Quite a bit in the press recently about Apple and it’s lack of concern about how its products are made. I think this provides a really fascinating moment in time for consumers to decide what they value.
Many Apple products are made in China. There’s this chilling article in the New York Times that basically says that Apple are aware of and don’t care about the frankly horrendous conditions that workers making iphones and ipads have to put up with. Part of this is due to the success of the products that mean that they are forced to make them faster than is safe. So, for example, those cleaning iphone screens should use alcohol. But, alcohol takes time to evaporate. So as the article says:
“Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis. Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each minute.”
As well as this there are suicides, explosions due to aluminium dust that have killed workers as well as the 6 day a week, 12 hour days. Basically, Apple supports 21st Century Work Houses.
As one former Apple executive puts it: “Most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”
So, what does all of this mean? To me, what’s interesting is what will consumers do?
At what point, if at all, will consumers make a value judgement? When will they, if at all, decide that the way the iphone 5 or ipad 3 is made runs against their sense of equality and justice? Or is the fate and treatment of Chinese factory workers less important than their desire for the kit?
In a way and if you wanted to get all patriotic about it, the Declaration of Independence states:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”
So, this is approaching Apple from one ‘negative’ angle.
What makes Apple even more interesting is fact that Apple products are made to be replaced on a short cycle. From a sustainability point of view, it would be easy to argue that no other single company is more responsible for contributing to both our never-ending desire for more stuff that we arguably don’t need (we didn’t need a tablet before, but now we do), but also the desire to replace the perfectly workable stuff with new, flashier stuff. E.g. iphone, iphone 3, iphone 3s, iphone 4, iphone 4s were all introduced in just over 4 years (2007-2011).
Given the amount of rare metals and resources that go into making Apple products, again, at what point, if at all, will consumers decide that the environment is more important than their desire to have the newest, latest kit, some of which they didn’t need before?
Is it possible to join these two points together?
If the mounting evidence of Apple’s business practices aren’t enough to get those people to stop buying Apple, the question becomes ‘How bad would Apple’s behaviour have to be in order to get them to stop buying Apple?’
There’s this website where you can put in your salary and compare how much you earn not just to the rest of the UK, but to the rest of the world. It tells you that if you earn the average wage in the UK or above (>c.£25k) then you’re in the top 1% of global earners. To be in the top 1% doesn’t require you to drive a Ferrari or own a yacht. It requires you to work at M&S.
I only remembered the above when I was on the plane back from Ethiopia, where I’ve been for two weeks, doing some work for the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) into what they need to say to farmers to encourage them to adopt new farming practices. Beyond the specifics of the project, which was fascinating, there was one incident that has had a significant impact on me. It’s an incident that highlighted the differences between the world’s richest (me) and the world’s poorest (Ethiopian farmers).
We were just outside a town called Soro, about 4 hours south of Addis Ababa. We had been interviewing farmers all day on their attitudes and uptake of new farming technologies and practices. We learnt that the farmers grow their crops which, typically, provided them with enough food for their family to eat as well as enough to sell to provide the money to buy seeds and fertiliser for the next season. If they were lucky, then they had enough excess crop to buy things like clothes or send their children to school. So, this is ‘less than a dollar a day’ living. These are some of the poorest people in the world.
At the end of the day two of us, an Addis local and myself, wanted to know if it would be okay to take a peak in one of the farmers huts that we’d seen so many of on the journey to Soro and indeed on other travels around the country. Indeed, there are 80 million people in Ethiopia and about 85% of them are farmers and I understand that the majority of those live in these type of huts. That’s a lot of people.
The government Development Agent said that was fine and walked us down the track and introduced us to the family living in a beautiful hut with a painted exterior.
We went inside.
The first thing that stuck me was how dark and cool it was. It was nearly 6pm, so the sun was going down but inside it was a refreshing change from the heat of the day. However, if they didn’t light a fire soon, there was going to be no light. There was no electricity, no gas, no solar lights, no kerosene lamp. Indeed, there seemed to be nothing that wasn’t made of grass, mud or wood, other than farming implements.
The circular hut had a mud floor with a central pillar (like a mast on a ship). It had a diameter of about 4 metres so the total floor space was like a studio flat in London. Similar to a studio flat, there was a space for eating (table and bench seating), cooking (a fire pit) and sleeping (a double bed). However, this was all in front half of the hut (i.e. half the space). There was a partition down the centre behind which was an empty floor.
