The spread of ideas can be a double edged sword...
Sourced from TED, February 2002
Excerpt from transcript
'...people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking - to our thinking...it's ideas...that hijack our brains. Now, am I saying that a sizable minority of the world's population has had their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas? No. It's worse than that. Most people have. There are a lot of ideas to die for. Freedom...Justice. Truth. Communism. Many people have laid down their lives for communism, and many have laid down their lives for capitalism. And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam. These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They're infectious.
Yesterday, Amory Lovins spoke about "infectious repititis." It was a term of abuse, in effect. This is unthinking engineering. Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking. It's infectious repetitis. And we might as well try to have a theory of what's going on when that happens, so that we can understand the conditions of infection. Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others. I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is. And you have to have a bumper sticker, you know, you have to have a statement. So, this is mine.
The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. Most of us - now that the "Me Decade" is well in the past - now we actually do this. One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives in our own lives...It's not maximizing the number of grandchildren we have. Now, this is a profound biological effect. It's the subordination of genetic interest to other interests. And no other species does anything at all like it.
Well, how are we going to think about this? It is, on the one hand, a biological effect, and a very large one. Unmistakable. Now, what theories do we want to use to look at this? Well, many theories. But how could something tie them together? The idea of replicating ideas; ideas that replicate by passing from brain to brain. Richard Dawkins, whom you'll be hearing later in the day, invented the term "memes," and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book "The Selfish Gene." Now here am I talking about his idea. Well, you see, now, it's not his. Yes - he started it. But it's everybody's idea now. And he's not responsible for what I say about memes. I'm responsible for what I say about memes.
Actually, I think we're all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but for their likely misuses. So it is important, I think, to Richard, and to me, that these ideas not be abused and misused. They're very easy to misuse. That's why they're dangerous. And it's just about a full-time job trying to prevent people who are scared of these ideas from caricaturing them and then running off to one dire purpose or another. So we have to keep plugging away, trying to correct the misapprehensions so that only the benign and useful variants of our ideas continue to spread...
Memes are like viruses. That's what Richard said, back in '93. And you might think, "Well, how can that be? I mean, a virus is - you know, it's stuff! What's a meme made of?"...A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude. That is, there is something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that's what a meme is; an information packet with attitude. What's a meme made of?...They're made of information, and can be carried in any physical medium. What's a word made of? Sometimes when people say, "Do memes exist?" I say, "Well, do words exist? Are they in your ontology?" If they are, words are memes that can be pronounced.
Then there's all the other memes that can't be pronounced. There are different species of memes. Remember the Shakers? ...they're basically extinct now. And one of the reasons is that among the creed of Shaker-dom is that one should be celibate. Not just the priests. Everybody. Well, it's not so surprising that they've gone extinct. But in fact that's not why they went extinct. They survived as long as they did at a time when the social safety nets weren't there. And there were lots of widows and orphans, people like that, who needed a foster home. And so they had a ready supply of converts. And they could keep it going. And, in principle, it could've gone on forever. With perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts. The idea being passed on through proselytizing, instead of through the gene line.
So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they're not being passed on genetically. A meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shakerdom was essentially a sterilizing parasite. There are other parasites which do this - which render the host sterile. It's part of their plan. They don't have to have minds to have a plan.
I'm just going to draw your attention to just one of the many implications of the memetic perspective, which I recommend. I've not time to go into more of it. In Jared Diamond's wonderful book, "Guns, Germs and Steel," he talks about how it was germs, more than guns and steel, that conquered the new hemisphere - the Western hemisphere - that conquered the rest of the world. When European explorers and travelers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to, that they had learned how to tolerate over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years, of living with domesticated animals who were the sources of those pathogens. And they just wiped out - these pathogens just wiped out the native people, who had no immunity to them at all.
And we're doing it again. We're doing it this time with toxic ideas. Yesterday, a number of people - Nicholas Negroponte and others - spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out, thanks to all the new technology all over the world. And I agree. It is largely wonderful. Largely wonderful. But among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology, are a lot of toxic ideas. Now, this has been realized for some time. Sayyid Qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical Islam, one of the ideologues that inspired Osama bin Laden. "One has only to glance at its press films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars and broadcasting stations." Memes.
These memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages. They are wiping out traditions and practices. And it's not our fault, anymore than it's our fault when our germs lay waste to people that haven't developed the immunity. We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies around the edges of our culture. We're a free society, so we let pornography and all these things - we shrug them off. They're like a mild cold. They're not a big deal for us. But we should recognize that for many people in the world, they are a big deal. And we should be very alert to this, as we spread our education and our technology, one of the things that we are doing is we're the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes - the memes that they are prepared to die for.
Well now, how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes? That is not the job of the science of memetics. Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger. If you've had a friend who's died of AIDS, then you hate HIV. But the way to deal with that is to do science, and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective.
Get the facts. Work out the implications. There's plenty of room for moral passion once we've got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do. And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures and the like that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.'
07 November 2010
The Steady State Economy Conference: Working Towards An Alternative to Economic Growth
An overview of this event held in Leeds, UK, June 2010
Sourced from the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
Click on the links below to navigate to the individual workshop pages and learn more about the speaker(s), chair, and rapporteur for each workshop, and also read the policy proposals:
Sourced from the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy
Click on the links below to navigate to the individual workshop pages and learn more about the speaker(s), chair, and rapporteur for each workshop, and also read the policy proposals:
The Ecology of Growth
Reposted in full from the new economics foundation, 15 October 2010
'One of the few good things about the current financial crisis is the extent of serious soul-searching about the right way to deliver economic success. Britain has been among the worst-affected countries, losing perhaps five years of economic growth following the pricking of the credit bubble – predicted with precision by Ann Pettifor in her 2006 classic, The Coming First World Debt Crisis. Unemployment has soared, public-sector deficits have ballooned and a new age of austerity beckons. Business, politicians and the media are all calling for a rapid return to growth to create jobs, repair public finances and pay for a creaking welfare state.
'One of the few good things about the current financial crisis is the extent of serious soul-searching about the right way to deliver economic success. Britain has been among the worst-affected countries, losing perhaps five years of economic growth following the pricking of the credit bubble – predicted with precision by Ann Pettifor in her 2006 classic, The Coming First World Debt Crisis. Unemployment has soared, public-sector deficits have ballooned and a new age of austerity beckons. Business, politicians and the media are all calling for a rapid return to growth to create jobs, repair public finances and pay for a creaking welfare state.
Yet this regrowth option lacks conviction. It’s not just that finance – the vanguard sector of the last wave of growth – is still structurally challenged, or that debt-burdened consumers look unlikely to act as economic shock-troops once again. More profoundly, there is a dawning recognition that the growth model adopted by the industrialised countries over the past half-century no longer works. Our model of growth has simply become uneconomic, with more stuff not only failing to bring additional wellbeing in the so-called rich world, but also storing up impending environmental shocks, most notably peak oil and runaway climate change.
In his latest book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, Nick Stern calmly sets out the reasons why “high-carbon growth will eventually destroy itself”, as fossil fuel prices rise and the physical impacts of climate change start to bite. In spite of Copenhagen, a new economic race is under way: to deliver low-carbon growth. According to Climate Solutions 2 (a pioneering report on low-carbon industrialisation), some 20 clean energy, energy efficiency, low-carbon agriculture and sustainable forestry sectors will need to grow by 20–24% every year for the next four decades if greenhouse-gas concentrations are to be stabilised. Only three of these sectors are currently on track.
Yet one paradoxical outcome of the current economic crisis is the degree to which key governments have recognised low-carbon growth as one of the key routes out of recession. South Korea, for example, is investing 2% of its gross domestic product (GDP) over the next five years in its ‘green growth’ plan, with a clear intention to gain the economic and employment benefits of these emerging sectors.
Simply painting growth green doesn’t do the trick, however. We know that growth in GDP is a lousy measure of performance. It fails to distinguish between income and capital, thereby enabling both the liquidation of natural resources and the build-up of unsustainable levels of credit to be treated as growth. It fails to capture the social dimensions of economic activity, thereby enabling vast gulfs in inequality to be masked by per capita statistics. And it takes market valuation of prices as its touchstone, something that the credit crunch has taught us to be deeply wary of.
Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth is perhaps the most elegant exposition of a route out of this maze. The spectre of growth has haunted environmentalism since the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, with sustainable development emerging in the 1980s as an uneasy way of reconciling economic expansion, social justice and environmental resilience. Jackson helps break through some of the entrenched positions that have encumbered this debate, by placing his attention squarely on the ends of economic activity: expanding our capabilities for flourishing as human beings. Growth in incomes and consumption still remains an important component of such prosperity for most of the world’s peoples. But Jackson questions whether growth is still “a legitimate goal for rich countries”, for reasons of human happiness as much as ecological necessity.
