AnimalsMagazine

Michael Davis has been involved in the political process for most of his life and at all three levels of government – municipal, provincial and federal. He tells us, “I think the biggest thing is to step up and get involved and look for opportunities to get your issue on the agenda.”

Getting an issue on the agenda might be best achieved from within the political process, but advocacy – as an individual citizen or within an organized campaign – is a powerful tool as well.

But what makes an effective advocate? We asked Mike Farnworth, who has served in both opposition and government in the British Columbia legislature.

“What I need to know as a policy maker is what is the problem? What is your solution? And what does it mean?”

Mike tells us, “I get people who say, ‘I need an hour’. The reality is you don’t need an hour; you need 20 minutes. Because if you can tell me (what the issue is) in 20 minutes, I’m much more likely to go: ‘You know what? I get it. And here’s what we’re going to do’.

“If someone comes to me with a stack of documents? I’m (overwhelmed)”, Mike adds. “And particularly when it’s not something I’m very familiar with. My eyes will glaze over. If you can’t tell me what it is you want to do in two pages or less, you’ve got a problem.”

But the idea being advocated for? It needs to be realistic.

“Understand that everything isn’t black and white, that it is shades of grey. Understand that there are often multiple perspectives on a particular issue. Understand what government can and cannot do. But, at the same time, know that by asking the right questions and pushing in the right way and not over swinging, you are far more effective in trying to get the change you want to see happen.”

Michael Davis has lobbied for change and been lobbied as a political staffer. He says it’s also important to realize that “if politicians don’t see (an issue as a) win for them in the next election, it will lose steam; it will drop away. And we see that happen over and over again. That’s why it’s so important not just to go to politicians with an ask, but when you start to get success on that, give feedback to the politicians. Give them the win that they need. Give them the permission they need to make that change.”

That’s a very, very important point. Validation is a helpful motivator for us all, but for those being asked to spearhead unproven, societal change. And it’s also why the most effective advocacy is much simpler than we think, explains former conservative Alberta cabinet minister Donna Kennedy-Glans.

“A letter from you, a visit from you, an email from you, a phone call from you – even though it feels to you like you’re pounding against a brick wall, it actually matters.”

Just remember that personal letters have way more power than simply signing a petition, adds conservative Sam Sullivan.

“With changing technology, there are quite an excess of petitions that are coming at us. So, it almost becomes too much noise. (Petitions) have actually started to be less effective than they might have been before. But all of these things go together to add up to a sense that there’s a public will about this stuff, that there is a public consensus that something needs to be done. It’s often a lot of work by citizens to raise that awareness, but it can be effective.”

What does that work entail?

Sam says it’s “public education, public awareness, consensus building, helping identify who’s getting hurt – or who thinks they’re going to get hurt. It’s helping massage that process to make sure that everybody understands what’s being proposed and they feel comfortable that it’s a good thing, ultimately, for the whole community.”

It’s a blueprint for advocacy that Harvey Locke knows well.

“The magic in nature is only there if people ensure that it’s there.”

Harvey has worked to understand what conditions need to be met to sustain biodiversity at home and abroad. And though you may have heard Harvey’s ideas before, listen to them again to really understand the process he undertook, as an advocate, to advance his vision.

“We’ve recently learned through the study of the movements of animals and birds that the scale at which we must practice conservation is much larger than we once thought.”

How much larger? Harvey says he discovered that “I need to be thinking about the scale of Yellowstone to Yukon, in terms of how the Canadian Rockies parks sit in that broader framework. That’s actually the scale at which the temperate mountain living things require to live and exchange genes.”

But to take that knowledge and create new laws or parks, Harvey first needed to build support amongst the public. To do that, Harvey used science and research, of course, but also art.

“That impulse to appreciate natural beauty and to express it as part of being fully human – it’s very, very deep. That’s what a lot of art does and that’s what photography can do. It’s in seeing (natural beauty) and expressing it visually that we help people make the emotion connection. It bypasses the brain circuitry into the heart.”

Through art and storytelling, Harvey was able to amplify his science and social science research, capturing the hearts and minds of the public.

