Becoming Green

On the role of Government

2012-01-21T02:41:00.001-08:00

The role of Government in improving the wellbeing of citizens and in protecting the wellbeing of the natural environment has been on my mind ....... again. This has been sparked by conversations we've been having around our new approach at Waste Watch. Firing our discussions this week were Roger Scruton's Green Philosophy talk at the RSA and the Institute of Economics Affairs '.... and the Pursuit of Happiness' report on wellbeing. Both Scruton and the IEA argue that Governments, by interfering, actually have counterproductive impacts on the human and environmental wellbeing they are trying to increase. Environmentalists, typically left leaning, are naturally skeptical, but Scruton and the IEA offer quite persuasive arguments. [For more, see the Action for Happiness response to the IEA and Jonathon Ree's review of Green Philosophy.]

I'm left uncertain. What is the role of Government? There is a great paragraph by Henry D Thoreau written in 1849, which I dig out every time I'm considering this question. These are the opening lines on his essay 'On the duty of Civil Disobedience' I share his standpoint and am grateful that he expressed it better than I ever could:

I HEARTILY accept the motto,—“That government is best which

governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly

and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which

also I believe,—“That government is best which governs not at

all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of

government which they will have.

The key line for me is 'when men are prepared for it'. [By men, I'm doubtless he means men and women - give him a break it was 1849!]. And the fact that it was 1849 is interesting, 163 years later are we prepared for a government which 'governs not at all' or 'governs least'? Scruton, the IEA and others on the right seem to think so.

The rise and rise of Neo-liberalism is driving us towards these 'governs not at all' government's. But, are we ready, are we educated and mature enough to co-exist peacefully with each other and in harmony with the natural environment? Would we, if further freed from the restrictions of Government law and regulation, live lives that have a more benign impact on the natural environment and on our fellow citizens at home, abroad and in the future? I'm far from convinced that we would. Would Thoreau, in 1849, have expected us to be prepared by now? Would he be surprised if someone told him back then that in 2012 we are still not prepared? I won't delve into why we are not prepared here, I want to return to the question. If we are not prepared, what should the role of Government be?

Maybe we rapidly remove government interference. Maybe we endure the harsh short term pain of inequality and environmental degradation as relaxed laws are exploited by those acting in narrow rather than enlightened self-interest. Maybe we do this and hope that the shock therapy is enough to jerk citizens into behaving more mindfully longer term. Under Neo-liberalism that seems to be the current risky experiment. Or, do we remove government interference more slowly and in time with increasing ecological intelligence (the ability to think systemically and act mindfully from a position of sustainability literacy)? The theory being that as ecological intelligence goes up, so too does our ability and motivation to live in harmony with each other and the planet. With increased ecological intelligence throughout society, governments could step back in the confidence that we are prepared to take on more personal responsibility for the wellbeing of ourselves, our fellow citizens and the living species of the natural environment.

However, we are far from being an ecologically intelligent population that is prepared for this week's other buzz idea 'responsible [free market] capitalism'. To prepare us, our formal and informal education needs transformation and investment. All education should be education for sustainability - with the aim of increasing our ecological intelligence (not to mention our emotional intelligence). The Government must invest in it today, so that they can govern us less in the future - when we are prepared for it. Lets hope it doesn't take another 163 years. If, in their impatience, they step back too quickly now, it might.

The High Price of Materialism

2011-12-06T02:44:00.000-08:00

Alongside 'Psychology and Consumer Culture' and his work on Common Cause, Tim Kasser's 2002 book The High Price of Materialism has had a powerful impact on the sustainability movement. The Center for a new American dream has just released this five minute summary of Kasser's work; it is a great starting point for getting people interested in this most important debate:

Locking out contamination AND recyclables?

2011-10-05T15:21:00.000-07:00

I wrote a piece for the Waste Watch blog today:

http://wastewatch.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/locking-out-contamination-and-recyclables/

The Accidental Environmentalists - #1 Alain de Botton

2011-09-07T14:55:00.000-07:00

A couple of years back I interviewed a few people on the subject of 'accidental environmentalism' exploring with them whether, in educating FOR sustainability, we actually need to talk about environmental issues at all. Sustainable lifestyles are made up of a vast collection of sustainable behaviours. They are all underpinned by a set of values such as kindness, empathy and respect. The argument is that to build sustainable lifestyles we need to work from values. I'm fortunate now to be working at a charity that truly understands this. The sustainability movement in general seems to be waking up to it too.

These interviews were intended to become some sort of coherent book on the subject. Maybe one day they will become that, but judging by how busy I currently am, it won't be anytime soon. Therefore I feel that I should no longer sit on them, waiting for a rainy day. Over the next few weeks I'm going to publish some of the transcripts here.

The first one features the philosopher and School of Life founder: Alain de Botton.

Alain De Botton (London, 21/08/09)

I started off by asking him how engaged he is in sustainability issues.

I think it seems to me to be part of a broader thing that no thinking being can be unconcerned about, which is really the position of man in a very advanced technological age in relation to nature and natural forces and the balance between the human man-made world and nature, which includes things like nuclear weapons as much as it includes global warming. I think it is part of a broader thing; it encompasses lots of different things and is perhaps over and above everything else. So, it almost encompasses war as well. It is about human beings as agents of destruction, rather than as respecters of life, or givers of life. Yes, it is hard to be human and not to have come across those issues in some form.

I explained the traditional structure of education about and through the environment and their overall aim of being for, and that there is a limit to this in terms of changing people’s behaviour.

Well the point is that if you talked to them about kindness; that might have as much of an impact on their attitude to the environment, because I think a lot of it is about aggression in its broadest form and the opposite to aggression is kindness.

I wondered if people are consciously aggressive towards the environment?

Well they could be consciously aggressive, or they could just be heedlessly destructive of it, like we are with people.

I explained to him how I view his work as being education for sustainability despite it not talking too much about the environment at all. I asked him if he sees his work in any way as a sort of education for sustainability.

You are right in that people can care about certain values that do not immediately seem connected, or not directly connected to a particular issue, but values don’t have to be. So if you are interested in a value like tolerance, let’s say, tolerance is an application to how you discuss a recipe with a friend to how you run your immigration policy as a country to whatever. In other words one can say that a book or a theory can be discussing something, or be relevant to something without discussing it. It’s like if you read a Jane Austen novel, you come away looking at your world through Jane Austen’s eyes and so it weirdly seems as though Jane Austen is telling you about office politics in the 21^st century. Even though that’s not what she was writing about. It has a relevance that stretches beyond. So you know you could find that Greek tragedy is about environmentalism or whatever and it’s not implausible to say that. So yes I think the amount of people who may be relevant to the discussion might be much larger than traditionally understood by people who are trying to define an ‘eco’ literature or eco-philosophy, or whatever.

I explained that that is where I am coming from and that there is a lot of accidental environmentalism going on. My argument is that if this ‘accidental’ education can be aligned with understanding’s of why (from a purely environmental perspective) it is important to use low energy light bulbs, recycle, compost and save water, then we might start to get somewhere. Rather than telling people to ‘stop doing this...’ and ‘give up that....’ and so on. Especially when there is so much education against sustainability going on around us all the time.

I think you are right, but I think one might need to make that connection explicit sometimes and to say ‘you know about this... and you know in theory that you should do that, well there is a bridge between the two.’ You might need to make that bridge explicit, that would be invaluable, maybe.

I said that this is what I am trying to dig out and whether we can integrate other forms of education. I went on to ask him about The School of Life (TSOL) and how he thinks that might fit into Education FOR sustainability.

[Chuckles] I don’t know. Again, perhaps not directly, immediately. I guess it’s one of those things that if you really took the message of many of the things that TSOL does, you would be unlikely to end up as a sort of ‘eco-destroyer’ as a destroyer of the environment. It is not that there is a direct course in how to save the environment, but if you take it seriously, if you engage with almost anything that it does, there would be a serious incompatibility if you then emerged as a logger of the Amazon rainforest. So again, it is not that it is explicit, but it is implicit. You know, ‘if you take ‘x’ seriously, you are almost by definition going to be quite sympathetic towards ‘y’.’

I spoke about realigning our value systems and working out how to meet our emotional needs in authentic, non-material ways and how The School Of Life can help us to do that.

I suppose it raises the question of what a concerned citizen should do... In modest ways TSOL is trying to change the mindset, but it is a very tiny thing next to ‘The Sun’ (the newspaper, the Sun). It is an incredibly tiny thing. I do think in our society opinions are shaped by the media, it is a cliché, but it is true. The reason why people start to worry about things, or know about things, or think about things it is because disseminated through organs. Which explains why there are people like PR companies etc. The problem is that it is incredibly difficult to get some of the more complicated or awkward[m1] messages through for any length of time and TSOL can try, but on a bad day, in terms of a global problem, you could say that it is just appealing to the converted. It is appealing to people who are basically pretty nice anyway and they need to get together and that would be very nice for them, but its lacking power in a serious sense, in the way that The Sun has power.

I said that it has the potential to be a leading example, or a prototype of this sort of approach and people are already starting to copy it, people are recognising the need for this sort of thing and this approach can build.

For me, one of the questions is what do you do if you care about things? Traditionally for me the response is you write a book and that helps things. But I also recognise that a ‘pilot project’ can in a way can be a good thing and that is why I see TSOL as a pilot project in the sense that it’s a model for how one might do things that could then spread out. We haven’t got the resources or energy to do that, but it is a small thing that could grow. So in that sense it is the equivalent of the single issue campaigner: ‘I’m not going to change the whole mentality, but if I manage to stop this sewerage works from being built, or I manage to stop thatfactory polluting.’ Maybe that’s as good as writing 100 editorials saying ‘shouldn’t we all... whatever’. So it’s trying to get ‘local’ and do one thing.

I then discussed my time at TSOL and how I wanted to get involved because I could see the FOR sustainability potential. I said that I felt that they didn’t want to engage with sustainability, or have that tag and I asked him whether he thought that was a conscience decision.

Personally speaking I think one has to find one’s own way to an issue and the thing about environmentalism and sustainability etc is that these are things which are words often made up by others to describe a problem, which sometimes you have to find your own way to before it actually becomes something you feel and understand deep inside. I think there is a real distinction between an academic intellectual understanding and a sort of emotional understanding. I’ve seen this with lots of topics you know, I remember sort of ten years ago or something when I was writing much more about the personal. Someone said to me ‘have you ever thought about writing about the workplace, or politics or whatever?’ I would say that of course these are things I have thought about, but I have not found a way of writing about it in a way that would feel personal, in a way that would be my own, rather than just a newspaper editorial or something. And for me it is slightly the same with the environment and I think that I am on the edge of finding my way towards a more authentic way of speaking about these things, but I’m not quite there yet, but I can feel it, I can feel it’s coming because I think you just need a topic to sit with you. [m2] I think that teaches me that if I’m feeling that, then probably lots of people are feeling that. You know, we are told by the media to worry and be concerned about a lot of things and a lot of time we are not actually concerned, because we don’t have the experience and we’re not at the right life stage. I know, as a man who has children, before I had children, I didn’t really understand.... For example I’d read in the newspaper headlines that a childs been run over and I’d think ‘oh dear’, you know... I didn’t really understand it, you know now I understand what that means, in a way that a media account would never prepare me for. Likewise there are many people in the environment movement who feel at a very deeper sense what this means and I think that is something that one has to realise takes some time. It’s like, racism, we live in a world where to be racist is considered immediately to be absolutely terrible and that’s it! So you don’t even allow anyone one second of thought that they might have a racist view or racist feeling and not be the antichrist. So for many people it takes actually quite a while for people to discover what it might actually really mean not to be racist, rather than to bullied into not being racist. It might take a trip abroad and it might take contact with people from different races until actually really they think ‘OK, I am going to stop faking that not-racist thing and I actually live it now, I actually believe it fully, I sense it with all my being.’ I think the same thing is true of environmentalism, I think it is unacceptable not be concerned about the environment and because of that strong pressure many people are simply too sort of scared to talk about it.

I asked him if he thought that it leads people to do ‘green’ things, to be seen to be doing green things, to be ‘conspicuously green’. I asked whether before a person has that deeper understanding and realise that it is not just about climate change, it’s not just about turning your taps off and that it is about re-evaluating all of your value systems and all of your decisions, being green just becomes another status symbol.

Well obviously there are horrifying sort of fake versions, just like there are fake versions of everything good. Like people who fake that they are interested in art. That can happen with anything that is good, anything good is open to fakery. So I don’t think it is unique. But I think you are right there is always a heart felt way of doing things that is better. If I was an advertising agency and was thinking ‘how can we sell concern for the environment?’ ‘What would be the best way into this topic?’ You could do a lot of research, perhaps you have done already... into... ‘When’s the moment when somebody feels an issue personally?’ As opposed to feeling it intellectually. I mean intellectually it is simple enough, you tell someone the ice sheet is melting and they go ‘ooh gosh!’ What moment might they... it might be a way of connecting, I mean this is normally this is the way it is done, you connect something that does happen to everyone and you try and show how that thing is connected to a bigger more abstract picture, so you say ‘that playing field that used to be near your house is now being concreted over, it is being concreted over by all sorts of forces and these are the forces blah, blah, blah.’ Then you zoom out from a particular and you hold on to people’s emotional connection.

I agreed that there is strength to that sort of approach of putting it in people’s back yard. I then discussed how it is possible to engage people in conversations about climate change when extreme things have happened, for example the floods in Cheltenham. I went on to pose whether it is more important to talk about things in people’s every day lives, like why did they go to Primark, why did they buy three shirts instead of one, what forces brought them there and what is the impact of that? I then said, this is why I felt that maybe we don’t need to talk about the environmental issues.

Yes it is a more general conversation about thoughtfulness, empathy, kindness and so on. I think there are some people that I’ve met from within the environmental movement, who in a previous age would have been saving people’s souls, I don’t mean that in a bad way... They are more broadly interested in kindness and a certain kind of redemption, salvation and so on, all these kinds of things, which obviously, they sit on religious topics but that is not to say environmentalism is the new religion as though that is immediately a bad thing, or a crazy thing. I think there is a very strong impulse in human beings to, obviously to kill, but also to nurture and it is part of that nurturing instinct which, at some points in history, has led one way and at some points it has led towards Buddhism and at others to other things... It is a way of worrying about human selfishness and greed which has always been a concern for a certain percentage... you know 15% of the population [m3] has always been acutely troubled by our impulses towards greed and thoughtlessness and have tried, in whatever way the age offered them, to channel those energies.

I wondered whether the survival of the fittest thing, could be modified with intelligence, in that we need to work together if we are going to help the species survive.

So it is the co-operative versus the individualistic drives in human nature battling it out[m4]

Next, I brought the conversation onto travel and explained how it is probably the hardest thing for environmentalists to talk about... I discussed the NEF five ways to wellbeing and how most of them can be done and coincidentally done well in environmentally responsible ways. But, travel is a harder one because it can be so valuable to people. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to talk to him about so I talked about escapism and how travel can be so much about escaping physical surroundings, certain people and so on, but it is harder to escape emotions.

There is one view that we never need to change our locations because we can do everything through our minds, so there is a disembodied view of human nature that everything you do, you can do in your mind. Then there is another view which is to say that we are embodied beings and we live through our senses, all of us not just our reason and that we are influenced by such things as the weather, the texture of the carpet and how high the ceiling is. And these are all awkward thoughts, because it signals a loss of control. It’s worse to think that your life might depend on the height of the ceiling, you ‘ooh how awkward, I might have to buy a new ceiling and that’s a major investment, or I might be dependent on the weather and it is only nice 3 months of the year.’ There is an incentive to deny that I think. I juggle with this, but I think that on the whole we remain awkwardly dependent on the external environment for our moods, happiness etc, state of mind and we may sometimes need to travel. I think one of the deepest reasons to travel is in order to cement an inner change, to somehow mark a change and help that change. If you think about how pilgrimages used to work. The whole idea of a pilgrimage was that it was an unpleasant long journey which provides a demonstration or commitment to some idea. And in a way the more unpleasant and long it is the better, because that will lend solidity to the idea. So you know you will walk to Jerusalem, you don’t need to walk there, you could take a boat, but you say ‘let’s walk it!’ you know. I think that is still bubbling away in us. For example, you might get a couple saying, we need a holiday, to get away from it, to mark a step or to re-charge our batteries. Or someone might say ‘I’m looking forward to the flight because when I’m on the plane I can look at my life in a different way.’ We need distance and perspective, etc, etc. I think that that will never go away. If there is a hopeful thing for environmentalism in relation to air travel for example, it’s that I think that that pilgrimage point plays right into an argument for making air travel more limited and more of a treat as it used to be you know 30 years ago, we might do it, but not that often, you’re not going to fly to Paris kind of thing.

I then discussed the concept or habit of ‘throwaway travel’ using a £30 trip to Berlin as an example and saying that one might not put as much effort into it.

Imagine if it cost £3000 people wouldn’t enjoy it any less, they might enjoy it more. If you were only allowed two trips to New York in your life time, ‘that’s it two trips!’ When are you going to take them and how are you going to think about it? Boy oh boy would people think about it. And if they cost 18 times as much the airline would still make money. The argument would then be that only the rich people would keep flying. Ok, but, it only goes some of the way... other people could fly as well, they would just have to save up for it more. You could tax it, according to income tax, or whatever. Anyway, there would be other ways of structuring it.

I discussed the travel experiences of people like James Cracknell and Ben Fogle and how they can inspire people to do similar things and to put themselves into a situation of forced reflection on their lives and priorities. I also discussed ‘slow travel’, but finished by saying not all flying is bad.

No, no, it just has to be limited to a certain level.

I told him I thought of him as a commentator on ‘life’ and asked whether he has ambitions greater than just commentary and whether his involvement in TSOL is an attempt to change things.

Yes I think that [TSOL] is an attempt to change the world rather than comment on it! I’ve always been troubled by this and the role of a commentator. That is why I have always had a vulgar interest, vulgar as in a desire to popularise and vulgarise ideas, which has got me into trouble with people who don’t like that, people who are professionally invested in things being as they are, but I think that, yes, I’d rather a bit of vulgarity I guess at the end of the day. I do think we live in a world where the idea of the artist, thinker, and philosopher is associated with irrelevance, you sit and you knit while bigger things are happening. Again to come back to religion, I’m always attracted to people like the Jesuits who understood the need to engage with power and to engage with the real world; if they wanted to do stuff they might have to sit down to dinner with someone they didn’t particularly like and butter them up and try and get some money off them, you know, whatever it was and that is actually part of life, it’s not some horrendous thing, it’s part of life. I’ve always understood that and felt open to that and a need for that, so TSOL is a first step in a way.

I asked him if one year on it is going the way he expected it to be.