Jackson challenges the belief of technological optimists that strong policies can effectively decouple growth from environmental impacts. Taking climate change as a case in point, he demonstrates that average global carbon intensity would need to be 130 times lower by mid-century to meet climate goals in an equitable world of steady population and economic growth – falling from around 770 grams of CO2 per dollar of output today to just 6 grams by 2050. The apparent absurdity of this scenario should not cloud our minds to the theoretical possibility of this ‘super green growth’ scenario. As Paul Ekins has argued, “the sacrifice of the environment to economic growth is not ineluctable”.
Jackson’s focus on an extended notion of prosperity means that he is at least as interested in the weakening connection between rising incomes and wellbeing as he is in environmental limits. A range of international surveys show that beyond an annual income level of US$15,000 per head, life satisfaction barely changes between countries with quite different levels of GDP. There appears to be a clear point beyond which extra income does not deliver extra wellbeing.
In their inspirational book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that “we have got close to the end of what economic growth can do for us” in terms of quality of life. Within the industrialised world, it is income inequality rather than absolute levels of GDP that explains differences in a range of health and social outcomes (such as trust, the status of women, mental health, drug use, educational attainment, murder rates, life expectancy and obesity). And inequality even constrains the time we have to ourselves: “People in more unequal societies do the equivalent of two to three months’ extra work a year. A loss of the equivalent of an extra eight or twelve weeks’ holiday is a high price to pay for inequality.”
If growth is to be dethroned as the primary goal of policy in the rich world, what should take its place? Jackson’s book is a brave attempt to develop a new ecological macro-economics, setting out a framework for scaling up investments in resource efficiency, clean technologies and ecosystem enhancement. Just as the welfare state of the 20th century – with its investments in health and education – laid the foundations for today’s knowledge economy, then investing in the quality of our natural resource base will form the basis for the next wave of innovation, employment and, yes, growth.
Rich countries dedicate at least 15–20% of their GDP on investments in human capital through spending on health and education; absurdly, spending on the entire environmental foundation of our wellbeing is less than a tenth of this. The problem with current discussions of the green economy is not that the proposals are too expensive, but that they are not expensive enough as a share of economic output.
The task of confronting the human costs of growth has barely begun, however. For Wilkinson and Pickett, this means consciously focusing on reducing inequality as a way of improving wellbeing for everyone. For Jackson it also involves dismantling the culture of consumerism (for example, through controls on advertising). Perhaps the clearest strategy of all comes in the new economics foundation’s The Great Transition, ably supported by its subsequent reports Growth Isn’t Possible and 21 Hours, its call for a 21-hour working week.
One of the great failures of the past three decades has been how the enormous improvements in labour productivity generated from new technology have been reaped by a very small part of the population, increasing inequality and stress. Cutting the amount of working time is a way of sharing these benefits, breaking the cycle of work and spend, and liberating that most non-renewable of resources, time: for family, friends and sheer enjoyment.
What is refreshing about this crop of books is the shared confidence that an economics that puts growth in its place will be more prosperous, healthier and sustainable. Some of the specific recommendations may not be especially new, but taken as a whole, a clear strategy for social and environmental transformation is starting to emerge. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding in the middle of the Second World War, “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”.'
Jamie Oliver, Food Revolutionary, On Change
Excerpt from The Guardian, 11 October 2010
'..."I hate making TV documentaries," he says with feeling. "Because it takes quite a lot of energy to know that you're going to get your arse kicked and people will hate you, or fight you, for large proportions of time. You know when I did School Dinners I got so much abuse for a year and a half, and the people who were getting in the way of some of the biggest progress...you know, once the show was broadcast, all of a sudden it was 'authentic'. But until then it was just lots of – well, people hate change. So I don't particularly enjoy doing the stuff I'm most proud of."
...You know that government advertising campaign, Change4Life, cost £20m on billboards? I could have built over 100 Ministries of Food in towns all over the country for that. The public doesn't need to know that we're in a f*cking state, that we need five a day. What it needs is skin on skin, it needs beacons locally where you can find out stuff for free, and have lessons. It's the only way forward, and it won't blossom through cuts."
'..."I hate making TV documentaries," he says with feeling. "Because it takes quite a lot of energy to know that you're going to get your arse kicked and people will hate you, or fight you, for large proportions of time. You know when I did School Dinners I got so much abuse for a year and a half, and the people who were getting in the way of some of the biggest progress...you know, once the show was broadcast, all of a sudden it was 'authentic'. But until then it was just lots of – well, people hate change. So I don't particularly enjoy doing the stuff I'm most proud of."
...You know that government advertising campaign, Change4Life, cost £20m on billboards? I could have built over 100 Ministries of Food in towns all over the country for that. The public doesn't need to know that we're in a f*cking state, that we need five a day. What it needs is skin on skin, it needs beacons locally where you can find out stuff for free, and have lessons. It's the only way forward, and it won't blossom through cuts."
Jamie's Ministries of Food have been established in four cities now, where the public are taught basic cooking skills in a bid to wean them off processed food and ready meals. But the future of the original Ministry in Rotherham is now in doubt, threatened by cuts, and Oliver is incredulous.
"The reason why I'm so passionate about the Ministry of Food is that we're fully booked, and if we had another staff member we could put another third on the numbers. We do about 8,000 people a year from one little cheap £130,000 setup grant from Rotherham council. We're fully booked, we're busy. It works. But they're all looking at me now for money, and the thing is I don't have it. I haven't got dough sitting in banks for me or for anything else."
Some readers may think come off it, you're really rich, I suggest. His wealth is routinely reported to be anywhere between £25m and £45m; could he not write a cheque for £130,000?
"I can't. I can't. I just can't, it's as simple as this. I've got my businesses that I look after, I don't have venture capitalists swoop in and pay for everything. Basically everything I've got funds my restaurants, the vulnerabilities are all mine. I've got 18 months of wages for my staff in the bank, but I'm not spending their money."
Oliver has recently extended his campaign to America, where he made a series called Jamie's American Food Revolution, set in the nation's most obese town. It won him an Emmy, and has been recommissioned, but far from celebrating, Oliver is still recovering. "The town didn't react very well to me being there, and there was one fellow on the radio who did a lot of shit-stirring that caused basically six weeks of aggro for me. No one really wanted to get involved or help, they thought we wanted to make them look stupid." With hindsight, I ask innocently, does he feel he made any tactical errors?
"No," he shoots back, "it was brilliant. You know, change is very hard – structures, organisations, businesses, people, anyone really. And if you're shining a light on one of the most unhealthy places in the world, it has to be a car crash, there's no pretty way. I knew what I was flying over there for, I knew it would be horrible, but I hadn't done horrible without my family. When you have shit days you need to be able to go and hug your kids, do you know what I mean? I didn't have that, and it was hard, really hard."
And yet, I say, it's these documentaries which make us love him. "But there's still lots of people who don't like me," he counters straight away. "You can tell that if you go on any blog. I annoy lots of people. You know people often don't like the good guys, and I try to be a good guy, I'm consistent. You know, I've been consistent in my direction, the beliefs that I have. And people hate that."...
"No one understands me. No one. My wife doesn't even understand me in terms of what I want to do. Everyone thinks everything's about money. You think I'm going to America to make money? That is probably the worst financial use of my time in the world, going to America next year, cos there's no money in TV, and they don't buy books. I don't want to break America, I don't want to move there, I'll be there for three months next year but I don't want to be making that show, I want Americans to be making that f*cking show. I'm not pleased I got the Emmy cos I got the Emmy; I'm pleased because it will get other people to make these shows, and get the public active, and get McDonald's to start doing some other shit instead of the shit they are doing."I have a fairly low regard for money to be honest, it doesn't really add that much to a lot of the things that give me pleasure in life. However, if you have an idea, and you've got it, you can do it. If you haven't got money and you've got a great idea, it's hard to get it done. So for me I want to get in a position where I can do stuff myself. I want to be able to go into Essex and say: 'I want all your schools.' I want to set up a company that would be not for profit; I want to set up a company that would be like the government used to be, where we train dinner ladies militantly, where we'd fit the kitchens out and deliver on budget. But it's not just Essex, you see, it's trying to create things that can be rolled out elsewhere. But it all comes down to money."
In the end, Oliver believes that change will only come through public pressure. "Although they don't know it, the public is still king. So what I try and do is shit-stir. In America, what hasn't happened yet is the public haven't really told business what they want. For instance, McDonald's America and McDonald's UK are totally different. You've got one public that's fairly well informed, which is here, so you know you've got organic milk, 100% free-range eggs; they do a huge amount of salads, they've done a huge amount of inward thinking in the last five years. So although they've been the enemy for many years, you've got to take your hat off and say well done, and carry on. America hasn't even done that, they've done nothing in comparison. The only difference is the public ask for more."
So if he had to choose only one element of his empire – the cookery shows, the restaurants, the books, Fifteen, or the campaigns – which one is closest to his heart?
