This project investigated the landscape of motivations, strategies, and goals of informal ocean science centers in Orange County, Ca. The projected is situated within a larger context of expectations and definitions of environmental education, and the knowledge-to-action pathway, framed by education and social movement mobilization theories. The objective was to understand how ocean education is put into action on-the-ground across the county, and how cohesive the expectations for outcomes are within the environmental education for sustainability framework. Director or equivalent level employees of five centers were interviewed. While the centers’ missions vary, they all hope for ultimately the same things, employ similar strategies, and programs address similar issues. Responses indicate, first, that integration with formal schooling while a factor in content creation helps bolster the efforts of environmental education but also highlights a need to attend to both formal and informal structures for broader social and environmental change. Second, emotional connection is considered a critical element to move visitors to action. Third, the center-based informal ocean educators serve or intend to serve as change incubators for improved knowledge formation, delivery, and training.

Partisan bias in media, together with psychological biases, sets the stage for and perpetuates polarization around climate change in America. Passing and implementing a successful national climate action plan necessitates bridging the gap between Republicans and Democrats on this topic. I present two complementary studies investigating potential messaging interventions that leverage positive affect and novelty to overcome negative snap judgments of climate policy. First, a content analysis of conservative media coverage of climate change and climate policy indicated that negatively framed content is more common and that connections are rarely made between health and climate topics- indicating potential novelty for both positive valence and health frames. Informed by this, I investigated the effects of a climate message’s valence (positive, neutral, negative) and emphasis frames (health, energy, climate) on measures of Republican support in an experimental survey. Results indicate that neither positive framing, health framing, nor their interaction increase support as expected based on their novelty and association with positive affect. However, analyses identified trust as a crucial model component. Against the backdrop of declining trust in science at the societal level, I discuss the implications of trust’s crucial role in climate policy decisions.