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Transcript

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0:01Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, illuminating the human side. In this podcast, we unveil the human side of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences, and we discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research. Welcome to Science Behind the Glass, illuminating the human side. The podcast that uncovers the hidden characters, making our world richer and more connected. Today, we are thrilled to introduce Stephen Gill. a naturalist and founder of Gone Bogo, who brings the wonders of nature to life through creative storytelling, photography, and Lego dioramas. His work invites us to connect with tiny creatures around us, inspiring curiosity and compassion for the natural world right under our feet. Steven’s dedication to nature education extends behind Gone Bogo. He’s an author of children’s stories, a TEDx speaker, and recently completed a theater tour of his show, Let Me Explain, along Australia’s East Coast. Come Bago, he’s crafted an enterprise to raise awareness about the small forms of life that are often underappreciated, yet crucial to our ecosystems. Through public speaking, classroom incursion, and social media, Stephen brings environmental education directly to audiences, fostering a deeper understanding of our natural surroundings. Welcome, Stephen.

1:26Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. To start, could you share what first inspired you to bridge the gap between nature’s tiny wonders and our often fast -paced, disconnected lives? And how did that curiosity grow into GonBogo? I didn’t have a plan. GonBogo grew quite organically, really. I have a background in tour guiding, so I’ve been taking people to the reef and the rainforest for over 10 years. And in that work, I have always wanted people to slow down, connect with nature and appreciate it. But in the reef and the rainforest, most of the creatures that make those ecosystems functional are small and hard to appreciate. Often people are looking for the big things, you know. We prioritize the big creatures, the flashy colors, and all the important creatures don’t get appreciated often enough. So I had been trying to find a way to make that work well for years. And I accidentally took a photo, not accidentally, but without thinking, took a photo of a snake on some Lego to try and show how small the snake was. It was a newly born snake and I just wanted to show that it was tiny. So I put it next to Lego because Lego is always the same size. Doesn’t matter which country you’re in. all around the world lego has been one size since 1978 so it became a way the photographs scale originally and just say

2:58this is how small this is but through that i learned that with storytelling and creative art i could then make people look at animals that even in the rainforest where that is why they paid to come they’re not interested you know so it’s it wasn’t a planned development but it certainly worked out well That’s amazing. And especially like with mammals and furry animals, we’re more appealing to them. But with insects or bugs, we’re just more like I felt. Well, a lot of people feel really, I don’t know, like or nauseous or fear, some curiosity, but not much. Curiosity is the last thing normally after fear and disgust. Curiosity somewhere down the line. And what inspired you to use these interactive elements like Lego dioramas to help people to form a positive connection with the natural world?

3:55As I say, the first photo wasn’t, it was only for scale. But over time, I only had a little bit of Lego when I started. But over time, I realized there was so much flexibility in it as a building medium, you know, as… As a photographer, if you take what you see, you can work within that. But when you get to build what you see, you can form bigger ideas. You can bury new jokes and extra jokes inside photos. So it gave me a creative outlet as an artist, as well as a great platform as a photographer. And the other thing with Lego that’s really good is that Lego has so many different expressions. So when you start using these characters to take photos, they become identifiable. They become relatable.

4:48So you can have someone be relieved. You can have someone be scared. You can have someone be exhausted. You can have someone be disgusted. And there’s all these different expressions, but it’s still just that tiny little Lego person. So it’s really, it works as a really flexible medium. Yeah, that’s the reason we have now Lego movies of… Many characters and these kind of things, right? Yeah, it’s relatable, but it’s also slightly strange and distant at the same time. Yeah, that’s interesting. And how people react to these Lego dioramas? Do you have some memorable experiences of people interacting with them? Originally, it’s actually always been good.

5:34Most people have reacted very, very well to this. When I started taking these photos, I was actually very embarrassed about them. I was worried that people would think I was being childish. People wouldn’t take me seriously as a communicator or an educator because it was a children’s toy. And I still struggle with that in some regards, but generally people respond really well to this. The biggest problem I have is many people think my photos are fake. I put a lot of effort into making sure that the animal integrates into the diorama, but it works so well sometimes that it looks like it couldn’t possibly be real. And that’s probably, most people respond very, very well to this and engage really well with it.

6:18But often after being amazed by the photo, then question whether or not it’s actually real. And they are, they’re all just real photos of live animals. That’s exciting. The last one that I saw was a rooster. But you mostly use bugs or tiny creatures, insects, spiders. So why them? Why these misunderstood animals, I would say?