"I'd love to be elitist, cos that's where my heart is – I'm a food geek. But it's f*ck-all use to anyone, absolutely no use to anyone, it doesn't change anything really. I really want to get school food sorted, and it ain't going to get sorted by the government. It needs investment, entrepreneurialism, expert management – and it's not going to happen, cos they'll never put their hands in their pockets or be there long enough to change anything."'
An Urban Orchard
Shot in and around Adelaide, South Australia
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2oNXksw4Jk
The first South Australian homegrown and gleaned produce swap was held on Saturday 3 November 2008, at the Clarence Park Community Centre. The Urban Orchard is a homegrown fruit and vegetable exchange, enjoying a brisk trade and much discussion over the morning.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2oNXksw4Jk
The first South Australian homegrown and gleaned produce swap was held on Saturday 3 November 2008, at the Clarence Park Community Centre. The Urban Orchard is a homegrown fruit and vegetable exchange, enjoying a brisk trade and much discussion over the morning.
The Urban Orchard is based on the exchange of backyard fruit and vegetable surplus. Participation is open to everyone, and participants are invited to take produce when they can use it, and contribute when they can.
The Urban Orchard is an initiative of Friends of the Earth Adelaide and the Goodwood Goodfood Co-op.
When: 10.00am-12noon, first Saturday of the month.
Location: Clarence Park Community Centre, 72-74 East Avenue, Black Forest
Contact: Joel 0403 886 951, joel.catchlove [at] foe.org.au
There are also swap meets at Henley, Croydon and Gawler in South Australia: www.ceres.org.au/node/114
Social Procurement Guide
Reposted in full from Pro Bono News, 14 October 2010
'The Victorian Government has launched a guide to social procurement in Local Government - as part of a national project to develop social procurement procedures for organisations and individuals.
Social Procurement: A Guide for Victorian Local Government
'The Victorian Government has launched a guide to social procurement in Local Government - as part of a national project to develop social procurement procedures for organisations and individuals.
Social Procurement: A Guide for Victorian Local Government
The Centre for Social Impact (UNSW) together with Social Traders, Foresters Community Finance, the Victorian Government, Parramatta City Council and Brisbane City Council are all funding a national research project into social procurement which is due for release later this year.
Social procurement is the process of an organisation choosing to purchase a service which will also provide a social outcome.
The Victorian Government guide was launched by the Minister for Local Government, Richard Wynne and has been developed to support Victorian councils deliver stronger social outcomes through procurement. It is closely aligned with Social Procurement in Australia, an overarching national paper commissioned by the Centre for Social Impact.
The Guide says that each year Victorian councils spend around $3 billion procuring goods and services in a wide variety of expenditure areas. Social procurement recognises the collective buying power of Victoria’s 79 councils and encourages councils to consider what could be achieved if even a small percentage of council spending was focused on ‘value adding’, so that the purchase of goods and services also had positive social outcomes.
For example, it says waste management need not solely be centred around a contract to collect bins and manage waste. It could also simultaneously generate local employment, increase community recycling options, educate the community about waste minimisation, reduce landfill and contribute to building the local economy. The act of strategic procurement can lead to multiple positive social outcomes for the municipality.
Minister Wynne says social procurement is becoming increasingly popular as governments look at ways to meet social objectives as part of their triple-bottom line reporting.
He says the guide is complemented by the Expert Support Program, which will bring the guide to life by supporting the development of social procurement projects and initiatives by councils.
The Expert Support Program: Social Procurement in Practice encourages partnerships between councils and organisations that can deliver social impacts to the community and scope for local business to engage with their local council.
The guide highlights that incorporating social benefits into a council's procurement framework can involve requesting that suppliers deliver social impacts as part of a contract with scope for Not for Profits to actively participate in the tendering process.
While primarily written as a guide for Victorian councils, the guide also provides Not for Profits with insight into how councils are undertaking social procurement and how they might best position their company to engage with councils in this space.
The guide itself is an example of social procurement, having been designed by Blue SKYS Media, a social enterprise of St Kilda Youth Services which offers training and employment opportunities to disadvantaged youth.'
A Ghost Agreement
I love it when George Monbiot gets stuck in...
'It strikes me that governments are determined to protect not the marvels of our world, but the world-eating system to which they are being sacrificed; not life, but the ephemeral junk with which it is being replaced...if governments had met in Japan to try to save the banks, or the airline companies, or the plastic injection moulding industry, they would have sent more senior representatives, their task would have seemed more urgent, and every dot and comma of their agreement would have been checked by hungry journalists. When they meet to consider the gradual collapse of the natural world, they send their office cleaners and defer the hard choices for another ten years, while the media doesn’t even notice that they have failed to produce a written agreement. So, much as I’m revolted by the way in which nature is being squeezed into a column of figures in an accountant’s ledger, I am forced to agree that it may be necessary. What else will induce the blinkered, frightened people who hold power today to take the issue seriously?'
Reposted in full from The Guardian, 2 November 2010
'“Countries join forces to save life on Earth”, the front page of the Independent told us.
“Historic”, “a landmark”, a “much-needed morale booster”, the other papers chorused(1,2,3).
The declaration agreed at the summit in Japan last week to protect the world’s wild species and wild places was proclaimed by almost everyone a great success. There’s only one problem: none of the journalists who made these claims has seen it.
'It strikes me that governments are determined to protect not the marvels of our world, but the world-eating system to which they are being sacrificed; not life, but the ephemeral junk with which it is being replaced...if governments had met in Japan to try to save the banks, or the airline companies, or the plastic injection moulding industry, they would have sent more senior representatives, their task would have seemed more urgent, and every dot and comma of their agreement would have been checked by hungry journalists. When they meet to consider the gradual collapse of the natural world, they send their office cleaners and defer the hard choices for another ten years, while the media doesn’t even notice that they have failed to produce a written agreement. So, much as I’m revolted by the way in which nature is being squeezed into a column of figures in an accountant’s ledger, I am forced to agree that it may be necessary. What else will induce the blinkered, frightened people who hold power today to take the issue seriously?'
Reposted in full from The Guardian, 2 November 2010
'“Countries join forces to save life on Earth”, the front page of the Independent told us.
“Historic”, “a landmark”, a “much-needed morale booster”, the other papers chorused(1,2,3).
The declaration agreed at the summit in Japan last week to protect the world’s wild species and wild places was proclaimed by almost everyone a great success. There’s only one problem: none of the journalists who made these claims has seen it.
I checked with as many of them as I could reach by phone: all they had read was a press release, which, though three pages long, is almost content-free(4). The reporters can’t be blamed for this: though it was approved on Friday, the declaration has still not been published. I’ve now pursued people on three continents to try to obtain it, without success. Having secured the headlines it wanted, the entire senior staff of the Convention on Biological Diversity has gone to ground: my calls and emails remain unanswered(5). The British government, which lavishly praised the declaration, tells me it has no written copies(6). I’ve never seen this situation before: every other international agreement I’ve followed was published as soon as it was approved.
The evidence suggests that we’ve been conned. The draft agreement, published a month ago, contained no binding obligations(7). Nothing I’ve heard from Japan suggests that this has changed. The draft saw the targets for 2020 that governments were asked to adopt as nothing more than “aspirations for achievement at the global level” and a “flexible framework”, within which countries can do as they wish. No government, if the draft has been approved, is obliged to change its policies.
In 2002, the signatories to the convention agreed something similar: a splendid-sounding declaration which imposed no legal commitments. They announced that they would “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss”. Mission accomplished, the press proclaimed, and everyone went home to congratulate themselves. Earlier this year, the UN admitted that the 2002 agreement was fruitless: “the pressures on biodiversity remain constant or increase in intensity”(8).
Even the desperately cheery press release suggests that all was not well. The meeting in Japan was supposed to be a summit; bringing together heads of government or heads of state. It mustered five of them: the release boasts of coralling the President of Gabon, the President of Guinea-Bissau, the Prime Minister of Yemen and Prince Albert of Monaco. (It fails to identify the fifth country: Lichtenstein? Pimlico?) One third of the countries represented there couldn’t even be bothered to send a minister. This is how much they value the world’s living systems.
It strikes me that governments are determined to protect not the marvels of our world, but the world-eating system to which they are being sacrificed; not life, but the ephemeral junk with which it is being replaced. They fight viciously and at the highest level for the right to turn rainforests into pulp, or marine ecosystems into fishmeal. Then they send a middle-ranking civil servant to approve a meaningless (and so far unwritten) promise to protect the natural world.
Japan was praised for its slick management of the meeting, but still insists on completing its mission to turn the last bluefin tuna into fancy fast food. Russia signed a new agreement in September to protect its tigers (the world’s largest remaining population)(9), but an unrepealed law effectively renders poachers immune from prosecution, even when caught with a gun and a dead tiger(10). The US, despite proclaiming a new commitment to multilateralism, refuses to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity.
