Where we might be falling down
Are we using a Dad's Army approach?
Do we have an image problem?
Information is not enough
You can't sell sacrifice
Creating fear and guilt doesn't work
Our words are putting some people off
Other things matter too
Normal people are not always like us
The attitude-action gap is a chasm to cross
NEXT: How we might do things better
Are we using a Dad's Army approach?
"We're all doomed!" Private Fraser used to pronounce in his distinctive gloomy lilt during episodes of Dad's Army. None of the platoon took him seriously and, of course, the television audience found it highly amusing, week after week.
Environmentalists often adopt the role of Private Fraser. We thrive on foretelling disaster and ruin and we also don't always get taken seriously. Some people even laugh at us. So, we try the Sergeant Wilson approach to communicating with people, putting on a supercilious, intellectual air and criticising what people do. "Do you really think that's wise?" Wilson always used to say. Worst of all, we throw in a bit of Captain Mainwaring. "You stupid boy," we splutter, as we challenge and berate others for not doing what we think is right.
And what response do we get? Yes, Warden Hodges said it: "Oi Napoleon! Who do you think you are?" People resent others telling them what to do, especially when it comes down to how they live their lives. Some people's automatic response to our message is to run in the opposite direction, perhaps the Private Godfrey response ("Please can I be excused? Sir"). Others simply don't think 'saving the world' is for people like them. As Private Pike would say: "I don't think my mum would want me to do that..."
But how often do we act like the old platoon hero, Corporal Jones? "Don't panic! Don't panic!" was his approach to anything scary that might unsettle his fellow men. If we reassured people, thought positive and sought their participation on equal terms rather than their submission to a higher way of thinking, could we even expect a Corporal Jones attitude in return? "Captain Mainwaring, Sir... I'd like to volunteer to test the new dangerous-looking rope bridge" might become "Hey, green groups: I'd like to volunteer to be the first on my street to give up my car..."
Heaven forbid that the environmental movement is a bunch of incompetent idiots, ridiculed with peals of laughter in sitting rooms up and down the country. But we do need to look at how we relate to people, and crucially how they relate to us. To connect with people and change attitudes and ultimately behaviour, we need to approach them in a way they can warm to.
Do we have an image problem?
Beards, beads, sandals, hair shirts, lentils, brown rice, scented candles, folk music, cds of ocean sounds, placards, samba bands, rubber dinghies, treehouses... all form part of the environmental stereotype. Like many stereotypes it can be damaging. Some people look at the way environmentalists are portrayed in the media and turn away thinking: "This is not for me."
During the big road protests in the 1990s, many of the public paid little attention to the actual issue behind the protests, reacting instead to the media-fuelled imagery of unwashed people with long hair claiming dole money away from home. In taking a dislike to the protestors, they automatically rejected their message too.
In actual fact, road protestors in the 90s did everyone a massive service, more or less shaping roads policy in the early years of the Labour Government. Unfortunately, Middle England was sidetracked by appearances.
The green movement needs to learn how to win friends and influence people. What we have to say is of course important, but in a media-driven world, our style, approach and tone are absolutely vital. How we operate will determine how people see us and that will determine whether they will hear us or simply turn away. In short, people have to like us.
Information is not enough
Let the age-old assumption that providing information on its own can save the world be laid to rest. For too long the green movement has pumped out information, assuming it leads to awareness of threats and problems, concern and finally action. Unfortunately most if not all the lifestyle decisions that the green movement seeks to influence are not determined mainly by rational consideration of the facts, but by emotions, habits, personal preferences and prejudices, fashions, social norms, personal morals and values, peer pressure and other intangibles. Many of the everyday decisions we seek to influence, for example whether to take the car or walk, buy the eco-washing powder or the high-chemical one, or turn the radiator on or reach for a jumper, are undertaken with little or no deliberate thought at all. It is therefore difficult to influence them purely through information provision and argument.
What this means is that to influence lifestyle choices we must connect with the heart, senses and emotions rather than the head and its brain cells. We have to create desire and other emotional responses in people before they will adopt green behaviours.
