Embracing our own hypocrisies

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.

WWF's Common Cause - The Debate

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.

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.

Jonathan Porritt @lsepublicevents 04/02/10

'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!

Sell the Sizzle

I've just read Futerra's 'Sell the Sizzle' guide, it is required reading for whoever thought the Please help the world - COP15 opening film was a good idea! The advice in Sell the Sizzle took me back to one of the '10 minute lectures' I did for Hackney Environmental Education Network back in June. So here it is:

10 Minute Lecture: I have a dream

I began the 10 minuter by playing an excerpt from Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech. Below are my notes for the lecture:

That speech in total is around 15 minutes long, during it he highlighted the oppression black people in America had and were suffering. But, it is one of the most famous speeches ever because of four little words and how those words made people feel. ‘I have a dream’

In 1963, when that speech was made, America was on the cusp of great change. ‘I have a dream’ provided a persuasive impetus. The speech is memorable because it is so full of HOPE and EXCITEMENT.

Messages of hope are far to infrequent in Environmental Education. This is especially true in the mainstream media.

Most messages are ones of fear, controversy and blame. Sensationalism sells.

Climate change, for example, is often described as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control. It has been dubbed by some as ‘Climate Porn’ (Ereaut and Signit, 2006)

The problem with sensationalism is that the scale of the problem is presented as so big that people become paralysed into inaction by feelings of insignificance. This is compounded by environmentalists telling people to give things up and to engage in mundane solutions: Changing lightbulbs, recycling, public transport, insulation, renewable energy, composting, campaigning etc etc... to a lot of people they sound like a series of chores.

All of those things are not THE answer, they are a small part of the answer. We need people to change their whole way of life, we need people to enjoy themselves without compromising the ability of others to enjoy themselves. As environmental educators we need to start showing the way and not just in terms of practical solutions. We need to create hope and excitement and not spread blame and depression. We don’t create waste and pollution because we hate the environment, we create it as a by product of doing the things that we hope will bring us wellbeing.

NEF has identified 5 ways to wellbeing: 1. Connect, 2. Be Active, 3. Keep learning, 4. Take notice, 5. Give...

Consumer culture conditions us to try and meet these needs in material heavy, energy dependent ways; we are sold pseudo-satisfiers that promise much but only provide short term satisfaction therefore driving us to discard one product as we buy a shiny new one.

‘Sustainability’ is about doing these five things in socially and environmentally responsible ways.

For this we need two things:

1. Understanding of how we can and why we need to live sustainably.
2. Opportunities and inspiration to lead a fulfilling and varied life.

We need more of the first and a hell of a lot more of the second, we need to start showing the way. We can meet all five things in low impact ways, but a lot of people have forgotten, or in the case of my generation, never really learned.

****

I'm really impressed with the Futerra guide. As it says at the end what we need now are lots of positive visions of the future. It is what we're trying to do with Global Footsteps.

Comments on: 'Exploring Behaviour Change Barriers at Greengaged'

This is a comment I left on an article by Ed Gillespie over on Greengaged... http://greengaged.com/articles/view/design-for-life/

There is some great stuff here, lots of people are beginning to sit up and take notice of the fact that people don't 'hurt' the environment because they hate it. They hurt it because they love doing other things like 1. travelling, 2. expressing themselves through their appearance, 3. eating(!) and 4. having a warm, well lit home. Those four categories are just the tip of the iceberg, they have many sub-categories: People like driving Ferrari's, people like wearing Diesel jeans, people like eating Tesco's finest strawberry cheesecake and people like buying the latest SMEG fridge... The reasons why people like doing things are hugely complex and they all make sense to us in some way at the decision making moment. A lot of things don't make sense to us when we have our eco hats on but they do make sense to us when we have our 'Keeping up with the Joneses' or 'I want to be sexy' hats on. To use academic speak here, we have 'plural rationalities'; for example, something can seem completely irrational from an environmental perspective but entirely rational from a marital harmony perspective (and the latter in that example almost always wins out!) Design has a massive role to play in making our lives more eco-efficient, but and this is a big BUT... the reasons why people want fashionable clothes and for that matter fashionable homes, holidays, food and all the rest of it, are complex. They involve the interrelationships we have with our peers, our heroes, our family, our community, our old school friends as well as brands, governments, environmentalists, celebrities and social networking sites (that bring all these thing into one intense space)!

We have been infantalised by the kings and queens of consumerism into feeling that we need a multitude of goods and services to be 'happy', 'normal', 'unique', 'cool', 'young', 'vibrant' and so on. Eg: in 2009 we discovered that we MUST twitter, so we all do! The cultural world around us creates anxieties, it makes us feel we are missing out and that we are inadequate, behind the times and un-cool as a result. Nearly all this adds up to education AGAINST sustainability because we are encouraged to buy goods, services, holidays, etc that are only ever really pseudo-satisfiers of our insecurities and more often than not environmentally damaging in their manufacture, marketing, transport, use and disposal (reused and recycled or not).

If we are not careful 'being green' will become just another one of these insecurities and will mix in with all our other insecurities as we struggle to create and maintain an acceptable public image. For many 'being green' is already something they aspire to, but is it because they genuinely understand and feel the need to be deeply, in the same way as they are not racist, or is it because everyone else seems to think it is pretty important to 'be green'. If most people are in the latter category the result is widespread shallow environmentalism; greenwash at the individual level transferring to societal wide greenwash. In the UK today, it is much harder to be deeply green than it is to be a non-racist. Not being racist is not a chore, it does not conflict with the rest of our lives. Being green is much harder as it can compromise our desires to buy/do things that promise to relieve our manufactured and genuine needs, wants and insecurities. Things like being cool, being relaxed, being safe, being young and sexy and, when it comes to commuter travel choices, being on time! We can't have all these things in 'sustainable' ways so it is good that designers are trying to make these things more eco-efficient, but often we can come to not feel the need for the things at all and that is the important point to remember.

The human race is still evolving, it is still incredibly immature and insecure. We need to mature as people and as a species so that we are less reliant on external confirmations that we are 'ok'. We need to be more secure in who we are and more efficient at satisfying rather than buying into 'pseudo' satisfiers of both our material and non-material needs. Designers have a huge role to play in this, they can design the material things we need 'cradle to cradle' and resist the temptation to add un-related meanings to their products. 'This fridge will keep your food cold with minimal environmental impact and it will look as 'ok' as a lump of metal in the corner of your kitchen can look' as opposed to 'This fridge tells people that you are successful, glamorous, artistic and on the pulse.'

Education FOR sustainability and Environmentally responsible behaviour change is about far more than just working out 'greener' ways of having a jacuzzi or playing a computer game, it is about empathy, kindness, respect, maturity, status anxiety, the music of Crass, Kramer vs Kramer, Into the Wild and Tobias Jones' excellent book 'Utopian Dreams'. Systemic change is needed because we can't keep having it all, we need an economic and cultural system that understands that and does not foster a desire in us to want, want, want, buy, buy, buy.