It suits governments to let us trash the planet. It’s not just that big business gains more than it loses from converting natural wealth into money. A continued expansion into the biosphere permits states to avoid addressing issues of distribution and social justice: the promise of perpetual growth dulls our anger about widening inequality. By trampling over nature we avoid treading on the toes of the powerful.
A massive accounting exercise, whose results were presented at the meeting in Japan, has sought to change this calculation. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) attempts to price the ecosystems we are destroying(11). It shows that the economic benefit of protecting habitats and species often greatly outweighs the money to be made by trashing them. A study in Thailand, for example, suggests that turning a hectare of mangrove forest into shrimp farms makes $1,220 per year, but inflicts $12,400 of damage every year on local livelihoods, fisheries and coastal protection. The catchment protected by one nature reserve in New Zealand saves local people NZ$136m a year in water bills. Three-quarters of the US haddock catch now comes from within 5km of a marine reserve off the New England coast: by protecting the ecosystem, the reserve has boosted the value of the fishery(12).
I understand why this approach is felt to be necessary. I understand that if something can’t be measured, governments and businesses don’t value it. I accept TEEB’s reasoning that the rural poor, many of whom survive exclusively on what the ecosystem has to offer, are treated harshly by an economic system which doesn’t recognise its value. Even so, this exercise disturbs me.
As soon as something is measurable it becomes negotiable. Subject the natural world to cost-benefit analysis and accountants and statisticians will decide which parts of it we can do without. All that now needs to be done to demonstrate that an ecosystem can be junked is to show that the money to be made from trashing it exceeds the money to be made from preserving it. That, in the weird world of environmental economics, isn’t hard: ask the right statistician and he’ll give you whichever number you want.
This approach reduces the biosphere to a subsidiary of the economy. In reality it’s the other way round: the economy, like all other human affairs, hangs from the world’s living systems. You can see this diminution in the language the TEEB reports use: they talk of “natural capital stock”, of “underperforming natural assets” and “ecosystem services”. Nature is turned into a business plan, and we are reduced to its customers. The market now owns the world.
But I also recognise this: that if governments had met in Japan to try to save the banks, or the airline companies, or the plastic injection moulding industry, they would have sent more senior representatives, their task would have seemed more urgent, and every dot and comma of their agreement would have been checked by hungry journalists. When they meet to consider the gradual collapse of the natural world, they send their office cleaners and defer the hard choices for another ten years, while the media doesn’t even notice that they have failed to produce a written agreement. So, much as I’m revolted by the way in which nature is being squeezed into a column of figures in an accountant’s ledger, I am forced to agree that it may be necessary. What else will induce the blinkered, frightened people who hold power today to take the issue seriously?'
Criminal Probe into E-Waste Exports
Reposted in full from The Environment Agency, 15 October 2010
'The Environment Agency has today charged nine people as part of the biggest investigation into illegal electrical waste exports from the UK to West Africa.
'The Environment Agency has today charged nine people as part of the biggest investigation into illegal electrical waste exports from the UK to West Africa.
All nine have been charged with offences under the Transfrontier Shipment of Waste Regulations 2007 and European Waste Shipment Regulations 2006 and bailed to attend Havering Magistrates Court on 11 November.
The law is clear that broken electricals, including everyday items such as mobiles, smart phones, laptops and TVs, cannot be sent overseas for disposal. As well as precious metals such as gold, copper and aluminium, electrical waste can contain hazardous substances including mercury and lead that are harmful to people and the environment.
There is good evidence that illegal exports of electrical waste from the UK is ending up on waste sites in Africa, causing harm to those who come into contact with it.
The Environment Agency’s National Environmental Crime Team Manager, Andy Higham, said:
“Over the past two years painstaking intelligence work by Environment Agency officers has uncovered a web of individuals and companies that appear to be making considerable sums of money by exporting electrical waste overseas.
“Exporters of broken electricals put at risk the lives of those who work on waste sites in developing countries. These are often children who are paid a pittance to dismantle products containing hazardous waste. Illegal exporters also avoid the costs of recycling in the UK and undermine law-abiding business.
“It is always a crime to export broken electricals and hazardous waste from the UK to developing countries to be dumped. The last thing we want is our waste causing harm to people or the environment overseas.”
Officers from the Environment Agency’s National Crime Team began their investigations in mid-2008. They soon uncovered a network of individuals, waste companies and export businesses allegedly involved in the export of electrical waste.
In some instances, it is alleged that considerable sums of money changed hands in deals to collect and recycle electrical waste while treatment costs were avoided.'
How Much Would You Pay for Planet Earth?
Excerpt from the New Scientist, 13 October 2010
'Putting a cash value on nature may give officials heading to a biodiversity summit the jolt they need
Invest in lush tropical forests, vibrant coral reefs and clear blue streams, and they will provide a healthy return. That's the message from a group of environmental economists who for the first time have estimated the cash value of ecosystems.
They say the figures show the case for conservation is overwhelming in pure economic terms. One case study found that protecting and replanting mangrove swamps in Vietnam cost $1.1 million - an investment which reduced spending on dyke maintenance by seven times as much each year.
Yet the scientists behind The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study (TEEB) admit frustration that most mainstream economists are blind to the value of biodiversity.
"Conservation has to be seen as an investment and not a cost," says Rudolf de Groot of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, one of the lead authors of the study.
TEEB was initiated at the 2007 G8 summit, in Germany. "It aims to do for biodiversity what the Stern report did for the economics of climate change," says de Groot. The group will launch the first part of its work - a report called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Ecological and Economic Foundations - at a UN summit on biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan, this month.
In it, they use prior studies to calculate cash values for biomes ranging from tropical rainforests to Arctic tundra, based on the services they provide to humanity.
Coral reefs come in top, and are valued at up to $1.2 million per hectare per year, mostly reflecting the tourism income they provide. By moderating extreme events like storms, the group estimates each hectare of reef saves $34,000 per year, on average. But even humble savannah grasslands, which protect water supplies and store carbon, have a calculated annual worth of thousands of dollars per hectare. Each hectare of coastal wetlands, meanwhile, treats dirty water to the tune of $120,000 in avoided costs each year.
The report makes clear that the value of many "ecosystem services" remains difficult to price, however. Its authors speculate that many woodlands have a high value for filtering air pollution, grasslands for pollination and rainforests for climate regulation. One appendix speculates that, at current prices on carbon offset markets, the carbon tied up in trees and soils of the Amazon rainforest would have a "stock value" of $1.5 to $3 trillion. Many ecosystems also recycle moisture to maintain the water cycle, create soil and perform many other functions vital to life on Earth - something which no ecological economist has yet managed to value.
"For all the ecosystems we investigated, restoration pays," says de Groot. "For every dollar invested in restoration of forests, wetlands or grasslands, the benefits are between twice and 75 times higher." Nonetheless, he says, "getting this understanding incorporated into mainstream economics remains a problem"...
The economists decided not to calculate a single global figure for the planet's ecosystems. But a rough calculation by New Scientist based on TEEB's figures for individual biomes puts the cash value of the Earth's ecosystems at about half a trillion dollars.
This seems far too low, considering that the global economy - much of which is ultimately dependent on biological resources - is valued at around $70 trillion. And lower still, given that by cycling carbon the biosphere acts as a planetary thermostat.
The numbers are therefore most useful as an indicator of the most immediate economic benefits. Including unquantified ecosystem services would considerably raise the figure. After all, as Tim Killeen of Conservation International puts it: "Biodiversity has been the foundation for the world's economy since the origin of human civilisation."
Placing a value on earth's biomes
Value in dollars per hectare per year. THE top end of each value range corresponds to Prime locations Source: TEEB
Coral reefs (tropical and subtropical)
$14 - $1,195,000
Key values: tourism, storm protection, fish nurseries
Coastal wetlands
$2000 - $215,000
Key values: waste purification, fish nurseries, storm protection
Other coastal systems
$248 - $80,000
Key values: tourism, fish nurseries
Inland wetlands
$1000 - $45,000
Key values: natural water reservoirs, waste treatment
Rivers and lakes
$1800 - $13,000
Key values: water supply, waste treatment, tourism
Tropical forests
$91 - $23,000
Key values: climate regulation, gene banks (for medicinal plants, for example), erosion prevention
Temperate and boreal forests
$30 - $4900
Key values: Food, gene banks, watershed protection
Woodlands
$16 - $2000
Key values: timber and other forest products, waste treatment
Grasslands
$300 - $3100
Key values: climate regulation, watershed protection
Promises, promises
In Nagoya, Japan, this month, the world's governments will agree that they have not kept a promise they made at the World Summit for Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in 2002 to decrease the rate of species loss by 2010.
They are likely to agree a new set of targets for 2020, including stemming the loss of biodiversity, controlling invasive species and conserving at least 10 per cent of all the world's major biomes.
