Color to Learn: A Salmon Conservation Project

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    In past years, there has been a severe decline in salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest. In areas like the Columbia and Snake Rivers, species like steelhead are at high risk of becoming extinct within the next 20 years (Siegler 2020). Some of the main factors leading to this decline are the construction of dams, pollution, and the farming of non-native salmon. Salmon play a key role in ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest and are important to the cultures and economy of people in the region. It’s also not a highly covered issue in the media, which is why I wanted to bring more awareness to it.

    To ensure that the material would be easily accessible and promote public engagement, I chose to create a Twitter page entitled Color to Learn: A Salmon Conservation Project (Link: https://twitter.com/ColortoLearnAS1). The main content of the page is hand-drawn informational coloring pages, as well as posts about current news concerning salmon in the Pacific Northwest. The goal was to engage the viewer, as I find that physical acts like coloring or taking notes help in solidifying information in one’s mind. Not only that, coloring would help to make the information more accessible for younger audiences. Below are examples of some of the coloring pages available.



    When designing this campaign, there were a few big concepts I first had to address. One of the primary actions was audience identification, where the audience is “the people being addressed, and their beliefs, actions, and larger cultural understandings (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018). In this case, my audience was anyone with access to the internet or more specifically, Twitter. Tweets are easy to spread, which is why I thought that this would be a good method for reaching as many people as possible in the timeframe I had to complete the project. Another important framework I used for this project was the idea of “alert, amplify, engage”. 

Alert: By creating content about the issue, I was alerting others to what was happening with 

           salmon in the Pacific Northwest and prompting them to take notice of it. 


        Amplify: By sharing content created by researchers, environmental groups and government 

                        organizations, I was helping spread the material to a wider audience. Sharing the link to 

                        my page on other platforms was also helpful in this goal. 

        

         Engage: By interacting with my followers through posts and making the coloring pages available 

                        for anyone to use, this would allow the audience to become personally involved in the 

                        projects.


    This all tied into the mode of advocacy that encompasses public education. Modes of advocacy are methods used to create an advocacy campaign, and the goal of a public education-focused campaign is to “influence societal attitudes and behavior” (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018). That’s exactly what I hoped to do with my project, as the problems facing salmon aren’t as widely known as other environmental issues. The last idea that influenced this project was appealing to the idea of "Clicktavism", which allows people to take action with a simple click of a link. This was one of the main reasons for making an easily accessible Twitter page as opposed to another form of media.


    My goal going into this project was to get at least 30-40 people to engage with my tweets and have at least 10 followers. As of now, the page has 7 followers and each tweet has met the goal of 30-40 people engaging with it, with some of the tweets reaching over 200. There were also retweets as well as shares on other media platforms. One of the big challenges I faced during this was gaining a following, and for future projects of this nature I would consider creating pages on other social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook, or even create a webpage. Another method for gaining a following in the future would be to contact pages for salmon conservation and try to establish a partnership, or get further ideas for content. Overall this was a great learning experience and helped in illustrating how important it is to spread awareness about environmental issues that aren't as widely known. It also showed how art can be used as a tool for learning and help make information more accessible to the general public.



Resources for Blog Post:  


Pezzullo, P. C., Cox, R. (2018). Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (5th Edition). 


Siegler, K. (2020, January 22). Northwest salmon In peril, and efforts to save them scale up. 

            NPR. 

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/797387258/northwest-salmon-in-peril-and-efforts-to-save-them-scale-up


Other Helpful Resources Used in the Project: 


Alexander, K. (2020, December 3). New research explains why salmon are dying in the Pacific 

            Northwest. California River Watch. 

https://criverwatch.org/2021/03/08/new-research-explains-why-salmon-are-dying-in-the-pacific-northwest/


CGTN America. (2017, August 24). ‘The salmon cannon' sorts and shoots fish over a dam 

          [Video]. Youtube. 

          https://youtu.be/zh8rzLGyLz0


Flaccus, G. (2020, February 28). Feds reject removal of 4 U.S. Northwest dams to save 

            imperiled salmon. Los Angeles Times. 

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-02-28/feds-reject-removal-of-4-us-northwest-dams-to-save-imperiled-salmon

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