“So, what we really did was we discovered through biology the natural connections of the landscape at both the human and the natural scale – the natural organic way to think about the region – and (his vision) caught on really fast. And that’s what gave rise to the idea of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, a phrase which I coined in 1993 and organized the first meeting. And it’s still going strong as an initiative now, one that’s not only recognized as important to our region, but is looked at around the world as an example of applied conservation for connectivity, or for large landscape conservation, at the global scale.”

Indeed, over the last several decades, as you likely know, Harvey took what many people viewed as an outlandish idea and made it standard government policy not only here or even across the Rocky Mountains, but around the world. In fact, that idea was the springboard for an even bigger idea.

“I was originally drawn into ‘this is our last best chance’ kind of language. The idea that if you can’t do it here, you can’t do it anywhere. All those scarcity theories of value where you try to prioritize what you’re doing because it’s special and rare and unique. But I came to realize that’s dead wrong. Yellowstone to Yukon should not be the last of the best, it should be the first of the next. So, I rolled out this idea at a conference saying, ‘we really need to protect half the world in an interconnected way. That’s really what the numbers are, that’s really what we should be talking about’. And it was very well received.”

That idea, of course, was Nature Needs Half and what began as an advocacy campaign has now morphed into something else. Today, Harvey advises governments globally on safeguarding biodiversity, helping them set targets to protect nature that just might add up to the realization of his Nature Needs Half dream.

“I believe you have to think at all scales. You have to think at the international scale, the national scale, the regional scale and the local scale. But if you don’t have an aggregate vision that it amounts to, those individual local action get orphaned, or lost, or may not even connect up. So, you need this higher-level vision that looks at what you’re trying to achieve, and then you need people empowered to act at multiple scales underneath that vision.”

That, Harvey argues, is how advocacy can create lasting change.

“(Nature Needs Half) is a vision intended to be a movement that everyone can participate in. Not one that anybody sits on top of and throws lightning bolts off about what you should do. This is what we need to do, let’s figure out how we can do it together as a global community.”

And for Harvey, that last bit is critical.

“I prefer to express it as we have this challenge, not ‘you’re the problem and I’m the solution’. How can we reason together to make big transformative change.”

Indeed, how does Harvey envision Nature Needs Half becoming a reality in, say, Canada?

“The Mackenzie Basin, in my view, should be a least two-thirds protected because it’s one of the great storehouses of carbon in the world in its peat bogs. If we develop and carve those things up, it will dry out and that will all go into the sky.”

Harvey continues, “Meanwhile, we have the oil sands, which is producing a lot of value, a lot of money in the world. We really have to deal with the water problems in the oil sands and cleaning that all up. But there’s already a plan to dampen down the emissions (from the oil sands). So, let’s just think about where that (the need for protecting the Mackenzie and the need for oil from the oil sands) goes together.”

In other words, Harvey is suggesting trading oil sands development for the protection of a large swath of the Mackenzie River Basin.

Even if the idea is imperfect, Harvey believes that it’s the type of advocacy that is big enough to matter, connecting up and down to address global and local problems, while also accounting for biodiversity’s needs and economic and social realities.

More importantly, Harvey adds, “We have to do stuff like that because people aren’t going to go cold turkey on things. We know that. People have been trying to make society go cold turkey for 25 years. It doesn’t work.”

As you know, Harvey’s ideas have many critics – especially from within the advocacy world. But few advocates have matched Harvey in building cross-partisan consensus or ideas that have endured, which is why his process is worth studying.

But if other advocates have a different vision than Harvey? He tells us that’s fine, so long as advocates aren’t simply focused on what’s wrong with Harvey’s vision, but are actually offering up a better alternative.

“If this isn’t the right idea, tell me what is right.”

And Harvey’s advice to aspiring advocates?

“Move ahead, not behind. (We can’t) be looking for 100 critiques, (we need to) be looking for solutions to the challenges that we all face.”

And that, political operator Michael Davis argues, is the real lesson we must all heed if we want to be an effective advocate.

“It’s very easy to protest and to be destructive. But, at some point, somebody has to build something new. Don’t assume that all you can do is protest.”