Diversitas, a group of leading conservation biologists, has already condemned the proposed new targets as vague, unachievable and not based on good science. Georgina Mace of Imperial College London, a leading figure in Diversitas, told New Scientist: "I don't think the current process or the 2020 targets are really fit for purpose."
In a letter to Nature earlier this year, Mace, Harold Mooney of Stanford University in California and others from Diversitas said: "The targets continue to mix the biodiversity we value highly and the biodiversity we urgently need to secure the benefits people derive from functioning ecosystems. To resolve competing demands, these different priorities should be made explicit."
Diversitas proposes distinguishing three conservation aims. Red targets would protect human safety and include conserving mangroves to shield coastlines against storms, maintaining coral reefs to prevent the loss of local fisheries, and preventing deforestation that causes landslides. Green targets would protect things that societies value - sacred forests or charismatic species like the great whales. Finally, blue targets would protect key ecosystem services, like carbon sinks in forests, soils and permafrost that help maintain the climate.'
'Putting a cash value on nature may give officials heading to a biodiversity summit the jolt they need
Invest in lush tropical forests, vibrant coral reefs and clear blue streams, and they will provide a healthy return. That's the message from a group of environmental economists who for the first time have estimated the cash value of ecosystems.
They say the figures show the case for conservation is overwhelming in pure economic terms. One case study found that protecting and replanting mangrove swamps in Vietnam cost $1.1 million - an investment which reduced spending on dyke maintenance by seven times as much each year.
Yet the scientists behind The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study (TEEB) admit frustration that most mainstream economists are blind to the value of biodiversity.
"Conservation has to be seen as an investment and not a cost," says Rudolf de Groot of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, one of the lead authors of the study.
TEEB was initiated at the 2007 G8 summit, in Germany. "It aims to do for biodiversity what the Stern report did for the economics of climate change," says de Groot. The group will launch the first part of its work - a report called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity: Ecological and Economic Foundations - at a UN summit on biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan, this month.
In it, they use prior studies to calculate cash values for biomes ranging from tropical rainforests to Arctic tundra, based on the services they provide to humanity.
Coral reefs come in top, and are valued at up to $1.2 million per hectare per year, mostly reflecting the tourism income they provide. By moderating extreme events like storms, the group estimates each hectare of reef saves $34,000 per year, on average. But even humble savannah grasslands, which protect water supplies and store carbon, have a calculated annual worth of thousands of dollars per hectare. Each hectare of coastal wetlands, meanwhile, treats dirty water to the tune of $120,000 in avoided costs each year.
The report makes clear that the value of many "ecosystem services" remains difficult to price, however. Its authors speculate that many woodlands have a high value for filtering air pollution, grasslands for pollination and rainforests for climate regulation. One appendix speculates that, at current prices on carbon offset markets, the carbon tied up in trees and soils of the Amazon rainforest would have a "stock value" of $1.5 to $3 trillion. Many ecosystems also recycle moisture to maintain the water cycle, create soil and perform many other functions vital to life on Earth - something which no ecological economist has yet managed to value.
"For all the ecosystems we investigated, restoration pays," says de Groot. "For every dollar invested in restoration of forests, wetlands or grasslands, the benefits are between twice and 75 times higher." Nonetheless, he says, "getting this understanding incorporated into mainstream economics remains a problem"...
The economists decided not to calculate a single global figure for the planet's ecosystems. But a rough calculation by New Scientist based on TEEB's figures for individual biomes puts the cash value of the Earth's ecosystems at about half a trillion dollars.
This seems far too low, considering that the global economy - much of which is ultimately dependent on biological resources - is valued at around $70 trillion. And lower still, given that by cycling carbon the biosphere acts as a planetary thermostat.
The numbers are therefore most useful as an indicator of the most immediate economic benefits. Including unquantified ecosystem services would considerably raise the figure. After all, as Tim Killeen of Conservation International puts it: "Biodiversity has been the foundation for the world's economy since the origin of human civilisation."
Placing a value on earth's biomes
Value in dollars per hectare per year. THE top end of each value range corresponds to Prime locations Source: TEEB
Coral reefs (tropical and subtropical)
$14 - $1,195,000
Key values: tourism, storm protection, fish nurseries
Coastal wetlands
$2000 - $215,000
Key values: waste purification, fish nurseries, storm protection
Other coastal systems
$248 - $80,000
Key values: tourism, fish nurseries
Inland wetlands
$1000 - $45,000
Key values: natural water reservoirs, waste treatment
Rivers and lakes
$1800 - $13,000
Key values: water supply, waste treatment, tourism
Tropical forests
$91 - $23,000
Key values: climate regulation, gene banks (for medicinal plants, for example), erosion prevention
Temperate and boreal forests
$30 - $4900
Key values: Food, gene banks, watershed protection
Woodlands
$16 - $2000
Key values: timber and other forest products, waste treatment
Grasslands
$300 - $3100
Key values: climate regulation, watershed protection
Promises, promises
In Nagoya, Japan, this month, the world's governments will agree that they have not kept a promise they made at the World Summit for Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in 2002 to decrease the rate of species loss by 2010.
They are likely to agree a new set of targets for 2020, including stemming the loss of biodiversity, controlling invasive species and conserving at least 10 per cent of all the world's major biomes.
Diversitas, a group of leading conservation biologists, has already condemned the proposed new targets as vague, unachievable and not based on good science. Georgina Mace of Imperial College London, a leading figure in Diversitas, told New Scientist: "I don't think the current process or the 2020 targets are really fit for purpose."
In a letter to Nature earlier this year, Mace, Harold Mooney of Stanford University in California and others from Diversitas said: "The targets continue to mix the biodiversity we value highly and the biodiversity we urgently need to secure the benefits people derive from functioning ecosystems. To resolve competing demands, these different priorities should be made explicit."
Diversitas proposes distinguishing three conservation aims. Red targets would protect human safety and include conserving mangroves to shield coastlines against storms, maintaining coral reefs to prevent the loss of local fisheries, and preventing deforestation that causes landslides. Green targets would protect things that societies value - sacred forests or charismatic species like the great whales. Finally, blue targets would protect key ecosystem services, like carbon sinks in forests, soils and permafrost that help maintain the climate.'
Make Presentations Work With Storytelling, Not Facts
'...How do you create a great presentation?...The answers I found had nothing to do with technology or the internet; they were revealed in screenwriting, Greek and Shakespearean drama, mythology and literature.
Great presenters employ the basic narrative techniques used throughout history to connect with audiences and move them to action and new understanding.
The presentations that work are not the ones with the most data or the most elaborate charts and graphs; the winners are those with the most compelling and convincing narratives...'
Excerpt from CNN, 15 October 2010
- Army officer fired after publishing essay complaining about useless PowerPoints
- Nancy Duarte says bad presentations obscure or conceal key points
- She says successful presentations don't win because of a wealth of data
- Duarte: What makes a PowerPoint work is great storytelling
'Editor's note: Nancy Duarte is the author of "Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences." She is CEO of Duarte Design, a presentation design firm based in Mountain View, California, that worked with Al Gore on the presentation featured in "An Inconvenient Truth" and whose clients include Cisco, Facebook, Google, TED and the World Bank.
A few weeks ago Col. Lawrence Sellin, a Special Forces officer stationed in Afghanistan, fell victim to a particularly modern hazard of war: PowerPoint fatigue.
Col. Sellin was fired from his post at NATO's International Security Assistance Force after he wrote an essay for the UPI wire service in which he voiced his frustration about PowerPoint-obsessed officers who spend more time worrying about font size and bullet points than actual bullets.
Col. Sellin's was just the latest in a series of complaints about the military use of slide presentations - you may recall public ridicule of the famously incomprehensible "spaghetti slide," and a recent New York Times article, that cited other officers just as frustrated with the emergence of the military bureaucracy's "PowerPoint rangers."
But PowerPoint isn't inherently bad - just misunderstood. And bad PowerPoint presentations aren't just a concern of the military. We've all sat through presentations - or suffered or even dozed through them. The truth is, most are poorly constructed and instantly forgettable.
Why does this matter? Because presentations decide elections, military strategies and multibillion-dollar business deals; they educate our children and they spread the ideas that shape society's most important goals and directives.
Ultimately, a presentation succeeds or fails on the strength of its message and how well it's told. And those elements have nothing to do with the brand of the software package involved in its production. You know instantly when you're watching a great presenter at work - you may even own the ShamWow to prove it.
Sometimes, presenters try to punch up weak content with stunts. I remember one speaker who rode onto the stage on a motorcycle - and promptly lost control and crashed. (He was okay.) Another presenter rappelled down to the stage like a mountain climber. I remember the stunts, but not the messages...
Unfortunately, the development of presentations is a skill that is rarely taught and for which few sources of best practices exist. Bad presentations kill ideas, waste money and impede progress. Great ones illuminate, persuade, generate consensus and spark action.How do you create a great presentation? I've been in the business for 20 years, but until recently even I couldn't define the deep structures and elements of truly superior presentations.
