In a piece in this month’s Ecologist, Richard Heinberg reflects on the psychological impacts of an awareness of the impact of climate change.
“Strategy shifts. We move from rehearsing ‘Fifty simple things you can do to save the Earth’ to discussing global triage. As the Great Unraveling proceeds, there may in fact be only one occupation […]

Alan Boldon (Director MA Arts and Ecology, Dartington College of Arts, UK and Associate Curator, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK) writes that “it is established that we are in the midst of an ecological crisis. I would argue that we also find ourselves in aesthetic crisis and that these two states are fundamentally related.” Read the […]

A recent article on Wordchanging:
A small yet growing body of evidence suggests that how people think and feel is being influenced strongly by ecosystem transformation related to climate change and industry-related displacement from the land. These powerful stressors are occurring more frequently around the world.
Read it here

The story may be familiar, but look who’s saying it. Speth was founder of both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute.
Will shifting from a GDP-driven society help solve the United States’ environmental problems? In his new book, “The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from […]

David Orr on the extinction of authentic experience, at the hands of the marketing industry. His call is to reclaim authentic experience amongst the young - by which he means experience that isn’t mediated by stuff, and the manipulation of our desire for ever more stuff.

Weathercocks and Signposts: The Environment Movement at a Crossroads critically reassesses current approaches to motivating environmentally-friendly behaviour change. Current behaviour-change strategies are increasingly built upon analogy with product marketing campaigns. They often take as given the ‘sovereignty’ of consumer choice, and the perceived need to preserve current lifestyles intact. This report constructs a case for […]

A new WWF report, Weathercocks and Signposts: The Environment Movement at a Crossroads, critically reassesses current approaches to motivating environmentally-friendly behaviour change. Current behaviour-change strategies are increasingly built upon analogy with product marketing campaigns. They often take as given the ‘sovereignty’ of consumer choice, and the perceived need to preserve current lifestyles intact. This report […]

Weathercocks and Signposts was written to help stimulate debate on the strategies that are currently deployed to motivate behavioural change. Please, do contribute your reflections on the content of the report, using the comment box below.
When I have a moment, I’ll migrate this discussion page to a wiki, so that contributors can start their own […]

Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the global marketing group WPP, recently called for an end to deliberate obsolescence, citing Apple as a prime example of a company that exploits this as a strategy to flog more stuff:
“Sorrell cited Apple as an example of a brand creating products that consumers quickly jettison in favour of […]