Yes, I mean it is incredibly fiddly, we are now just doing an audit into how the money will work etc etc. I was speaking to a friend the other day who said ‘what you are doing is really original and on a normal business plan it should be like that [uses hands to express growth] or there is something terribly wrong.’ And they were saying that it might just take a bit more time for it to really catch on. You know, things are building up really well for the Autumn, courses are building up well. There are signs that things are getting incrementally better but it shows me new respect for the practical world, you know just to get anything, to organise a payroll for four people is a major operation. It is very very difficult and it is not surprising that the people who have been able to do the thinking and the commentating, on the whole, have not been the ones who’ve been able to organise the other stuff because it is almost another side of the brain, it requires such patience. But, at least unlike some writer colleagues, I’m at least sympathetic to that discipline even if I do tire in front of the Excel spreadsheet. At least I deeply respect its role in trying to get to things that are valuable.

I suggested that his last book [on work] made him appreciate the mundane things people have to go through every day.

Yes, but also that the mundane can be in service of the not mundane and that if you can get the two aligned then you’ve got something to build from.

I asked him whether he ever considers the impact that his work and other things like it might have on people in terms of leading them into an existential crisis.

I suppose because I live it myself, these are journeys that I go through and they involve disruption but also growth, I don’t know, it never occurs to me. My feeling is that people pick up things and read things and get disturbed by things when they are ready to be. It may not always be a comfortable experience, but basically they are ready for it and they want to do it. No one is forcing them, you just shut the book if you don’t like it, or you don’t even pick it up. So by the time someone’s picked up a book or engaged with a film or something it is because they were ready to do so. So even if there is disturbance it is something they are inviting in.

I suggested that a lot of people are not willing to listen to it.

The majority

‘I get this all the time, I talk to my friends about these kind of things and they are like ‘oh shut up, can we not just talk about football?!’ and I reply ‘[sigh] well I guess we can!

And it is very frustrating because people are ready at different points.

‘You kind of feel like shaking them’

It is one of the great tragedies of friendship that, you know.... Of course these people might in twenty years time go: ‘oh my god I’m so concerned, I’d like to have a conversation with you.’ But, by this time you’re living in a different country, they’re doing something else and that moment’s not aligned. It is very hard to get people in a room who feel the same way, who want to, at that moment, talk about the same thing. I suppose that is why people read books, to make sure that they can find somebody, at that time, be it a writer who died a hundred years ago, who feels the same way.

How about the internet?

Well the internet can connect you, at that moment I guess.

I told him what I was up to with Global Footsteps, EcoActive, doing these interviews and so on...

Well, I feel for you. We’ve all got a limited lifespan and the whole problem is, if one cares about these things, what is one to do? How is one to attack the problem? Do you go into here, or do you go into there, this is something I ask myself every day, every day! Am I attacking the right area you know? I am perennially troubled by this I don’t know?

I told him I thought he was doing some good!

Yes, some good, but you just think... I always think the powerful forces in this world can feel so powerful. For example at the moment I am writing this book about Heathrow, I don’t know if you read about it, but anyway.... it’s a nice idea for me and it has enabled me to get all sorts of ideas across, so I have slightly gone to bed with the devil a little bit, but it is interesting. But I’m aware that to get certain ideas across you can get on the Today programme like that [clicks fingers] and to get other ideas across that actually feel totally important and valuable they would say ‘oh goodbye, that’s not for us.’ It is censorship basically and there is censorship in our society and you cannot get certain messages across.

Any examples?

Well some of the more: how are we living? So I was on the Today programme the other day talking about this Heathrow baggage system and it is totally computerised and automated and everyone is terribly excited about it and I said to the presenter: ‘you do wonder why it is automated, we have coming up to 3 million people unemployed, why have we automated it? What is so good about automating it? Why do we always want to do this, to put machines everywhere, chuck people out of work then pay them unemployment benefit, so that they can sit at home?’ We’ve got too little work on for people and yet we are obsessed by automation. Anyway, it is a big point about the role of machines and the role of humans, of course it has got completely cut for reasons that it was not quite ‘on the message’. We don’t live in a Stalinist dictatorship, it is a self censorship, people kind of know what is acceptable and what is not and you can’t really question the economic system. There is a moment at which it gets... you know, people will kind of say ‘oh that’s a bit too strident’ or something, they don’t see themselves as censors, but that is exactly what they are. People sometimes say things like ‘I wonder what it would be like live under communism, everyone would be whispering and so on’. And I think ‘you don’t have to imagine so hard you know, look at your own society and look at the way people naturally censor themselves!’ In work, when they are talking to the media etc, people naturally do it and they don’t even notice it and that is exactly how it would have been in communist society. People wouldn’t have gone ‘ooh I can’t say this’ they would have done it exactly how we do it. But we play up this enormous difference, ‘oh it was so un-free then!’

Ah well!

Tricky stuff!

Thanks very much!

[m1]Interesting choice of word

[m2]Maybe this is the stage we are at collectively? This topic is currently sitting with people... they are thinking about it and maybe they will soon ‘get it’.

[m3]This is a big point, we are never going to make everyone concerened, maybe the 15% need to stop trying to make others concerned and ‘like them’ they need to change the behaviour of others, in other ways?

[m4]Is this all it is, is it like he says, the environment, just a vehicle for those who rally against individualism to sit in?

Which Amazon do we most value?

2011-08-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

The profits of Amazon.com have fallen this year, but this is only because they are making huge investments in their infrastructure, so as a business they can continue to grow and grow. Although their profits have fallen, they are still pretty huge; they made £116m last year.

"Low prices, expanding selection, fast delivery and innovation are driving the fastest growth we've seen in over a decade," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive.

So, while one Amazon grows and expands, that other Amazon continues to catastrophically shrink and disintegrate. You may have received a nudge to sign an Avaaz petition today. The petition is calling on the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to veto changes to forest protection laws; have you signed it?

At the time of writing, 976,000 people have signed the petition to save the Amazon rainforests, while Amazon.com makes over 2 million sales every day.

What does this parable say about what we have come to value most in the world? Is it stuff, or the stuff of life?

Walking alongside to create change

2011-07-17T23:29:00.000-07:00

Two inspirational men I've been fortunate enough to spend small bits of time with over the last couple of years are Satish Kumar of Resurgence Magazine and Andy Middleton of The Do Lectures. I want to discuss something they've both taught me about creating change.

I'm reading 'No Destination', Kumar's autobiography. I was very lucky to share a meal with him in Cheltenham last year. I'm on chapter three, which describes the time he spent walking around India with Vinoba Bhave, a student of, and successor to, Ghandi. What Vinoba taught Kumar about creating changes to land ownership resonated with something Middleton explained to me about inspiring sustainable lifestyles and made me think about how we're reacting to Rupert Murdoch right now.

It was 1957, Vinoba was seeking to revolutionarise land ownership in India in the years after the Ghandi inspired removal of British rule. Vinoba wanted the land to be more fairly distributed to help the poor, he was seeking to create this change through peaceful persuasion, it was a lengthy process. Kumar was asking Vinoba why he wasn't calling for a radical civil disobediance campaign. Why wasn't he trying to force the landlords to adopt the principle of community ownership of land or force the government to change the laws of private ownership? Vinoba replied:

'Gandhi used civil disobedience successfully against the British only because the British government was not an elected government but an imposed authority. The situation is different now. We are living in a democratic set-up. The people have elected the government. If we want a change in government we should convince the voters, who, after all, are the masters. It is no good going to the government which is a servant of the people. My task is to create revolutionary consciousness in the minds of the people.'

According to Kumar, Vinoba believed that 'to overcome landlordism, we should not resist the landlords but assist them to act rightly.' Vinoba did not believe in 'opposition' arguing that it reduces the chances of a change of heart. 'It creates insecurity through which a man is drawn to defend himself just at the point when he should be taking a new impartial look at society.'

I spent time with Andy Middleton while doing my PhD, he told me something similar that has guided my approach to conversations and education around sustainability ever since: 'if you want to create change don't square up to those you want to change, don't confront them face to face. Instead walk alongside them, find common ground and try to guide them along a different pathway.'

Vinoba used an analogy to illustrate this to Kumar: 'Take the example of a house. You want to enter the house, but it has high walls around it. You go to the wall and fight to get past [through] it. You can not. What happens? Your head is broken. But if you find a small door, you can get into the house and go wherever you want. But you have to find the door. Like that, when I meet a landlord he has many faults and shortcomings, and his egotism is like a wall. But he has a little door. If you are prepared to find this door, it means you have risen above your own egotism and you can enter his heart. Don't worry about his faults, only try to find the door. I am in search of that little door in every capatalist landlord. If sometimes I can't find the door, it is my fault, my fault that I am banging my head against his shortcomings.' Vinoba successfully managed to encourage thousands of landlords across India to donate a total of over four million acres of land to the poor to create villages with communal ownership of land, the gramdan.

If we want to change the behaviour of Rupert Murdoch should we square up to him, attack him with accusations of selfishness, greed and corruption? Or, should we open those small doors he has offered us, get alongside him, applaud his public apologies and his promises of reform? Will this, rather than knife twisting, encourage him, News International and the rest of the free press to change the way they operate?

The role of Government

2011-06-20T14:32:00.001-07:00

I had a big row via email with my friend Adam on Sunday morning, it started off as a debate about the public sector pensions row and then veered off into a general argument about the role of Government. I think we both ended up with sour tasting cornflakes, sorry Ad! Today I came across the Henry David Thoreau's essay: 'On the duty of civil disobedience' the first few lines of which express (far more neatly than I managed) how I feel about the role of government:

"I HEARTILY accept the motto,—“That government is best which

governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly

and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which

also I believe,—“That government is best which governs not at

all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of

government which they will have."

I've been criticized before for thinking like this. The argument I get back is that if I think like this then surely I am arrogantly arguing for strong government NOW because I don't think that the men and women of Britain are currently prepared for a government 'which governs not at all'. Therefore, by extension, I'm also arrogantly arguing that men and women will not be prepared for this until they all think like me! Or, until they can be trusted! Hands up, against these accusations I am at least partly guilty [apart from the bit about everyone having to think like me - we are already far too samey, I adore diversity, long may it blossom and widen].

With all its slashing and cutting of the public sector and public services our current hyper neo-liberal Government is hurtling along a path to becoming one that 'governs not at all'. Right now this genuinely terrifies me. It seems to me from reading, watching and listening to our contemporary daily news that we continue to mistreat our fellow human beings both in the UK and abroad daily and horrifically. We also continue, through our actions, to mistreat the natural world; we're definitely not ready to be left to our own devices, if we were there'd be no need for BBC Panorama.

For me Governments are there to temper and actively discourage our most damaging behaviours. They are to do this by incentivising and rewarding good behaviours while enforcing laws that prevent us from harming each other and the natural world. But, I believe that Governments should temper our behaviour only so much as is absolutely necessary and not a tiny bit more; acting like a good nurturant parent who allows their offspring to push boundaries, learn from mistakes, mature and take responsibility for themselves. As opposed to the strict parent whose child is only capable of following orders and remains unable in adult life to decide, independently, how to behave maturely. Eventually, probably, public moral norms would have shifted far enough that it would have become totally socially unacceptable to smoke in confined public spaces. The smoking ban that the Government introduced would not then have been necessary, we would have self-governed ourselves into the exact same scenario, restaurant by restaurant, pub by pub. We were being nurtured towards this as we matured as a society, the introduction of the smoking ban in 2007 was simply our nuturent parent getting a little strict on us by saying 'right I'm introducing a new ground rule'. This effectively speeded up the process. The fact that there were not too many tantrums, or too much kicking and screaming demonstrated how well timed its introduction was.

So, in summary, I believe that Governments should allow us as much freedom to self govern as possible, without giving us so much freedom that we cause intolerable harm to others and the natural environment. That is, not so much freedom that we are able to compromise the freedom of others. It is an incredibly hard balance to strike, but right now, this Government seems to be making it too easy for those who are inclined to oppress others and harm the environment for their own gain, to do exactly that. As a parent it is being too hands off.

New Home Front - Poster Competition

2011-06-20T09:58:00.000-07:00

Please click on this pic to be able to actually the information on how to enter the New Home Front poster design competition!

You can also read about it at www.newhomefront.org get your entries in by 30th September.

£30bn for the UK's natural spaces

2011-06-02T02:50:00.000-07:00

Assume somebody wanted to buy all of the UK's natural space and cover it in tarmac and concrete, what would they need to pay? In their UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UK NEA), DEFRA today revealed what they have calculated to be the value of the UK's ecosystem's. Far from being a financial burden the UK NEA proves that the annual benefit to the economy of our green and blue spaces is somewhere around the £30bn mark. So, does this mean that if I wanted to buy all of this natural space I would need to compensate the Government to the tune of £30bn? Well, no, not quite. If looked at in purely financial and economic terms, I would need to ensure that I contribute at least £30bn a year to the economy as a result of changing the use of this land and water. If I couldn't guarantee that, I would assumedly need to pay 100 x £30bn plus interest at the rate of inflation to cover 100 years worth of loss, or maybe it should be 200 years, or 300? I'd also need to buy the land and a competitive market rate, that is likely to be loads more than £30bn. However, by throwing up a load of luxury apartments on say Hyde Park and Regent's Park, I could probably charge rents totaling more than enough in London alone. Or how about I buy Hyde Park, keep it as it is, but charge an entry fee to the public? Luckily I don't think DEFRA are looking at it this way, I'm confident that they recognise that some things truly are priceless. Then again, we have to pay an entry fee to get onto some National Trust land.

Adam Curtis: This is really all I'm saying in all these films:

2011-05-31T08:42:00.001-07:00

Have you been watching Adam Curtis' latest documentary series? 'All watched over by machines of loving grace' seems to be his most controversial work yet.

I found a recent interview from the excellent Resonance FM show 'little atoms' on YouTube. At around 17 minutes in Curtis says this:

This is really all I'm saying in all these films: I'm very sympathetic to a lot of the protest movements and to challenging power in society, but you are not going to do it through self organizing networks where you all sit round and there are no leaders and there is no guiding vision, except self-organisation. It's a retreat I think and I think in many respects it is a cowardly retreat on the part of the left from confronting the fact that power is getting more and more concentrated in our society, but they don't have an alternative. They retreat like bureaucrats, like librarians into process; processes of organisation, without actually inspiring me with a vision of another kind of way of organising the world.

The Green Party in the UK recognised this, when in 2007, members voted to do away with it's non-hierarchical policy of having no defined leader. New party leader, Dr. Caroline Lucas MP has gone on to become the first ever Green Party MP in the UK. Despite a limited platform the Greens have been able to promote 'an alternative vision of another way of organising the world' and voters are beginning to take notice of it. Caroline Lucas is an inspiring person and a good leader, she has assumed a position of some power and I agree with Adam Curtis, she should not feel scared of using it. Curtis' series (like all his other work) explores power, who has it, where it comes from, how it can be challenged and what people do with it. One thing is omnipresent: power itself.

To follow Curtis' advice we shouldn't just argue against the existence of Power, seeking to remove it entirely in the unrealistic hope that we can all live in a non-hierarchical self-organizing societal system. We should not do this because power never really goes away, it just changes hands. Since the late 1970s neo-liberalism has seen an unprecedented hollowing out of successive Government's in the UK, power has shifted away from elected politicians to the boards of unelected faceless corporations whose decisions are shaping the way we live. A decline in the power of Governments should not be confused with a decline in the existence of power itself. This is a convenient confusion, that does exist, and which serves the needs of an elite few. Hierarchy and power will always exist; the myth that we are becoming a non-hierarchical society is one propagated by an ever narrowing power base. The result is a society where there are many powerless and a concentrated, tiny, powerful elite. The challenge is to spread power more equitably through society, placing it more widely in the hands of more visible, accountable and trustworthy leaders; that is true democracy. We should do this while recognizing and accepting the inevitability that leaders do emerge and that we need honorable ones. Leaders like Caroline Lucas MP

Why don't we call it pollution?

2011-05-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

Just asking...

When we are talking about climate change we call the gasses that come out of the exhaust pipes and chimneys carbon ‘emissions’. Why do we do that? Why don’t we call it ‘pollution’?

The word emissions is so tame, the word pollution is cutting and devastating. I don’t suppose anyone set out to deliberately re-brand this sort of pollution as carbon emissions, but once it started to be used, it stuck. Now this is probably because ‘carbon emissions’ is much less offensive than ‘pollution’. The Grandfather of Madison Avenue, Edward Bernays, consciously dropped the word ‘propaganda’ in favour of the more palatable ‘public relations’. He did this because of the negative mind control connotations associated with the word propaganda but later admitted that public relations was essentially the same thing.

When you frame marketing and advertising as ‘propaganda’, a psychological technique that plays on your deep subconscious anxieties and emotions to manipulate you into buying a good or service, it sounds sinister and deeply unethical. If, however, marketing and advertising is framed as a profession practised by creative, cool and sexy ‘agents’ who show you how their product or service can fulfil your wildest dreams it seems clever, interesting and harmless. You know you’ve been tricked, but you don’t mind because you were tricked by Don Draper and you want to be him/sleep with him.

When you frame the climate altering gasses that we each create in huge proportions every day as Carbon emissions, they sound a lot less devastating than when you call them what they are: pollution.

Embracing our own hypocrisies

2011-04-20T02:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Ed Gillespie wrote a Guardian column on the hypocrisy of 'green' celebrities. Debate raged in the comment reel, I can't imagine Ed got a lot of work done as he typed up defense after defense of his own behaviour, which according to the accusations chucked at him meant he was no less a hypocrite than Sting, Bono and chums. Ed has responded again this morning on the safer territory of the Futerra blog. I started to comment on it there, but got carried away, so am giving my response here instead.

I find that being honest with people from the beginning that I don't always 'walk my talk' helps temper accusations that I'm giving it the old hypocritical: 'do as I say not as I do'. I do environmentally damaging things all the time, it's not because I HATE the environment, but because I like other things too. I enjoy experiencing what the wonders of the human mind has been able to create and make possible: eg: Reading festival, aeroplanes, wine, iPhones, go carting, etc, etc, etc. As Robert Tressell in 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' described it, I like to enjoy the 'benefits of civilisation' a little bit. To deny ourselves the 'benefits of civilisation' is to deny ourselves what it is to be human. Robert Tressell's painters and decorators, his ragged trousered philanthropists, were being denied this because of the low wages paid to them by those they worked for. Their bosses were milking the profits and enjoying the finer things in life, while keeping their employees in poverty. It is why the central character, Frank Owen, saw himself as a philanthropist. He, his fellow workers and their families were being forced to sacrifice their own basic wellbeing and enjoyment of life by the controlling elite, corrupt forces of business and local government. We all need to enjoy what it is to be human, when people deny us the benefits of civilisation we quite rightly rebel.

