“What’s it called?”, “Is it dangerous?”, “Can I have an ice cream?”, “Can I buy a plastic penguin for my collection?”
Simon Garrett is engagement lead at Nature Positive, and prior to joining the business he worked at Bristol Zoo, interacting with the strangest creatures of all…people. In this article, we interview Simon to get his insights from 30 years of engagement with visitors, schools, students, colleagues and conservation professionals – indeed all manner of humans! – and what lessons can be applied to implementing long-term changes for sustainability.
Why zoos, and why behaviour change? What is the link?
“For more than 30 years, I worked at one of the oldest zoos in the world; Bristol Zoo Gardens opened in 1836 when Darwin was still on the Beagle. I started in 1990 as an education officer, excited to share my passion for wildlife with as many people as I could. Surely if enough people get as excited about wildlife as I am and know more about it, they’ll help to save it. Won’t they?
“The short answer is ‘no’ (that’s depressing, but I refer you to the most commonly heard questions at the zoo above – rarely anything about ‘how do I help save it?’). The longer answer is much more interesting and empowering. Bear with me (actually, I frequently did have a bear with me when teaching at the zoo, but that’s another story entirely).
“In many people, especially when young, there is an innate interest in animals. Some retain it as a passion. Others focus on other interests in life, and that’s fine; we need people who are good at and interested in all sorts of things in order to make human societies function. All those things that humans do have an impact on wildlife and wider nature, either directly or indirectly, but knowing about that rarely leads people to do anything differently to protect it. They pay to adopt a tiger or a fruit bat or a lizard and tell themselves they’ve done their bit. The rest they leave to the zoo: to breed selected endangered species, maybe to carry out or support conservation fieldwork, but most visitors are just normal human beings who go home and get on with their lives.”
So what is the answer?
“The longer I was there, the more I realised that it’s what all those people do in daily life that matters, not what they know about animals. And what humans do is often a lot less rational than we all like to think. So I set about learning about humans and what makes them tick to see whether we could create zoo experiences that actually encouraged and enabled different actions and behaviours in people, rather than just filling them with facts and hoping something positive might happen. And in the midst of this I met two influential Australians – one a psychologist and one a zoo education professional at Zoos Victoria, which runs four zoos in Australia.”
Do you have any examples of campaigns to create different actions and behaviours in action?
“Here’s one of my favourite examples from their work that explains the principles and that I then based my subsequent thinking and practice on. They calculated that nearly 7 million trees were felled in Australia each year for people to wipe their bottoms with. They wanted to get visitors to Healesville Sanctuary to switch to recycled toilet paper to take the pressure off the forests. The traditional approach? Tell everyone what’s going on, ask them to switch toilet paper for the sake of the wildlife and hope that they do. Result: I doubt anyone would switch. Why? Their brilliant research showed that everyone already knew and strongly believed that if they used recycled toilet paper it would be better for wildlife and the wider environment. People who used it and people who didn’t all knew and believed that already, so telling them would be an utter waste of time. It would make no difference. So what were the differences between those who did and those who didn’t use recycled toilet paper? In a nutshell: softness, price and strength.
“Among non-users, there was a strong set of beliefs that recycled toilet paper cost more, was rougher in use and would be too thin and tear easily. That was why they didn’t buy it. Those things, even if they were once true, aren’t true any longer. Some people also reported that their spouse wouldn’t approve if they bought it and that the opaque packaging meant that they couldn’t see what they were buying, and some even thought that it was made out of (previously used) toilet paper that had been recycled! So the campaign that they ran, ‘Wipe for Wildlife’, wasn’t actually about wildlife at all – it was about softness, price and strength. And there’s no point in just telling people the new facts about current brands of recycled toilet paper – why would they believe you? So they had a costumed superhero, Crapman, running family games to build the tallest toilet roll pyramid, for example, thereby getting people to find out for themselves about the real softness and strength of recycled toilet roll. Other campaign elements addressed price, availability and social acceptability. In their first year, they estimated that 36,000 people switched to recycled toilet paper, and other campaigns have since amplified that. So the key is not about understanding the wildlife; it’s about understanding the people.”
What did you take away from their campaign?
“Most people do what they do influenced not by facts or concerns about wildlife but by much more immediate and sometimes mundane things. The drivers are at three main levels: internal beliefs, priorities and motivations; the social context (people are very much herd animals in many ways – social norms are powerful beasts); and the infrastructure (physical, financial, legal, etc.). We do what we believe is good, what we think others will approve of and what the infrastructure nudges, enables or even forces us to do. And quite a lot of the time we do things because they are fun and make us feel good.
“At Bristol Zoo, we used this insight to run campaigns on sustainable charcoal and kitchen roll, certified sustainable fish and even the controversial area of sustainable palm oil. And our visitors loved being enabled to make a difference – they had an even better day out knowing that their actions were part of a collective movement for change.”
So what does this have to do with sustainability for businesses and organisations?
“Businesses and organisations are all made up of humans doing things. So now, at Nature Positive, we can bring the same insight to businesses, local authorities, charities and any other parts of society. Yes, we can measure your impacts and dependencies on climate, nature and human rights. But it’s the next step that’s most important: what to change as a result. Who’s going to do what, how and indeed why should they? Yes, we’ll have the facts, but it’s the insights on human behavioural motivators and barriers, social contexts and enabling infrastructure that will unlock the transformative change for our clients and the environment in which we all operate.”
Thank you, Simon, for your insights into this topic.
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