Is the Green Campaign Over?

According to one UK Explorer, green campaigning has failed. Robert Swann, who is about to set off on an expedition to the Antarctic, has said that people switch off because they are tired of seeing pictures of forests dying and believe they can't make a difference.

If his assertion is true, and leaving aside the whole debate about the merits of the argument itself, why might it be that people haven't embraced the need for change that environmental campaigners have been urging?

We Haven't Evolved with a Global Perspective

Our evolutionary psychology is driven by what makes us successful in small, nomadic groups. Globalisation is an incredibly recent phenomenon on the evolutionary scale. Consequently, our day-to-day actions are driven by what is immediately significant to us personally and the people close to us.

Campaigners Believed Opinion Polls

What people say when asked in surveys has surprisingly little to do with their real behaviour. (This was the subject of my book, Consumer.ology). It's one thing to claim that you care about the planet when you're asked, not least because you feel you it's the right thing to say and, at that exact moment, you probably feel that you do care. However, that's not the same thing as changing your behaviour.

The Claimed Consequence of not Acting Don't Seem Problematic to Most

The first message to emerge was that we were experiencing 'global warming'. This was always a poorly conceived message.

In many parts of the world, take the UK for example, we'd like it to be a bit warmer - that would be great. And, as I mentioned, local preoccupations will always win through over any capacity we have for global kinship.

So suggesting that if you take a flight you're contributing to the planet warming up is a little like saying that, if you take enough of them, you won't have to keep getting on a plane to find somewhere warm enough for your holiday.

Now, if they'd called it 'global wetting', the British might well have taken notice!

More specifically, the campaigning suffered as so many international brands have: they wanted to take one message into every local market, when they really needed to reflect local differences.

The global proposition of 'climate change' needed bringing to life according to local climate anxieties and preoccupations.

'Consumer Mathematics' Struggles with the Data

I sometimes use the term 'Consumer Mathematics' to delineate between the way in which people process numerical information at an unconscious level and the pure mathematics of rational analysis.

Faced with the information that the climate has changed or will change by a degree or two, the initial reaction is to associate that data with existing experience. One degree isn't enough to reach for an additional layer of clothing: it doesn't feel like a change that should motivate us to act differently.

The Economic Downturn Shifts Priorities

Even where there was interest in behaving in an environmentally-sympathetic way, when times get hard we focus in on our immediate needs and desires. In a sense, we instinctively fight for our own survival.

Evidence for this can be seen in the downturn that has occurred with things like organic produce. Rather than the purchase being made on principle, behavioural evidences suggests that it's an indulgence; a luxury to make us feel good only if we feel the price is acceptable given our means at the time.

Change is Hard

Doing things differently is difficult. It requires conscious thought. Unless you make it either very easy to do the 'right' thing, or unless you make the consequences of not doing so sufficiently punitive, people will do what they've always done.

In the end, we might sum this up with the justification that, "We can't make a difference." Which raises the question, if the environmental campaigners are right, who can?