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?

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How about this for a Christmas present?!

I bought The Independent today because its front page sub-heading was:

'President-elect signals determination to fight recession with unprecendented eco-revolution'

Obama is putting together an administration that is overtly green. Amongst others he will make John Holdren his Energy Secretary and Jane Lubchenco his administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Professor Holdren is a nobel prize winning physicist and forceful advocate of carbon-free energy, while Professor Lubchenco is an oceanographer who specialises in the impact of global warming on the oceans. Is the USA becoming green?! It looks like there will be some action on Climate Change, only time will tell us what this action is, how deep Obama plans to go, how quickly a green-collar employment sector grows, what it will look like and how it will be funded.

From a British perspective, it would be interesting, right now, to ask Gordon Brown.... 'so Gordie what do you think about this new green administration of Obama's, are you going to follow suit, are you going to swap the purple tie for a green one?' I don't think the PM is a regular reader of this blog, but if I bump into him when I'm last minute Christmas shopping tomorrow I'll ask him and give him a copy of NEF's Green New Deal!

Since going out into the big bad real world, I have been amazed at the lack of funding available to help companies, schools, charities and so on develop environmental and sustainability policies. Schools, Charities and struggling businesses just can't afford an 'expert' to help them become green. Being 'green' is not as simple as it seems, it takes time, careful (and not always intuitive) planning, commitment, and a willingness to make sustainability a key principle underlying a companies operations and aspirations. The responsibility for doing something about 'the environment' usually falls to someone who shows an interest in it (someone who has watched An Inconvinient Truth and read a bit of George Monbiot). Given the low levels of Sustainability literacy that exist within the current workforce, it is not often that the someone has had an education that allows them to develop a well-thought out and approproiate response to the challenges. Often that someone has a passion (much needed) but no clear idea of what to do and how to do it! The result: poorly planned, marginal, low impact, conspicuosly green actions that might look the part but don't really cut the organic mustard. Every organisation is unique and must design and develop its response to sustainability based around this sort of question: what can we do to limit our environmental impact, and what can we do to help others limit thiers? Well informed, well intentioned and sustainably literate people need to brought in to help organisations, the problem is it is difficult to expect high calibre people to do this for free, they need to be funded. Either the government can fund this work, or the organisation can recognise the long term need for them to plan effectively now to ensure that their organisation actually has a future and invest appropriately.

It will be very interesting to see the reaction around the world to Obama's environmental intentions, and, in the longer term, his actions. Will people start thinking 'Well if the President of the USA thinks this is important, it must be bloody important!' and get on board? In Britain we have been pretty good at following America's lead over the last few years, the results have been pretty catastrophic. When I went to the launch of The Green New Deal, the Guardian journalist and green new deal contributor, Larry Elliot, said that the current economic crisis is a huge opportunity to instigate a progression to a greener society. Given the political and corporate will many jobs in the green sector can be created, the need is clear!

Professor Sir David King deserves a bigger audience!

In a week when Malcolm Gladwell had them queueing round the corner to listen to him talk about the merits of american and australian pilots over columbian ones, I sat in a row on my own in a lecture thearte at UCL listening to a deeply moving and expertly delivered exploration of the challenges of the 21st century by Professor Sir David King wishing he had Gladwell's PR machine behind him. There were about 40 people there, most of them UCL academics, the rest a handful of students. I wish more people could have heard (or wanted to hear) what this man had to say.

Sir David King has a calmness that gives you confidence. The content of what he said about the security of energy, water, food and peace, as well as what he said about the two biggies: Biodiversity and Climate Change was no less frightening than what everyone else says. But, unlike someone like George Monbiot the tone was far less hysterical and the mood was far less 'RIGHT ON MAN, LET'S GET OUT THERE AND SHOUT AND SCREAM AT OUR POLITICIANS AND THE GENERAL STUPID PUBLIC!' Sir David has been there, he has advised world leaders, he is a realist, he has his frustrations for sure, but he is incredibly sensible and rational about what can be done, especially about climate change.

