I learned an important lesson on Saturday while digging up sand to sample the
invertebrates that sanderling are stuffing their faces with:

I have 4 transects spaced 50m apart (that's164 feet). At the start of each
transect I put in a temporary wooden marker peg about 0.6m - 2 feet high :-).
Normally people drive all over the beach - a situation I'm sure disturbs
birds and damages invertebrate populations living in the sand. However people
driving along the beach as soon as they saw the pegs would steer their cars up
the beach and drive above the marker pegs along high tide line - there was no
real reason to do so. Since people are regulated when they drive along the
highway, perhaps there is some subtle psychology at work here.

So the upshot of all this is: rather than rant and rave, to overtly regulate
and reduce the impact of traffic using beaches - a situation which is going to
create conflict and generally piss people off, why not be clever about it and
try other schemes such a putting in a line of marker post and doing nothing
else to see whether this has an impact before considering more visible means.

It's always easy to get really steamed up about a subject and try and cajole
people people into doing things in a particular way. However a more
considered, intelligent might be more effective in the short as well as the
long term. Though it does require the patience of several saints :-)

I always thought it would be kind of neat to study Memes and how they work.
Memes, postulated by Richard Dawkins, are "information virues" that spread
throughout a population. Dawkins suggests they are as important as DNA.
Religion is a good example of a Meme, so is the craze for anything to do with
the "Power Rangers" or the Seattle Mariners. Memes can be transient like the
Mariners thing or persistent over long periods of time like Christianity.

Memes applied to conservation would be great to formulate and steer society's
opinions, attitudes and actions in a direction which was beneficial to the
environment.

There must be millions of situations where this could work.

Stuart - a reformed character ?
--
Stuart MacKay, Seattle WA