The reason for this became clear when I realised how many people lived in the hut. There were the two parents with baby twins, three boys under the age of 10 and two elder daughters and a grandfather. So, that’s ten people. I guess that the parents slept on the bed with the twins. This would mean that everybody else slept on the mud floor behind the partition. However, there was also another slightly sectioned off area inside. What was this for? It was for their two oxen that slept in the hut with the family every night.
What to think about all this? Sad? Lucky? Guilty? Not sure.
My confusion over what to think was compounded when we conducted a focus group of village elders. These included the mayor of the village and the local judge. At the end of the group, the judge stood up, made a speech and blessed the meeting. Someone then bought in a huge round of freshly made bread and some honey as means to close the session and for us to share a meal.
Interestingly, the honey tasted smokey. “Why does the honey taste smokey?” I asked. “Because they had to smoke the bees out of the hive this morning in order to get the honey for us to eat” was the answer.
I have never been thanked by anyone for asking questions before. Let alone a judge and a mayor. And never been given a gift for being a guest in someone’s place. I would always take a gift as the guest, not expect to receive a gift for being the guest.
So, what to think? What it’s like to meet and spend at least a little time with those at polar opposite of the income spectrum?
I guess my response to that is ‘balance’ in that both lifestyles represent an imbalance. They have too little and that I have too much. That I live in a society that’s gone for ‘stuff’, individualism and consumerism and places a reduced emphasis on community. That they haven’t got enough ‘stuff’ but have a remarkable sense of community and family (by circumstance rather than choice perhaps).
However, I do understand that it’s possible to romanticise that life of a farmer and I would not want to do that. From the stories that we heard and what we saw, it’s back-breaking, grinding work, generation after generation. However, I believe it’s equally incorrect to romanticise the Western way of life. Who says that being in the top 1% of earners is the best place to be? Just because this is what qualifies as ‘success’ by our Western culture, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the richest life. Study after study about the deteriorating mental and physical health of those in the West is testament to that. Now maybe I’m being naïve in saying this. I’m coming from a position of financial security and I’m making these grand statements as a result of being in Ethiopia for a couple of weeks. Perhaps that’s a fair point. However, equally, it could be arrogant thinking of the rich to believe that it’s naïve? To believe that being financially rich is a key (if not the key) definition of success – GDP growth us the only measure in town – seems remarkably narrow-minded to me.
What does it all mean? Am I going to try and do more work in Ethiopia? Perhaps. Am I going to donate money to the country? I doubt it. Have I had my perspective altered about what I should consider important in life? Definitely.
.
Christine Lagarde (Head of the IMF) said recently that she does not consider a meeting successful if it goes well….it can go very very badly, but if it has exposed the truth, she considers it victorious.
Nice.
Met up with a few people over the festive period who I haven’t seen for a while and in-between the turkey and mince pies have been explaining what I’m up to and what my thoughts are. I find it a bit of a struggle sometimes to explain the nature of the change that I’m going through, but it does start to make a bit more sense when I frame it in the context of the Size of the Challenge. What follows might not make for easy reading, but having a point of view on the what the task is at least enables one to identify what you need to do about it:
Okay then, I’ve arrived at the use of a metaphor as the best way to describe what’s going on, what needs to happen and how likely we are to make that change. The metaphor is that the change that needs to happen for us all to live sustainably on the planet is equivalent to the change that happened when we moved from fully believing in God and religion as the answer to all questions to believing that science holds the answers.
What do I mean by that? I’m not a big history reader, but my understanding is that in the past (pre-Enlightenment) the prevailing belief was that God created in the world in 6 days, the Earth was at the Centre of the Universe and we were special (i.e. not related to animals). Then along came science and through the likes of Galileo and Darwin, they introduced ‘laws’ and proof and rationality to disprove many of the religious beliefs. So, now, we not only have a prevailing wind that science can hold the answers (or rather if you can’t ‘prove it’ it doesn’t exist), but that the economic system is the way that world works, man can control nature and consumerism and individualism is king. These beliefs, I would contend, are as strongly held as those religious beliefs that existed before science came along and the systems that hold those beliefs are as strong as the church was (and in some places still is – i.e. for half of the USA).
