Interview with Simon Mustoe, Project Manager for Restore the Bay
Here is a transcript of our interview where Simon Mustoe explains why 25 minutes of your time is a major contribution to securing our Bay’s health, now and into the future. Here is a short version of the interview. You can watch the full version (7.5 minutes) here or follow the links below to hear each question answered separately.
0:00 Tell us about the program
0:32 Why should I give up 25 minutes to answer this question?
0:56 Why is this different? 01:22 What questions are you asking?
02:15 What happens next?
03:24 How will this help me?
04:23 How does it work?
04:58 What will that look like?
05:46 What will change?
06:54 What are your hopes?
Why should I give up 25 minutes to answer questions? 0:32
We expect to have to give up enormous amounts of work and family time, volunteering to make a difference in our community. But the reality is if the questions are asked correctly, this 25 minutes is one of the most valuable things we can do.
Why is this different? 0:56
We've flipped the script on how a community engagement is normally done. First, we are the community. We're coming at this from the other end. If you like, rather than building the car to transport us somewhere, we're working with the community – asking questions – where we can build the machine that builds the right car for us to get there.
What questions are you asking? 01:22
We're gathering information on the combination of activities we each undertake and the features of the ecosystem that together define us as individuals.
So, for example, you might be a fisher who fishes a particular fish that lives on reefs; you might be a beach goer or runner who likes to find sand that is clean, or a swimmer that needs water that's not polluted. It's the feature of the ecosystem that enables you to be you, so the third question is about the value you get from the ecosystem.
We value this system in ways that are quite unusual and personal and in ways that aren't captured by most community engagement, such as your sense of belonging or community or your how much it contributes to your workplace productivity or your family life and mental health.
What happens next? 02:15
Well, there are two ways you can go about addressing environmental problems. One way, which is the common way, is to ask people what problems they have and where. And for that, you end up with a map with dots all over it, thousands of thousands of problems, because we all have a problem, right? That's an absurdly large amount of things for anyone to fix.
If we go back to our activity-feature-value linkage, we find that most of the issues pass through an ecosystem feature before they become a problem.
For example, pollution will affect certain features of the environment that then cause us to not enjoy snorkelling or not enjoy fishing or risk us not being able to swim during spring because of storms and pollution from sewage.
So rather than come in from the end point and worry about all the many thousands of locations, we come in from the other end and we look at the cause of those problems before they reach the ecosystem features that are affecting us. And in that way, and with our community's assistance, we can help identify where the main priorities lie: broadly speaking, we can address some of those issues at source.
This is the key to what we call nature based solutions. To restore the Bay is about restoring nature's ability to recover the natural processes that maintain the values that we hold most dear.
How will this help me? 03:24
In just 25 minutes of your time it will do a number of things. It will enable you to take your knowledge and use this to understand how you specifically connect to the Bay in ways you've probably never thought of before.
It will change your perspective, as you learn from nature as part of this project.
And so there's a conversation we're having where we're presenting information to enable a new way of thinking. In doing so, in altering the way you think about your connection with the Bay, you’re able to present information back in the conversation, that enables us to then make more sense of the Bay.
It’s what we call a sociological system.
If you think about all of the ways that society interacts and all the way that the ecosystem functions, and you put those two together, what it culminates in is our economy.
The really exciting part of this project is that by asking these very specific questions, which ostensibly no one's ever asked before, we can get paint a picture of your place within the Bay's ecosystem and forecast what actions are most likely to fix many of the complex problems we're facing today. And put the community at the centre of that outcome.
How does it work? 04:23
Okay, so crucial step, and one we can all do easily, is to invite as many of us as possible to sit down for 25 minutes on our own, or with our family, friends, or our kids. We can fill this information in as often as we like. It doesn't matter, it just gets better.
The more information we can get about how you personally connect with the features of the Bay, the activities you're doing and the values you you place on them, the more we can paint a picture of how the whole system operates.
What will that look like? 04:58
We have a very beautiful and sophisticated piece of software called BioNet, which is going to enable us to draw a picture of where your values sit within the overall system.
Imagine you will be able to see how those values are likely to change into the future, going up or going down based on the current situation, or on actions we take.
So, the other thing that you get from this as a community is a change in focus, to something altogether more advantageous.
Focusing on problems is very divisive and drives conflict with lots of different values traded off against one another. It changes nothing.
By gathering information this new way, we work out which actions will have the greatest grassroots impact on improving our Bay's health. This moves our minds from seeing existing problems as a foregone conclusion, to the real possibility that we can make changes that are going to improve all our livelihoods and lifestyles in future.
What will change? 05:46
It’s a common question and the honest answer is, we don't know exactly.
Okay, two facts: number one, we don’t know what actions we will take yet, because we haven't yet asked what you, the community, value most of all. This is why we'd like to have you involved in doing this shorts 25 minutes survey first.
Secondly, we don't know what nature has in store for us. What we can tell you is that we have degraded nature's processes to such a point that it is collapsing our economies.
So, we need to restore natural processes and in doing so understand how we can enable ourselves to maximize that economic potential in future by removing threats to the values that define us all.
And we know this works, but it cannot be achieved unless we make project truly community co-designed.
That means starting with just 25 minutes to sit down and answer three simple questions.