Category
Green consumerism
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Campaign strategy, Climate change, Engaging societal values, Green consumerism, Psychology of denial, Small steps
The Carbon Detox: How far will materialism get us?
03.09.09 | Permalink | Comments OffI spent Saturday at a meeting on the psychological and political challenge of facing climate change at UWE.
George Marshall delivered the opening lecture – in witty and thought-provoking style. He guided us through the evidence for the deployment of ‘emotional management strategies’ or ‘psychological coping mechanisms’ that people use when confronted with a threat [...] -
Campaign strategy, Climate change, Environment and wellbeing, Green consumerism, Psychological impact of climate change, Psychology of denial, Small steps
The ideology of simple painless steps
10.29.08 | Permalink | 3 CommentsI’ve spent the last two days at a conference for environmental communicators, Communicate 08. There was a recurrent issue which ran through the whole conference - about the strategies that the environment movement deploys to create change.
We heard disparate inputs from (on the one hand) Tesco’s (’Every Little Helps’ - let’s focus on successes in [...] -
Green consumerism, Small steps
Recycling for free flights
10.06.08 | Permalink | Comments OffA couple from Hampshire cash in on Tesco’s offer to provide free air-miles in exchange for recycling: a particularly vivid example of rebound, when the use of the financial rewards from doing something ‘green’ totally undermines any environmental benefits of this. The irony is lost on the author of this piece in the [...]
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Campaign strategy, Green consumerism, Small steps
Do The Green Thing gets real
05.06.08 | Permalink | 2 CommentsDo The Green Thing has long been urging subscribers to take the lift rather than the stairs, or to turn the lights off early every so often. All good stuff; but nothing that is going to help us begin to scrutinise the primary drivers of unsustainable behaviour. This month, though, Do The Green Thing has [...]
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Campaign strategy, Environment and wellbeing, Green consumerism, Psychological impact of climate change
Yale’s Gus Speth calls for shift from U.S. consumer capitalism to solve environmental problems
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 [...] -
Green consumerism, Marketing and manipulation, Self identity
David Orr on authentic experience
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.
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Campaign strategy, Green consumerism, Marketing and manipulation, Self identity, Small steps
New WWF report: ‘Weathercocks and Signposts’
04.15.08 | Permalink | 9 CommentsA 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 [...]
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Green consumerism
Sir Martin Sorrell on deliberate obsolescence
04.01.08 | Permalink | 8 CommentsSir 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 [...] -
Aesthetics, Fatuous attempts of companies to appear green, Green consumerism
Branson’s coconuts
02.26.08 | Permalink | 3 CommentsThe climate change debate is forever mired in statistics (or what George Bush would call ‘fuzzy math’). But it seems that in the last couple of days one number has really spoken: 150,000.
It took 150,000 coconuts to produce the biofuel to fill one fifth of one of the four fuel tanks on a Virgin Boeing [...] -
, Economics and the environment, Green consumerism
Recession-proofing the climate
Can we look to a recession to reduce emissions? Or will it simply serve to expose the capricious nature of those approaches to tackling climate change which are focussed narrowly on the ‘business case’?
Yesterday I was talking to a friend who was speculating that a recession may contribute to the emergence of a greater sense [...]
Home: Valuing Nature
ValuingNature.org provides a forum for asking: are the successes of today's dominant strategies for creating behavioural change adequate if we are to meet the huge environmental challenges that we face, and might there be alternative approaches? It has been developed as part of WWF-UK's Strategies for Change Project.
First visit?
Please read Introduction
REPORTS
Weathercocks and signposts: The Environment Movement at a Crossroads is a critical re-examination of the assumptions underlying current approaches to motivating environmentally-friendly behaviour.
Simple and Painless? The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning presents a critical examination of the evidence that urging people to switch to energy-efficient lightbulbs encourages them adopt more ambitious changes.
DownloadsQuote of the week
"The next revolution - World War III - will be waged inside your head. It will be a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or even around the scarce resources of the earth, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, TV and in ’cyberspace’... It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing worldviews and alternative visions of the future. "
Marshall McLuhan, in Culture is Our Business, cited on 'Dennis Pamlin's homepage'
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- The Carbon Detox: How far will materialism get us?
- The New Politics of Climate change
- Okri on Oracles
- The ideology of simple painless steps
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