So, if we are to move to a more sustainable future, then why is the change as big as the change from ‘religion’ to ‘science’? Because, I think just like back then, it requires an entire re-calibration of the way you think that the way the world works, or more importantly how you relate to the world. So, rather than being disconnected from nature and seeing nature as ‘other’ we, as a species, have to understand that we are interconnected to it, want to live in harmony with it, indeed, that we are interconnected to everything else. Don’t we already do that? Doesn’t the internet let us do that? No. If we believed that then we would run the global economy with no environmental impact. We’d understand that there are things that are more important that our individual needs. We’d be thinking about what our actions mean for people living generations ahead of us and acting in their best interests, not just ours today.
If this is right (or in the ballpark) then the question then becomes ‘Can we change to think and act in a way that will allow us to live sustainably on the planet?’ Reframe that question as ‘Has mankind ever given up the prevailing system and the values it promotes without great suffering?’ I’m thinking slavery, Suffragettes, American Civil War, Apartheid, Arab Spring. But, there might be some examples where that hasn’t happened. Further, if you think about the amount of tension in the system before the system changed (read that as a lot of people dying and getting beaten up who wanted the change to happen) then we’re a long, long way off that. A few thousand people involved in the Occupy Movement is hardly Tahrir Square or Sharpeville.
So, in my mind it’s a race. On the positive, we as a species evolve fast enough to care about nature and each other. There is a sort of ‘rising global consciousness’ and somehow we understand, intuitively, that we’re all interconnected. Big business and governments change accordingly. On the more dramatic, there is a grass roots, global movement that puts an insurmountable of pressure on those that currently run the system and again Big Business and governments change accordingly. The race is that either (or both) of those things need to happen before we heat up the planet beyond acceptable levels (and the bio-diversity loss point). If that doesn’t happen then we, as a species, are in deep shit.
The last question then becomes ‘Are you an optimist, a pessimist, or a realist?’
I’m a big fan of people who take the bigger view, so was interested to see the BBC correspondents predictions for 2012. There were the things you’d expect: Syria, Egypt, Eurozone Crisis, US presidential elections. Then there was this cracker from Mark Mardell, the North America editor:
“Revolution and economic crisis.Tectonic plates are shifting. Five hundred years ago, the West began its political, economic and scientific domination of the world. History since then has been about the impact of this imbalance – but the era is ending.”
Now, that’s what I call framing. The question then becomes ‘What will come next?’
Learning quite a bit recently about system change and personal change and how this relates to the issues that our society, economy and environment face. But do things need to change? Is that just a personal point of view, rooted in the course and the things that I see? Just because I see something and might believe it, is no reason for anyone else to. So, it’s always good to get ‘evidence’ to help validate my own emerging views that the way the world and society works needs to change if we’re all going to live ‘happily ever after’. Now, you can find loads of support for a view like that in every ‘eco’/Climate Change/green book/article/movie you come across. But, I don’t really count them because ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’. So, where would the ‘evidence’ really count? How about a publication whose very essence, name and readership is inextricably linked to the success and continuation of the current system – the Financial Times.
So, it was with pleasant surprise to read an interview with Laurence Freeman who runs some Christian meditation outfit in London that includes members of the IMF and Blackstone on it’s Board. In the interview he talks about success and money (something that will be important to many FT readers):
‘“Perfectionism is like a virus. In religion, it can lead to fundamentalism and self-loathing. The secular equivalent is success. If you only judge yourself by success – of your job, your marriage, your children, even – you are setting yourself up for failure or a sense of inadequacy. Learning to meditate, you have to unlearn perfection and the need for success.”’
Given the economic crisis, unlearning success, or rather rediscovering failure, seems especially relevant today. I ask what he makes of it all.
“Clearly, the crisis is hurting those at the bottom most,” he says. “But even at the top there is anxiety, a sense of failure and, perhaps, shame. Clearly, we have to deal with the surface turbulence and strive for the best solutions to minimise suffering and preserve justice. However, the depths of these forces of change come close to, or actually participate in, humanity’s spiritual stratum. This means we cannot manipulate or exploit them but must strive to understand and go with them. This requires a subtlety of wisdom. It also makes one wonder if the crisis is symptomatic of broader change, a new axial age in which old assumptions and ways of living are breaking down.”
When asked about the unfocussed demands of the Occupy Movement he says….
“That’s understandable. They are protesting against fat cats, sure. But the movements’ deeper value is to witness what is happening – even if it’s not yet clear what the meaning is. Still, we have time to think about it: how long will this crisis last, five or 10 years? We must think about limits. We have become so inebriated with success.”
