Monthly Archives: November 2014

WPC first impressions by Brett Bruyere

The WPC is in its third day here in clean and friendly Sydney, Australia! I’m  finally getting my bearings around here. The event is on the grounds of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and there’s thousands of people from all over the world, so it took me a solid 48 hours to really get my head around things.

So, here are my first impressions:

Youth. Lots and lots of talking about youth, younger generations, young professionals, future generations, and so on.  One of 8 guiding themes is about engaging future generations, but that topic or theme is showing up in a lot of other places too. I just came from a 2 hour session about the future of Africa’s protected areas, and there was 20-25 minutes of talk that emerged about how to engage young people in the discussion, how to encourage them to consider conservation in their lives, and so on.  Karina Mullen, CSU alum and graphic recorder, told me about a great moment in a climate change session yesterday about youth and how inspiring it was. 

Second topic I’ve noticed a lot of:  Balancing science with traditional knowledge.  Similar to the “youth” topic, one of the eight themes are devoted to indigenous communities and the interface of such communities with conservation, and a lot of that talk that I’ve seen has had something to do with traditional ecological knowledge. And, like the “youth” theme, it is showing up in a number of other sessions and discussions, and it seems like there has been a reasonable effort to bring people here representing indigenous populations. I’ve met a few who were sponsored by or brought in partnership with an NGO or ministry.  I have moments where I wonder what might be going through their heads, as they see thousands of people walking around with their laptops and iPads yakking it up about conservation.

And that activates my cynical side that can get triggered in forums like this, when various entities tout their success in training X-number of local people in such-and-such, or when they bought a bunch of GPS units for monitoring by a local community……..and then the story ends, with little or no discussion about whether the trainings or the provision of equipment led to a desired conservation outcome.  Ultimately, that’s what this is all about, right? 

The ‘Gram Feed at IUCN WPC

I have been following the ICUN Worlds Park Conference (WPC) on Instagram for a couple days now and there are quite a few things that have struck me.   First of all, right off the bat, I think it is quite interesting that there are only 314 followers for such a massive world wide and what thousands would say is a very important event.  Contrast this to a popular pop/country artist, Taylor Swift, who has 13 million follows.  I understand some would say these are like comparing apples and oranges but in the end they are both fruit 😉   There have been some solid snap shots over the last few days that are doing a pretty good job of capturing the essence of what’s happening.

The opening ceremony was a big hit and they posted 42 pictures and videos in a 3 hour period.  Since then, almost 3 days later, there has been 46 more posts.  There have been some pretty cool videos nearly all of them capturing tribes people music and dances.  The diversity of shots since the opening ceremony have been really cool too.  One thing that I find somewhat lame for a social media use such as Instagram is that there are a lot of pictures of people speaking.  This is not captavating or interesting – a video of them speaking would be more appropirate.  Another great feature of instagram, the they are not using, is applying your personal creativity, using filters and adjusting a bunch of features.

I am really looking forward to more diverse pictures and some sweet tribal videos.  I still feel a little left out of the loop and am unsure if Instagram is catching all the fascinating moments over there.  Generally between 10 and 20 people out of the 314 followers are clicking the “like” button which is clearly a low percentage.  I am hoping they throw some exciting stuff up on the feed and really turn up the energy level for these next few days.

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