Thanks to my ongoing sustainability education, I'm learning how to ensure I meet my basic material needs (food, clothing, shelter) in as low impact a way as possible and am discovering how to enjoy music, travel, drinking, communication, speed etc, etc, in lower impact ways too. I've questioned whether Reading Festival is really that enjoyable compared to writing and playing my own music with friends, whether I need to travel by plane to Morocco, or whether an overland journey might be more fun and whether the satisfaction of ripping downhill at 50mph on my racing bike after a long climb up is more fun than go-carting. This doesn't mean I don't sometimes want to go to a big music festival and still do; or don't enjoy go-carting when I do it, I truly do; or don't use an iPhone (I'm a slave to it). I do do all these things, but a bit less now and it is because I have learned that what it is I get out of them can be found in other, more fulfilling ways. And with some sustainability literacy I'm able to do them in an environmentally more sensitive way.

But, hey, I flew back from Morocco. I want to talk to you about that, not to justify it to you, just to dig deeper into this common dilemma. Exploring why, despite all the physical and emotional discomfort it caused me, it still made the most sense and was therefore ultimately what I wanted to do. In the list of my life's priorities, my environmental concerns are sometimes trumped by my other concerns - I want to talk to you about those other concerns and how they came to be. Exploring with people our own environmentally destructive behaviours and what drives them takes you to a position where your audience feels they can walk alongside you, rather than wanting to square up to you and punch in your hypocritical nosey nose.

Chandran Nair at The RSA

2011-04-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Emma and I attended 'Constraining Consumption' at the RSA this evening. It was nice to hear someone telling it like it is. Here, very briefly, is one part of the argument as I understood it!

From the end of the second world war onwards Government's in the Western world had to work out how to deal with the fact that they had a production system that produced far more goods and services than people actually wanted. Too many resources and too few consumers. The business of public relations was ushered in and set about convincing people they did need more stuff. In the process they ensured that demand matched supply and that a lot of producers got rich. This story is told most succintly in Adam Curtis' Century of the Self. The result was rapid and spectacular economic growth. Today in Asia the problem faced by the governments in Beijing, Delhi, Manilla and so on is the exact opposite. Too few resources, too many people. In Consumptionomics Chandran Nair argues that they are apparently blind to this reality and instead obssesively follow the consumer capitalist model of the West. It is an absolutely insane thing to do. At exactly the time when governments should be working out how to constrain consumption they are out there, all over the world, actively encouraging us to buy, buy, buy.

Paul Gilding at The RSA - Where are 'we' in The Great Disruption?

2011-04-14T04:30:00.000-07:00

Paul Gilding is talking tonight at The Hub Kings Cross on his new book The Great Disruption. Its free, but you need to sign up and is chaired by Ed Gillespie from Futerra. My wife and I went to his RSA talk last night; he's great to listen to!

I agree with a lot of Gilding's analysis, we are coming towards the end of global economic growth, it is a scientific fact. The world's capability to produce enough for the 7 billion of us currently on Earth is diminishing rapidly, I'm in total agreement. The world's economy is going to contract, it is going to be disrupting! I've not read the book yet, but the most interesting thing to me at last night's event was the use of the word 'we' by Gilding and the chair, Martin Wright. They seemed to be talking about the global 'we'; 'we' as a species, and argued that this 'we' will eventually, collectively, act to cope with the great disruption. I admire the optimism.

At the end of the Q&A, Wright asked the audience to put their hand up if they agreed with the following statement: 'We're going to go through a serious shit storm and then we'll eventually emerge, slightly weather beaten, but basically in tact in about 70 years time.' (I'm paraphrasing!) I didn't put my hand up, because I assumed he was talking about the global 'we'. My hand would have (regretfully) shot up if he'd been referring to 'we' the rich 1 billion.

Why? Well I was left wondering if anyone really cares about GLOBAL economic growth; I mean is there anyone out there activitely on a mission to sustain global economic growth? Or, is it just the cumulative result of lots of people autonomously caring about personal, national and corporate economic growth? Surely it is and always will be. The upshot of this is that as the global economy retracts people/politicians/CEOs will do everything they can to delay the death of their most immediate economies, in fact they already do this daily. As these more immediate economies are under threat from increasing oil prices, impacts of Climate Change, new regulations, redundancy or whatever other crisis they face (which many already are) the instinct is to act selfishly to cope with or diminish the emerging threats. There is little incentive to care about the detriment your actions will have on others(1). The rich 1 billion, in its various overlapping guises as nations, corporations and wealthy individuals, has been doing this for decades, most noticeably for us, here in the UK, through the government's ongoing foreign policies. The result of all this is the growth of between country and within country inequality. More threat (and more perception of threat) intensifies this process; fear breeds protectionism, resource grabbing and self preservation. This is one of my concerns about creating a 'fear' of climate change.

But, will individual economies/nations/people/businesses acting in their own self interest between now and 2050 add up to a global collective movement capable of navigating the great disruption with all the estimated 9 billion people in tact? It seems to be a hope some are clinging to right now. But, the consumer culture fuelled demise of our ecosystem services and natural resources suggests it won't. What will probably happen is that the current weakest economies will collapse and the stronger more powerful economies will swoop down to mop up their scraps to keep their economies going as long as possible. It is a frankly terrifying future prospect and one that makes me feel quite ill.

Is there any hope? Yes, I strongly believe, like Gilding that the Earth has the carrying capacity to feed and shelter 9 billion people, in a more equal, less consumerist, world it would be possible. We might even be able to still enjoy some of Robert Tressell's 'benefits of civilisation' too. Part way through his talk last night Gilding said that for this to be possible 'we simply need to change the way we think'. He was of course talking about the need for us all to appreciate that the true ways to wellbeing are found not through shopping, hedonism, celebrity and power, but through giving, caring, connecting and playing. The 'simply' part was an enormous understatement, but I totally agree and it's why I passionately work to do this everyday with Global Footsteps, Becoming Green and most recently Common Cause. It is a far from 'simple' task, but its not impossible and Gilding cites some precedents for this happening. If the global 'we' is successful in doing this I'll be a delighted 80-year-old come 2050, if not I will be able to sleep at night knowing I was one of the those who was trying to make it happen. Paul Gilding, Martin Wright and Ed Gillespie are three others amongst a growing crowd who will also be able to look themselves in the mirror and say 'I tried'.

Notes

1. Other than pissing them off so much that they rise up against you and even then you can avert that threat by owning weapons of mass destruction

Action for Happiness

2011-04-12T05:22:00.000-07:00

Action for Happiness launched today. So far I like it.

Find out more via their website.

Follow them on Twitter

If you're not the sort of person who does all the things listed below, you probably don't read this blog. But, just in case, try one or two. I'm off out now and will try to do number 10.

T-Shirt for sale: 'I'm Cameron's Big Society'

2011-04-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

This soggy dog was photographed in 2008 by the pond in Springfield Park, Hackney. He probably made a mess; someone probably had to clear it up.

Springfield Park overlooks the River Lee and Walthamstow Marshes in East London and is becoming increasingly popular as the people of Hackney seek a refuge from the overcrowded fashion show that Clissold Park in nearby Stoke Newington has become. My wife and I took my parents to the Springfield Park Cafe yesterday on our way home from Sutton House in Homerton. As Dad and I queued up for the men's toilet, the resident Park Ranger lamented to us the difficulty he and his colleagues are having in keeping Hackney's parks litter free and well stocked with loo paper. With a wry smile he complained, 'I was here at 8am this morning waiting for Cameron's Big Society to turn up and help me clear up yesterday's litter. They didn't come; its 3pm now, I don't think they are coming are they?' I was quite moved to want to help this guy, but the thing is I really, really don't want to be one of 'Cameron's'Big Society'. He is not a leader I am drawn to follow, I'd hate to wear the 'I'm Cameron's Big Society' t-shirt. I don't want to vindicate him, he's a hypocrite. If Caroline Lucas MP asked me to grab my litter picker and pooper scooper, I'd be there, she's not a hypocrite. It's not that I don't want to help others, I continue to volunteer on projects I've been involved in for several years, but to take on any new volunteering, especially something as conspicuous as litter picking, stinks of Cameronism. I won't volunteer to help Cameron's re-election campaign.

The selflessness that should be at the core of the Big Society is a value I certainly hold, but it is not a value I easily associate with Mr Cameron and Conservative party members. There is a carefully veiled hypocrisy here and it surfaces in the Government's 'Giving' Green paper. The paper condescendingly explains to the NGO sector that to encourage selflessness you need to highlight the self-enhancing benefits of donating time and money. OK, this approach can mobilise people in the short term, but it's oxymoronic and doesn't address the root of the problem. Boiled down the message is this: Be selfless for the sake of yourself; it will reflect well on you in your social circles, it will make you feel good and make your life better and safer. 'Selfish people have been dropping litter in your park, be selfless for selfish reasons and pick it up won't you?' This, according to the the Green Giving paper, is what NGOs should be communicating to the public to create the Big Society.

Such advice is grounded in our current culture and is therefore an insufficient challenge to it. We live in hyper-individualist times where self interest is championed by the business and political elite almost everywhere we look. From adverts selling us status symbols to the recent revelation that David Miliband MP has set up a company to change and lower his personal tax burden (Labour are certainly not immune here). From this base, it is very difficult to encourage generosity, kindness, community spirit and genuine altruism. When the Big Society fails, as it surely will, Cameron and colleagues dare not accuse the public of selfishness; they reinforce it in them on a daily basis.

To lead a selflessness revolution, Mr Cameron, as the 'Prime' version, should look up the definition of the word 'minister' ('to attend to the wants and needs of others') and so should his parliamentary colleagues. They should all be exemplars of this ministering. Currently they only seem to be attending to the wants and needs of a few at the expense of the all the 'others' they have been elected to attend to. This should surely be the other way around (I do recognize the need for trade-off and compromise in Politics!) Until selflessness becomes observable in the deeds as well as words of our political leaders, they will remain difficult leaders to follow.

Adam Curtis documentaries

2011-04-04T08:23:00.001-07:00

This is just a link to a website containing most of Adam Curtis' documentaries.

Possible streams of effort to carry Common Cause forward within the education sector

2011-04-04T02:32:00.000-07:00

Please feedback by commenting below or by emailing

Morgan Phillips: mail@becominggreen.co.uk

It is my strong personal belief that the sustainability sector¹ is too small and too powerless to create a mainstream shift towards sustainable lifestyles on its own. Such a shift would require a dramatic modification of the values of the entire population and the sustainability movement is only a very tiny shaper of those values. The forces that drive and embed self-interest and therefore consumerism in our society are numerous, complexly interrelated and self reinforcing. This is not to say they can't be challenged, they are and can be; I'll discuss how a little later.

Following on from discussions on March 11^th, 19^th, 20^th and 21^st that I’ve been having in various ‘Common Cause’ meetings I want to suggest two streams of effort that those interested might want to join together to pursue. They are related and mutually reinforcing but need not be pursued in any particular order, I am therefore naming them the RED and BLUE streams.

RED stream - Getting our own house in order

As a sector¹, and as Common Cause points out, what we absolutely must not do is be complicit in reinforcing damaging self-enhancing values. Heaven knows they are reinforced enough elsewhere! So, no longer, for example, should we encourage environmental behaviours by preying on cost and time saving motivators, however tempting such short-cuts can be. There is a very real need for us to get our own houses in order. No matter how difficult and challenging it might be, this must be the path we set out on. We must do this for several reasons, one not least of which being that if we are playing on self-interest to further our agendas, we are in effect - as respected ‘universalists’ - further legitimizing hyper-individualism².

The first task in getting our houses in order is to communicate to the sector as a whole the necessity of actually doing this. Waste Watch’s collaborative Sustainable Lifestyles framework and its initial discussion paper 'Working from values'³ provides a very useful starting point for us. The 'next steps' of that project will explore the issues in more depth and contribute further advice, through research and best practice case studies, to help the sector as a whole to modify its approach. Tim has called for others to come forward to help him develop these next steps; it is up to us to respond to that call.

However, dissemination, I feel, must not be restricted to PDF files and online forums. Face-to-face contact in the form of one-to-one conversations, workshops, action research and ‘work experience’⁴ need to happen as budgets allow. Several networks⁵ exist to make dissemination possible, we should use as many as possible to ensure we reach all corners of the sector.

The shift in practice called for will not happen overnight, there are many obstacles⁶ to overcome. As advocates and consultants⁷ we can catalyse a change in practice - the shift is already in motion, we need to help it gather speed until it snowballs.

Getting our own house in order is crucial not only to improving the efficacy and long term impacts of our own work, but will also allow us to carry out the BLUE stream more effectively.

BLUE stream – Engaging the wider education sector

Formal education in the UK is beset with many difficulties⁸; many argue that it is not fit for purpose. Schools are filled with disengaged students, frustrated teachers and worried parents. The formal education system is ripe for transformation and we need to get along side those calling for change, find common ground and combine with them to become a powerful and irresistible voice.

I may be a bit naive here, but I believe that if you ask teachers and parents what they want their children to grow up to be, they don’t say: image and celebrity obsessed, infantalised, hyper-hedonistic, dependent, conformist, selfish capitalist consumers. They are probably more likely to want them to be: creative, kind, independent, community spirited, mature, intelligent, caring and selfless young citizens. If they do want them to be the latter they have an enormous role to play in nurturing them and making it possible⁹.

As we know children and adults are surrounded by self-enhancing values. Adam Curtis called the 20^th Century the Century of the Self ¹⁰; the 21^st Century shows no sign of being any different. We are taught to look out for number one, to buy large houses and fast cars, expensive holidays and designer clothes. We have status anxiety, debt and boring jobs. Consumerism, for many, is an escape, a temporary relief and a way of life. Self-enhancing values are reinforced constantly, by celebrities, public figures, script writers, musicians, academics, teachers, parents, brothers, sisters and friends. Often it is done inadvertently, it is so embedded in our culture that our ‘natural’ behaviour unwittingly reinforces self-enhancing values.

But, every time we hold a door open for someone, lend an ear to a friend in need, give our family members a lift to the shops or organise a birthday party for someone close to us we reinforce self-transcendent values, all is not lost! Our learning institutions have a very important role to play in helping children and young people to decipher the world around them. Teachers can help children to celebrate the joy of giving and caring for others. Teachers can help children to understand their emotions and basic material and non-material needs. They can help them to think critically about the things that influence their values. They can marvel at the wonders of nature, science and art with them. They can nurture their creativity and bring stories of self-transcendence, rather than self-enhancement to life. They can do all this through books, films, poetry, photography, field trips, music, art, sport and history. The point is they can do it within their chosen subject, it really is not that hard and it is probably what the majority of them would actually like to do¹¹.

The conversations I have been having with those with several years more experience of working in and around the formal education sector have led me to the following premise: Lasting change in education is more likely to happen from the bottom up. Education ministers come and go; schools and teachers stick around a lot longer (and believe or not do have some autonomy, creativity and pride in their work). Although the thinning out of the curriculum will present challenges¹², it also presents opportunities. Teachers beyond the core subjects of English, Maths and Science will be freed up to express their self-direction and their creativity. They will have more freedom to decide what they teach and the resources they use. We need help them curate these and encourage them to facilitate and celebrate creativity in children. In doing so, we can hope they produce young people who are creative and caring, rather than creative and selfish! ¹³

If change does happen from the bottom up, we need to work out ways to engage teachers, parents and children (and perhaps civil servants). Can we go into schools and ask some fundamental questions? Why are you a teacher? Is the current education system fit for purpose? How can you change it? Are children leaving school with the skills, aptitudes and values that will help them flourish as adults in the 21^st Century? What do we want our children to grow up to be?

The BLUE stream will require us to get alongside other groups who are also interested in asking these sorts of questions. Those in the arts and creative sector, those interested in children’s wellbeing, those interested in bringing New Economics into schools, those interested in introducing philosophy to children, those interested in reclaiming Sport as an environmentally benign and community building pastime. We need to identify these groups and link with them. There are workshops, weekend retreats for teachers and parents, discussion papers, books, documentaries and so on to be made. What will these look like? How can we modify existing approaches and create new ones?

****

I hope this is useful and helps focus efforts. I am keen to hear your feedback, tell me if I am being unrealistic or idealistic! The RED stream may well be the easiest one to navigate, but the BLUE stream is where the real opportunity for change seems to lie, I recommend doing both.

If you can think of a GREEN or indeed YELLOW stream to add to this, please offer it up! I look forward to hearing from you.

Notes

1. The sector I’m referring to here includes all those working in education for sustainable development, development education and environmental education. Most specifically those who engage with schools in the UK.

2. ‘Hyper-Individualism’ is a phrase I am borrowing here from Bill McKibben’s (2007) book ‘Deep Economy’.

3. ‘Working from values’ available from: http://wastewatch.ning.com/group/workingfromvalues I’m sure you can also contact Tim Burns directly tim.burns@wastewatch.org.uk to request a copy.

4. There is no better way to learn about a new approach than to witness it firsthand. I hope organisations pioneering this approach will open their doors to fellow practioners.

5. Networks: Sustainable Schools Alliance, SHED, PRISM, Compass Network, Common Cause, LEEF, HEEN, Project Dirt, Sustainable Lifestyles, IES, The Green Party, NEF etc, etc. [Please add to this list].

6. Obstacles to change within sector: Funding hoops to jump through, Culturally embedded practice, Audience expectations, Time, Resources, Ignorance of funders/educators(!), Heavy emphasis on actions, desperation and impatience.... (I researched this during my PhD studies)

7. As momentum for a shift begins to occur, there is likely to be a role for advocates and consultants who can help organisations and individuals to modify their work. Advocates and consultants will need to be trained and resourced to do this.

8. Problems with formal education sector. For a brief summary just watch Sir Ken Robinson’s RSA Animate: http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/ Please feedback to me with other good critiques.

9. I argue this more fully, but from a Higher Education perspective here: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/6065/Emotional-Wellbeing.pdf

10. Adam Curtis’ BBC Century of the Self documentary series details the rise of Public Relations and is well worth watching, you should be able to find it here and you can often get DVDs of it on EBay.

11. My personal website: www.becominggreen.co.uk is a collection of resources and ideas to be used by teachers of all subjects who wish to explore values, wellbeing and sustainability; it hopefully demonstrates how wide education for sustainability actually is / could be.

12. The core concern I heard raised at the recent launch of the Sustainable Schools Alliance is that schools will become preoccupied in achieving success in the small range of core subjects, therefore lessening the emphasis they put on more peripheral subjects, especially sustainability.

13. I have just written a piece titled: Creative and Caring, or Creative and Selfish: http://becominggreenblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/creative-and-caring-or-creative-and.html

Creative and Caring, or Creative and Selfish? A challenge for Sir Ken

2011-03-31T04:13:00.000-07:00

I'm going to do something that is perhaps slighty unwise, I'm going to offer up a criticism of Sir Ken Robinson. 'Really?' I hear him chuckle. 'Well, frankly, Sir Ken, yes I am'. Its not just a criticism though, it is a challenge.

But, I'm starting with a disclaimer. A problem in any criticism we might offer up against academic superstars is that it can be misinterpreted as a dismissal of everything that they say and believe. So I'm starting by saying that I agree with Sir Ken Robinson in very many ways. Most especially, his critique of current formal education and how it homogenizes young people on factory like production lines, is spot on and vital to arguments for educational transformation. Like millions/billions of others I had my creativity passively contained during my years of formal academia, I know what he means. I wonder what I would have become if I hadn't been so consumed with the fear of failing the next test, essay or exam.