6:45There’s a few reasons. I want to photograph everything. I want to photograph absolutely everything. But in Far North Queensland, what is most accessible… is smaller forms of life insects you know i want to photograph a cassowary with lego but it’s going to be a lot harder to make that happen um so i i have been gardening to pay the bills in the region for a long time i work as a gardener as well and so as a gardener you tend to find a lot of insects you you ruin their homes cut down the branch that they’re on you know so i come across insects a lot more than anything else but I will photograph anything I can and I try because I want to represent all areas of biodiversity but it tends to be insects because they work well within the format of small scale photography and they’re accessible and they’re normally not protected by law and they’re a lot easier to work with you know when you have a big animal and a big diorama it becomes a lot more complicated to get. a sensible photo. And having said that, what challenges have you faced during your work, especially trying to shift people’s perspective on small creatures that are often misunderstood or overlooked? Well, the biggest challenge I have faced so far with my work is getting people to take it seriously,

8:15actually. As this is only sort of a young enterprise, I… have a lot to share, a lot to communicate. And the Lego photos become simply a backdrop once I get a chance to speak. But as a business, when I try to market myself, the first thing people see is photos of Lego. And so I find it very hard to get people to take me seriously as an educator because they think I’m just a person who photographs children’s toys. So that’s probably the biggest challenge I’ve faced. not just as a business trying to market to schools and social groups as an educator, but also with conservation. I’ve tried to engage with researchers and conservationists to help highlight species that need assistance because I know people will look at my photos. I know I have an opportunity to share information that isn’t always being taken up by the general public, you know. You can take a photo of an endangered species in its natural habitat, but it’s kind of the only people who will care are people who already care.

9:27But if you take an endangered species and photograph it in a crazy Lego diorama, even people who don’t care about the future of that species will care about the photo long enough to learn about the problem with that species. So I have this tool that I could use to help people raise conservation awareness. But the people who are trying to raise conservation awareness won’t work with me because they think I’m an idiot or because they think I’m childish, you know, like I’m not doing something serious. So that’s probably my biggest challenge on both sides is getting people to consider it as a serious way to talk about science. Well, that’s really curious because one of the biggest problems that we have, what we are facing now with all these dangerous species, species that are in danger of loss and… biodiversity is that people is not engaged with our natural world and the way that you tell or immerse people in your stories is really important and with a lot of scientists we don’t get that how to it’s like oh it’s gelling or even scolding people like oh you don’t care about climate change but how they’re going to care we need to Try to find a way to communicate with them. Yeah, I know it’s challenging. I know they should be more aware of that. But at the same time, we need to find the tools to try to communicate this.

10:49That’s really cool what you’re doing. Thank you. And do you have a favorite diorama that maybe have reached a wider audience or that you consider that is like very appealing in a static way maybe or something like that? I have a few photos that are definitely more popular than the others. Unfortunately, the ones that people like the most are the ones that don’t do enough educationally for me. So they become almost like false advertising.

11:25There’s a photo of a giant mud crab attacking a boat and everybody loves the photo. It was on my calendar for this year. And it’s a very popular photo, but it just doesn’t, I mean, the giant mud crab is an economically important species and it does have a function in its ecosystem, but it’s not the first stop on an important scientific discussion about mangroves, you know. And so the photo works really well, but it also doesn’t achieve the same kind of educational goals that I would aim for when I try and take other photos.

12:02that and there’s you know there’s a wallaby of i photographed a few wallabies but because i have to photograph them in their habitat without coercing them without forcing their behavior because they’re protected by law all i can do is put the lego near them and hope they investigate it and so it’s not a photo i’ve had a lot of control over so i can use them and people love them but they don’t achieve as much for me as other photos do So yeah, I prefer, there’s a lot of photos I’m very proud of that nobody likes as much as me. And there’s a lot of photos that people really, really like that I’m not very proud of. And it’s hard to find a balance between the two. I love this spider. I’m really biased.

12:44Yeah, but I put a lot of effort into that backdrop. So that is probably my favorite photo personally, because the backdrop is engaging enough that people can look at it, but the content is also really important. you know venomous spiders and fear around spiders means so much to me because i was scared of spiders i grew up very scared of spiders and i killed so many spiders that didn’t need to be killed out of fear and ignorance so the funnel web photos for me are probably my personal favorites because they are dramatic engaging photos but they’re also very important in a number of different ways for education That’s fantastic. And I love the background. It was amazing. How has your view of the natural world changed over the years? Very dramatically. As I say, I was scared of spiders. As a kid, I grew up very hands -on with nature, but very disrespectful.

13:44I didn’t care for wildlife, but I did have access to a lot of wildlife in my younger years in the country. And so I… handled a lot of things very badly i injured a lot of animals mostly unintentionally but sometimes on purpose i wasn’t i wasn’t very conscientious and through this photography i have learned an entirely new respect for these animals and their behavior i’ve learned how to read their behavior read their intentions which has made it a lot easier i mean it sort of came out of the photography because i can’t make a spider do what I want. I have to understand what the spider wants to do and make the photo work with it. So I’ve developed this way of sort of understanding my subjects and then working with them to achieve these images. And now, I mean, after five years of photography, I have an entirely different respect for smaller forms of life, but all forms of life, how I engage with every insect. Every animal now is very different than it was even five years ago. Yeah, that is right. Yeah, and maybe it’s a common thing in children’s behavior that they manipulate maybe wrongly the animals that they have access to.

