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eredienI was reading this Scientific American blog post on how much it would cost to save "the world's remaining 3,500 wild tigers." The article is titled "Cost to save the world's tigers: $10,000 each per year (or just pennies a day!)" I read the article to find out two things:
- how much money was needed to save the tigers
- how I could contribute that money
I saw these numbers:
42% more than is already spent
$35 million/year
$10,000/cat
$47 million/year
$82 million/year
$10 k per cat
$20,000 or more for an illegal tiger skin
$50,000 or more for a poached tiger carcass
$35 million a year
I read these sentiments:
"The price tag to save one of the planet's great iconic species is not a high one," said Alan Rabinowitz, president and CEO of the wild-cat conservation organization Panthera[...]
a drop in the bucket
a fraction of the profits generated by Apple's OS X Tiger operating system
I like tigers. And I don't have much money. I assume that most people are in this boat. When someone who likes tigers and doesn't have that much money reads an article like this, they find out only how overwhelming the job is, and don't get any idea of how they personally could contribute to that $35 million dollars/year. In this article, there is not a header saying "how can I help?" There is not a "donate to save the tigers" button.
There are five different organizations mentioned--Panthera, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the IUCN, and the World Bank.
The names of these organizations are hotlinked above, with links to their tiger-conservation efforts in particular when there is one, in order to enable you to find out more about the organizations' tiger-related efforts and donate, but they are not even hotlinked in the Scientific American blog post. What's hotlinked in the article? A prepared media statement.
People come to read this article prepared to find out how to give money to save tigers.
They are informed about the massive scope of the problem, but not how to solve it. So people close the tab and play Farmville again--because we have placed easily-findable buttons everywhere that make it easy to play Farmville all the time even if that's not what you want to do, but we have placed no easily-findable buttons anywhere that make it easy to donate to tigers all the time.
Even if that's what you want to do, you'll find it too complex and give up:
Anyone who wanted to help had to overcome both psychological hurdles (how much it was going to cost! How little my monies would help!) and technological ones (Typing "panthera" into Google, then finding the big cat donation page three layers deep into the site, then typing in info, then clicking send, was the easiest and most straightforward procedure).
This happens a lot, I think, in popular science reporting.
How could articles like this actually help tigers (3,500 left), or the Bois Dentelle tree (2 (yes two) left), or the Psathyrella cystidiosa mushroom, which is only found in a few places in Minnesota?
What could be changed? These articles could say something like this:
$35 million a year is needed to save these tigers. That's $95,890.42/day. But if 350,400 people give $99.95 right now, we will raise more than we need to save all the tigers. Donate now!
Why doesn't all science journalism [clarification: popular science journalism, not information in a scientific journal] do this already, after (of course) appropriate ethical vetting to reduce conflicts of interest? Does anyone know? Why is there a "tweet this article to your friends" button on each post, but no "donate" button on any post?
And seriously, it's only 27 cents a day for a year.
- how much money was needed to save the tigers
- how I could contribute that money
I saw these numbers:
42% more than is already spent
$35 million/year
$10,000/cat
$47 million/year
$82 million/year
$10 k per cat
$20,000 or more for an illegal tiger skin
$50,000 or more for a poached tiger carcass
$35 million a year
I read these sentiments:
"The price tag to save one of the planet's great iconic species is not a high one," said Alan Rabinowitz, president and CEO of the wild-cat conservation organization Panthera[...]
a drop in the bucket
a fraction of the profits generated by Apple's OS X Tiger operating system
I like tigers. And I don't have much money. I assume that most people are in this boat. When someone who likes tigers and doesn't have that much money reads an article like this, they find out only how overwhelming the job is, and don't get any idea of how they personally could contribute to that $35 million dollars/year. In this article, there is not a header saying "how can I help?" There is not a "donate to save the tigers" button.
There are five different organizations mentioned--Panthera, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the IUCN, and the World Bank.
The names of these organizations are hotlinked above, with links to their tiger-conservation efforts in particular when there is one, in order to enable you to find out more about the organizations' tiger-related efforts and donate, but they are not even hotlinked in the Scientific American blog post. What's hotlinked in the article? A prepared media statement.
People come to read this article prepared to find out how to give money to save tigers.
They are informed about the massive scope of the problem, but not how to solve it. So people close the tab and play Farmville again--because we have placed easily-findable buttons everywhere that make it easy to play Farmville all the time even if that's not what you want to do, but we have placed no easily-findable buttons anywhere that make it easy to donate to tigers all the time.
Even if that's what you want to do, you'll find it too complex and give up:
Anyone who wanted to help had to overcome both psychological hurdles (how much it was going to cost! How little my monies would help!) and technological ones (Typing "panthera" into Google, then finding the big cat donation page three layers deep into the site, then typing in info, then clicking send, was the easiest and most straightforward procedure).
This happens a lot, I think, in popular science reporting.
How could articles like this actually help tigers (3,500 left), or the Bois Dentelle tree (2 (yes two) left), or the Psathyrella cystidiosa mushroom, which is only found in a few places in Minnesota?
What could be changed? These articles could say something like this:
$35 million a year is needed to save these tigers. That's $95,890.42/day. But if 350,400 people give $99.95 right now, we will raise more than we need to save all the tigers. Donate now!
Why doesn't all science journalism [clarification: popular science journalism, not information in a scientific journal] do this already, after (of course) appropriate ethical vetting to reduce conflicts of interest? Does anyone know? Why is there a "tweet this article to your friends" button on each post, but no "donate" button on any post?
And seriously, it's only 27 cents a day for a year.