My research into this question led me in unexpected directions. The answers I found had nothing to do with technology or the internet; they were revealed in screenwriting, Greek and Shakespearean drama, mythology and literature.
Great presenters employ the basic narrative techniques used throughout history to connect with audiences and move them to action and new understanding.
The presentations that work are not the ones with the most data or the most elaborate charts and graphs; the winners are those with the most compelling and convincing narratives.
We're a distracted, multi-tasking society. So presentations need to lure and re-lure an audience simply to keep their attention. Audiences are looking at the clock or fiddling with their handheld devices throughout a presentation. You don't connect with your audience by throwing information at them - you do it by taking them on a journey toward your perspective.
Whether you're a CEO, a salesperson, a general or a biochemist, you must understand how to connect with an audience, how to construct a powerful narrative argument, and how to visually display information for maximum audience comprehension.
I read recently that our nation is suffering a crisis of literacy, with only 35% percent of high school seniors able to read proficiently. Yes, you read that correctly (assuming you're not part of the 65% of high school seniors.) But literacy really means the ability to communicate effectively. For professionals and citizens in every strata of society, true literacy now includes the ability to communicate effectively through presentations.
The stakes could not be higher for our country. If corporate executives communicate poorly, businesses and the economy suffer, and jobs are lost. If teachers communicate poorly, our children don't learn and advance. If generals communicate poorly, our troops and their missions are put at risk. These are dangers we cannot ignore.'
Fate of the World
Sourced from the Fate of the World Facebook page
'“Fate of the World” is a nail biting set of global warming scenarios covering 200 years of Earth’s existence. At the heart of the game are 10 'Masterplans' where the player calls the shots for all mankind including 'Apocalypse' where the gut wrenching goal is to raise the planet’s temperature a lethal degree; 'Lifeboat' where the goal is to save only the player while abandoning everyone else to whatever catastrophes await them; and 'Utopia' where a player can try to build a perfect society while battling population growth.'
'“Fate of the World” is a nail biting set of global warming scenarios covering 200 years of Earth’s existence. At the heart of the game are 10 'Masterplans' where the player calls the shots for all mankind including 'Apocalypse' where the gut wrenching goal is to raise the planet’s temperature a lethal degree; 'Lifeboat' where the goal is to save only the player while abandoning everyone else to whatever catastrophes await them; and 'Utopia' where a player can try to build a perfect society while battling population growth.'
06 November 2010
The Power of Enough - Free Seminar Series
The Global Sufficiency Network invites you to participate in a unique tele-seminar series entitled The Power of Enough: Embodying Exquisite Sufficiency in Your Life and in the World.
This powerful and interactive event features key experts and luminaries sharing their wisdom about creating a life and a world of having, doing and being enough– and it’s all for FREE.
Register here: http://maestropath.com/poe
This FREE tele-seminar series will explore:
- How to set yourself free from the unconscious, relentless context of scarcity, lack and limitation. Learn why you feel like you never have quite enough or even more importantly, why you feel like you are not (good, rich, thin, pretty, etc) enough as a human being.
- Why a paradigm shift out of the global cultural context of scarcity is vital for creating a just, sustainable and fulfilling world.
- How to experience yourself, your time, your money, your work, your families, your communities and all of the crises in the world from an empowered view of “enough”.
- Why sufficiency is an exquisite experience of fulfillment, peace, gratitude, generosity, flow, courage, possibility and joy.
The Power of Enough Series offers seven separate 90-minute interactive tele-seminars.
The seminars will occur each Tuesday 9-10:30 am PT November 9- December 21. Here is the list of leaders in this series. As you can see, we have a large ensemble of powerful visionaries and movers and shakers:
Nov 9 - The Power of Enough: Why Sufficiency Matters with Vicki Robins, Jennifer Cohen and Kay Sandberg
Nov 16 - A life of Having, Doing and Being Enough with Wayne Muller and Claire Zammit
Nov 23 - The Sufficiency Movement and its Role in Changing the Course of History with Lynne Twist, Marilyn Levin and Miriam Hawley
Nov 30 - The Currency of Sufficiency: Having an Empowered Relationship to Money with Nogie King and Joel Hodroff
Dec 7 - A New Paradigm for the Business World – Why Enough Works with Gina LaRoche and Mike Anson
Dec 14 - Transforming Scarcity Conscious into Sufficiency Consciousness: The evolutionary context of a world that works with Victoria Castle and Craig Hamilton
Dec 21 - Sufficiency 2.0 with Joshua Gorman, Samantha Tan and Lora Lyons
Please do share this invitation with friends and allies - all are warmly welcomed to participate. If you can’t make the live calls, register anyway and the organisers will send you the recordings.
Co-sponsors: MaestroConference, MaestroPath, Global Sufficiency Network and The Currency of Connection
The Lesson of Kansas: Change Outcomes - Minds Can Follow
Reposted in full [because its so important] from Campaign Strategy newsletter, November 2010
'On October 18 New York Times reported [1] a remarkable success in cutting carbon in the USA. Under the heading 'In Kansas Climate Sceptics Embrace Cleaner Energy' it succinctly describes a major achievement in getting cities and communities to cut carbon by saving energy and using renewables. Not through advocating 'action on climate change' or by trying to change people or their values but through propositions that start from where people already are - in this case clearly Security Driven Settlers*, safety-oriented, authoritarian, mainly right wing, traditionalist and identity seeking.
In other words, by matching the asks and offers to unconscious values and the attitudes and beliefs that flow from them, the project succeeded in getting people we know from many surveys to be the bastion of 'climate scepticism' (eg [2]), to do exactly what legions of climate advocates want: to cut carbon.
So will climate campaigners learn from this? Some will - others won't, because they are bent on trying to also get people to act for "the right reasons". In other words, they are intent on trying to change people first, so that they become like the campaigners, and want to cut carbon for "ethical" reasons, rather than for instance to save money or because they find instruction in the bible (are told to by Authority) or because it helps protect them from foreign threats (oil imports).
In essence, the Common Cause argument is that people like us do the right thing, so we need to make other people into people like us. And they propose doing this, in essence, by talking to them, persuading, cajoling and arguing them into being "like us".
“It is increasingly evident that resistance to action on these challenges will only be overcome through engagement with the cultural values that underpin this resistance. It also seems clear that, in trying to meet these challenges, civil society organisations must champion some long-held (but insufficiently esteemed) values, while seeking to diminish the primacy of many values which are now prominent – at least in Western industrialised society.”
In its recommendations, the largely theoretical Common Cause makes numerous suggestions for a form of political correctness in communications: ‘a series of principles that could come to inform civil society campaigns and communications’. For example it says:
and
‘Starting with civil society organisations themselves, all organisations should openly scrutinise the values that their activities promote, draw public attention to these, and outline the justification for working to strengthen these values’.
The only problem is that, for most people, this approach doesn't work. It’s a common cause of campaign failure, which the Common Cause recipe would only make worse. Forcing your values upon an audience which doesn’t share them, will only enable them to find more satisfying reasons why you are wrong, and whatever you proposed as an action will then be more deeply framed as ‘wrong’.
Indeed it is climate-campaigning and the media debates which it generates, that have mainly moulded these views. No values group was born with an in depth understanding of emissions scenarios or climatology. Their opinions on climate, which are so important politically, have been principally framed by the public politics provoked by campaigns, filtered through their values. And as those campaigns are primarily versed in universalist terms, with a heavy dose of non-acquisitiveness (giving stuff up or going without), they have succeeded admirably in provoking a response from 'people': A broadly positive response from other Pioneers; a mainly negative one from Prospectors and Settlers.
Similarly, we (my company CSL and KSBR) have found in focus groups across all values segments in the UK that the very word “environment” no longer denotes “your surroundings” but is interpreted as a political cause, and one that Pioneers tend to embrace and Settlers and Prospectors tend to reject.
The engagement of the Kansas Settlers by values-matching of propositions shows that it doesn't have to be like this. If we start from where other people are, and propose action which resonates with their attitudes and beliefs, it is possible to get 'climate action' but we have to accept that for many, it won't be for "ethical reasons".
Of course the Settlers are only half the picture in terms of the conventionally ‘disengaged’. The other problem group for climate campaigns is the Prospectors. These are the people who the Concerned Ethicals love to blame the most. Fun seeking, hedonistic and fashion following, the Outer Directed Prospectors don't just look conservative and head-in-the-sand like Settler denialists, they positively revel in getting the latest must-have thing. If you've got, flaunt it, is a Prospector reflex.
This deeply dismays the Concerned Ethicals and they tend to respond by lecturing Prospectors about 'over consumption', and the need to lead better, more ethical lives. They often fail to connect with Prospectors because their favoured channels of communication are used mainly by Pioneers (eg the current affairs sections of 'serious' newspapers) but when they do connect, the effect is often to annoy.
