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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Can the highly refined influencing techniques of the marketing industry have any role to play in helping us to move beyond green consumption; from consuming differently, to consuming less? This piece in today’s Guardian announces the formation of a group of depth-psychologists and marketing executives, to explore this question.

The 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 [...]

… despite being a bit dour; and what do they think they can teach the Americans about it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shepBx2ogJo

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 [...]

What is the role of shopping in meeting the challenge of climate change?
Today I came across a note on the West of England Climate Change project, written by Ian Preston from the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE), and disseminated as a link in Chris Rose’s Newsletter. The West of England Climate Change project put [...]

Nicole Richie loves the planet.

I spent Saturday morning at the Guild of Psychotherapists Annual Lecture by Mary-Jayne Rust entitled Climate on the Couch - unconscious processes in relation to our environmental crisis. I am convinced that environmentalists have much to learn from psychotherapists’ understanding of our unconscious. After all, it was through manipulation of our unconscious that the marketing [...]