Approach Philosophy, Natural Habitat Restoration/Preservation Activities, Barron Park (Neighborhood) Association
Creek Restoration, yard by yard
- Payoff for residents:
- Conservation ethic
- Civic pride in results
Remember: Barron Park fought to keep creeks from
being turned into concrete channels
- Property values (intertwined aspects):
- For their own enjoyment
- Resale value
- Details:
- Visually, lot extends across the creek to the top
of your neighbor's bank (and vice versa).
Thus your lot seems more spacious than it really is.
- Current ivy-covered creekbanks are dark, forbidding, no-go zones.
Hence, lost space.
People also tend to keep their distance from
such zone.
- Improved landscaping would make yard appear bigger
- Color and variety of vegetation
- More birds in lower story
- Still a physical no-go zone, but coming up to
near the top of the bank become attractive.
Now looking down onto the creek can be
a real positive attribute of your property.
- Based upon what has been seen in other neighborhoods
containing natural creeks.
- Method
- Early adopters to experiment with improving creek banks.
Test/prove out the theories.
- Neighbors can see what works.
- Neighbors have multiple real examples to help them visualize
what they could do with their segment of the creek bank.
- Early adopters can support next generation of adopters,
with tutoring, question-answering, and generic
handholding.
A personal experience
I grew up in a small town in upstate New York
where the common practice in the 1950's and early 1960's
was to spray the trees in your yard with pesticides
in late spring.
How this practice came to be completely reversed,
and how quickly it happened,
may be instructive,
My memory is that spraying was quite uncommon in 1966,
and I expect that the change started in 1962 (with the publication
of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring).
The "early adopters" were bird-lovers:
they noted how few birds there were in their yards
and decided to stop spraying their trees
because they were willing to sacrifice the appearance of their trees
to have more birds.
To their surprise, their trees looked no worse,
and often better, at the end of the first year of no spraying,
and substantially better at the end of the second.
The practice spread by word-of-mouth and example:
there was no local media coverage until very near the completion.
- One person would talk to his immediate neighbors,
explaining why he was no longer spraying his trees,
and ask that neighbor to tell his tree care company
to avoid having spray drift across the boundary.
- The several of the immediate neighbors would often decide not to spray
that year,
and might even make the same request of their immediate neighbors.
- People also passed the story of their success to their friends.
- Near the end of this process,
people moving into the neighborhoods were advised that
spraying trees "was not done here."
Lessons that I see:
- Theory was simple to state, and hence for people to pass on:
Birds are full-time "pesticides"
whereas the chemicals are a one-shot action.
The chemicals killed enough insects to drive away the birds,
but not enough insects to keep their populations from coming back.
Clever phrasing is advantageous:
it both minimizes distortion as the information is repeated
and, being memorable, it is more likely to be repeated.
In other words, you want it simple and stylized like a slogan,
but without becoming a simplistic slogan.
Simple also makes it acceptable in informal conversation:
many people would be reluctant to seem to be lecturing (pontificating),
or to otherwise take on the role of an expert.
- The persuasion was very gentle.
- Visible demonstration that the theory worked -
people rightly distrust theories for which validation is not
available,
and many people distrust results (as simply chance) that don't
have a good theory to explain them.
- Theory and result reinforced each other.
- Action required was simple:
stop wasting money on counter-productive spraying
of chemical pesticides.
-- Doug Moran
Version Info: $Revision: 1.9 $ $Date: 2002/02/17 00:52:31 $