The World Park Congress and a model.

Here we are: The VI World Park Congress Sydney 2014- “Parks, people, inspiring solutions” is currently happening in Australia. Since the last WPC that was in South Africa, 11 years has passed. This period of time seems like a long pause to talk seriously about the future of the protected areas, especially if we think how many things have changed during this period.

During Durban 2003, I was in my last year of university. So, then as in now I couldn’t assist to the World Park Congress. Then, I tried to know more about the things that were happening in South Africa; just as I am trying it now, with the current congress in Australia. But with the difference of hours between South Africa and Ecuador, in addition of the chaotic Internet connection (DSL-Connection), all of my attempts failed.

Now, 11 years after, the manners to ccommunication between us have changed drastically. Now, thanks God we have high speed, Facebook (2004), Flickr (2004), Youtube (2005), Twitter (2007), Tumblr (2007), Instagram (2010) and all of the traditional media as newspapers or television. With all these tools, it may seem to be bit weird to spend time, money (create an significant ecological foot print (even for one person)) for to move to Sydney just to know on first hand about new advances in the context of protected areas that have been achieved.

I made a quickly review about the number of followers that the World Park Congress has had until now (November 17), but the number of followers between Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram less than 16,000 (This is not an impressive number if we think that a photo of a model on the internet in the same day of the of the WPC beginning had thousands of likes or retweets). Could it be that the people who are more concerned about the nature prefer use the traditional medias to access information. Under this assumption, I was looking for the impact of the WCP on the cover of the three most read newspapers around the world: Daily Mail (UK), The New York Times (USA) and The Guardian (UK). Surprisingly I couldn’t find any news regarding WPC on their front pages.

These results looks like nature is not so important to them. This short assessment about the diffusion of the event on medias have given a poor outcome and could have two meanings: first, a lack of interest by the people (medias) about these events or maybe the people behind WPC have not found a more efficient way to make viral the WPC congress among people and medias. I prefer to believe the second option because I don’t want to believe that some environmental issues that have been successful in the public eye such as global climate change are just a new fashion for them.

by

Santiago G.