“You can put ethics courses in business schools but you can’t legislate for ethics. What people need is an experience of goodness, which has to come from within. That’s where meditation comes in. If you are too neurotic and inebriated with success to give yourself time to take care of your interior life, you are going to spin out of control. ”
So, interesting that the FT both interviewed him and printed it. Well done them. But also, I think it’s really interesting that he doesn’t think that this is a ‘flash-in-the-pan’ thing. That he thinks that the length of the crisis (’5 to 10 years?’) will give us a longer time to think about all this stuff and in doing so, provide us with an opportunity to decide whether (money and) success are the things we should be aiming for. Good stuff.
This is now becoming a recurrent theme. What does it take to encourage someone to ‘Go sustainable’? The last time I posted about this I said that it was about a year. I think that might actually be bit optimistic (i.e more like 2 years), but then that’s because I now have a better idea of what I think needs to happen in that year (or two) based on a conversation with people from the Finance Lab at WWF and the System Innovation work I’m helping Forum with.
What you get if you put 'system change' into Google Images (pt1)
What needs to happen is for a person to undergo a ‘personal transformation’. And the reason for this is because the ‘system’ needs to be transformed. (By ‘system’ I mean the current economic and social system which is geared for unsustainable growth. A new ‘system’ would be a brand new thing that enabled 7 billion of us to live sustainably on the planet.)
This direct link between personal and system transformation makes intuitive sense to me. The current system is bound by inertia and ‘the way things have always been done’. It therefore takes a great effort to change this. As a result, it’s fairly naive to expect people to go against the grain of the prevailing ‘system’ and be motivated to change unless they themselves have changed. They will have had to have changed so much that they are not only able to see the limits of the current system and their place within it, but also able to see what changes are required and able to affect those changes. This requires a dramatic shift in values, identity and motivation. Noting short of a ‘personal transformation’.
What you get if you put 'system change into Google Images (pt2)
Now, maybe you just need 5% of the population to do this? Or maybe 10%? or 20%? What’s the minimum number of people who need to undergo a personal transformation in order to actually change the system? And who are those people? To talk the language of ‘Occupy’, does it need to include the ’1%’? If so, how the heck do you do that because they’re the ones with the most vested interest in keeping the current system just as it is. Or is that another one of those pesky ‘assumptions’?!
Here’s a summary of the month I spent in the woods, up in Scotland. Not sure what to do with it now I’ve written it, so if anyone’s got any ideas, they would be much appreciated.
Cheers and enjoy….
What I learnt in the woods by Jonathan Wise
In general, an adult can survive for 3 minutes without air; 3 days without water; 3 weeks without food.
John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman, SAS Survival Guide
I spent 25 days in a wood in Gleam Meadhonach on the Clan Donald Estate, in Sleat, on the southern end of the Isle of Skye in September and October 2011.
I did this because I am currently studying for an MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility at Ashridge Business School and have embarked on a series of experiences that will hopefully provide insight into how I (and we) should think and behave more sustainably.
I wanted to spend time alone in a wood because I wished to explore whether I could develop a different relationship with nature; a more powerful relationship that would in some way provide me with a greater understanding and appreciation of the natural world and my place within it. What form the relationship might take – spiritual, practical or something else – I did not know, but my sense was that by doing it, on my own, something would change. If not, at least it was going to be a good way to lose some weight!
All I had with me was what I could carry in my rucksack. This included amongst other things a simple shelter: food – the backbone of which was 5kg bag of oats and a 5kg of rice; and a means to acquire firewood – an axe and a bowsaw. I didn’t take a watch, any books (other than a book on foraging and the SAS Survival Handbook) or any music. To record my experience I took a camera and a journal. I also took a mobile phone in case of an emergency and so I could text various people once a week to let them know that I was okay.
The wood I stayed in was about 3 miles from the nearest road and house. It didn’t have a path going through it on the map, but in reality it did. This meant that I saw people – walkers, fishermen or a farmer – about once every three days. Sometimes I would speak to them and I reckon I had a total of two hours human contact in the month I was there.
The length of time and that lack of contact meant that there were two major issues to contend with: myself and nature. Given this and the limited amount of ‘kit’ I took in, meant I learnt a good deal about myself: what I do and don’t need in order to live and what’s really important.
