CONSERVATION VALUE INSTITUTE

Winning With Nature (a podcast coming in 2021) features interviews with conservation leaders, business executives, regenerative ranchers and farmers, and government officials who inspire listeners with real life (and often surprising) stories of the valuable benefits that maintaining a healthy environment and stable climate generate for ecosystems, people, businesses, and the communities we live in. Each episode aims to reframe the way people view the importance of a healthy environment from “extrinsic” (i.e., not beneficial or relevant to me, costly, burdensome) to “intrinsic” (beneficial to me, my family, my business, my community, and to our economy, public health, national security and quality of life).

Winning With Nature Update: For each episode of Winning With Nature, we will produce an additional segment titled, “Winning With Nature Update”. These will be 3 to 5-minute radio quality podcast shorts that tell the story of nature's valuable benefits reported by a newly published scientific journal article, business case study, or technical report. Each mini episode will translate cutting edge scientific findings into storytelling about the surprising ways that climate crisis and nature conservation solutions benefit our environment, economy, public health, national security and quality of life. We will market these mini-episodes for syndication on national and local radio and satellite radio stations.

Need: While a growing number of podcasts explore various aspects of nature conservation, the climate crisis, and sustainable business, there is not yet a program that focuses explicitly on "bright spot" success stories and reveals the specific steps involved so that listeners can replicate them. Winning With Nature (coming in 2021) will address this need by featuring solutions-oriented conversations with leading conservationists, business leaders, scientists, regenerative ranchers and farmers, professional athletes, and government officials. Each guest will inspire listeners with real life (and often surprising) stories about the valuable benefits that maintaining a healthy environment and stable climate generate for ecosystems, people, businesses, and the communities we live in.

Innovative applications of social science-based behavior change strategies: Both The Nature of Music and Winning With Nature also stand apart in terms of their innovative program design: we apply science-based behavior change and messaging strategies to shape content.

For example, at the program design level, featuring guests who share real-life success stories about how they have benefitted by implementing nature-based solutions reflects a powerful behavior change strategy called “Social Proof” (wherein people change to copy the actions of similar others, a phenomenon also known as Peer Influence). What is more likely to inspire farmers to transition to regenerative practices – reading a scientific fact sheet about them or looking over the fence at their neighbor’s productive crops and shiny new pickup truck and wanting to learn how they’re doing so well?

At the content development level, we use influence strategies to both shape interview questions and frame our own ideas. Examples include the logical and emotional mind behavior change strategies that Chip and Dan Heath describe in “Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard”. Inviting guests to share success stories is a logical mind strategy that the authors call “Find the Bright Spots”. Asking them to reveal the specific steps that they followed to implement their winning strategy (so that listeners can replicate it) applies a logical mind strategy that the Heath brothers term, “Script the Critical Moves”.

In contrast, “Social Proof” (described above) is an example of an emotional mind behavior change strategy that the Heath Brothers call, “Rally the Herd”. A second emotional mind strategy that we use to shape content involves teaching a stepwise approach to adopting sustainable practices (referred to in Switch as “Shrink the Change”). This simply entails breaking up a larger change (e.g., transitioning a farm to ALL regenerative practices) into a series of small, confidence-building wins along the path to sustainability. These are just a few examples of behavior change and messaging strategies that we will use to create fascinating and useful episodes that inspire listeners share our programs with family, friends and colleagues.