Hence, as I've reported before in this Newsletter, the reactions to environmental campaigns from Prospectors along the lines of "if I hear one more thing about what I shouldn't do - my next car's going to be a Ferrari", or "I know we've got to save the planet but there's more important things as well" [verbatims].
Fortunately we also know how to get Prospectors to take 'climate action' by matching asks and offers to their particular values. The best example is the work of Global Cool [www.globalcool.org]: motivating the uber-Prospector 'Now People' group to turn down their central heating by following fashion and wearing jumpers, avoiding flying by using Eurostar for hedonistic holidays, incentivizing bus travel with lessons in how to chat up strangers, and cutting embedded carbon with Swishing parties.
At its ‘public engagement’ or front of house website, Global Cool describes itself as a ‘green lifestyle’ organisation. Not a ‘campaign’. See www.globalcoolfoundation.org for a more ‘rear of house’ website which gives a more conventional NGO explanation of the organisation.
So as this works, whereas preaching ethics doesn't, should more climate communications resources be targeted in this way? Obviously yes (as I have probably bored you with for years). But WWF UK disagrees.
In Common Cause, Tom Crompton and others argue a form of moral hazard, in other words although this values-matching might work, it will have a perverse effect of reinforcing a bad behaviour because of its motivation, even if it's a good one in terms of outcomes. It's the motivation that Common Cause authors dislike: the desire for more, latest stuff or trendy behaviours. This, they argue, is a weaker basis for a good behaviour (eg which cuts carbon) than an ethical, internally driven or "intrinsic" one. They reject the pragmatism of Saul Alinsky who noted that the ‘right things’ are rarely done for the ‘right reasons’. Consequently there is nothing for it but a crusade to change the people.
This argument is fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons.
First, Maslowian needs are not conscious but unconscious, and the sequence of needs identified in Maslow's Hierarchy is not just a segmentation of needs but a sequence of un-met needs . We cannot change them by asking people to reflect - we cannot get Prospectors to become Pioneers by talking to them about it.
By the same token, once the underlying dominant unmet need is met, a new one takes its place. So if Settlers meet their needs for safety, security and identity, they become Prospectors seeking esteem of others, and then self esteem. If meeting a need (eg to belong or to be safe) simply reinforced that need, we would have a uniform population of security driven Settlers - they would not have developed a desire to find the esteem of others. It is this search for esteem which drives them to acquire and display symbols of success, which in our society has long taken the form of material goods and services, and which so annoys the Concerned Ethical subset of Pioneers.
So, if Prospectors meet that need by getting enough stuff and following sufficient fashion etc, they do not stay Prospectors but develop other needs - ie they become Pioneers. Does this happen? Yes - otherwise where did the 41% of the UK population currently inner directed (Pioneers) come from? Unless, as is not apparently the case, Crompton et al think Maslow was wrong and some people are born with these values. There is also substantial evidence that Maslow was right and that if conditions allow us to have the right experiences, we meet previously unmet needs and new ones emerge.
For example: - The attitudes and beliefs mapped in huge detail in CDSM's British Values Survey (1,000 questions put to 8,500 nationally representative adults) clearly map into the three main Maslowian Groups. Very similar systems have produced the same results in many other countries: for example the work of Shalom Schwartz in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Sociovison in France, and Environics in Canada.
- in the UK there is a preponderance of Settlers and Golden Dreamers (entry level Prospectors) amongst younger teens, and the increasing number of Now People and Tomorrow People (later sequence Prospectors), and Pioneers, at student age. This is consistent with needs groups emerging as the population reaches adulthood and some move on from being Settlers, which all start as (ie all children are initially Settlers)
- inter-generational shifts in values have been mapped across whole societies, from Settler to Prospector and then to Pioneer, as socio economic change has improved conditions, as predicted and charted by Ron Inglehart [4] and others, and, eg in the UK, the recent drop-back of some Prospectors to Settlers in circumstances of recession**
So there is no reason to think that the dominant Maslowian needs of a person are immutable, and as meeting them causes new needs to dominate, that is not ‘a problem’. At any event it is infeasible for any campaign group to exert enough influence over existential conditions for any conceivable campaign plan could affect the unmet needs of large audiences. No campaign group is likely to have the resources to meet individual psychological needs - which requires providing people with experiences that have that effect - for any significant number of people.
Even so, do social conditions make it harder than is desirable for people to meet needs? That's a huge political question as it presages fundamental social engineering. Might for example it be that advertising and product development makes it harder for people to satisfy the need for stuff? Possibly so - and that might be one of a number of reasons why the US is a Prospector dominated society than those in NW Europe.
Yet even if this were the case, it is going to be far easier and so more practical to get Prospectors to undertake low carbon behaviours by making those behaviours generate esteem, as Global Cool do, rather than to try to change the entire commercial culture of a society to remove all products or services which are associated with environmental damage. Nice perhaps but wishful thinking.
In values terms that is the root of the debate over use of values - between what would be ideal and what can be achieved. I am obviously in the latter camp.
So, to revert to the case of Kansas, the Common Cause approach would say no, this is wrong - instead of getting Settlers from Kansas to cut carbon for their own reasons, we should be trying to convert them to universalist, ethical, holistic thinkers of the sort that you might meet at a Schumacher College seminar or in a Deep Ecology retreat. The Common Cause approach would also say it is wrong to be getting sociable, esteem seeking predominantly female, young and fun loving fashion followers to adopt green lifestyles, as Global Cool does, because they should be somehow educated out of their extrinsic motivations and persuaded to act for ‘intrinsic’ reasons. Common Cause doesn’t give any suggestion of exactly how this will be achieved.
The second main reason why I think Common Cause is wrong as a guide to campaigning is that it draws conclusions without taking account of strategy. Strategic change can be used to lock off the opportunity to undertake ‘bad’ behaviours in outcome terms. Indeed the whole point of campaign strategy is to get a big result with the greatest efficiency in terms of effort, assets and resources.
There is, for example, no reason why esteem-generating behaviours cannot be decarbonized. For instance, getting a car is obviously a status enhancing event in many places because it enables you to do many things, including social activities that are otherwise more difficult or impossible. That is a 'problem' if cars emit carbon but not if they are made electric and run on renewable energy.
Similarly, campaigns might aim to change markets so that ‘market forces’ drive a desired change. For example if the price of a product like a solar electric panel was dependent on scale, a campaign to drive down the price by market building and upscaling production, or to ensure a new technology was applied by breaking a new entrant into a market, might create a new market leader whose product would then dominate the market. If that was cheaper to own than other forms of power, it could then crowd out other sources of (more polluting) energy. Here the strategy would not involve changing decisions by all consumers but only a certain group, whose actions were enough to bring about the change in commercial activity which had the inevitable consequence of changing the market for good.
In fact of all the carbon-transition developments which we can now see are likely to happen anyway - that is, the opportunity will be created for campaigners rather than them having to initiate it from scratch - the entry of affordable, performance-comparable, conventional-brand electric cars onto developed-country markets is probably the most important. In a country like the UK, it is also imminent: electric cars are going to be on the mass market soon.
It is salient - as cars are ‘in my life’ for many people in a way that power stations or sea level rise is not - and it is tractable because cars are consumer purchases, and understood. It is clearly strategic as widescale adoption of electric vehicles forces or is constrained by power infrastructure and/or policy, and fiscal policy and interacts with mass popular culture. It has the potential to make oil look and feel un-necessary. The transition to electric vehicles has the potential to be a perfect storm of change in decarbonizing economies - all without having to ‘change people’. It is an example of how campaigns could bring about lock-in or close off options for behaviour, and to create aspiration, recommendation cascades and norms, if the campaigns are designed and targeted strategically.
In terms of achieving change therefore, even if it were possible, trying to ‘change the values’ of someone who might at some point buy a car, as a way to change the outcomes of car buying and use at a population level, would come way way down the list of strategic options for campaign design.
A strategy to exploit that opportunity means looking at and understanding the dynamics of car buying, and the commercial interests in play within the market and understanding how that interacts with government tax and subsidy and what signals will have an effect on politicians, officials, manufacturers, distributors, the business press and so on. We already know what social signals would best motivate Pioneers, Prospectors and Settlers to go out and get an electric car, and who to start with and how not to talk about the behaviour as well as how to do it.
Carbon itself could also be made unfashionable - desocialised. If carbon slimming became as aspirational as being physically slim, it would soon spread amongst Prospectors. Not easy to start but possible to achieve.
And most obviously but apparently ignored by Common Cause , no decent campaign strategy should set out simply to convert an entire population, one by one, as in the manner of government social marketing schemes. Indeed if that is the thinking behind Common Cause then WWF UK and its partners might better ask themselves why they are not more successful in engaging the 41% of the population who are not esteem-seeking Prospectors or security driven Settlers but Pioneers who are much more willing to think about ‘issues’ and accept personal responsibility for taking action on them.
