Taking Risks with Somber Environmental Exhibits at Zoos

“I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests. I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans . . .” – from Bob Dylan's song “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”

Zoos have become increasingly interested in promoting environmental awareness and conservation-oriented attitudes and behaviors; at the same time, these sites have the opportunity to impact more than 150 million visitors annually. However, zoo visitors usually come for entertainment and family leisure time, which could potentially be at odds with learning disturbing, challenging, or depressing information related to conservation and the environment. Since zoos are businesses, they need to be careful not to drive away their customers and, as such, need to balance their visitors' interests in entertainment with their desire to educate about pressing environmental challenges. In this paper, research staff at a zoo investigated visitor response to a stark, controversial photographic exhibit called Hard Rain. The exhibit dealt with themes such as climate change, threats to wildlife, and human degradation of nature.

The research took place at the most-visited zoo in the United Kingdom, the Chester Zoo. The authors, who were responsible for putting the exhibit on display, had three objectives. Their first aim was to acknowledge the responsibility of zoos in providing environmental education. Second, they wanted to test the tolerance and receptivity of the visitors to the emotive and gloomy images and messaging in the exhibit. Third, they were interested in testing and developing research methods to effectively evaluate visitor behavior and response to such exhibits.

The Hard Rain exhibition is a collection of photographs, each placed above a line of the Bob Dylan song “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.” The exhibit was displayed in a horizontal fashion along an outdoor walkway, and visitors could start at either end. Hard Rain was not designed specifically for zoos; it has been displayed at museums, universities, city centers, and the United Nations building in New York City. According to the paper, the authors estimate that Hard Rain has been seen by more than 15 million people worldwide. (The images can be seen at www.hardrainproject.com.) In response to concerns from some zoo staff, warning signs were placed at either end of the exhibit, cautioning viewers about the images' graphic content.

The authors used two data-collection methods: written feedback from viewers and unobtrusive visitor observations. The authors placed a board at one end of the exhibit to solicit written feedback from visitors; prompting questions included: “What do you think? Have your say here . . .” Visitors were invited to write responses on Post-It notes and add them to the board. The same four “staged” Post-It notes were always left on the board, written by different zoo staff, to prompt visitor participation. The goal of the written feedback was to gather more considered responses as well as the direct thoughts of the viewers. To observe visitors' more immediate, real-time responses, researchers (discreetly dressed in plain clothes) carried out unobtrusive visitor observations. The researchers measured the amount of time a given subject spent at the exhibition using a stopwatch. They also gauged the subject's engagement level on a scale from -3 to +3, representing a range from “active repulsion” to “engrossed response.” In total, 227 Post-It comments were collected and 238 visitors were observed from May to September 2008, the busiest season at the zoo.

The researchers analyzed the Post-It note responses by categorizing them as follows: positive, negative, positive and negative, personal reflection, comments focused on children, environmental comments, responses to other visitor comments, empathetic, and unrelated comments. Each comment was assigned to only one category in order to assist analysis, which they note in their paper was sometimes challenging as comments could be seen as overlapping. The researchers also separated the comments as best they could into those written by adults and those written by children, based on the quality of the handwriting.

The researchers found that, on balance, there were many more positive than negative responses. Comments categorized as “empathetic,” “other environmental comment,” “personal reflection,” and “positive toward exhibition,” together, accounted for over 60% of the responses. Only 16% of the responses were strictly negative, 7% were both positive and negative, and 6% of responses were focused on the children. A small percentage of the comments were unrelated or responding to other visitors' responses.

The overall positive response of visitors to the exhibit was supported by the results of the visitor observations. The researchers were particularly delighted to find that the median time spent at the exhibit by the observed visitors (49 seconds) was comparable to the amount of time visitors spend with some of the more exciting live animal exhibits at the zoo, such as the indoor giraffe exhibit (53 seconds). In terms of engagement, no visitors in the recorded sample fell into the -2 or -3 engagement levels, meaning that no one was recorded as being actively repulsed or having a very negative response to the images. Only 4.6% of visitors were noted to have a negative response (-1 level); 37.8% of visitors were recorded with a neutral response; and 57.6% were recorded to have a positive response, from +1 (positive) to +3 (engrossed).