I 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 [...]
I’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 [...]
A 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 [...]
Do 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 [...]
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 [...]