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 [...]

Much has been written about ‘climate porn’; the perjorative phrase for journalism that pulls no punches in highlighting the scale of upheaval that climate change is likely to create over the course of the next few generations. It came up several times in discussions at Communicate 07, a recent conference for environmental communication professionals. The [...]

Our autistic relationship with the world enshrined in three images:
Thanks to Alastair McIntosh for sending me this.
Stuff you don’t need… but you really, really want.

…dine out all year…

…and warm your hands on one of these…

Here’s a short video that Richard Wilson shot when we interviewed Mark Lloyd about his experience of getting people - from stockbrokers to school children - down to the river Thames in Central London, to help clean it up. What particularly interests me is that Mark’s own state of happiness is in some way bound [...]