Society needs a major shift in its core values to stave off an environmental crisis, warns a Yale report “Toward a New Consciousness: Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities”.
“For a long, long time the environmental community has been running on the original fuel from the 1970s,” said Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School [...]

Here’s an extract from a speech by Hilary Benn, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which he gave on 28 June 2007. After this excerpt, the speech continues in a more prosaic vein: But these are surely sentiments that our political leaders must come to air more openly and frequently. It [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]