15:07And this kind of portrays and dioramas and pictures may help to have a wider understanding of these species. Yeah, that’s true. And especially with kids, right? Because when they are learning and they’re curious, but they are really clumsy too. And it’s so important how you guide them, how you teach them. In a personal way, my mom and my dad were like, well, those insects have the same right that you have to live. But that was my mom and dad’s pretty different perspective, so completely different to other people. And then now that you… engage with them because it’s really cool backgrounds and these animals are like, oh, maybe they need to survive. Well, maybe I can respect them and just let them be when I’m touching them. And that’s the play and that’s what Gombago is all about, is teaching people not to feel comfortable enough to touch these things. I try and stay away from encouraging kids to engage physically. Obviously, when you’re looking at venomous fish, venomous snakes, venomous spiders, you know. I don’t want any child to walk away from my lectures, my lessons, or my social media and think that they could do this themselves. But to learn just respect, you know, we can coexist with these things that have been perceived as disgusting or dangerous or scary.

16:34We don’t have to touch them, but we do have to understand that they have a place. That’s true. Yeah. And how do you keep the kids engaged for, I don’t know, how long, one hour? It’s normally one hour. My classroom visits are one hour, but my theatre show was an hour and a half or it was supposed to be an hour and a half. It normally went longer. I had a lot to say. One of the things that helps me is I have a deep interest in storytelling and I also have a rather exuberant way of delivering my stories. I use storytelling as a way to keep people engaged because humans engage better with stories than facts. So if I kept it just factual, it would become quite boring. So I try and make all of the facts embedded in stories, which keeps people engaged for longer. But then I also have a wide range of expression. I’m quite loud and excitable, so I tend to turn it into something of a… a whole show you know there’s there’s me dancing around on the stage waving my arms around and then there’s these images so between the lego and me being something of a character and a story the science almost hides within the lesson but because of all those things the science becomes very memorable out of the lesson and so the it works really really well nice and considering

18:06all this What advice would you give to someone who wants to develop a closer connection to the natural world but doesn’t know where to start? Well, my very personal biased advice would be follow me on Instagram. It’s a good place to start, you know, because one of those things that I’m trying to do is give people just little nibbles of interest in the natural world. But apart from my selfish promotion, I think the main thing is to slow down. I think nowadays I find more as a tour guide than anything else.

18:44We’re so busy. We have so many things we want to achieve that we move too quickly through everything. And when it comes to engaging with the natural world, we move so fast that we scare them away. When you stop and look, whether that’s… looking at a coral reef or whether that’s looking at a rainforest or whether you’re in a dry sclerophyll environment, when you stop, life will begin again.

19:12But if you continue to move, all life stops, hides, shies away because you are a large thing moving through their environment. So in all tourism, but also with all of this other stuff, my best piece of advice is just slow down. and pay more attention to the little things because when you stop, you can see them move. But if you’re looking for big exaggerated movements, you’re not going to see that many. But if you look for little things like birds moving from one tree to another, like insects creeping along, yeah, so slowing down and paying more attention is really the first place to start. You don’t need to know what you’re seeing or why you’re seeing. But once you start seeing it, that curiosity will follow along and turn into knowledge. Slowing down is the best thing, the first thing. That’s exciting. And I want to ask you, can you tell us a little bit what was your show about? Let me explain that you were in a tour because you were quite famous here in Australia. So the show, the idea of the show was to… make an opportunity to explain to people not only why i do what i do but also how i do what i do as i say i find it hard to get people to believe in the usefulness of what i’m doing because it looks very simple so it it was the show was just me and a projector

20:43with you know a huge screen showing what i was talking about and it was all the lego photos and stuff but it was a bit of a look into behind the scenes so how i started um how i build some of the lego dioramas a lot of talking about how i work with the animals which then largely became about animal ethics and animal understanding but then i also used the show once i talked a little bit about how i’d started and why i’d started to talk a bit about why invertebrates are so important worldwide so the show although it was written and put together so that it could entertain children and i did i had like tiny you know three -year -old four -year -old five -year -old kids in this show sit still and just stare at me for 90 minutes it was made to entertain children but it was also made to educate adults so even though the pictures on the screen held the kids attention i was talking about complex scientific concepts to the adults in the room and the kids just didn’t notice you know there was just a man waving his arms around talking about lego and they were happy but i got the chance to educate adults and children about different things in different ways all at once which was a little complicated to put together but very very enjoyable to deliver because i had you know grandmas and granddads thanking me for teaching them things they’d never heard before but i also

22:13had children and teenagers coming up and really engaging with me afterwards about what they’d learned, how they’d felt, how it had changed their opinions of things, how it had made them less scared. So it really did address every different age level in a different way, but all at the same time, which I’m really, really proud of. So, yeah, it was a show. Just let me explain about all of it, basically, was what the show was about. That’s exciting. And part of your inspiration also has been your daughter, right?