So, I agree with Sir Ken, it is of course very important for one to be allowed to flourish, to find one's passion and lead a fulfilling life. To state that this is good for people's wellbeing, is to state the bleeding obvious! But I'm glad Sir Ken is out there doing it because a lot of powerful people in education seem to disagree. Like Sir Ken I would argue for an agricultural model of education that nurtures individual students helping them to flourish and grow. And against industrial models that breeds conformity, standardization and control.

However, individual (individualist?) pursuit of a passion - the finding of our element - is not always necessarily going to be a good thing for wider society and the environment. In the same way that a 'cradle to cradle' designed oil pipe is not necessarily a good thing for the environment. In encouraging people to find their element, do we not need to ensure we are aligning this 'self direction' with a healthy wedge of 'self transcendence'? Tim Kasser posited this at a recent WWF Common Cause weekend I attended and it has hugely significant implications for education. Especially if you believe, as I do, that all education should ultimately be education for sustainability.

Now I don't believe that Sir Ken is indifferent to sustainability, he quipped in the second of his very famous TED talks: 'there is a major climate crisis, obviously, and if people don't believe it they should get out more!' But, in the many examples of people finding their 'element' he uses on stage and in his book, very few (eg. the firefighter he cites at 9m30 here) are working on what Tom Crompton, in Common Cause, calls 'Bigger than Self' issues. He does not choose examples of people who are great humanitarians, environmentalists or simple loyal companions. People who forgo personal gain, and sometimes even safety and comfort, to help others and address issues that transcend them. Where are the generous, kind, selfless, mature people with strong universalist and benevolence values? People like Greg Mortenson and Mohammed Yunus. There are many examples of people out there who are self-directed but also deeply care about bigger than self issues, they need to be championed!

Instead, the majority of examples Sir Ken presents (and the ones that stick in the mind) are fantastically successful and financially wealthy individuals. People like Paul McCartney, Bill Gates, Matt Groening etc etc; the Business and Cultural Elite. These people have risen above the shackles of industrialist education systems to fully exploit their talent and creativity in the field they love, I don't have any major problems with these people they make me laugh, sing and write lengthy blog posts. But, I do have problems with other historical and fantastically successful people, who, in their element, have achieved huge prominence, like military dictators, CEOs of arms manufacturing business, heads of petrochemical firms, bosses of pharmaceutical companies and George Bush junior. Indeed, I'm sure Dr Robert Oppenheimer was in his element when he was developing the atomic bomb. It is not always necessarily a good thing to encourage self-direction in people, you don't know what they might end up creating! However, this is not the main point I want to make and fear of what we might be unleashing should definitely not inhibit us from developing and celebrating creativity, critical thinking and self-direction.

My major concern is this: Sir Ken cites role models who are fantastically wealthy and/or successful. I understand why he does it, it is because audiences can relate to them, look up to them, respect them and even daydream of being like them. Not all of them are hugely famous and therefore instantly recognizable outside of their specific field though. For example, he talks about a female world champion pool player, it does not matter whether we know her name or not, we understand what a 'world champion' is and can appreciate the financial success, power, status and glory that comes with being one. In the same way we can imagine what a Nobel prize winner is and what the lives of FTSE 100 CEO's look like. What his examples do is play with our perceptions of what a fulfilling and meaningful life looks like. This is my criticism, by citing these examples he is reinforcing our self enhancing values. These people have found their element, but they are also often fantastically wealthy, popular, hugely respected, attractive and quite possibly world famous. They have designer clothes, big houses, fast cars, expensive holidays, thousands of air-miles and their own private swimming pools (probably). Sir Ken holds them up as exemplars of a creative life well lived and something to aspire to. In doing this he also, inadvertently, holds up all the luxurious trappings that surround such luminaries as something unquestionably OK. He doesn't question whether material wealth brings happiness or whether the selfish pursuit of one's goals is necessarily good for one's personal relationships and ecological footprint. The emphasis is on the 'self'; find 'your' element and 'you' will be happy.

The high value individuals have come to place on power, status, achievement, hedonism and financial success in modern western culture promotes hyper-individualism and selfish consumer capitalism. But, people who place a high priority on the self are far less likely to care about bigger than self issues like climate change, biodiversity loss and global inequality. That's not just a theory, the evidence can be found in the Common Cause report if you want to look it up. When self-enhancing values are strong, so too is materialism. So not only do people care less about bigger than self issues when they are overly concerned with enhancing the self, they are also the people who are most likely to over consume the world's resources as they buy status symbol after status symbol in their attempts to assert their identity.

The consequences of reinforcing self-enhancing values are not just global and environmental, they are very personal too. Tim Kasser discusses the High Price of Materialism for our emotional wellbeing as do Hamilton and Dennis, De Graff et al., and Oliver James who have all released books under the heading 'Affluenza'. The imperative for individuals and society is clear, lessen the emphasis placed on self-enhancing values, don't expect them to disappear completely, just lower their influence a little in favour of self-transcendence.

Common Cause argues strongly that when Civil Society Organisations inadvertently reinforce self-enhancing values they have a counter-productive impact on the bigger than self issues they are trying to solve. So here is the challenge for Sir Ken and for a transformed education system:

Please do promote self-direction, creativity and critical thinking in education but frame it within the values of self-transcendence and a critique of the cultural reinforcement of self- enhancing values. If we want children to grow up to be creative, kind, generous, community spirited, mature young adults; rather than creative, infantalised, image and celebrity obsessed, selfish consumer capitalists we need to be very careful about how we transform education and which values we promote in doing it.

Follow Sir Ken Robinson on Twitter

Check out his website: http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/

And his latest book: Out of Our Minds

Ecoinomy - Ecosystem - Economics

2011-03-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

It is worth taking a look at the Ecoinomy website, they are a company purportedly setting out to help businesses become more 'sustainable'.

The main motivating force they are appealing to to get clients on board is the bottom line: money and profit. Their messaging is so explicit, it is almost painful, they might even fall flat on their face as a result. What particularly disturbs me is their hi-jacking of the word and concept of Ecosystem. Check this out from their website:

The eco.system. What's that? What's in it for me?

For a small monthly sum per employee, we will bring our unique ‘eco.system’ into your workplace. Not only will this help you begin to comply with the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme regulations, it will also repay itself many times over as your employees begin to see the fun in behaving in a greener way, are encouraged to interact with each other (particularly between departments that previously had nothing much to do with each other), and find their morale and motivation growing. As a recent survey observed, a highly motivated workforce is 84% more productive than one that isn’t. Imagine that translated into profits. What a happy manager that would make you, especially as Ecoinomy and our eco.system will also lift an astonishing amount of responsibility from your shoulders.

The linguistics here are appalling. Talk about appealing to and reinforcing damaging 'self-enhancing values'. To learn more about the dangers of this read up on the Common cause report. The rest of Ecoinomics site including this video explains their concept a bit more. Aside from the outrageous abuse of the meaning of the word ecosystem, Ecoinomics seems to me to be a classic example of businesses being encouraged to ask 'what can sustainability do for me', rather than 'what can we do for sustainability?'

Forests, its not about public access or sustainability....

2011-02-02T06:15:00.000-08:00

Today at about 4pm MPs will debate the coalitions plans for our Forests. Earlier today David Cameron said that the plan (selling the remaining 18% of our woodlands that are still publicly owned) is better for public access and woodland management. It may well be, but that is not the reason they want to do it.

By campaigning on public access and sustaining woodlands, we are doing Caroline Spelman, David Cameron and all their cronies a massive favour, this is exactly what they want us to do. Why? Because it will give them room to make 'compromises' in the shape of grants to the new landowners that 'help' them to maintain the woodlands and improve public access. As Private Eye recently reported, the government will give back nearly all the money they make from sales in grants to the new landowners. The landowners will therefore make a very tidy profit, by essentially not having to pay anything to maintain and enhance their asset. This represents yet another gradual transfer of wealth from the tax payer to the rich elite.

A dangerous and hidden knock on effect of this policy is that to make up for these expenditures (either from the grants, or, if campaigners are successful in changing the policy over the selling of the forests) is that there will be even more job losses at Natural England and the Forestry Commission. The jobs of wardens, ecologists, scientists and so on are already under threat, losing the key employees will be devastating for the long term sustainability of all our wild places.

The £400m saving deriving from these cuts is a laughable drop in the ocean, its impact on the deficit is minuscule, yet the impact on our natural environment, inequality and environmental education will be very tangible and devastating.

Do visit 38 Degrees and ask your MP to vote for a re-think on DEFRA's plans. But, make sure they know what the true motivation for the plans are and that in the debate they highlight this.

Oh yeah, and it is also a sweet tax relief move for corporations and wealthy individuals!!

Please also see my post on Pam Warhurst, chair of the Forestry Commission

Heat Map

2011-02-02T01:57:00.000-08:00

The 'heat map' below was published in the Economist in November 2010, around the time of the UNFCCC COP16 in Cancun. (You may need to click on it to see a bigger version)

What is so striking about this map is that those who seem to have the most power to act on Climate Change are those who will be least/most pleasantly affected by temperature rises (namely the wealthy, fossil fuel hungry American states and although temperatures will rise in the American South, they are quite willing to discount this to 'protect their liberty' now - see this weeks BBC Climate Sceptics Storyville) - so where is their motivation to act? Meanwhile, those who will suffer the most, are those least empowered to do something about it and those to poor to be able to cope with the consequences. According to the Science article from which this graphic is lifted, the biggest impact will be on Food Security and this is perhaps where the motivation will come from. It will become increasingly difficult to grow food in the tropics as today's extreme high temperatures become tomorrow's norm. Without Climate Change the growth in population in the less developed world already places a great strain on food production, by 2050 the population of the world could be as high as 10 billion. Much of the food (and flowers) we buy in our super-chilled supermarkets are flown in from the tropics. By 2050, we made need to start flying it the other way.

Alternatively what might happen is this, we will realise that we can't rely on the tropics to grow our food and the cost of transporting it will rise dramatically as Oil peaks. This will combine to motivate us to grow our food locally (transition town style). But, will we set up the infrastructure needed to transport surplus food to the less developed world where it will be so badly needed? Will we bollocks, we can't even do that now, we'll eat/waste it all ourselves, protect our liberty and further global inequality. The poorest countries will most probably be left to grow biofuels to run the cars and power plants of the rich elite, using the money earned (which will amount to pennies after the developed world owned biofuels companies have taken their profits) to buy in scraps of corn and grain to malnourish themselves with.

Thanks to Leo Hickman for posting this map on Twitter.

A great quote

2011-01-31T09:45:00.001-08:00

If you don't share your stability and your economic success with the poor, the poor will share their instability and poverty with you.

(Omaru Sisay, 2010)

My wife, Emma, and I scribbled down this quote while watching the BBC Storyville documentary 'The Trouble with Pirates' that was broadcast in September and then again in December last year. One of the interviewees on that show was a specialist African analyst called Omaru Sisay who works for intelligence experts Exclusive Analysis in London. I thought we'd lost the quote, but it has just turned up at the bottom of a pile of papers. In a world which, by October this year, could have a population of 7 billion, the majority of whom live in 'less developed world' conditions, this quote is an intelligent warning.

Russell Brand on Consumerism

2011-01-30T11:05:00.000-08:00

Just in case you've missed this. Follow this link to see an interview by Jeremy Paxman with Russell Brand. Some very interesting insights into celebrity status, consumerism and happiness. A documentary directed by Oliver Stone is apparently imminent too in which Brand goes to India to ask the big questions about happiness. Could be interesting stuff.

I've got a lot of time for Russell Brand, he's thoughtful, intelligent and not afraid to shake things up a bit; he looks set to change the direction of his career in quite a significant way.

Pam Warhurst - One to watch

2011-01-30T02:33:00.000-08:00

As DEFRA try to force through their proposals to change the way our Forests are managed here in the UK, it is worth keeping an eye on Pam Warhurst, who has just been made Chair of the Forestry Commission. Her background suggests that she is not going to be a keen supporter of Caroline Spelman's plans. Here is Warhurst's statement from DEFRA's news article on Thursday:

Ministers have set out a new vision for forestry in England that will require a fundamental shift in our thinking and how we work. The proposals provide an opportunity to think about forest ownership and sustainable land management in a new way and to engage a wider cross-section of society. The consultation will allow people to have their say and we encourage everyone with an interest to give us their views.

It is not exactly a resounding statement of support is it? But, already you can see that she is having to use politically sensitive language. In the quote above, she says 'provide an opportunity' when she might well be thinking 'force us to' and when she says 'encourage everyone with an interest' she may well have preferred 'urge everyone with an interest'. Linguistics are very important here, I hope she and others in authority start using stronger language soon.

A bit about Pam Warhurst's background. She is also the chair of a Yorkshire based company, Pennie Prospects. It is heavily dependent on public funding and is a strong advocate of public access to the South Pennines and Britain's wild places in general. In her 'message from the chair' Warhurst says this:

What we have [in the South Pennines] is so special but it is under threat. Threat from development that is inappropriate, threat from unsustainable land management practices, threat from climate change and from human apathy, perhaps the greatest threat of all.

She is also a former board member of Natural England, the Government's advisor on the natural environment. It is a very important organisation, it works on behalf of the environment and strives to balance the human-environment relationship for mutual benefit. It answers to no shareholders, economic concerns are secondary. Important jobs are under threat at Natural England, many of its scientists will lose their jobs because of the looming cuts. These are the scientists who have worked in the natural environment for many years and help us understand its current and future states. Their impartial advice is crucial to policy making, it will hollow out at great cost. Losing the forests might lessen the blow to Natural England, but it is a desperate situation, we can't afford to lose either. Pam Warhurst is in a very difficult, but very important position.

Underground Advertising Jan 2011

2011-01-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

Three tube posters that have caught my eye today

*Sorry, you'll need to zoom in on these images to read the copy!:

Mad Men moves from BBC to Sky, Draper meets Murdoch. But, its one show that might actually benefit from having ad breaks. Don't make tea, spend the break analysing the clever techniques used to sell us stuff.

I didn't realise that Action Aid's charitable purpose was as much about improving the emotional wellbeing of the middle-aged sufferers of existential crisis. It's a nice spin off I guess, but are they volunteering for the right reasons?

Finally, Jack Daniel, a 19th Century role model for the 21st Century man. Mature, loyal relationships? Pah, there is only one thing I'm committed to, the booze!

Happy Friday, I'm off to celebrate 10 year of award winning graphic and web design with my amazing pals at Ten 4 Design, I won't be drinking Jack Daniels, probably a couple of glasses of Jameson's, that's OK right?

‘How to encourage people to be sustainable’

2011-01-28T00:32:00.000-08:00

Below is a rough transcript of what I talked about at the LEEF event last night in London, which was really excellent. Includes links to the images I didn't manage to show. There were 5 speakers in all, all of them gave great answers to questions that had been sent to us by Anna Portch, hopefully some of the other talks will appear online too. The question I volunteered to talk about was:

‘How to encourage people to be sustainable’

– crikey why did I pick this topic?! Maybe I was having one of those supremely arrogant ‘Eureka’ moments that us Environmentalists have occasionally, where we suddenly think ‘Yes that’s it, this is how the world works, this is how people think and behave, this is what we need to tell them – take me to the lectern, I’m going to save the world!!’ Hmmm. These moments of self confidence are short lived, quickly I revert to despondency and self-doubt.... why am I doing this? I can’t change the world, I have enough trouble changing my energy supplier.

So, don’t expect that at the end of my fifteen minutes you will have been given the definitive answer to the question of how to encourage people to be sustainable, it ain’t going to happen, sorry!

What I am going to do is this. I’m going to explore a dilemma that currently exists between two different approaches to encouraging people to be sustainable.

John F. Kennedy famously said in his inauguration speech:

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

We can paraphrase this by saying:

Ask not what sustainability can do for you; ask what you can do for sustainability.

This advice highlights two very different mindsets: those with an interest in enhancing themselves versus those more concerned with solving problems that are bigger than themselves.

The reality is that most of us sit somewhere between these two extremes of selfishness and altruism. But asking what you can do for sustainability rather than what sustainability can do for you is what I want to discuss. Part of us of course thinks argh, climate change is a really bad thing, what can I do about it? But somewhere within us we are also thinking what are the costs and benefits of adopting new behaviours? Will it impact positively or negatively on our pursuit of our other life goals?

So we’re interested here in the ways we go about encouraging people to be sustainable. By sustainable I also mean green, eco or environmentally friendly. I am also talking about how to encourage people to give time, money and effort to causes that deal with other ‘bigger-than-self’ issues like: global poverty, child cruelty, homelessness, illiteracy, racial prejudice, HIV/AIDS, animal cruelty, care for the elderly, care for those with mental and physical disabilities and so on.

In the UK today the major trend seems to be that people look at ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ behaviours and ask themselves what the benefits to themselves will be, if they engage in these behaviours. It is the ‘what’s in it for me?’ mindset. This mindset has come to be embedded in our society. And the campaigns of charities and approaches of environmental educators have adapted to it, they work within this culture. Increasingly, as educators, we focus on highlighting the benefits you will get from being green, from volunteering, from giving and so on. This reinforces that self enhancing mindset.

This is true not just for individuals; it is true for other social actors as well. Businesses, governments, charities, clubs, institutions, political parties as well as individuals, assess the costs and benefits of adopting a ‘green’ behaviour (or of giving to a cause) based largely on the impact it will have on them. Their concerns are with their image, their status, their brand and their nice warm feeling inside.

So new behaviours and products are promoted to us and it is usually quite obvious what we need to give; exactly what we get back is often far less clear cut. So let’s look at the new Toyota Auris Hybrid Car. This is what their website says about it:

The world's most advanced, innovative, compact family car brings low emissions, £0 road tax and stunning fuel economy with over 700 miles on one tank of petrol. Introducing the New Auris Hybrid - a car that defies convention at every turn - the first Toyota hybrid built in Britain, more environmentally friendly than ever before and the latest member of a forward-thinking family.

So, you buy this car, what do you get? You get monetary savings on your fuel consumption (that presumably you can spend on something else), you get a flashy new status symbol, you get an approving, maybe jealous, look from your eco-conscious neighbour, you spot flashing glimpses of the envious eyes of cyclists and pedestrians as they see you glide by. You might even get approving glances from potential future spouses on the lookout for someone mature and caring, maybe someone who wants to start a family. Or if you are already in a relationship, you are saying to your partner that you are ready to leave behind the hedonism of your Golf GTi, you now need a family car and you care about the future, your children’s future and Britain!

So, by buying this car, you are ever so slightly changing your identity and the way other people see you. You're a bit unconventional, you're intelligent, you're a proper grown up!

