Chesapeake Crabs: A Response Paper

These past few weeks’ readings focused largely on perception, conflicting ideologies and strategies to mobilize people in the face of climate change threats. We honed in through a variety of lenses on cases like ocean acidification, Canadian environmental non-governmental organizations and more, on which approaches best fit certain ideologies across certain contexts. In an examination of these readings, I’ve come up with a rudimentary checklist to bring climate change action from the public sphere to a more localized one. This checklist is a patchwork quilt of the policies and studies in the readings, and to demonstrate, I chose the infamous “save the crabs, then eat ’em” campaign that was discussed in class. In this scenario, the livelihood of crabbers and consumption of crabs was affected by protein pollution in the Chesapeake Bay.

Feldman writes that “this is the most optimistic scenario for reducing political polarization” (p.119) because of its ability to cover initial fears with hope, instead. Often, people fear what they don’t know, and, in the case of climate change, this “perceived lack of control...leads to immobilization and risk avoidance” (Feldman, p.102). Thus, people who feel out of control tend to turn away rather than embrace the problem. In the case of the Chesapeake crabs, sewage and fertilizer dumps were indirectly killing the crab population. Thus, the Chesapeake Bay Program set up a program to convince people to fertilize their lawns in the fall, when there was less runoff. By putting a solution within arm’s reach, you are engaging and emphasizing efficacy beliefs, thus reaching people at the grassroots