The Live Blue Initiative: Bringing Coral Reefs Close to Home

The New England Aquarium unveiled its Live Blue Initiative recently. The initiative uses some of the same communication approaches I’ve seen in successful energy efficiency programs.

Like the energy use stickers from my Twitter post this week, the Live Blue site attempts to connect our environmental choices with their effects. The site asks visitors to click on an image of a sea creature to select an area of the ocean; once they select these places, they can commit to taking environmental actions. For example, when I click on the image of a rare dolphin from the New Zealand coast, I learn that “living blue” can help this species of dolphin survive.

Inviting people to make commitments can be a very successful approach for environmental outreach. But what is “living blue” – and how does it make a difference? The site suggests environmentally friendly choices, but doesn’t connect these actions with their results. I know using fewer plastic bags is a good idea, since many of them become unhealthy appetizers for animals in the ocean. But if I’m deciding between bringing reusable bags to the store and not buying oysters, how do I know what to choose? If I didn’t read environmental news, I wouldn’t know oysters are going extinct.

I’m already supportive of the New England Aquarium’s work, so I’m interested in learning more about “living blue.” But there are many people who are not sure why they should recycle. If the New England Aquarium wants site visitors to understand that their choices have environmental consequences, the site should make the connection between the “living blue” actions and their potential benefits – especially the benefits that are clearly and directly relevant to website visitors.

How to Make People Think Twice

In May, I spent a day at the Museum of Science and exploring downtown Boston. What caught my attention at the museum wasn’t the IMAX or the dinosaur. Instead, I saw that the exhibits are full of brain teasers designed to nudge us out of our everyday assumptions about science and nature.

If you walk through the  exhibit called “A Bird’s World,” you’ll see the museum staff have avoided labeling some of the birds. A sign comments wryly that birds don’t have name tags in the wild.

Strolling toward the Natural Mysteries exhibit, you can look to the right – near the door – and see a wall-mounted board inviting you to play a guessing game. You can lift up different flaps labeled with descriptions and find surprising information underneath them. Lifting one flap, labeled “an animal,” shows people their own faces in a mirror.

The Natural Mysteries exhibit asks visitors to imagine they’ve woken up on the shore of a desert island. The “island” takes up an entire corner of the room. The challenge? Using a list of shells from different parts of the world, figure out where you’ve landed.

Other challenges throughout the room include identifying when a deserted schoolhouse was built; learning which mammal skulls are which; and understanding mountain lions by reading their footprints.

Just when you think you’ve escaped the brain teasers by going up to the second floor, the Seeing is Deceiving exhibit is waiting to confound you. The artwork consists of a series of images which change their appearance depending on one’s location and perspective.

If you’re getting tired of thinking after staring at the Mobius strip in the Mathematica exhibit, you can spend a few minutes in the butterfly garden taking in the sunshine. Make sure there aren’t any orange and blue hitchhikers hanging onto your jacket when you leave.

A butterfly close-up from Boston.com

Subverting the plastic bottle

Trash Menagerie, a show in the Art and Nature Center at the Peabody Essex Museum, uses recycled materials to tell the story of our view of objects and our choices about what is disposable. If we saw these objects differently, what would happen?

The artists bring this question to life in many different media. On walking into the exhibit, I was confronted by a green-eyed dragon made of bundt cake pans and bicycle brakes. Each section of a pan was part of its body; each brake had become a leg. I can imagine how much welding it took to get that right.

Behind the dragon, visitors meet a pair of mechanical insects – built from drafting tools and sewing machine parts – and their sister sculpture, a squid made of small electronics.

Ironic uses of plastic are a central theme of the exhibit. A shimmering trout turns out to be a composite of layered plastic. An ethereal crowd of hovering jellyfish and other sea creatures reveal their past lives as plastic soda bottles.

A statement by Nnenna Okore, the artist who rolled magazines into a roving band of large spiders, says that seeing poverty in Africa gave her a different perspective on what reused materials are worth.

Seeing ways to reuse everyday items we throw away – magazine covers, plastic bottles, newspapers – is a creative act. When we reframe what a plastic bottle means to us, that’s when the sea creatures start emerging. Literally.