And it is not just eco-cars. You might have seen the latest campaign by the charity Action Aid. It stars ‘Silvia’ who also appears on their website exclaiming this: I didn’t just change the world, I changed myself. And what a feeling!’ Action Aid are going really heavy on this approach, their homepage shouts ‘What a feeling! Get yours today!’

In pushing the Big Society, the government are advocating this approach really strongly, this theme runs right through this ‘Giving Green Paper’ where they have picked out evidence of how by appealing to people’s self-enhancing values – their desires for power, image, status, happy feelings, career enhancement etc you can get them to ‘give’ time and money to charity.

In this way, green products and behaviours, as well as the giving of time or money, are sold to us just like any other product or service. Be green, it can save you money, it can make you look cool, it can make you look wealthy and so on. Volunteer, it will make you feel better about yourself, it’ll look good on your CV. Obviously they dont just say that, they do tell you about the problems you're helping to solve. But the emphasis is on you and what you will get out of it. This is quite a big problem.

But, why is it such a big problem? If the result is giving and volunteering, or is sustainable behaviour, don’t the ends justify the means? The responses needed to some of the world’s biggest current problems appear so enormous and so urgent that many in the sustainability movement say we can’t be fussy about how we change behaviour, the need to change behaviour is so pressing, we should use any means necessary! Right now! And, just get on with it!

And it works, well at least in the short term it does, it brings in donations and volunteers and creates observable green behaviour. By focusing mostly on the benefit to the giver with only a passing mention of the benefit to the environment or society the charity or environmental educator or green business can achieve some success.

But what it is not very good at doing is changing the really damaging behaviours associated with high consumption of disposable goods and services. And it is these behaviours that are causing and perpetuating most of the worlds environmental and social problems. If we look at the issues that most major environmental NGOs are dealing with, the problems are getting worse not better.

And there is a long-term danger, which is pointed out in Common Cause, a report published last year by WWF in association with Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, COIN and CPRE. This report argues that if charities, green businesses and environmental educators use the same techniques as the multinational corporations who are trying to flog their products and services, they are ultimately, in the long run, contributing to a process that thrives on creating and sustaining a population of individualistic, infantilised, anxiety ridden, status and image obsessed, selfish consumers.

Charities, environmental educators and truly green businesses should be doing the exact opposite; encouraging people to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives, characterised by generosity, benevolence, community spirit, stable levels of self esteem and a natural instinct to care for and then act on issues that are ‘bigger than themselves’.

But, it is very hard for charities to make that switch, even those who contributed to the Common Cause report like WWF, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth recognise that appealing to people’s self interest works, it brings in the money, their fundraisers ask if it ain’t broken why fix it? And you can certainly see their point, as organisations they are in a highly competitive marketplace and they need to survive, this is why Common Cause argues that they all need to move together on this. But the fundraisers and the sustainability comms people argue that the appealing to people's selflessness, generosity, kindness and universalism just does not work. Are people just too selfish now?

To finish I just want to tell you about a man called Greg Mortenson, some of you may have read his book ‘Three Cups of Tea’. This guy is incredible. He was a mountaineer who after climbing some amazingly high mountain in the Himalayas above one of the remotest parts of Pakistan lost his way hiking back down to civilisation, he was separated from his team and his guide and on the verge of starvation and exhaustion stumbled into a small mountain village. Over the course of a few weeks those villagers nursed him back to health. While he recovered he spent time with some of the children who had no school, a teacher who visited them just once a week, no books, pencils, nothing, they were teaching themselves basic numeracy and literacy by scratching lines in the dirt. It transformed him from being a self-obsessed mountaineer to the man he now is. On leaving that village he vowed to return one day with enough money to build a school for the children and to employ a full time teacher.

He returned to America, to his job as a hospital porter, decided to save as much money of his own as he could and to try to raise the rest from others. He moved his most essential possessions into a storage box and lived in his car, spending all his spare time telling people his story and persuading them to donate money to his cause. He worked incredibly hard and eventually raised enough to go back to Pakistan to fulfil his promise.

But he didn’t stop there, he recognised that the people in those remote parts of Pakistan needed so much more, more schools, hospitals, bridges, roads etc, etc. He has dedicated his life to raising the funds needed to make this happen, he has even crossed the border into Afghanistan where he is building secular schools for boys and girls. He is an incredibly selfless man.

The book ‘Three Cups of Tea’ has been in the top 50 of the bestsellers list in the USA for over 5 years, he now regularly talks about his work to audiences in arenas to up to 30,000 people all paying $20 per ticket. His generosity, courage and selflessness is massively inspiring, his story inspires these values in others and his charity is incredibly successful at raising money.

OK, we can’t all be like Greg Mortenson, but we can all tell stories like his. Who here knows the story of how Oxfam started, or Friends of the Earth, or WWF, or Greenpeace, or the NSPCC? Who started them and why, what were their stories? I bet they are powerful stories too and I bet there are people still working for those organisations who are generous, selfless and concerned almost entirely with 'bigger than self' issues (if there aren't we're in big trouble). We need to be telling these stories, they inspire people and create much need role models.

So in encouraging people to be sustainable can we get them to follow that advice?

Ask not what sustainability can do for you; ask what you can do for sustainability.

Wealth

2011-01-14T09:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's Thursday Essay by Sean O'Grady in The Independent argued if we were bankers 'we would take the bonuses' too so we shouldn't get on their backs so much. He argued that we would take such highly inflated wages if we were bankers, just as we would if we were footballers or the CEO of an Oil company. We wouldn't turn down the money because we didn't think it was fair for us to earn so much. It seemed to me to be a poorly veiled attempt to say 'you're all just jealous, stop whining'.

But what about others measurements of wealth? Financial wealth is no guarantee of wealth in other areas, but we generally understand it to be desirable. The more money we have the better our lives will be. But what if, in earning that money, we exploit others or the environment around us? Does that not diminish our emotional wealth a bit? Does that not force us to lower our self-respect? I wonder how many bankers walk north out of their Liverpool St offices and up London's Curtain Road towards the headquarters of the NSPCC reflecting on true wealth. Do they see the warm faces of people who leave those offices and ponder to themselves: 'its not fair, I earn loads of money, but they seem to be so much more fulfilled by their work. I earn loads more than them, but I am not as happy, my work is just not as meaningful or socially useful - its not FAIR!'

“In light of the current economic climate, what is the future of sustainable development and what role does government policy have to play?”

2010-12-22T13:39:00.000-08:00

I applied for a job a couple of weeks ago. As part of the application I had to write an essay on this: “In light of the current economic climate, what is the future of sustainable development and what role does government policy have to play?” in 400 words, here's my effort:

People, Planet, Profit; Win, Win, Win?

During hard economic times it is easy to assume that action on Sustainable Development will be delayed; ‘if you are in a fight to save your business, you might forget to save the environment’¹. However, a recent study², highlights the rise in corporate action on Sustainability. The drivers for such a trend are not easy to detect but are worth exploring. The study reports that: ‘demonstrating a visible and authentic commitment to sustainability is especially important to CEOs... Strengthening brand, trust and reputation is the strongest motivator for taking action on sustainability issues, identified by 72 percent of the CEOs’³. It is easy to be cynical, but we must not be too quick to judge.

Wighton⁴ makes an interesting observation: ‘Many [CEOs] privately believe that being environmentally responsible is a good thing in itself. But they feel that they must adopt utilitarian ethics, justifying everything on the basis that it leads ultimately to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of shareholders.’ Are CEOs therefore acting on their environmental concerns but having to justify their sustainability activities on financial grounds to their investors (what’s good for the brand is good for profit)? This suggests a difficult balancing act in communications. At present, those concerned with People and Planet are sceptical that they can win while Profit wins. Those concerned with Profit alone worry that prioritisation of People and Planet will lessen the wins for shareholders and investors. The result is that authentic commitment is often masked and difficult to detect (whether it is there or not).

But, the future of sustainable development is bright if Government seizes the apparent enthusiasm in industry for sustainability and ‘steers the conditions’⁵ for sustainability in three key ways.

Following the Dutch example Government policy could:

Nurture a business led ‘Cradle to Cradle’⁶ revolution by regulating in favour of environmentally positive practices, to create a level playing field and encourage innovation.
Promote collaboration and sharing of best practice by those already leading on Cradle to Cradle;
Transform the education system to improve creativity, systems thinking and ecological intelligence^7,8,9.

Such Government leadership may help push those superficially engaged along with those who are already authentically committed. Although, this assumes that Government itself is authentically committed. If it is, it must proceed with caution. People do not like to be told what to do by politicians and ‘do-gooders’; this impacts on their role as promoters of sustainable development. Lively debate¹⁰ ensues over the correct approach for politicians and civil society organisations to take in communicating sustainability.

‘Cradle to Cradle’ may not be the answer, but it frames a sustainable future positively; a future where People, Planet and Profit all improve; it ‘sizzles’¹¹. This is an insight to be built on and a reason for hope.

Notes

1. Wighton, D. (2010) What’s good for the planet is good for business, Opinon, The Times, December 1^st, p. 29

2. United Nations Global Compact - Accenture (2010) A New Era of Sustainability [Online], p. 1, Available from: https://microsite.accenture.com/sustainability/research_and_insights/Pages/A-New-Era-of-Sustainability.aspx Accessed: December 4th, 2010.

3. UNGC-Accenture (2010), p. 10.

4. Wighton, D. (2010), p. 29

5. Jan Joustre, D. (2010) Cradle to Cradle Government, Presentation to Ten+One Conference, Bradford, UK.

6. Braungart, M. & McDonough, W. (2002) Cradle to Cradle, Remaking the way we make things, North Point Press, New York, USA.

7. Robinson, K. (2010) Changing Paradigms, RSA Edge Lecture [online], Available from: http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/archive/sir-ken-robinson Accessed: December 4th, 2010.

8. Webster, K. & Johnson, C. (2009) Sense and Sustainability [online], Available from: www.senseandsustainability.com Accessed: December 4^th, 2010.

9. Sterling, S. (2009) Ecological Intelligence, [in] Stibbe, A. (ed) (2010) The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy, Green Books, UK.

10. Phillips, M. (2010) WWF’s Common Cause –The debate [online], Available from: http://becominggreenblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/common-cause-debate.html Accessed: December 4th, 2010.

11. Futerra (2010) Sizzle: The New Climate Message [online], Available from: http://www.futerra.co.uk/downloads/Sellthesizzle.pdf Accessed: December 4th, 2010.

Bill Shankley and Benevolence

2010-12-12T04:00:00.000-08:00

Saw this in The Independent yesterday. Liverpool are (were?) a club of with commendable values.

Former manager, Bill Shankley, is revered, not just because of the success he brought, but because of the man he was; his values. This quote exemplifies it. 'I would like to be remembered as a man who was selfless, who strove and worried so that other could share the glory...' Stirring stuff, what's it got to do with Sustainability? Well, it reinforces self-transcendent values, a commitment to things 'bigger-than-self'. In a world in which much messaging (not least from Premiership football) reinforces 'self-enhancing', self centred values, it is nice to reminded of great men like Shankley. He lived and breathed for his beloved club, he put it before himself at all times.

This quote highlights Shankley's Benevolence values, he was concerned with 'preserving and enhancing the welfare of those with whom who [he was] in frequent personal contact (the 'in group') (Crompton, 2010, p. 31). In Common Cause, Tom Crompton draws on Tim Kasser. Kasser's empirical studies have produced data showing how those with benevolence values are more likely to be concerned with 'bigger-than-self' issues than those who value personal achievement, status and power. I listened in on a conversation between Kasser and Andrew Darnton last week at the Common Cause workshop last week. They were discussing the potential for 'bleed over' between benevolence and universalism. Universalism: 'Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature.' (Crompton, 2010, p. 31) Those who value universalism are even more likely to be concerned with 'bigger-than-self' issues. But, universalism (where concern is with abstract 'out groups') is probably less common in most people than benevolence (where concern is with those closest to us, our 'in groups') . The 'bleed over' suggests that benevolence can provide a step up to universalism and that they are mutually reinforcing. Common Cause argues for stronger reinforcement of benevolence and universalism. The sort of benevolence displayed by people like Bill Shankley and more recently by current Liverpool heroes like Steven Gerrard, and Jamie Carragher is good to see, but rare. Benevolence does not necessarily predict universalism, but it is a better value to champion that 'achievement, power and hedonism'. Sustainability educators can search out and amplify cultural examples benevolence, they don't need to mention the environment.

Keep Cup

2010-12-03T06:48:00.000-08:00

'Keep Cup' are an Australian company responding to the disaster of 400bn disposable non-recyclable coffee (and tea) cups being discarded around the world each year. The Keep Cup is re-usable, the right size for coffee vendors but is getting cradle to cradle wrong.

Pret a Manger in London Bridge held a trial at the end of last month, selling their specially branded Keep Cups for £6.50 a go. 'Dan' commented on the Keep Cup blog: 'At £6.50 - not worth it. And the staff at London Bridge certainly were not pushing them this morning.' I can certainly understand this reaction. You'd have to be some sort of crazy eco-geek to want to pay that sort of money to get your coffee, drink it, wash it up and then remember to take it back to Pret the next day to get it re-filled. Even if you habitually buy coffee from the same company, it is still some ask to pay for the privilege of a cup that you can probably only re-use at Pret outlets and have to wash up yourself. Not to mention having to pay a company for your services as a moveable advert for them.

So, what's the solution? First what are the problems?

1. Problem: A thirst for coffee / tea / hot choc while on the move. Solution: Takeaway 'fast food' hot drinks outlets. (Let's hold the discussion on manufactured supply and demand for a minute!)

2. Problem: Mountain of packaging waste. Solution: well......

For retailers number 2 is only a problem if it is hindering sales, damaging their product brand, or so horrendous that customers have to wade through discarded coffee cups to get to the counter. Right now, it doesn't appear to me that this is perceived as a problem by retailers or their customers. The waste mountain is too abstract and too 'normal'. We are so used to the linear model of production and consumption, that the inevitable wastes are not surprising or alarming, it is just a fact of life when understand the world in this way. Pretty much all of our food is packaged in materials that will eventually end up in landfill or an incinerator, that's just the way of the world right?!

The opposite to the linear 'cradle to grave' model of production is the cyclical 'cradle to cradle' model where waste = food. Cradle to Cradle is based on the continual cycling of technical and biological resources in two discrete closed loops (see my previous post for a diagram). Keep Cup is attempting to create a cycling of a technical resource (plastic cup) but I can't see it working. It is very hard for retailers to re-capture plastic take-away cups for re-fill on any grand scale, because our behaviour as consumers is too chaotic. Would Starbucks fill a Pret cup or vice-versa? If when I came across a Starbucks and fancied a coffee, had a clean Pret 'keep cup' in my bag, but could not see a Pret anywhere, I'd probably just go into Starbucks and get a coffee. I'd be pretty unlikely to fork out again for a Starbucks 'Keep Cup' so would probably quietly take a disposable one. If I was feeling particularly rebellious and wanted to protect my identity as an 'ethical consumer' I might even pour my Starbucks coffee into my Pret 'Keep Cup' and discretely dispose of the Starbucks cup!

Maybe Keep Cup could persuade the large coffee chains to club together on this and agree to re-fill any 'Keep Cup' regardless of the branding. Maybe they'd go for this, I'm not sure they would and they'd probably want to continually make small technical upgrades to their 'keep cups' to make their competitor's one's look outdated, un-fashionable, 'Have you seen Cafe Nero's new Keep Cup? It is way better than the 'Pret' one I used to have' etc, etc.

Now, I like being able to get a hot drink on the move, it is handy. But, being environmentally aware, I also have a guilty conscience every time I chuck an empty cup in the nearest bin. 'Keep Cup' are trying to cycle a technical resource, when the solution might be the cycling of a biological resource. Coffee Cups can quite easily be produced to bio-degrade a day or two after use into nice juicy compost which could then become food for a new coffee plant, or any other plant for that matter. This makes life a lot easier for the retailers and consumers.

Of course, infrastructure is needed for this, compost bins need to be as widespread as other bins in public spaces (a job for government?); the waste food needs to be turned into compost efficiently and taken back to growers (a job for the market?). Both of these things seem more possible to me than expecting consumers to re-use 'Keep Cups'. We have to remember that the cradle to cradle model is still in its embryonic stages, amazing things are possible and as conditions become more favourable, things like this will take off.

It doesn't have to be one line for the shareholders and another for the environmentalists

2010-12-02T10:34:00.000-08:00

I got back from the Ten+One conference in Bradford last night. My understanding of the sustainability and business was satisfactorily advanced, thanks largely to the conference, but also unexpectedly by an article I gleaned from The Times over breakfast at the independently run and very hospitable Ivy Guest House!

Many environmentalists feared that the economic crisis would delay corporate action on Sustainability, as David Wighton put it in The Times yesterday (December 1^st, 2010, Opinion, p. 29 [paywall]): ‘If you are in a fight to save your business, you might forget to save the environment.’ Wighton points out however that the opposite appears to be true; the economic crisis seems to have had a galvanising effect:

[S]ome of the increased focus on green issues is a direct result of the economic crisis. Companies are faced with slow growth in mature markets, but rising and volatile prices for many commodities driven by the insatiable appetite of China. It makes sense for businesses to be more careful about how they use such resources, particularly energy.

Wighton speculates further that investing in sustainability is also a very good public relations exercise:

Business leaders have also been alarmed by the slump in the public’s trust in big companies... Some chief executives talk about trust as “the scarcest resource of all.”

Bosses fear that their businesses could pay dearly for this loss of trust and believe that demonstrating a commitment to the environment could help to rebuild it. A survey of global chief executives, conducted by Accenture with the UN this year showed that boosting trust in their brands was by far the most important motivation for taking action on the environment.

It is of course easy to cynical about this, I must point out that Wighton is not presenting these findings in a cynical way at all, he is just exploring a business trend, taking his cue from this year’s UNGC/Accenture CEO Study ‘A New Era of Sustainability’. That study surveyed 766 CEOs from around the world and interviewed a further 50 CEOs and 50 business and civil society and business leaders; ‘the largest such study of CEOs ever conducted on the topic of sustainability’ (UNGC & Accenture, 2010, p. 10). The study says this: ‘Demonstrating a visible and authentic commitment to sustainability is especially important to CEOs... Strengthening brand, trust and reputation is the strongest motivator for taking action on sustainability issues, identified by 72 percent of the CEOs’ (UNGC & Accenture, 2010, p. 10). So what is an authentic commitment to sustainability, do CEO's even know? And what about the shareholders? I’ll deal with that last question first.

Wighton argues that because a commitment to sustainability is good for a company’s brand, employee retention and running costs it is good for the company full stop. It follows therefore that it must also be good for its shareholders. But, Wighton throws up another interesting observation: ‘Many [CEOs] privately believe that being environmentally responsible is a good thing in itself. But they feel that they must adopt utilitarian ethics, justifying everything on the basis that it leads ultimately to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of shareholders.’ Are CEOs therefore acting on their environmental concerns (a la ‘Social Business’ as practised by Professor Yunus) but having to justify their sustainability activities on financial grounds to their investors and shareholders? This creates a difficult balancing act in communications around the win, win, win; People, Planet and Profit triumvirate. The result is that authentic commitment is often masked and difficult to detect (whether it is there or not).