In terms of what’s important, I was advised before I started that the four things I needed to care about most were water, food, fire and shelter. These were wise words because they were vital for my survival and comfort. As a result, they absolutely dominated my thinking, action and time from the moment of my arrival to the moment I left.
I found it fascinating that I spent the majority of my time being concerned about these basic building blocks. This was in total contrast to my ‘normal’ working life where I spent very little time thinking about them and have never considered how important they are.
It was the total focus on these basic elements that led to what I would regard as the most important revelation I had whilst I was there – that we are utterly dependant on nature for our survival and, on the whole, we don’t even realise it. As a result, we abuse it with little thought and in doing so, threaten our own survival.
For example: fire. Fire was critical because I needed to boil water to make it drinkable, cook my food and provide warmth, both physically and mentally – I now know what is meant by the phrase ‘the fire is your friend’. However, I came to regard my relationship with the fire as stronger than that: the fire was my baby. This is because keeping a fire going took a lot of energy and effort as I was constantly tending and caring for it. During the day, I never left if for more than half an hour for fear of it going out so I was restricted as to the sort of activities I could enjoy. Not only was I always close by, but I would spend about six hours a day finding and collecting wood; sawing and chopping it and drying it when necessary. The more time I spend with it, the more aware I became of its subtleties – how it reacted to wind, to rain, to certain types of wood. I came to know what sort of wood I needed to put on the fire and in what way in order to create the intense heat needed for boiling water. Similarly, I learnt what I needed to do to dampen it down so it would burn slowly. During the night I trained myself to always check it when I woke – 5 or 6 times a night – so it wouldn’t go out. I became very adept at being able to get it going from the faintest of embers. I feel I came to ‘know’ the fire and what it needed and when.
This led me to realise that not only did I need the fire but the fire needed me to stay alight – there was dependency and interconnectedness between us. In this understanding, the fire became symbolic; symbolic of the emerging understanding that everything is interconnected. For example, we are interconnected to the food we eat because food provides us with the energy to live and our actions affect the ability for food to grow, or not. And at an even bigger level, everything in nature is interconnected. So, burning fossil fuels here has an effect on the other side of the world as sea levels rise.
Given how much time I spent with the fire I came to feel that I had a strong ‘relationship’ with it. This feels wholly appropriate seeing how much I cared and nursed it and how vital it was for my survival and well-being. Not only this, it stands to reason that the more important something is to me, the deeper my relationship with it should be.
It became very interesting when I compared this relationship with the fire to the relationship I have with ‘fire’ in my flat:
I turn the gas stove or the central heating on or off and turn the heat up or down. Errr, that’s it.
It doesn’t feel as if the contrast could be more dramatic. My relationship with fire in my flat is purely functional and unthinking. I don’t think about it or care about it: there is no bond between us.
I found this fascinating. We have created a society that is wonderful in many ways. One of these is that we don’t have to worry, day to day, about our survival. We have a roof over our heads, access to clean drinking water, are able to eat enough food so we don’t go hungry and can cook food and keep warm. These basic needs are so readily taken care of and woven into the way that we live and we don’t even consider them. I have never had to sleep rough on the street, think about clean drinking water, been hungry for more than 12 hours or not had the means to boil a kettle or turn on a cooker.
However, in creating this society we have, effectively, divorced ourselves from the rawness of nature and the reality of its importance for our survival. It’s not as if fire, water, food and shelter are any less important in our towns and cities – the Wiseman quote obviously holds true no matter who you are and where you live. So, whilst our society represents great progress in that we don’t have to spend all day securing food, water and firewood, but it can also be seen as potentially very dangerous given that we are not conscious of and have no consideration for the things that we depend on for our very survival.
There is an irony here. We’ve made getting the important things easy, but in doing so, we’ve forgotten how important they are; we don’t have to think about the things we can’t do without. Instead, we have created a society that shields us from this reality and have replaced a concern for securing natural resources with other things to worry about be it economic growth, getting a better job or what to watch on TV tonight.
This disconnection from nature is exacerbated by the fact that, day-to-day, our relationship with those four critical elements isn’t with their source: nature. We have created the buffer of business as an intermediary between us and nature. In the wood, my relationship with the fire was with the flame and with the firewood from nature that I put on the fire. In my flat, my relationship isn’t with nature and ‘fire’. If there is any relationship, it’s with the energy company that supplies the gas and electricity or the appliance that I use to heat things up. Similarly, when I think of ‘food’, again, my relationship isn’t with nature, it’s with Sainsbury’s, Tesco and the local deli.