Global population is predicted to rise to 9 billion by 2050 and that population will have increased aspirations about their standard of living, meaning that our average consumption per person will also increase - more people consuming more stuff. Given this (likely) scenario King argued that a paradigm shift is needed, we need a new way of thinking about how we live. The challenge for the 21st century is clear we are going to have to deal with more people consuming more stuff. At the end of his lecture King stated the following four cultural challenges that need to be overcome to allow a paradigm shift:

1. National perceptions versus global priorities (the Bush administration is the best example of this. King described how Bush had said that his priority was looking after the USA and their economy, energy security and so on. As far as he was concerned the rest of the world could deal with Climate Change)
2. Economism; unfettered consumerism as the instrument for economic growth (he pointed out the economic and environmental unsustainability of this strategy, I would have been deeply disapointed if he hadn't!)
3. Nostalgic romanticism; or the 'angst of affluence' (Paul Collier)
4. Re-gearing science and technology to meet the global challenge. (The appropriateness of scientific work should be re-thought - 'do we really need another Hadron Collider if this one doesn't work?' quipped King.)

These are huge challenges. King pointed out that there is a lot that can and should be done in the short term that does not require huge cultural shifts. For example ensuring our highly wastesful building infrastructure is made energy efficient should be a number one priority and global investment into renewable energy is a must. I had two questions for Sir David King scribbled in my note pad, unfortunatley I didn't get a chance to ask them... I handed them to him on a note, they were (and still are):

1. How can we stimulate a letting go of the materialist, individualist and hedonistic value systems that underlie consumerism?
2. Can I have a job at your new 'Smith School of Enterprise and The Environment' to help you answer my first question and all the difficult questions that surround it?!

I really do hope he has some thoughts on the 'big question.' If you ever see an advert for a David King lecture, please, please go along and ask him!

He does have a book (which is in the post to me right now) that might have some answers!

(This report is a good summary of a similar talk by Sir David, some figures have probably changed. There is also a link to a video there)

Book review - Crap at the Environment

It is painfully obvious that it is difficult to be ‘Good at the Environment’ when you are a stand-up comedian in the English speaking world. Poor old Mark Watson is crap at the environment because he has to fly back and forth from the UK to Australia to make people laugh. I am struggling to find anything positive to say about this book as a piece of education for sustainability. The one thing I can say that his self pitying honesty does at least highlight something that needs to be better understood by environmentalists. His story basically explains that he has plural rationalities. This is what is meant by plural rationalities: From an environmental perspective, Mark recognises that it is not rational for him to fly to Australia. However, from a career perspective, it is completely rational for Mark to fly to Australia. Mark therefore has two competing rationalities. He then has to make a decision, should he stay at home and not be crap at the environment, or fly, further his career and be crap? On a smaller scale, he faces these sorts of competing rationalities in many other areas of his life, take a one mile taxi ride or walk through the rain, use the lift or walk to the 20th floor of his hotel, eat delicious red meat or eat vegetables.

We all face these decisions; they are basically choices between taking the easy or more desirable option, or taking the harder or chore-like one. We all have plural rationalities. The result of this is that we are willing to make sacrifices for the sake of the environment when it does not feel like too much like a sacrifice or chore. Environmental education can make us more motivated to take the environment into consideration when we make decisions. For Mark, the main sources of his environmental education were Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’, George Monbiot’s ‘Heat’ and Mark Lynas’ ‘Six Degrees’. These three sources are pretty sensational in their findings and delivery, with a real ‘act now’ message. The pleas to the ordinary citizen are framed as sacrifices for the sake of the planet. The questions of why we travel, why we shop, why we eat red meat are not really asked. The reaction is to carry on doing the 'crap' things but in a slightly less environmentally damaging way. I wish Mark Watson had been a little less self-pitying and a bit more analytical about why he and his followers are crap at the environment. The book wasn’t very funny anyway, so he may as well have gone a bit deeper. If you haven’t read this book read Tom Hodgkinson’s ‘How to be Free’ first.