At the Ellen MacArthur Foundation ‘Ten plus One conference’ this week, Douwe Jan Joustra of the NL Agency (the Netherlands governmental agency for innovation, energy and sustainable development) explained how the Netherlands government is trying to nurture a business led Cradle to Cradle revolution. He made three key recommendations for policy makers: Firstly, using the slightly lost in translation phrase ‘steering on conditions’, he argued that Government’s need to provide the right conditions for innovation (basically don’t intervene; let creativity flourish). Secondly he advises policy makers to make use of ‘coalitions of the willing’, start with the businesses, like Desso, who already ‘get’ the C2C model and are living and breathing it; the rest will eventually follow. He thirdly stressed the need to ‘educate, educate, educate’ specifically on systems thinking and Biomimicry.

A Cradle to Cradle revolution has a huge potential to realise the sustainable development dream; the holy trinity of a balance between People, Planet and Profit. This is why it is so powerful and it makes the communications balancing act possible. At present those concerned with People and Planet are sceptical that they can win while Profit wins. Those concerned with Profit alone worry that prioritisation of People and Planet will lessen the wins for shareholders and investors. This is why CEOs are caught in the difficult position of trying to convince shareholders that sustainability is good for business, while also trying to convince environmentalists that their commitments to sustainability are authentic. Either by accident or design the Ten+One conference was priced such that it attracted Corporate Businesses as well as independent business, academics and one or two scruffy environmentalists like me. Because of this mix, the speakers from Desso, Aveda and B&Q were thrown into the communications dilemma, they had to convince environmentalists and business simultaneously. Although wild enthusiasm never quite broke out, I detected very few raised eyebrows or deep sighs. Why? Because of a recognition that Cradle-to-Cradle is not about limiting the impacts of business on the natural world, it is about creating positive impacts on the environment. Cradle to Cradle, when thoughtfully applied, enhances the natural world; companies can say ‘we are in the business of enhancing the natural environment’ and can show the tangible results to prove it. It is a natural ally of the Social Business concept championed by Muhammed Yunus.

Ten+One was framed around Cradle to Cradle, Systems thinking and the Circular Economy. Looking at the world from these perspectives is transformative, it is game-changing. We often think of the world in a reductionist, mechanical way in which we are separate from nature and seek to control and tame it. We think of natural resources being infinite and send them linearly from cradle to grave in a take, make, transport, use (re-use and recycle a bit) and dump progression. These linear models are embedded in business practice and environmentalists have been trying to limit the negative impacts of businesses that use this model for decades. Instead of focusing on greening that model to make it ‘less bad’, we should be focusing on the promotion of an entirely new model (one, as Bucky Fuller said, that makes the old one obsolete). This is where the Cradle to Cradle model comes in. In this model resources don’t travel along a linear path they cycle. Technical resources and biological resources cycle in two discrete closed loops powered by renewable energy sources. If that can be achieved the environment no longer gradually declines, it gradually improves. Michael Braungart describes this as the difference between eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness. This model is incredibly positive, it ‘sells the sizzle’, it is inspiring and transformative. At the moment it is in an early embryonic form, but as a concept it allows us to dream of true balance of People, Planet and Profit and a better future.

The examples of Cradle to Cradle presented during the Ten+One conference illustrated what could emerge when you ‘steer the conditions’ correctly. By their own admission Desso, Aveda and B&Q are far from perfect; they have a long way to go to be truly cradle to cradle. They are limited by ‘the conditions’ they exist in but, as leaders, and as part of a ‘coalition of the willing’, they have an opportunity to help ‘steer the conditions’ for others, like Unilever (?) to follow. Despite the positivity of the UNCG/Accenture study, it is notable that it only carries one reference to cradle to cradle on page 44 of 60. Apparently ‘the Timberland Company’s new range of “Earthkeepers 2.0” are conceived with “cradle-to-cradle” principles in mind, and designed to be disassembled for recycling at the end of their useful life’ (UNCG/Accenture, 2010, p. 44). This suggests that sustainability is not properly framed yet in the business world, the objective of being ‘less bad’ seems to remain.

Despite the phenomenal success of the Cradle to Cradle book, as a concept it still remains on the margins of both the business and sustainability worlds. It mustn’t stay there, it is a concept with a huge potential to unite these two worlds. For it to gather speed in the mainstream, an imperative must be placed on education. But, it is not enough to simply educate about Cradle-to-Cradle in isolation in the business world. Education based on a mechanistic worldview needs to move towards education based on a systems worldview and ecological intelligence. It is a paradigm shift called for by Sir Ken Robinson, Stephen Sterling and now the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Why we resist the truth about Climate Change

2010-11-27T04:42:00.000-08:00

Clive Hamilton is the co-author of the best book about Affluenza and earlier this year published the brilliant and frightening Requiem for a Species with Earthscan. Christine Ottery interviewed him in the late summer on the subject of being 'maladaptive', his thinking seems to have developed again with his latest article

Presented to Climate Controversies Science and Politics Conference in Brussels, 'Why we resist the truth about Climate Change' explains why climate change denial really has very little to do with scientific evidence and reason. Hamilton argues that denial-ism, especially in the US, has its roots in culture war:

Those on the left are as predisposed [as the right] to sift evidence through ideological filters; but in the case of global warming it happens that the evidence overwhelmingly endorses the liberal beliefs that unrestrained capitalism is jeopardising future well-being, that comprehensive government intervention is needed, and that the environment movement was right all along. For neo-conservatives accepting these is intolerable, and it is easier emotionally and more convenient politically to reject climate science. (p. 2)

Hamilton then uses two examples from history and one from literature to illuminate the nature of climate change denial. I'll leave you to read about Einstein Relativity in Weimar Germany and Camus' The Plague. I found the comparison between today's climate change denial and the wishful thinking in the UK that played down the threat of war in the run up to WWII most useful. Throughout the 1930's Winston Churchill and a small handful of others spoke repeatedly about the evidence suggesting that Nazi Germany was re-arming and preparing for a major assault on its European neighbours. Churchill was accused of being a 'doom-sayer' an 'alarmist' and a 'fear monger'. Hamilton explains why and compares the public reaction to what seems to be happening today:

[P]acifist sentiment among the British public, still traumatized by the memory of the Great War, provided a white noise of wishful thinking that muffled the warnings. Behind the unwillingness to re-arm and resist aggression lay the gulf between the future Britons hoped for—one of peace—and the future the evidence indicated was approaching—war in Europe, just as today behind the unwillingness to cut emissions lies the gulf between the future we hope for—continued stability and prosperity—and the future the evidence tells us is approaching—one of danger and sacrifice. (p. 11)

Today's Climate scientists and activists face a steeper challenge than Churchill faced, Climate Change arrives gradually and for many will be un-perceptible. A bomb landing on your house is instant. That is a big, big difference. The other big difference is that there is no clear enemy to attack and no justification to attack them militarily. But the analogy is useful because it explains to us the power of wishful thinking. As George Lakoff in his brilliant 'The Political Mind' explains it is very difficult to get people to accept facts that they don't want to believe. This is also explored in the WWF Common Cause paper, understanding that emotion, more often than reason, shapes attitudes and behaviour is so important to those involved in education for sustainability and sustainability communications.

WWF's Common Cause - The Debate

2010-11-18T05:45:00.000-08:00

Ever since I read 'Psychology and Consumer Culture' edited by Kanner and Kasser, Tim Kasser has been one of my hero's. 'Psychology and Consumer Culture' is dark, it literally made me weep as I read it. My Wife and I call it 'The Bad Book'. It is however incredibly important to read if you are serious about addressing the core problem at the heart of our unsustainable development; consumerism. Kasser also wrote The High Price of Materialism, less dark, equally compelling and has since teamed up with Tom Crompton of WWF UK to produce two very important pieces of work. 'Meeting Environmental Challenges: The role of Human Identity' which Kasser talks about in this video. Both serve as a great introduction to this year's 'Common Cause: The Case for working with our cultural values' published by WWF. 'Common Cause' has fuelled the debate around Identity Campaigning, with Futerra and Chris Rose both very much in the anti camp and George Monbiot and others in the pro camp. I'm in the pro camp and have recently critiqued this through the Unilever Case Study. I'm not going to write a review of Common Cause here; I just wanted to list a few resources and reactions around it:

Solitaire Townsend's VIEW on Identity campaigning: 1 page (Blog) with 11 comments including some from Tim Kasser, Joe Brewer and Tom Crompton
Response to Solitaire by Common Cause author Tom Crompton: 1 page (Blog) with 29 comments.
Ed Gillespie, Futerra, lends his view Common Cause or Common Sense; 1 page (Blog) with 5 comments
Chris Rose's Campaign Strategy Newsletter: 15 pages (PDF)
Oxfam's Martin Kirk responds to Chris Rose: 8 pages (PDF)
Tom Crompton in the Guardian, A value laden Elephant in the boardroom, : 1 page (Comment is Free) with 3 comments!
George Monbiot in the Guardian, Left values progressive self-interest: 1 page (Comment is Free) with 480 comments!
Cian O'Donvan offers a brief summary of the pro and anti arguments on his Keep Faking It blog: The Network Grenade: Policy, Values and Behaviour
Deeper analysis by Shaun Chamberlin, Dark Optimism Blog, Values and Propaganda: 4 pages (Blog) with 18 comments.
The RSA's Matthew Taylor on 21st Century Enlightenment, putting it into practice?: 38 pages (PDF)
Visit Cognitive Policy Works for advice on how to conduct Frame Analysis for your organisation.
Clive Hamilton on 'Why we resist the truth about Climate Change' : 14 pages (PDF)
Jon Fletcher on the Brook Lyndhurst blog responds to the Common Cause conference: 1 page, with a very useful comment from Martin Kirk

It is also very worth reading George Lakoff's views on Environmental Communication: 3 pages (Blog) with 48 comments. Lakoff is a major inspiration behind the Common Cause paper as well as Webster and Johnson's 'Sense and Sustainability'

I've not read all of these yet (not sure I'll read all 480 comments left in response to Monbiot's article!), but when I have I am sure I will be adding to the debate! I would be really interested to read Jon Porritt's views on this; searches for Tom Crompton, Tim Kasser and Common Cause WWF all threw up 0 matches on his blog. Anyone want to speculate which side of the pro/ anti camp he would be in?

Why we shouldn't get over-excited by Unilever.

2010-11-15T15:40:00.000-08:00

Unilever have announced an ambitious 'Sustainable Living Plan' with plans to cut the environmental footprint of their products in half while doubling their profits. Sounds good hey?!

The first thing I'd like to say is who came up with that awfully uninspiring title? Yawn.

If Unilever had of stood up today and announced that they and all their subsidiaries were going to become a Social Businesses along the lines of Muhammed Yunus' Grameen then I would be on here congratulating them wholeheartedly for making a genuine paradigm shift away from Profit Maximising to Social Benefit Maximisation. They didn't, I hope one day they do.

The first disappointing thing about their plan is the virtual absence of any 'cradle to cradle' thinking. They have added it as one of their 'future challenges', which presumably they will take up after 2020. They say they 'are not in the waste handling business', but they are in waste creating business, so why don't they get into the waste=food business too and close the loop? Again, hopefully one day they will.

One of their stated ambitions is to halve the environmental footprint of all their products. This only really makes their products 'less bad', not 'better'. They have to reconcile this to win over the sceptics. If Unilever moves into new markets, which it has clearly intimated it wants to, then the world could end up consuming twice as much of their 'less bad' product, causing just the same amount of environmental footprint they do now. If waste equalled food, this problem would be less. The message here is don't enter new markets if you haven't worked out how to do it in an environmentally positive way.

There are clever linguistics at play too. To state that they'll halve the footprint of their products, is a dramatically different thing to saying that they'll halve the footprint of Unilever as a whole. They could simply stop selling some of the less useful of their vast array of products and decrease their footprint over night. How much 'Findus Crispy Pancake', 'I can't believe its not butter' and 'Lynx deodorant' do we actually need? And, what about the full life-cycle of these products? They helpfully (for them) point out that it is us the consumer who in fact is to blame for 95% of the CO2 emissions caused by showering. They promise to persuade their customers to take a minute off their shower each day to save 1 million metric tonnes of CO2 a year. They argue that they've been successful persuading their customers to clean their teeth and wash their hands in the past, so changing their showering habits should be a easy. Teeth and hand cleaning have instant personal benefit. 1 minute less in the shower has a totally abstract benefit to the climate some time in the future; it is a completely different thing. Oh yeah and 1 minute less in the shower sounds to me like one less minute to clean myself: 'I'll have to skip cleaning behind my ears today, I've only got 30 seconds left!'

Another 'commitment' they make is to: 'help more than a billion people to improve their health and wellbeing.' Which essentially translates to selling more of their products, to more people, under the guise that it will improve their lives. Selling soap to people so they can wash their hands is undoubtedly a good thing. But what about all those fatty foods and drinks that Unilever sell, will they improve health and wellbeing? They promise to improve the nutritional value of their food and drink, look at that list, they need to make some huge steps (or change the products they sell, out with the processed food in with the 100% sustainably sourced fresh vegetables?)

There are huge question marks on the subject of wellbeing too, especially if we get into emotional wellbeing, which they don't. We've all seen the Lynx adverts, sex sells right? 'Buy Lynx. Get Laid'. Lynx adverts create body image anxieties for men and women, while also advertising sex as THE goal to young teenagers. There are too many examples to list when considering the rest of their advertising. Mostly they appeal to our selfish interests of hedonism, image creation and social status. These values are the complete polar opposite of the sorts of community spirit and 'bigger-than-self' values that need to be encouraged and reinforced if sustainability is ever going to become a reality. It is not just the products that need to adhere to sustainability values, it is the marketing too.

I'll finish by saying this, if you believe that we need businesses to be more localised and connected to the real needs of the communities they are based in; or that supply chains should be shorter and free from fossil fuel use; or that diversity and local variation in products and high streets is a desirable thing, then you might have thought that a 'Sustainable Living Plan' would involve radical fragmentation of multinational companies like Unilever? Instead of acquiring more companies, they could gradually shed them trusting that smaller social businesses would emerge who exist not for financial success, but for success in alleviating a problem. Problems like dirty hands, malnutrition and sanitation.

I'm sorry Jonathon it is not 'the best Plan out there for big global companies'. I'm sorry Solitaire, it is not 'game-changing' it is 'game-perpetuating' and will be until Unilever, and all those who sit cosily beneath them, redefine what it means to be a success. Game changing would imply a change in philosophy, there hasn't been one; this question has not been asked: Do Unilever really need to double their financial revenue by 2020? They certainly could do with doubling their contribution to making the world a better place.

Unilever's 'Sustainable Living Plan'

2010-11-15T15:30:00.000-08:00

....make them less bad.

Stripping the Natural World

2010-11-15T13:16:00.000-08:00

You might have noticed these Artemis billboards about the place. It reads: 'If PROFITS are scarce in one territory.... ... our Strategic Assets Funds hunter is free to cross into another.'

or..

'Strip an ecosystem of all of its resources then move on to the next one and mine that one dry too. All in the name of short term profits.'

Artemis are right; this is what happens thanks to deregulated free market economics. Until you run out of new territories that is (look out Burma!), then what?

The metaphor of this imagery is all a bit too literal for me. The 'hunter' looks like he is living in some 1920s romance novel called 'Man tames Nature'. But, it is 2010 now and there is far far less Nature left for us to strip assets out of, this poster alludes that there is and that, for me, is irresponsible. Artemis seem to be forgetting that the economic system is a sub-system of a global ecological system, which ultimately it is dependent on. Unless we stop taking from nature and start living and learning from it, it'll disappear completely, we won't be able to grow any food if there isn't any soil! But, hey who cares, so long as I've made my millions before we're down to bare rocks and sand.

Teaching on Systems Thinking

2010-11-14T10:07:00.001-08:00

It always seem so important to me that sustainability educators place an emphasis on systems thinking. I'm currently researching for some practical advice on how to actually go about doing this, so am going to plonk a load of URL's on here, mostly for my own benefit, to collate some good advice as I find it!

http://www.ecoliteracy.org/nature-our-teacher/systems-thinking

This article briefly discusses the importance of systems thinking to ecological thinking. Not much advice however on how to teach about it.

http://www.nesh.ca/jameskay/www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/u/jjkay/pubs/systems/hkk.pdf

This power-point slide show by Dr. James J. Kay from University of Waterloo, CA, gives some very useful advice on teaching systems thinking, I include a few quote below:

'Students must be given explicit opportunities to apply systems tools and approaches to real-world situations. Experience has shown that students can only really appreciate systems thinking and the issues related to it after they have undertaken a system study. Accordingly it must be the first element of a systems education.'

'Educating about general systems behaviours involves teaching about such phenomena as:

non-linear behaviour,
attractors and flips between attractors,
feedbacks,
emergence,
self-organization,
chaos.

Generally these behaviours are not intuitive to students. They do not conform to the Newtonian linear causality mode of reasoning that is a cornerstone of our culture.'

'Chaos Theory: our ability to forecast and predict is always limited regardless of how sophisticated our computers are and how much information we have.'

'Whether dealing with soft or hard systems situations, instruction about systems approaches is best done in the form of case studies, both presented in class and undertaken as student projects. In this regard, we can not overstate the importance of students participating in project work. One cannot learn to drive a car or to ride a bicycle by attending lectures or watching others doing it. One must do it oneself under the guidance of an experienced practitioner. Learning about systems approaches is learning a craft and as such the apprenticeship model is the appropriate mode of instruction.

http://s.coop/58a

This is a 13 page article by Bob Cannell on the wrongness of systems theory as a HR tool.

http://teachweb2.blogspot.com/2010/05/decision-making-and-systems-thinking.html

Some very good insights here in relation to decisions made in the education system. Here is a list of reasons people make bad decisions in complex systems:

Acting on instinct
Failure to anticipate-delayed effects
Focus on one aspect of a complex system
Failure to understand non-linear effects
Less analytical & reflective thinking as a problem worsens
Accidental reinforcement of undesired behavior
Failure to recognize internal feedback mechanisms and change over time (Spector, 2010; Sterman, 1994)

http://www.uwex.edu/CES/cty/waupaca/cnred/documents/SystemsThinking2010.pdf

This PDF titled 'Systems Thinking Basics' should be useful, it has several student activities at the end.

http://www.clexchange.org/lom/default.htm

Some fantastic resources here for planning lessons on systems thinking from the Creative Learning Exchange.

http://www.systemswiki.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Systems Wiki.

An Open Letter to Johann Hari

2010-10-31T04:01:00.000-07:00

Hi Johann,

Over the last 18 months I have 'discovered' your writing in a big way and have got a lot from it. I am very thankful and grateful that you are out there researching and writing these things and that we have a press willing to publish your work.