Not only did I find my relationship with fire skewed, I realised that my relationship with another one of the critical elements for my survival was also somewhat off-balance. Water.
Given that I was in Scotland in September, it rained. A lot. And I learnt pretty quickly that my mood was very weather dependant; upbeat and active when it was fine and fairly despondent and lethargic when it rained. As a result, I would get fairly annoyed when I had to put my waterproof coat and trousers on. Yet, rain is nature’s way of providing me with drinking water (how else?!) and according to Lofty Wiseman’s quote, I’d be dead in three days without it. So, water is extremely important to my survival yet, despite this, when it rained I was getting annoyed – “Oh, it’s raining again!”. Shouldn’t I have been celebrating rather than complaining?! This to me is a wonderful example that demonstrates my distance from nature. Further, perhaps the lack of importance we place on rain is because it’s so abundant. In our society, things that are abundant are seen as being of far less value than things that are scarce. So, for example, we value diamonds over water yet if there were no diamonds it would have no impact on our survival. The same cannot be said about water. Just because something is abundant shouldn’t reduce its value. Something’s value, perhaps, should be linked to its importance to our survival rather than its scarcity?
Thinking back to my baby/parent analogy with the fire, when it comes to water it feels as if it is reversed. This is because I am ‘helpless’ without the water that nature provides. It provides the water for me to survive and I have no influence over that – no matter how much I might want to cry!
This provides added depth and texture to my relationship with nature. In one way it is the baby, in another I am. It again highlights the interconnectedness between us.
So, it felt like I had developed a different relationship with nature – a deepening connection coupled with an appreciation that I am utterly dependent on it for my survival. But, how did this compare to my current relationship?
Strangely, I had never thought to define it before but in doing so, the best I could come up with was one of Abusing Beauty.
This is because, on the whole, nature is something I consider as beautiful – I go for long walks, take photos, especially of landscapes and enjoy TV programmes that reveal the unseen wonders of the world. Nature is a something aesthetic to be admired and revered. Yet, simultaneously, I abuse this thing of beauty. I buy items that use rare metals, eat fish like tuna whose stocks are become dangerously low and use fossil fuels that heat the planet. Given my emerging awareness of the baby/parent relationship I have with nature, the words Abusing Beauty sit very uncomfortably with that. How can I abuse something that I also consider to be a ‘baby’?
Part of my explanation for this is inherent separation from nature within the idea of Abusing Beauty. Nature is something beautiful, ‘over there’, that I can look at and admire. It’s something I can take a picture of and have as a memory. And because I’m not connected to it, I care less about it thus making it easier to abuse.
My experience in the woods has clearly and profoundly shown me that we are in no way separate from nature. We are deeply interconnected to it, to the point of intimacy when considering it as a baby/parent relationship. Perhaps recognising this can provide a different narrative to encourage more people to become more sustainably-minded?
I believe this is the case because, at present, much of the communication around, for example, Climate Change relies on the Abusing Beauty narrative. So, for example, we must stop abusing the atmosphere by pumping too much C02 into it, or ‘raping’ the rainforests. Or we must save the photogenic polar bear or the stunning Great Barrier Reef. Yet, the Abusing Beauty narrative misses the fundamental axis of my ACTUAL relationship with nature – that of nature as provider for my survival – of food, water, fire and shelter.
As a result, I believe that we’ll encourage people to act more sustainably if we can get them to care about nature based on an understanding of both their interconnection to it and that their survival is wholly dependent on it. This may well be more effective than the current situation where so many are observers and abusers of the natural world.
How can we do this? Obviously, spending 25 days in a wood is not for everyone and so we need to be imaginative and practical about developing peoples’ relationship with nature. How can we collapse the barriers between us and nature so we can be both more interconnected to it and aware of its importance for our survival? For example, a ‘solo’, where a person typically spends 24 hours alone in nature with a day of preparation before and a day of reflection after can be a powerful experience of connection. For meat eaters, having a live animal and killing it, preparing, cooking and then eating it can also provide a strong sensation of connectedness to nature. If you eat meat, why shouldn’t you experience what it takes to get it to your plate? Or more simply, cooking a meal on an open fire and then reflecting on how connected you are to nature can help change the way we relate to it.
These examples and many more can help make nature more personal and connected, rather than impersonal and separate.
