Hi, I'm Mike Clarke, I'm an ecologist at La Trobe University, my Big FAT Idea is that

we are facing a crisis of ecological illiteracy.

Collectively we know more about nature than we've known at any time in history.

Unfortunately individually people are more and more disconnected with nature.

They don't know the animals and plants they share their neighbourhood with.

Ironically in Australia we seem to know more about overseas species than the ones

in our own country and that means when it comes to losing or perceiving changes in

our own country we're just not picking it up. So around this campus here at La Trobe

there's been profound changes in the bird life that most of the people walking past

today would be completely unaware of. Those changes are possibly linked to

climate change.

I think we're less familiar with nature because of urbanization. And the less we

know about the animals and plants we share our neighbourhood with the less we're

likely to care about them. I contrast it with the way we care about actors in a play.

If we don't know the actors in a play or the characters we don't really care about

their fate and we won't even watch to the end of the film. But if we care deeply it can

affect us profoundly so I was staggered recently when one of the actors on one of our

local soap operas died tragically in the series. People took days off work the next

day they were grieving so much. About the same time we lost, forever, a little

mammal, an insectivorous bat that lives on Christmas Island, the Christmas

Island Pipistrelle. Most Australians wouldn't even know that bat existed, let

alone the fact that it had gone extinct, even though its decline was well

documented and quite predictable. So the fact that we don't know the individuals

actually matters in how much we care about them, and so I'm keen that we raise

people's ecological literacy so they know what we're loosing before it's gone.

Ironically the fact that people are so fascinated with technology and that's

distancing them from nature provides an opportunity for us, because our

fascination with technology could be used to get people back in touch with nature.

I think through cleverly using the new technology we could reengage people with

nature in their own backyard and that's what we're going to need as the very

beginning steps and improving ecological literacy.

A good example might be an app that's been developed like Shazam, where you can work

at what song you're listening to in a pub, people have made a Shazam for frog calls.

So you hold up your phone and it will tell you what species of frog is calling in that

background. One day we might get it for that noisy Myna that just called, and so

people would know what they're hearing, they would have an opportunity to learn

about the things that are around them and be able to identity and say "gosh those are

noisy Myna's, they're really abundant here, they weren't really abundant

twenty years ago", pick up some of the changes.

We've inherited amazing wildlife in this country and we have a moral obligation to

future generations to look after it and not trash it, and we will only do that if we

know what we're looking at, if we know what we're losing. So the challenge for us is

to educate future generations and inspire them to reengage with nature. That

might involve technology, that might involve inspirational older people who

know the nature that is around their own backyard, who can tell a noisy Myna from an

Indian Myna, a Purple Swamphen from a Dusky Moorhen. These kinds of things may seem

trivial but they're the beginning steps in improving ecological literacy, and

unless we know what we're looking at we want care for, and we need to start to care.