You played no small part in me attending the protest against Vodafone on Wednesday, it was the first time I have ever taken to the streets in anger to protest against anything (apart from the odd Climate Change march, which I find wholly disillusioning). As you wrote about Obama the other day, good people must 'keep on' at good people, so I am here to ask you why you didn't come down to Oxford Street on Wednesday? Many of my fellow protesters were expecting you and were disappointed you hadn't showed. I am sure you had good reason for not being there, I'd never accuse you of being lazy! I couldn't take further action this Saturday as I am in Wales spending precious time with my family, if you missed Wednesday for similar reasons, I totally understand that. I'm not sure whether you were on the streets on Saturday? Were you?

My personal reason for protesting is a dissatisfaction with the system of governance we live under, for me it wouldn't have made a jot of difference whether we protested against Vodafone or O2 or Orange - I am protesting against the corporatisation of the state and the free market crusade. I hope Thom Costello and friends decide to attack multiple targets to show how this problem is a systemic problem, not the malpractice of one isolated organisation. There are legitimate reasons to protest against almost any multinational corporation, they all have skeletons in their closet from some point in their history. They have created or exacerbated many untold environmental, social and economic problems over the years, why not dig these skeletons out? It is almost irrelevant how recent or not their malpractices are. If you target only one company, it makes them look like the one 'bad egg' in an otherwise fair system - giving the impression to the public that if we route them out then things will be OK again. This won't create change, maximise the diversify the protest to highlight how many companies and people are implicated in this - this then tells the truth to the public about the systemic problems we face.

Keep up the Good Work!

Morgan

Re-thinking our approach to Climate Change

2010-10-26T04:46:00.000-07:00

I've just responded to a blog post titled: 'Is it time for the Climate Change movement to completely re-think our approach?' on Be That Change.com. In short, yes it is and it has been for a long time. In the blog Kieren Battles laments the lack of media coverage given to events on 10:10:10 and rightly suggests that: 'Surely we cannot continue to do the same thing and expect different outcomes. As we all know, that’s the definition of madness.' So here is the comment I posted, hopefully it is constructive:

It is nice to read someone honestly admitting that 'events' like 10:10:10 essentially fail to capture public and media attention, you are right they do. On top of this only 74,000 people out of a 60,000,000 population have signed up (and how many of them fulfill their pledge I wonder?) .. You are also right to say that a mass frisbee event (if, and probably only if, heavily sponsored and promoted by a multinational corporation) would have got more attention, it undoubtedly would have. The mainstream media sadly has a habit of ignoring anything that in any way suggests we consume less (of anything) for any reason. The mainstream media is, in the main, run/funded by people stuck in the neo-liberal consumer capitalist paradigm and they are hell-bent on prolonging it as long as they can. I'm not a huge fan of the 10:10 approach and although I think Bill McKibben's 'Deep Economy' is an excellent book, 350.org, is also not the best approach to take... they both use the wrong language, ask for a pathetic amount of change, are reductionist and strengthen the trend toward green consumerism, which in the end creates 'less bad' not 'better' behaviour. What always seems to be missing in the design of such initiatives is a realisation that people don't damage the environment because the HATE the environment, or HATE polar bears. They damage it because they care about other things as well, lots of other things - TV, films, music, clothes, playstations, holidays, toys, phones etc etc etc. It is hardly surprising given all the influences that surrounds them. Environmental concern, however strong, is only one of those influences and often it is a minor and easily forgotten one.

Taking the single issue, reductionist approach of only campaigning on Climate Change, is disingenuous when we need systemic change. Campaigns like 10:10 seem to ask only 'how can we go on living like this, but in a low-carbon way?' We need to inspire people, especially young people, to create new ways of doing just about everything: grow food, make clothes, entertain themselves and each other, build houses, travel, socialise, holiday, work, care, etc, etc. We need an education system that teaches science, maths, english, history, geography, languages, sport, economics, politics and philosophy through the language of sustainability... this way we create sustainably literate young adults, who can envisage different (and more commonsensical) ways of doing things and the skills, knowledge and creativity to do them. Sure you can educate about environmental problems, the end of oil, biodiversity loss and so on, the reality check is essential. But also educate in science about biomimicry and permaculture, in PE and drama about the joy of doing it, rather than watching it; in English about The Great Gatsby's painful experience of the material wealth = happiness myth; in philosophy about Aristotle's pursuit of wellbeing through welldoing and Plato's understandings of simplicity; in economics about the truth behind Milton Friedmann's Fundamental free market, The Spirit Level and the Green New Deal; in Art about the romantic's love of nature and fear for it, etc, etc.. The young people of today need to question everything, they need inspirational teachers who can guide them through this and point them towards ideas like Cradle to Cradle and The School of Life.

A lot of money was thrown behind 10:10, has it done anything more than create a load of convenient 'greenwash' for institutions, individuals, organisations and governments? Could the money have been spent better by campaigning for systemic change in formal education, which is clearly, at the moment, completely unfit for the 21st Century? The inconvenient question then of course is whether they would have got so much support? I'd argue they would have; there are a lot of teachers and parents and pupils out there who are deeply dissatisfied with our current education system. Let's stop pissing about at the margins of a broken system, pretending that it can work and, to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, 'create a new system that makes the old one obsolete'. The Human Race has not evolved to anywhere near its potential yet, this is obvious by looking at the way we measure our wealth as individuals and countries. There are exciting times ahead, we need to create them, Ellen MacArthur recognises this, please check out her foundation.

@MorganHPhillips

www.becominggreen.co.uk

Greenest Government Ever...

2010-10-24T05:47:00.000-07:00

It was reported today in the Telegraph that DEFRA are being forced to sell off thousands of acres of woodland in the UK to cuts their costs.

These are sad times.

If you're better at graphic design for me, please make a better version of this!!

Collaborative Consumption

2010-10-19T02:18:00.000-07:00

Just read a P2P foundation article on 'Collaborative Consumption' and a book by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. It discusses how we are de-materialising the creation of our identities by using social media websites. They do of course concede that we do still use material things to communicate things about ourselves, comfort ourselves, or simply to make ourselves smile. Wedding rings, shoes, family heirlooms, etc, etc.

The process of de-materialisation must be a good thing for sustainability, but how will markets react to it in an economy based on material consumption? Will they encourage and cash in on the trend, or ignore and steamroller it by upping its sale of status symbols and convenience?

Here is a quote from the book that P2P posted:

Better Than Ownership

From pp. 97-98, chapter five:

“The relationship between physical products, individual ownership, and self-identity is undergoing a profound evolution. We don’t want the CD, we want the music it plays; we don’t want the disc, we want the storage it holds; we don’t want the answering machine, we want the messages it saves; we don’t want the DVD, we want the movie it carries. In other words, we don’t want the stuff but the needs or experiences it fulfills. As our possessions “dematerialize” into the intangible, our preconceptions of ownership are changing, creating a dotted line between “what’s mine,” “what’s yours,” and “what’s ours.” This shift is fueling a world where usage trumps possessions, and as Kevin Kelly, a passionate conservationist and founder of Wired magazine, puts it, where “access is better than ownership.”

There are new channels emerging—channels that don’t require you to own anything other than a computer or even just an iPhone—to share what we are doing (Twitter), what we are reading (Shelfari), what we are interested in (Digg), the groups we belong to (LinkedIn), and of course who our friends are (Facebook). As our online “brands” define “who we are” and “what we like,” actual ownership becomes less important than demonstrating use or use by association. We can now show status, group affiliation, and belonging without necessarily having to buy physical objects. Self-expression through objects will, of course, not become obsolete. We will, for instance, always treasure possessions that have high sentimental value, such as our wedding rings, relics from travels, or family heirlooms. But our relationship to satisfying what we want and signaling who we are is far more immaterial than that of any previous generation.”

Read this... No Pressure.

2010-10-04T03:08:00.000-07:00

Independent journalist Johann Hari who has written an article on just about every injustice in the world today. If you want to learn about anything from Pirates to the Pope search for 'Johann Hari, Pope' and you will be taken to somewhere in the archive of the wonderful johannhari.com

Hari has just responded to the now infamous Richard Curtis / 10:10 'No Pressure' short film. He does not mention 10:10 in the article but this was the tweet that led me to it:

@johannhari101 The 10:10 campaign is run by good people, but I never agreed with it - here's why: http://tinyurl.com/35l8k2 - and that advert is INSANE

He is far from being the only one to react to the 'green consumerism' approach to environmentalism, Rob Hopkins has also posted an informative blog article in which he defends 10:10 but distances himself from the No Pressure video. As he puts it 'not in my name'

I posted this on Johann Hari's Facebook, thought I'd share it here too:

Re: Independent article this morning

What about encouraging people to engage in deeper systemic change? Starting with education. Our children are taught in horribly reductionist ways, they learn about the world through a very narrow frame and are not encouraged to think holistically, creatively and ethically. If we succeed in lowering our dependence on fossil fuels (or are forced to by Peak oil) we will need a new generation of young designers and doers ready to change the way we do pretty much everything....grow food, keep homes warm, travel, entertain ourselves, keep the Internet alive, generate electricity, etc, etc... That's why 10:10 frustrates me massively, they could have spent thier time and money inspiring young people and celebrating human presence on Earth. They are wasting it in exactly the ways your article describes. In environmental action/campaigning terms it is a colossal waste of funds, energy and media exposure. Mind you 10:10 might not have been blessed with so much 'support' if thier 'supporters' / colluders (I'm looking at you Guardian editor, you Prime Minister, you faceless corporation in need of Green PR) actually thought that a meaningful challenge to the status quo was on its way. You are right Johann, time is too short to pussy foot around in the margins, deep systemic change driven by unprecedented levels of creativity and ecological intelligence is required, if the mainstream green movement does not recognise and call for this what chance the powerful will?

I have a lot of respect for all the energy and commitment of the people behind 10:10 and their hearts seem to be in the right place, I hope they can take on board all the constructive criticism and stay strong in the face of all the mindless vicious criticism that does the rounds on YouTube and the like!

Mummy, when I grow up I want to be Caroline Lucas

2010-08-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

I was watching the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line again the other day and it threw up a question for me. The film starts by recalling Cash's childhood in rural Arkansas. His older brother Jack, who met an awful end thanks to a wood saw accident, was held in high esteem by his whole family. Jack Cash's ambition was to be a Preacher, he wanted to help people. At that time, of course, this was seen as an incredibly noble and honorable thing to do. If you wanted to help people in your community spiritually and emotionally this was THE way to do it. Given the demise of Christianity in this country what does the teenager who wants to help people aim for? If he chooses the cloth, he does so in the knowledge that fewer than half of his community will take his advice seriously and even fewer would come to him for it. Teacher? Doctor? Volunteer? Psychopherapist? Politician? Green Party politician? Mummy when I grow up I want to be Caroline Lucas.

Flying is brilliant - Restrain yourself

2010-08-26T01:18:00.000-07:00

Whenever someone says to me 'I hate flying, planes are really bad [for the planet]' I always find myself thinking 'no, I like flying, it is a brilliant, liberating thing, its just a shame it is bad for the planet'.

It is incredible to think that if I really desperately wanted to and had enough time and money, I could book a flight, get a visa and get out to Pakistan by the weekend to help out in whichever I can with those suffering from the great flood at the moment. Pakistan that is, somewhere 4000 miles away! Somewhere like many other distant locations, that really need our help. Flying is a brilliant invention and is regularly used for a lot of good.

Just one example: I am reading 'Stones into Schools' at the moment. It is the follow up to 'Three Cups of Tea' by Greg Mortenson (photo). He has dedicated his life to humanitarian causes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He promotes peace through 'books not bombs'. There is no way in this world he could achieve what he has achieved without the aeroplane. Thank-you aeroplane.

But, it has become environmentally (and by extension socially) irresponsible to fly, just as it is irresponsible to constantly upgrade one's gadgets or drive cars when the bus is a viable option. But I hate the approach of environmentalists who continue to try to demonise flying, telling people that everything about it is evil and bad, or they tell us that the 24 hour coach journey is always a better option, or that Leeds is just as nice to visit for a romantic weekend as Barcelona. It is not. It is just unfortunate that the side effects of flying are so damaging to the planet. But, for me, overall, flying is a means to enriching people's lives (and not just their own).

OK, sometimes the motivations for flying should be questioned, tied up as it is in escapism, status anxiety and runaway hedonism. A fall in the influence of these three on people's behaviour, would probably bring a natural fall in flying. Creating this fall is not going to be easy.

As environmentalists I don't think we should try to kid ourselves that aeroplanes are terrible, awful things, we should be honest and become exemplars and ambassadors of restraint. We must restrain ourselves from the temptations of flying, just like we try to restrain ourselves from alcohol, chocolate and cigarettes. True, it is often a lot of fun to travel overland and holiday more locally, but not always. If you need to go somewhere (like on holiday) cheaply and in a hurry, flying makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. To suggest otherwise makes you look slightly odd and very easy to ignore.

A shift to an age of restraint would require huge developments in maturity and selflessness throughout our population. At the moment we exist in a polar opposite age of infantalisation which breeds hyper-invidualism and countless environmental impacts. Cheap flights and a culture of 'live for today and let tomorrow worry about itself' is the embodiment of this, we should celebrate maturity and foster selflessness by helping people to grow up. Of course the cheap flight providers don't want this to happen. I flew back from a Global Footsteps conference on Saturday aboard an easyjet flight that offered to sell me as 'entertainment' the following choice of reading materials: Hello Magazine, Top Gear Magazine, or the Daily Mail. There is not going to be much critique of materialistic celebrity obsessed consumer culture in that lot!

Open Minds and Dropping Conventional Environmentalism

2010-08-23T05:37:00.000-07:00

Here is my response to Christine Ottery's excellent recent article 'How to be Less Maladaptive' over on 'Open Minds and Parachutes'

Hi Christine,

If we do as you suggest and keep all bases covered in our 'green' communications, are we not just perpetuating the status quo? It took me a while to find it, but I am now fixed on the 'Don't mention the Environment' approach.

We, as environmentalists, are locked in a battle (that we are losing horrendously) with consumer psychologists employed to keep people believing that material wealth = well-being. Belief in this myth is caused by what John K Galbraith in 'The Affluent Society' called 'The Paramount Position of Production' in the pursuit of economic growth and security. This creates 'The imperative of [maintaining] consumer demand' and, ultimately, our social and environmental problems.

Environmentalists are locked in a paradigm that has been proven over decades to be a fruitless and we need to wake up to it. The influence of long term, short term, immediate and distant environmental problems on people's behaviour are very small. We live in a world in which the majority are unable to properly identify and pursue the things that do and do not bring them well-being. We live in a world of 'pseudo-satisfiers', if we didn't the economy would collapse.

Making people aware of environmental problems is pointless unless it is mixed in with a much heavier dose of deeper soul searching. Rather than point people toward The Ecologist, Guardian Environment, 10:10 and The Age of Stupid; point them toward Alain De Botton, Vance Packard, Neil Boorman, Mihaly Csikzentmihayli, Mohammed Yunus, Tobias Jones, Peter Senge, Peter Singer and Oliver James. Or the albums: '12 Crass Songs' by Jeff Lewis and 'Cold Fact' by Rodriguez. Or films like Garbage Warrior, Into the Wild and Shooting Dogs.

These are the sources that have changed my way of thinking about the world and what the hell I should be doing within it. Stories of environmental despair add to my general despair about the human condition in modern Western life. But it is my concerns about my well-being and the well-being of my friends and family from the developed and developing world that drive me. It is the embedded 'Conventional Wisdom' (Galbraith, 1969, Chapter 2) of our current material consumption driven economic system that needs to change. If we want continued economic growth we have to de-materialise it, to do this we as environmentalists need to help people let go of what Tim Kasser calls our High Materialistic Value Orientations.

Key Reference:

Galbraith, J,K. (1969) The Affluent Society, Pelican, UK

Chris Waddle let me introduce you to Sir Ken Robinson

2010-06-28T00:55:00.000-07:00

I love football / real life analogies...

Chris Waddle was a boyhood hero of mine, the man could drop his shoulder, beat a defender or two then whip in a cross onto the foot of Gary Lineker, he had swagger, he had skill, he was creative. He wasn't the only one in THAT Italia 90 team who could do that, Gascoigne, Beardsley, Barnes. What have England got now in terms of creativity? Lennon, Joe Cole, who mostly warm the bench and Walcott, who they left at home.

Waddle was on Radio 4 this morning lamenting the way that young players in England have their creativity drummed out of them in football academies set up to teach them to 'keep the ball'. They've created malfunctioning one dimensional robotic players, who can't keep the ball - they've not done a great job. The England football team lacks creativity, it is squeezed out of players in their learning environment in the same way as our children have, for years, had their creativity squeezed out of them in our schools.

Chris Waddle: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2010/8767443.stm

please meet Sir Ken Robinson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZIlJN0JVro

A very useful passage from 'Spent' by Geoffrey Miller

2010-06-14T08:41:00.001-07:00

I've been reading 'Spent' by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He goes deeply into the many forces driving modern day capitalist consumerism. Most environmentalists now recognise consumerism as central to nearly every environmental problem. Miller explores the 'personality trait display' reasons for why we behave the way we do in a consumerist world. It is a book well worth reading and there are many passages that it is useful to read, but this one from Chapter 16, pp. 292-297 stood out to me:

What Anticonsumerist Protesters Are Doing Wrong

A clear understanding of civil society and informal behavioural norms can help identify not only points of maximum leverage for changing society, but also tactics that are bound to fail. Ever since the green movement of the 1970s, the traditional strategy for trying to change consumer behavior has been through verbal preaching and admonishment. Humans love to talk, especially when we are telling other people what to do. So, we have for decades given one another vague encouragements to respect Mother Nature, consume less, recycle more, buy green, think globally, act locally, be less selfish and greedy, and live simply. In some cases, these tactics have worked surprisingly well, by creating new social norms and expectations. The preaching signals to everyone that there is a new status game in town, and that conspicuously green behavior is the best new way to display one's conscientiousness and agreeableness. In other cases, such preaching proves futile, because the sinners who most need saving (multinational corporations, military-industrial complexes) don't have personality traits, don't care about signaling them, and don't get any benefits from playing the new green game.

For example, anticonsumerism protesters often target large corporations and international trade organisations. They try to use the usual social-hominid tactics of informal social sanctioning - preaching, public humiliation, ostracism, name-calling, and throwing rotten fruit. But the objects of their wrath are faceless institutions that have no conscience or responsiveness to such sanctions, or institutional leaders and functionaries whose real social lives have no overlap with those of the protestors, and thus who are immune to suffering any real fitness costs from the protestors' disaffection. The Nestle and WTO leaders can leave their besieged workplaces in strong, fast cars, drive to their anonymized exurban mansions, and enjoy the evening with thier empathic spouses, adoring children, deferential dinner guests, and single-malt whiskies. The protestors are nottheir neighbors, friends, kin, colleagues, or potential lovers, so their disapproval means nothing. They are the out-group, and informal social sanctions only work within one's in-group.