Could this be a powerfully different way forward?
I know it is for me.
Was talking to some students the other day and remembered that great John Berger quote about advertising – ‘Advertising sells you an unobtainable future’. Just because Wayne Rooney wears Nike boots doesn’t mean that you’ll play like Wayne Rooney if you wear Nike boots.
Anyway, I’m currently doing some work with WWF around their ‘Think of me as evil?’ report and in it, it talks about the fact that a large amount of advertising appeals to ‘extrinsic’ values – namely it encourages us to be concerned with status and our outward appearance. This is in opposition to ‘intrinsic’ values which are linked to being concerned with each other and the environment. Broadly. This makes intuitive sense, but what’s the reality? So I decided to take a walk down the street and find out. So, in a sort of GCSE Media Studies analysis, here’s what I saw.
There was a lot of, what can be regarded as ‘neutral’ messaging, just told you what’s available. So, stuff like:
Okay, then I can buy that – it’s sort of ‘Just The Facts’ kind of work. It’s public announcement advertising from the commercial world. But, what about that extrinsic stuff?
As it turns out, there was quite a lot, so here’s just three:
Ummm, so, buy this hair colour and it ‘transforms’ you. Really? If I was being generous I could say that it’s true – it transforms your hair colour. But, I think it’s fair to say that it’s trying to say a fair bit more than that. But maybe it can. Maybe changing your hair colour can transform you into a different person.
Next up is the end-line on a bus side for Pandora jewelry. Buy Pandora and you are promised an Unforgettable Moment. So, let’s be generous again. Let’s say the most likely opportunity for that to be true is when someone buys it for someone else and in the act of giving it, it could be an Unforgettable Moment i.e. the same strategy as a diamond ring when you ask for someone’s hand in marriage. But, it’s not a diamond and it’s not asking a hand in marriage. So, can that be true? I think that Pandora is writing cheques it can’t cash (or at least guarantee) there. It’s definitely closer to the ‘unobtainable future’ there, I’d say.
But, my personal favourite was this, for Venture portraits:
Run that by me again? Your current family situation is the ‘most important story ever told’. So, more important than ‘War and Peace’, the story of mankind, anything by Shakespeare, the Bible, Koran or the life story of Ghandi or Mandela or any other historically significant figure or even the person standing next to you? Your family contains the ‘most important story ever told’. Ever told. If there was an Extrinsic Hall of Fame, this would be in it.
Here’s a very good, clear articulation of how to get more people act in a more sustainable way.
Caroline Fiennes of GlobalCool breaks people into three groups (called Value Modes) based on their broad motivations:
First group. People who care about things that are quite proximate to them. Their primary concern is the safety and security of myself, family and nation. Like rules and big into community.
Second group. Primarily driven by the esteem and respect of others and therefore need to demonstrate their success. So, big into fashion and social networks.
Third group. Primarily interested in their intellectual and ethical imprint. Interested in ideas and others even if they’ve never met them or are never likely to meet them.
So, who does the existing sustainability narrative talk to? The third group and the third group only, of course. It’s effectively missing out two-thirds of the population. Talking about glaciers melting and people on the other side of the world just doesn’t connect those in the other two groups based on what they value. They don’t really listen. So, what to do? She goes onto to give a couple of great examples of health advertising – e.g. communicating that you shouldn’t take Crystal Meth because it ruins your teeth is more appealing for people for whom appearance is important (the second group) than talking about how addictive it is.
Her point, which is obvious but very well made, is that you need to talk to people about what they care about in a way that engages with them as a means to do what you want (the obliquity strategy). The health people don’t care what they need to say in order to get you to not take Crystal Meth, just that you don’t start taking it. They’re happy not to talk about health in order to get people to be more healthy. As she puts it – the important thing isn’t why you act in the way they what you, just that you do act.
Taking this to sustainability an example of an ‘Accidental Environmentalists’ are kids who want to go to school on their micro-scooters because this is more fun than being in a car. This has lead to an appreciable drop in car journeys in some areas of London. You would never say to them that what they are doing is ‘green’. But it is.
Commercial marketers have known this forever – they never talk about their agenda (we want to make more money) they just talk about your agenda – ‘You want to be popular? Buy our product’. And in doing so, we make more money.
She gives a bunch more examples and there’s loads more good stuff on their website, but in summary – to get more people to act sustainably, don’t talk about sustainability. Simple really.