You can't sell sacrifice
Earth's resource systems are on overload. We do too much, we buy too much, we waste too much. Much of what is wrong in environmental terms stems from over-consumption. The common response of environmentalists has therefore been to preach a more frugal lifestyle, but even a top salesman couldn't really sell sacrifice, other than perhaps to people like ourselves for whom sacrifice provides some degree of satisfaction, comfort even. Less is hardly ever seen as more and directly or indirectly trying to sell a green lifestyle as giving up everything nice and living in a cave with the light switched off is ultimately doomed to fail.
Indeed, when faced with the 'chocolate cake test' most of us find it very hard not to put consumption before sustainability automatically: we subconsciously choose the best cake on the table and the slice with the most chocolate on. In a choice between chocolate cake and ship's biscuit, chocolate cake will always win but we still try to serve up ship's biscuit on the grounds that chocolate cake is bad for us and inherently 'wrong'. And we expect people to leave the chocolate cake alone.
Our task must be not to position ourselves against consumption but against over-consumption. We can say that too much chocolate cake makes people fat, spotty and unhealthy but not try to take it away altogether. Our message must be one that is against resource-bingeing not one against putting the environment to our own use.
We've also misunderstood what consumer goods actually mean to people, ignoring their connections with personal identity, esteem and belonging. Nowhere have we got things more wrong than in understanding car use. Pleas for people to cut car use in favour of public transport are on their own more or less doomed to fail because they miss the fundamental point. Cars are much more than a means of getting from A to B. Indeed if that were all they were good for, these expensive items wouldn't be needed at all in many if not most people's lives. The car is less about transport and more about a sense of freedom, convenience and personal identity. It is a status symbol, a means of social bonding (particularly for men), a cocoon, a lover, a best friend and a refuge. People go by car because they largely want to, and they don't want to take one of the alternative options.
Creating fear and guilt doesn't work
The human mind can cope with only a certain amount of bad news before it disengages and goes into denial. Scaring people with shocking images can be counter-productive. Why should we expect them to be motivated by images of environmental calamity and notions of gloom, pessimism, hardship, sacrifice and hard work? Continually promoting a message that everything is getting worse takes its toll in terms of demoralising people and leaving them without motivation.
Indeed, we all tend to block, deny or ignore things we find frightening or feel helpless about. It's part of what might be called the 'Daily Mail Effect' in which people dismiss out of hand things they don't understand or don't like the sound of.
People sign up to hope rather than fear. It is psychologically more productive for people to be part of, and feel ownership of, the solution rather than the problem. It is far more attractive and more likely to achieve participation.
Lastly, people don't respond to guilt tactics either, especially, it seems, those who already have children.
Our words are putting some people off
Much of the language the green movement uses is unpalatable to some of our audiences. They trip off the green tongue all too readily but words such as environmentally friendly, green, campaign group, pressure group, eco, planet, etc present problems for some people (but not all people) and can lead to them switching off from our message. We've therefore often lost them unnecessarily.
Whoever invented the word 'sustainability' deserves nothing less than the guillotine. Many people wonder what we mean by sustainability. They are still blank-faced when we finish our explanation 20 minutes later. Many environmentalists are perplexed at this. How can people not 'get it' when we give the following clear definition direct from The Environmentalist's Dictionary of Classic English (Greenman and Greenman 1928)?
"Sustainability, in particular the act of sustaining sustainable sustenance in our society, is sustainment, in a truly sustentative way, of our sustaining systems. It requires, and sustainedly so, the input of both society's sustainers, and more significantly sustainable society's so-called sustentaculum, to sustain these systems in a systematic, systemic way. In short, sustentacular sustention must be sustentive and sustinent if sustaining substantially sustainable sustainability is to be sustained sustainably."
Other things matter too
We must stop pretending environment is the only issue that should matter to people. There are countless others too, many of them appearing to be more urgent and immediate to people. Even with climate change mentioned on television and in newspapers pretty much on a daily basis, most people are more worried about crime and antisocial behaviour, terrorism, cultural tensions, pensions, unemployment, health care, war and so on. Because we don't acknowledge these as real problems, in return people don't acknowledge our 'real problem'.