The protesters would do better to aim their sticks and carrots at social in-group members who care what they think - and to recognise that their social in-group is much wider than they might realise. For typical college-student protesters, these in-groups include their like-minded, same-aged, protester-subculture friends, of course. But they also include anyone who has overlapping fitness interests by virtue of genetic relatedness, social attachment, economic codependency, spatial proximity, or repeated interaction. That is, their in-groups include all their parents, step-parents, siblings, and relatives; their house-mates and neighbours; their workmates, bosses, and customers; their schoolmates and professors; their online game-playing companions, chat room pals, and e-mail correspondents.

As adults most of us have a social network of around 150 people whom we know well enough that, if we met them in an airport, we would be happy to chat with them over drinks, In many domains, we feel comfortable praising or punishing these in-group acquaintances for good or bad behavior. We would commend them for altruism toward family, friends, children, or animals. We would condemn them - with a wince, a scowl, a gentle remonstrance, a pointed question, or an abrupt exit - if they revealed acts of cruelty or infidelity. We might even do so for ideological sins - for derogating minorities, enjoying pornography, or cursing within earshot of nuns. Yet in most developed nations, there is a strange and strong taboo against condemning in-group members for acts of conspicuous consumption. If our airport drinking buddies reveal that they have bought a new Lexus or Stanford law degree, we feel obligated to praise their success, status, and taste. If they see an ad for some new cell phone of grotesquely conspicuous precision on the airport's propaganda screeens (usually tuned to CNN, in the United States), and if they comment that they covet the product, we feel reflexively inclined to assent. I wish instead that we had the guts to say something like:

Yeah, I wanted that phone once, too. But then I thought, I already have a pretty good phone, so why do I crave this thing? It's just going to cost hours of frustration to set up, and make me stare at little electronic screens even more than I already do, so I have even fewer face-to-face conversations like the one we are having now. I think we unconsciously want these things because we want to show people that we have some attractive personal traits - things like intelligence and conscientiousness - that lead to success as a worker and taste as a consumer. But, you know, I think these products don't even work that well to show off these traits. For instance, I can already tell that you have these traits just from talking with you for a few minutes. You make interesting, funny comments about meaningful things, so I know you're intelligent. You got through security an hour before your flight, so I know you're conscientious. Your virtues speak for themselves. We don't need to wrap all those costly goods and services around ourselves to get respect. What do you think?

Such mini-sermons might sometimes fail by seeming too direct, offensive, intimate, or weird. But they might often succeed in sparking some new thoughts and feelings, if articulated in a spirit of "Let's think through this consumerism problem together, as joint victims of bad habits" rather than "I'm a virtuous know-it-all anticonsumer, and you're a shallow, craven materialist." Especially in settings as alienating as airports, where personal identity feels paper-thin, and product branding feels thick and hot as lava, a few genuine words of personal contact and consumerist scepticism from an acquaintance can seem momentously vivid. These words might resonate in the listener's memory for weeks to come, and resound every time he sees an ad or steps into a mall; they might even be rearticulated when he meets and acquaintance of his own in some future airport bar. (Nothing ever changes for the better without someone's seeming overoptimistic about other people's thoughtfulness....)

In fact, these moments of one-on-one consciousness raising, compiled across individuals, in-groups, and history, are probably the main routes by which all social change occurs. They are how civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, and animal rights got discussed and accepted. To the extent that public protests helped at all, they may have simply provided the news-feed fodder to provoke private discussions among family and friends. They were occasions for airing thoughts about topics that were previously off the radar. Once people's tacit assumptions and behavioral habits are held up to the arc lamp of thoughtful discussion, they tend to burn out like stalled film stock: flicker, scorch, bubble, whoosh. The German social philosopher Jurgen Habermas made this point already when he wrote about human emancipation through "communicative rationality" in an "ideal speech situation" within civil society - but the point bears repeating, for those who haven't curled up by the fire lately with his 1981 masterpiece Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: Handlungsrationalitat und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung.

Face-to-face discussions of consumerism can often go more smoothly than confrontations about topics like racism, sexism, or homophobia. This is because when you point out that consumerism is a really inefficient way to advertise personal traits, you can praise someone's traits and tickle their vanity even as you're cluster bombing the central ideology around whihc they've organised their education, career, leisure, identity, status seeking, and mating strategy. As well-trained consumer narcissists, we are such insecure, praise-starved flattery sluts that a little social validation goes a long way. A friend or lover can imply that we have wasted our lives chasing consumerist dreamworlds and status mirages, as long as he or she reassures us that we still appear intelligent, attractive and virtuous. (Don't forget to mention that, or people will cry.)

Another, more subtle way of opening such conversations is through mentioning movies that address consumerism. Most people love to talk about movies, and do so in chummy, open-minded, leisure-chat mode. (By contrast, when discussing books, magazine articles, or TV documentaries, people tend to revert to college-seminar debate mode, and become more intellectually prickly and ideologically defensive.) One can say, "You know, last night I was watching Fight Club on DVD again - have you ever seen it? - and I was thinking about some of its themes..." Or, one could mention American Beauty, or The Matrix, or any of the movies listed in "Further Reading and Viewing." These films have a few key features: almost every cultured person has seen at least one of them; they evoke many themes beyond consumerism, so don't elicit an instant defensive reaction, they way that An Inconvenient Truth or The Corporation would; and they offer intriguing alternative ways to display one's mental, moral, and physical traits. By startinga chat about a highly rated mainstream Hollywood film, one can slop painlessly past an acquaintances political defenses to question consumerist assumptions and habits.

Excerpt from Chapter 16 of 'Spent' by Geoffrey Miller

Pseudo satisfiers and Sustainability Non-sense

2010-02-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

Reflections on: ‘Sustainability Sense: Creating value in an economic downturn’ PP4SD conference, 23^rd February 2010, Thistle Hotel, Victoria, London.

Responding to our values: Pseudo satisfiers and Sustainability Non-sense

Morgan Phillips

When talking about values, the things we as social actors place a value on, love, status, trust, fast cars, fun, houses, education, compassion and so on, we must also talk about emotions and the power of them. When does a human being have emotional wellbeing, when are they emotionally stable or high? I would argue that it is when they are able to live their lives in ways that allow them to have, protect or feel the benefit of the things they value. So if someone wants status symbols, enjoys regular big nights out, likes smoking cigarettes, cherishes Costa coffee mornings, loves clothes from Primark and a dozen other 'unsustainable' things and is able to get/experience them, they will have emotional wellbeing. It may not be continuous but they are able, thanks to credit cards, stable employment, overdrafts and so on, to sustain frequent enough waves of hedonistic highs to make the lows or boredom in between bearable. They're on the hedonic treadmill¹.

The argument from many environmentalists, myself included², is that we need to understand better what brings us stable sustained emotional wellbeing, which has occasional highs, but does not collapse into painful lows of confusion, regret, shame and anger. The New Economics Foundation³ ask in their edited book 'Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth?' Most of the chapters in that book argue 'no' and this is crucially important to sustainability.

Often the reasons we behave in unsustainable ways are more to do with our misunderstandings about how to protect, have or enjoy the things we value and there seems to be a hierarchy of values. We value one thing because we value another and we value that because we value something else; something more profound. It is not a simple linear thing however. We may value something like a bicycle for many different reasons, health benefits, time saving, exhilaration, etc, which all align, eventually, with our deeper values. We might however, place high value on an expensive gift from our partner as we see it as a measure of how much we are loved (valued) by them. The expensive gift may or may not have a large environmental or social justice impact, but its impact is likely to be more than something less tangible and arguably more loving: a hug, a kiss, a sacrifice, a poem etc. Loving someone means spending time with them, taking a selfless act to make their day a bit nicer, being loyal and understanding when and when not to bring up sensitive issues. Buying expensive gifts to compensate for not being able to do these things because of other commitments (work, leisure, etc) is not, in my opinion, the wisest way to show someone that you value them.

So, if emotional wellbeing is indeed linked to how congruent our values are with our lives, we are likely to get upset/ angry/ dissatisfied/ jealous when they are not. For example we might experience status anxiety⁴if we feel our neighbours house, car, holiday, sofa, partner even, is more glamorous than our own. Emotions like anger, frustration and jealousy, when stirred up, are powerful drivers of behaviour change. The urge we get to 'kick out' at others or ourselves to try to change the conditions that are disrupting our emotional wellbeing intensifies as we get more angry, upset etc, so the more fierce the emotion, the more likely the change is. On a more positive note, we are also likely to modify our behaviour in ways that we believe will enhance our wellbeing. We shape our lives in ways that are likely to increase our chances of having and protecting the things we value, whatever they may be. We may not always change our behaviour in the right ways, we may fall back on old habits and lead ourselves back into the frustration we’re trying to escape and this is where education can help.

Discussions of values and proxy values are therefore very important. If after a discussion about status symbols an individual begins to get frustrated with the false promises of advertising and then, because of a realisation, or perhaps an admission, that material wealth does not guarantee happiness, they may get sufficiently emotional to strive for change. This change could be personal or at the sub - systemic level of an organisation they are a stakeholder in, or at the systemic level of a consumerism based economy. The vast majority of people, if you ask them, will value core things like love, happiness, friendship, tolerance, equality, health, compassion, openness, liberty, respect, generosity, empathy and kindness, among other things as Paul Murray showed us yesterday. Given this, a discussion of how we seek to observe these in, or have them facilitated by, other social actors is as important, if not more important than a discussion about how we can be kind, tolerant, etc to others and not impinge on their freedom, health etc. When we feel we need to change, we need to learn how to change.

I value nature, I get upset, angry and frustrated when I learn about the innumerable ways in which it is exploited by business, individuals and governments. I feel uncomfortable when I engage with social actors who are not doing their upmost to lessen their unsustainable behaviours. Ideally I support more sustainable competitors to send out market signals and fill out feedback forms like this one (http://www.thistlefeedback.com/) with constructive criticism and offers of help and advice. Beyond that, there is not much else I can do as an individual; it is out of my sphere of control. But these actions are enough for me to maintain my emotional wellbeing.

Paul Maiteny taught us yesterday about the importance of emotion; our emotional drives as educators and the importance of exploring, even challenging the emotions of others. An exploration of our emotional wellbeing and the reasons why we value the things we do is very important. When the things we value appear under threat we get emotional and feel moved to act. It is a crude thing to say but a lot of people still believe (or at least behave as if they do) that material wealth = happiness, they therefore value the ‘wrong’ things environmentally and, if you agree with the Affluenza^5,6,7,8hypothesis, the ‘wrong’ things emotionally. The consequence is a ‘take, make, waste’ economy with an infantalised⁹ population that is constantly in need of external stimulation and consequent gradual but persistent environmental degradation. As educators, in whatever capacity, we need to help people unpick the material wealth = happiness paradigm at personal, sub-systemic and systemic levels. And, importantly, we need to help them to truly connect with the values that are inherent within us all. We need to help them discover true satisfiers and protectors of the things they value to replace their cravings for the pseudo-satisfiers, which keep them locked on the hedonic treadmill¹.

What does this do at the systemic level, within business? I don’t know. If a business recognises that its future success is tied up in some direct or indirect way with the persistence of the material wealth = happiness paradigm, they may be resistant to ‘training’ that encourages its employees and customers to question it. If it truly wants to be sustainable, it may recognise the long term benefits of a wellbeing based economy and seek to change itself to be at the forefront of making it happen. To do this it will need an employee base that understands and values this approach; workers who feel proud to be an employee, customer and advocate.

People value ‘unsustainable’ things not because they hate the environment, but because they believe that these things will protect or enhance the deeper things they value like love, happiness and respect. It is the value we place on pseudo-satisfiers that needs to be explored, not our underlying, core values. Is it possible to find and access the people we need to explore it with?

Easterlin, R.A. (1974) Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence, In: David, R. and Reder, R. (Eds.), Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz. New York, USA, Academic Press
Phillips, M. (2009) Emotional Wellbeing In: Stibbe, A. (Ed), The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy, UK, Green Books
Simms, A. & Smith, J. (eds.) Do good lives have to cost the earth? UK, Constable and Robinson Ltd.
De Botton, A. (2004) Status Anxiety, UK, Penguin
De Graff, J., Wann, D., and Naylor, T.H. (2002) Affluenza. The all consuming epidemic, USA, Berret-Koehler Publishers
Hamilton, C. and Denniss, R. (2005) Affluenza. When too much is never enough, Australia, Allen and Unwin
James, O. (2007) Affluenza, UK, Vermilion
James, O. (2008) The Selfish Capitalist, UK, Vermilion
Barber, B.R. (2007) Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, New York, W.W. Norton and Company

Jonathan Porritt @lsepublicevents 04/02/10

2010-02-05T01:12:00.000-08:00

'The whole debate is in the wrong place' that's the stand out quote I took from last nights Jonathan Porritt talk at the LSE. He was referring of course to Climate Change, most specifically the UK debates around it. He is championing a positive approach to our communications. Acting on Climate Change can stimulate green jobs, innovative and marketable new technology, it can improve energy security and lastly (important to put this last) it'll help the planet. People just don't buy into doing something about Climate Change, people do buy into job creation, healthier lifestyles, money saving through ENERGY EFFICIENCY and energy security. This is what Obama is selling and the Americans are buying it! In the UK people no longer trust scientists and, unsurprisingly are not responding to scare tactics and the prophets of doom.

He's not alone in expressing alarmism over the alarmist language surrounding Climate Change. He pointedly attacked the governments horrendous 'Act on CO2' campaign, blaming it, in part, for the recent drop in the number of UK citizens who believe Climate change is caused by human behaviour. You could probably add 'The Age of Stupid' to this, but at least they have provided an antidote of sorts with the 10:10 campaign.

I put Energy Efficiency in block capitals above because it is staring us in the face and the environmental gains are potentially huge, Porritt drew our attention to the strong advocacy Dr Steven Chu (US Energy Secretary) gives to Energy Efficiency. Apparently the US could cut its energy use by 40% with improvements in energy efficiency alone, that is before anyone tries to do anything about the sacred American way of life. It is a no-brainer to invest in energy efficiency (unless of course your middle name is... Shell, Esso, Total, Texaco, BP, etc, etc).

CSP was also championed, Porritt very skilfully got us all very excited about it, then grounded us by saying the reality of installing the vast new infrastructure needed to power the whole of Western Europe would be costly: half a trillion pounds! He then asked us if that was a big figure, before answering for us, no. The UK, alone, managed to find 17 trillion pounds to bail out the banks, that is just the UK! Surely the EU can find the money to invest in CSP in a big way, so that the Sahara's sunshine can power all our homes and, because it is morally right, the homes of millions of Africans.

Prof. Mike Hulme from UEA (author of 'Why we disagree about Climate Change') was in the audience and during the Q&A the discussion swung eventually to whether we should be seeking political action at the International level at all?The situation at the international level is, as Porritt pointed out at the start of his talk, quite bizarre at the moment, the UN is really struggling to get us anywhere near a satisfactory successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the jury is out, maybe we should abandon the UNFCCC and concentrate on solving Climate Change through domestic politics. Porritt argues that we shouldn't make that leap quite yet, a lot has been achieved by the UN process and in the end Climate Change is a genuinely global problem, which in time of globalisation of economics, needs a global solution.

The evening ended with Porritt hypothesising that far from being a negative Climate Change might actually be the one thing that unites all the people of the world. Everyone will be or has been affected by Climate Change, it might just bring us together. We Britons are quite prone to scepticism and we get all awkward championing the ideas of entrepreneurial capitalists who might just have some of the answers to our plight, we'd much rather moan on and on, it is easier, but we have got to try and snap out of it and start 'selling the sizzle' a bit more!

P.S. I really wanted to highlight the conclusion to Porritt's talk where he discussed the findings of the truly fantastic work 'The Spirit Level'. This is getting a bit long now though, so I'll just say listen to the podcast when it gets uploaded and check out The Equality Trust website to understand why doing something about Energy Efficiency is a social justice priority. We live in a horribly, embarrassingly unequal country, we desperately need to do something about it!

LEEF Event

2010-01-27T01:29:00.000-08:00

WHAT DO WE WANT OUR CHILDREN TO GROW UP TO BE

Event type:: Residential
Event dates:: 26/04/2010 to 28/02/2010
Location:: Paddington Farm Trust
Price:: £120 LEEF members, £160 others

How are we going to help our children to have fulfilling and meaningful lives, characterised by generosity, intelligence, community spirit, stable levels of self-esteem and maturity? Join us at Paddington Farm for a weekend of relaxed and informal discussions on what learning and education for sustainability can actually include and go away with fresh activities, ideas and inspiration for your groups and classes. Paddington Farm is a beautiful 43 acre organic small holding in Glastonbury, Somerset with a mission to improve the quality of life and well-being for community groups and families from urban areas by enabling access to the countryside.
Course Trainers: Dr. Morgan Phillips writer of blog “Becoming Green” and co-ordinator of “Global Footsteps” and Paddington Farm Trust for “Forest Survival” and “Farm tours”.

Programme:
Friday after work – Londoners: meet at Paddington Station for brief activity. Take train to Somerset.
Dinner – Followed by introduction to the course and Paddington Farm.
Evening – Discussion of the Cambridge report.
Saturday morning – Workshop: School, The Media, Friends and Family – Where children learn from and what it means.
Lunch – Followed by ‘Forest Survival’ workshop.
Afternoon – Workshop: Ways to Wellbeing – ‘Books for Children’ and ‘The Happiness Wall’.
Dinner – Followed by conversations round the fire.
Sunday morning – What would we like to be?
Mid day – Departure to be back in London by 3:00pm

Course suitable for: environmental educators, play workers, parents, teachers, people who are interested in young people and the environment.
Please bring: Outdoor clothing, towels, pajamas, toiletries, and your own favourite treats to share. (e.g. a bottle of wine or some chocolates)

Contact Details

Contact name: Anna Portch
Contact telephone: 07891 837 120
Contact email: aportch@wildlondon.org.uk

Event Registration

Note: LEEF members are entitled to a discounted price of £120 for this event. If you are a LEEF member you'll need to login to take advantage of this discount. If not, the price will be £160.

The Big Deal

2010-01-26T01:09:00.000-08:00

Picked up on this via @guardianeco on twitter.

A designer, Julia King, has created a set of top trump style cards which allow players to compare various energy saving and sustainability inducing home improvements. It's really good, I was going to buy a pack via Julia King's website, but they cost £11.35, which is a bit much for me. Hopefully a larger manufacturer will pick them up and lower the cost. I'm sure this would go well in schools, maybe I'll buy a pack for ecoActive.

Obama's Copenhagen Speech

2009-12-18T04:51:00.001-08:00

'We ain't making more cuts unless China tells the world what their cuts are going to be' [Not his exact words of course!]

Full speech here

We wait and see!