusted alpine ridge at dawn, a student soaked in the golden light, lifted his trekking pole and proclaimed, "It's just like that map on my X-Box game!")

I love moments like this, where I get to help students or guests make connections to the wilderness or natural environment.

I've become an avid experiential educator, albeit through an informal route. I'm a certified guide and have my thumb in a few pies of outdoor leadership training, and wilderness risk management. But my heart is to see my students experience personal, even spiritual transformation. What a privilege to use the natural environment as a classroom and platform for discovering our connection to and identity on this amazing planet!

I've identified my target, and now I'm enthusiastically embracing this opportunity to learn alongside, and learn from you. I'm feeling privileged to be in the MAEEC program because I know it's right where I need to be. I sometimes feel like I must have fooled the program to let me in because I don't belong. But I just picked up some new nerd glasses, and I'm bald, so at least I'll look like I'm smart enough for grad school!

I'm now leading a small wilderness program called Zao, which is a Greek word for "life," in the sense of fully-alive. My wife and I have three kids, 3, 6, and 8. We tend to a small city farm where we live in BC. Some of my proudest environmental education moments came recently when my kids' mushroom foraging skills surpassed my own, and when my five year-old nephew plucked a leaf shrub at Disneyland, chewed it with vigour and promptly spat it out with a horrified expression. It was a fake plastic plant masquerading as kale and he couldn't understand why it was there if it wasn't to be picked and eaten. What's the connection there?