Indeed, there are at least five main families of visionary causes, campaigning for:
- Prosperous, comfortable lives
- Social justice
- Peaceful, safe communities
- Physical, mental and spiritual well being
- Healthy environment
What would be useful would be to 'wrap' healthy environment up with other families of issues to broaden its appeal and present it as inarguable. It was the iconic John Muir of the Sierra Club in America who argued that everything in the universe is attached to everything else. In other words, you can't have prosperous lives, social justice, peaceful communities or personal well being without a healthy environment.
Normal people are not always like us
There is one serious error that nearly everyone in the green movement has made in their attempts to reach out to the public. We tend to assume everyone is like us, with the same thirst for scary details of environmental threats, the same triggers for concern and the same compelling urge to do something about it. Too many materials end up being written by green people, very often about green people and therefore inevitably for green people. It might be disappointing, but most individuals are not like those of us who work for environmental organisations and they don't necessarily respond to things in the same way.
Indeed, a common reason for communication campaigns failing is that they are conceived by people with a strong environmental and ethical conscience and expressed in their own terms. They are then aimed not just at other people at the same level but at the general public, many of whom think, act and are motivated in different ways to those who devised the campaign. The propositions do not 'make sense' to many people they are aimed at and they fail. It's a classic error but one that the green movement keeps making. Our campaigns/public education programmes usually assume one size fits all and they don't take into account that people are different with different attitude and action triggers.
There are a number of psychological models that can be used to segment the public into useful groupings. In terms of influencing environmental behaviour, one of the most relevant models is that developed by Riesman and Maslow, and championed by Chris Rose and Pat Dade, which defines three basic types of personality. Naturally many people might be a mix of all three or may adopt different roles in different company or circumstances or at different times of life, but usually one of the types is recurringly dominant and is a strong determinant of response and behaviour. We can therefore divide people very crudely, and with a necessary degree of fluidity, into three sets.
Inner-directed Pioneers are strongly motivated by ethical concerns and stimulated by new ideas and ways of doing things. When becoming aware of a problem, the action mode of inner-directeds is DIY: they are the activists and they most naturally accept campaigning messages. Inner-directeds start things, including social trends, and start change. Most of them have either already gone green or are contemplating it. Inner-directeds are likely to soak up 'green language' and eco-paraphernalia and be stimulated by it. Most people reading this are probably Pioneers.
The dominant motivation of outer-directed Prospectors, on the other hand, is status and the esteem of others. They place a high value on success and wealth. Their action mode is to organise; they scale things up, build organisations, become managers and want to run successful things. They follow fashion, and big brands are natural message sources for them. It's no good expecting outer-directed people to be primarily motivated by ethical or environmental concerns. They are more likely to ask "What's in it for me?" or "How will that make me look good or be more successful?" There is a danger that outer-directeds will dismiss environmental or ethical campaigns as 'do-gooding' and they are less likely to resonate with green language than inner-directeds.
Security-driven Settlers are more concerned with their home-base, tradition and belonging. Security-drivens don't really have an action mode and in response to environmental problems, they might say "Someone should do something about it", the 'someone' being those in authority. Hence they oppose most NGO campaigns by default but are more open to authority messages. When change does come, they follow on last and resist any departure from what they have been used to doing. They are likely to be disinterested by environmental problems at a global level and might block messages based on this; they are much more likely to resonate with issues that affect their home ground or way of life. Green language might be unproductive here, unless it implies local rather than global significance. Settlers are also more likely to feel uncomfortable with language that implies challenging authority or traditional values, such as pressure group, campaign or demo, and they find other green language that implies instability or threat unsettling. There is a high risk that messages using Pioneer-style approaches might be blocked or dismissed.
The attitude-action gap is a chasm to cross
Awareness of environmental issues has never been higher. And most people do care about the environment and want to do the right thing. The trouble is, they often don't get around to doing it. Marketeers talk about the 30:3 rule. Around 30 per cent of people might say they are very concerned about something but only about 3 per cent will do anything about it.
This attitude-action gap acts as a block on people actually acting out their concerns and is a big challenge for the green movement to face. It also means that if you challenge someone's actions, for example argue their level of car use is not sensible, they will more likely change their attitude than their action, perhaps getting defensive and saying they don't think car use is a bad thing after all rather than agreeing to drive less. This might seem incredible to campaigners but psychologists have known about it for years: it's called cognitive dissonance.