22:44Absolutely. Being a dad has made me realize, firstly, I want to make sure that she has a world to inherit. But secondly, that I want her to inherit in a sustainable and sensible way. So I want to influence her behavior, but also influence what she has. And it’s really made me reconsider and reassess the kind of education that is available to kids at the moment. authored a children’s book, as you said. So I wrote books about basic sustainable environmental principles for her.

23:19But then, yeah, also just how all of that information gets conveyed and what information gets conveyed. So yeah, it’s really influenced me in every way. That’s inspiring. And Stephen, finally, what tools or approaches can scientists use to connect with the public and raise awareness in ways that fosters understanding? What would you… other than our advice to do, to convey in a better way, in a proper way, will sound like a boring or completely disengaged reality. But at the same time, like, well, we are running. This is like we don’t have time. The world is in a really critical situation for how we can approach the people. Yeah, I think the two main things. I suppose would be a sense of wonder, which is something that I find really easy because I learned all of this very late. Everything I share with people comes from a place of wonder because I learned all of this in the last 10 years. So I’m surprised at what I’m telling people still.

24:25When I talk about science with other people, I’m telling them things that I haven’t entirely figured out myself yet, which I then find really exciting. So I make it exciting by being excited. And I think it’s possible for scientists to have been studying a subject for years to be so familiar with the content, so intimate with what they are sharing with people that they kind of forget to make it exciting for other people. I think it would be very easy. as someone who studied something to the nth degree, to make it boring just by not being excited yourself. You have to really show your own excitement because people do respond to those feelings. When you speak, you speak with your own emotion and people can pick that up. If you are sad about something, you will make your listeners feel sad. There’s even been studies done where people didn’t understand the language they were hearing. but they understood the feeling of the speaker. So when you talk science, you need to be excited about your own science, I think is part of it. And then the other thing is storytelling. And it is very easy for someone who has studied the facts to state the facts. But humans, for our entire existence as a social animal, have engaged with stories.

25:48We don’t engage with facts as a species. Facts are a new creation. And so we learn from stories we can imagine, stories we can embody, stories that we can feel a connection to. And so making story out of science will immediately make it more relatable, more engaging, and more memorable for the general public than just saying, this is what we know, this is what we know, this is what we know. It’s hard. for people to take in lots of that at once and still engage with it.

26:22So yeah, storytelling in wonder is the best advice I could give to anyone trying to communicate science. Yeah, that’s very true. It actually happens to me in my graduated studies because I’ve been for years getting the results and explaining the same things and I feel sometimes that is very monotonous. So I struggle with that part of trying to nail a story that may be compelling to other people because I find it so familiar and it’s like, yeah, I already know this and I see the same species and everything. So it’s hard sometimes, but you are totally right about it. Yeah, that’s true. And something that we mentioned before with other guests, with Jorge, with Dr. Jorge, is that it’s not… Explaining simple words is not oversimplifying the meaning of a story, but actually is understanding deeply what is like how it works, how ecosystem works, what is the function of the bee, what is the importance of that. And it’s not like putting in simple words actually is not oversimplifying that. And you said this right, like a curiosity, a storytelling. This is part of the scientist, but everyone. And also, I think that when you mentioned that people think that your work is quite childish. I don’t think so. I think that is really creative. And I think that we have

27:52to keep this heat. Because if not, we lose the perspective and the amusement of life. And they are always of every day. I think so. Thank you very much. My pleasure. It was really nice. Thank you, Steve. Yes. It’s great. It’s great to be able to talk about it. I’m really happy to share this stuff. This episode celebrates the beauty in the small and often overlooked. Stephen’s work reminds us that even the tiniest creatures have stories to tell, stories that connect us more deeply to the natural world. We hope this conversation has sparked your curiosity and inspired you to see nature’s wonders from a fresh perspective.

28:34Science Behind the Glass is independently produced and edited by your host. with the invaluable support of our technical director, Rafael Giordano, and original music by our talented friend, Bernardo Aguila. Stay connected with us on Instagram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and visit our website for updates and stories. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues to amplify these important narratives.

29:01If you have been moved by our mission, we invite you to support us via PayPal. just click the Support Us button on our website. Your support helps keep this project alive and thriving. Thanks for listening. Keep observing, wondering, and protecting the small wonders of our world. Until next time.