Shark Truth is a not-for-profit consumer awareness campaign that seeks to engage consumers in a collaborative discussion to find alternatives to shark fin soup. We are dedicated to promoting awareness around the irreversibly detrimental effects of the shark finning industry, specifically working with (and not against) consumers.

My friend Claudia Li co-founded the effort with Vivian Kwong in the summer of 2009. Along with a great team of volunteers, they have been working hard to make Shark Truth an effective and engaging campaign. The team realized that existing campaigns (such as
WildAid’s Shark Conservation Program and Sea Shepherd’s Defending Sharks campaign) were not creating a dialogue with the Chinese community about the practice of shark finning. While these campaigns and others have done a great deal to raise the profile of this issue, they have mainly focussed on the supply side of the situation. Shark Truth, by choosing to focus their efforts on the demand side, have a chance to develop awareness amongst the culture and community that constitutes the largest market for shark fin. As Chinese Canadians, the team’s sensitivity to both the cultural and ecological facets of the problem provide them with an opportunity to effect real change. They know that another attack campaign full of images of blood and gore is not going to reach the Chinese community, so they are instead seeking ways to collaborate with the consumers of shark fin soup to find alternatives.

As a city, Vancouver represents the largest market for shark fin soup in Canada, and a major proportion of Canada’s Chinese population: 75% of Canadian Chinese live in either Vancouver or Toronto. Shark Truth’s organizers hope to make Vancouver the first step in a broader campaign. They have begun both Personal and Wedding Pledges to “Stop the Soup”, and have provided information on the website and other campaign materials (including Shark Truth info in fortune cookies!) about the unsustainable and inhumane practice of shark-finning.

I have been interested in the campaign and their unique approach since I first heard about it. In order to assist, I undertook the development of the Shark Truth website. In collaboration with the team, I designed and implemented a custom look and feel for the website, using WordPress as the CMS, and developed identity materials to match the existing logo. In addition to this role, I advised on web and social media strategy, and consulted on technology selection and maintenance.

The campaign is off to a great start. The Launch Event at Wild Rice was sold out, raising over $2000 for the campaign, and featured a presentation by world-renowned marine biodiversity researcher Dr. Nick Dulvy, IUCN Shark Specialist Group Co-Chair. Since then, we’ve had lots of interest from the community, including a pledge to not serve shark’s fin soup at a 1000 person wedding! That’s a lot of sharks who get to keep swimming a little longer.

It’s been a pleasure working with the team, and I fervently hope their passion and perseverance will help to slow and eventually reverse the demand for shark fin. Sustainability requires a thorough reassessment of how we use our planet’s limited resources. Sometimes this means slow changes. In other cases, such as this, change must be rapid and resolved in order to make a difference, else we risk losing one of Earth’s oldest and most beautiful predators, and with them the balanced ecosystems that have sustained our oceans for millenia.

I did a couple new things this time around. I’m a big fan of Google Maps and thought it would be cool to embed a map of the various locations we visit in the sidebar of the blog (the long skinny shape of New Zealand helped make this fit!). It was very easy to do. After creating the map, I grabbed the Paste HTML to embed in website iframe source from Google and dropped it into the sidebar.php file of the WordPress Sandbox theme that I had built for the blog. Piece of cake! Check out the map or see it embedded on the blog. It’s a simple thing, but I think it helps to make the country and places more tangible to readers of the blog back home in Canada. I think this is a tiny pointer toward the need for a more cohesive web service for travel blogging. Writing travelogues was my introduction to the blogosphere, and it’s still what I primarily use blogs for. A service that could easily integrate travel data (maps, photos, stories) into a blog would be very useful! The public API’s of Flickr and Google Maps make this just a matter of programming and time, but as such a service doesn’t exist yet (to my knowledge), I have to mark my map in Google, post my photos to Flickr, post my entry in WordPress, then path my entry photos to Flickr. Also, I have to modify the WordPress theme files by hand to embed the results in the sidebar. Kind of a lumpy process.

Speaking of Flickr, the other new thing I did (after adding a similar feature to my website) was add a randomized Flickr badge to the sidebar of the blog, which pulls 10 random photos with the tag newzealand on each page load. This too was a very simple task. Simply use the wizard to generate your badge (HTML or Flash), select whether you would like your photos limited to a specific set or tag, select layout and color options (or none so you can write your own CSS), and you’re done! I dumped all the junk that the generator spits out (ugly HTML tables and verbose CSS selectors) and just grabbed the one line of JavaScript responsible for the communication with Flickr. All the parameters selected in the wizard are appended as a query string to the script URL, and can be edited inline. I embedded the script and tried to edit it to select more than 10 photos, but Flickr doesn’t respond to requests over this limit. No bother – 10′s enough, and the badge adds a little bit of random Flickrness to the blog! Now I just hope Microsoft doesn’t end up buying Yahoo, rebranding Flickr as Windows Live Photo Sharing Utility for Vista Internet Service Pack 2 and breaking the badge