It was once said that capitalism is the operation of the market without the intervention of human intelligence. To try to initiate campaigns without strategy is the equivalent in NGO terms - a broad brush crusade which will soon squander its resources and exhaust its assets.
The third practical reason why campaigns should not be modeled on the Common Cause formula is that they won’t generate political space for population-wide measures. Politicians in government are only too aware that governance is the art of the possible and that they must bring along or gain consent from constituencies far wider than those who may have elected them.
It is clear therefore that if your project sets out to tell Settlers and Prospectors that they are wrong to hold the values (expressed as attitudes and beliefs) that they do, and instead should think like Pioneers, you are going to generate rejection and debate rather than signs of agreement and support. Politically you will simply create evidence that your idea is not a flier, has no legs and is a difficult political cause, best avoided.
As it happens, we do know something about the values of the Tea Party. A recent US study using samples gathered via Facebook and asking questions which enable mapping of values in terms of the ‘Schwartz dimensions’ (much discussed in Common Cause), surveyed supporters of the Tea Party, the Democrats, and the Republicans, and can be compared against UK political affinity results (previous CDSM surveys reported at www.campaignstrategy.org and www.cultdyn.co.uk - CDSM pers comm).
(By comparison the UK (affinity to) Conservative Party score is 11.4%, Labour 22.9%, and the Liberal Democrats 25.4%. Only the BNP at 4% look similar to the Tea Party in this respect). Tea Party adherents from the two wings of Libertarians (angry Prospectors) and the Religious (scared Settlers) themselves are split by a values antagonism from stimulation to tradition and conformity but that is another story, which Cultural Dynamics will tell.
The Minds Will Follow
An article [5] in Organizational Dynamics recently triggered a round of confused debate about values and behaviour but in two respects the author (Andrew Hoffman) is certainly right. As he said in an email "We live in a world where scientists can talk until they are blue in the face ... but if businesses pay money on it, people will think it must be true". That particularly applies to the way Settlers and Prospectors construct proofs and truths, as has been seen in countless qualitative research and framing projects. It’s the same rationalisation reflex which led many people to conclude after the ‘failure’ of world leaders to agree much at the Copenhagen climate talks, that there couldn’t after all, have been much to agree (or worry) about.
As Hoffman says, like cancer and smoking and the abolition of slavery, an issue, a contested topic, has to mature into ‘social fact’ for wholesale change on it to be acceptable. This is why campaigns ‘on climate’ should, as argued in previous editions of this Newsletter [6], focus on generating those signs, of showing that the response is real, happening now, and mainstream. The material is out there - in the burgeoning ‘green’ industries and jobs (particularly renewable energy) - it needs to be made to resonate and connect with people’s realities, especially Settlers and Prospectors, to be opened up and laid out to see, to be felt and experienced, to be made to count in daily life, so that it becomes experienced as the norm. This is not what conventional campaigns do but it is what they should do now.
It’s the consistency principle or ‘heuristic’, also described in earlier editions of this Newsletter [7], which lies at the heart of this process. Opinions change to stay in step with behaviours. Life and lifestyle has to make sense for it to be tolerable and satisfying, so what you do must make sense, so if government and business are doing renewable energy, and if you are using it yourself or you know a friend, relative or neighbour who is working in it, then it becomes a reality “that works”. The connection to the underlying cause then comes not analytical and reflective and open to debate but accepted as the way things are. Up until recently this worked in favour of fossil fuels, the oil industry and the “climate problem”. Every time you filled up your car with petrol or diesel you were reinforcing the notion that we need to keep on using this stuff. Now there is the potential to make it work the other way around.
** but not from Pioneer to Prospector, as consistent with a one-way transition on achieving self-esteem
[1] http://bit.ly/aBvPY8 New York Times article, In Kansas Climate Sceptics Embrace Cleaner Energy
[2] www.campaignstrategy.org/whogivesastuff.pdf
[3] www.wwf.org.uk/wwf_articles.cfm?unewsid=4224 Common Cause: The case for working with our Cultural Values, Tom Crompton et al 2010
[4] Ron Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence published Cambridge University Press, 2005
[5] Climate change as a cultural and behavioural issue: Addressing barriers and implementing solutions, Andrew J. Hoffman, Organizational Dynamics (2010) 39, 295—305 www.eenews.net/assets/2010/10/28/document_cw_01.pdf
[6] See for example Campaign Strategy Newsletter 57 and www.campaignstrategy.org/climate_campaigns_keep_calm.pdf
[7] www.campaignstrategy.org/articles/VBCOP_unifying_strategy_model.pdf
'On October 18 New York Times reported [1] a remarkable success in cutting carbon in the USA. Under the heading 'In Kansas Climate Sceptics Embrace Cleaner Energy' it succinctly describes a major achievement in getting cities and communities to cut carbon by saving energy and using renewables. Not through advocating 'action on climate change' or by trying to change people or their values but through propositions that start from where people already are - in this case clearly Security Driven Settlers*, safety-oriented, authoritarian, mainly right wing, traditionalist and identity seeking.
In other words, by matching the asks and offers to unconscious values and the attitudes and beliefs that flow from them, the project succeeded in getting people we know from many surveys to be the bastion of 'climate scepticism' (eg [2]), to do exactly what legions of climate advocates want: to cut carbon.
Common Causes of Failure
So will climate campaigners learn from this? Some will - others won't, because they are bent on trying to also get people to act for "the right reasons". In other words, they are intent on trying to change people first, so that they become like the campaigners, and want to cut carbon for "ethical" reasons, rather than for instance to save money or because they find instruction in the bible (are told to by Authority) or because it helps protect them from foreign threats (oil imports).
I would call this the ‘ethical fallacy’. The latest and most elaborate exposition is in WWF UK's report Common Cause [3], of which more below.
In essence, the Common Cause argument is that people like us do the right thing, so we need to make other people into people like us. And they propose doing this, in essence, by talking to them, persuading, cajoling and arguing them into being "like us".
Common Cause states of ‘global challenges’ like climate change:
“It is increasingly evident that resistance to action on these challenges will only be overcome through engagement with the cultural values that underpin this resistance. It also seems clear that, in trying to meet these challenges, civil society organisations must champion some long-held (but insufficiently esteemed) values, while seeking to diminish the primacy of many values which are now prominent – at least in Western industrialised society.”
To ‘champion values’ is a notion which seems logical and greatly appeals to some inner directed Pioneers - especially the Concerned Ethicals, who have a dominant unmet need for ethical clarity. This they apply to any social problem, advocating that if only we explained the problem more clearly, fully and holistically, and got people to think ethically, they would change their minds and change their wrong behaviours.
In its recommendations, the largely theoretical Common Cause makes numerous suggestions for a form of political correctness in communications: ‘a series of principles that could come to inform civil society campaigns and communications’. For example it says:
‘Civil society organisations should lead the way in openly discussing the values that a campaign or communication seeks to activate, presenting for public scrutiny both the evidence that these values will help to achieve the aims of that campaign, and the ways that the frames they deploy will help to strengthen these values’.
and
‘Starting with civil society organisations themselves, all organisations should openly scrutinise the values that their activities promote, draw public attention to these, and outline the justification for working to strengthen these values’.
The only problem is that, for most people, this approach doesn't work. It’s a common cause of campaign failure, which the Common Cause recipe would only make worse. Forcing your values upon an audience which doesn’t share them, will only enable them to find more satisfying reasons why you are wrong, and whatever you proposed as an action will then be more deeply framed as ‘wrong’.
If it did work then Security Driven Settlers and Outer Directed Prospectors would long ago have swung into line with the bulk of Pioneers and agreed with the propositions of (Pioneer led) climate campaigns. For climate is a "mature issue": it's not new, people have heard about it, they have taken positions, they have made up their minds, and they have armed themselves with rationalisations about it which match their behaviours.
Indeed it is climate-campaigning and the media debates which it generates, that have mainly moulded these views. No values group was born with an in depth understanding of emissions scenarios or climatology. Their opinions on climate, which are so important politically, have been principally framed by the public politics provoked by campaigns, filtered through their values. And as those campaigns are primarily versed in universalist terms, with a heavy dose of non-acquisitiveness (giving stuff up or going without), they have succeeded admirably in provoking a response from 'people': A broadly positive response from other Pioneers; a mainly negative one from Prospectors and Settlers.
Similarly, we (my company CSL and KSBR) have found in focus groups across all values segments in the UK that the very word “environment” no longer denotes “your surroundings” but is interpreted as a political cause, and one that Pioneers tend to embrace and Settlers and Prospectors tend to reject.
The engagement of the Kansas Settlers by values-matching of propositions shows that it doesn't have to be like this. If we start from where other people are, and propose action which resonates with their attitudes and beliefs, it is possible to get 'climate action' but we have to accept that for many, it won't be for "ethical reasons".
Global Cool Shows How To Engage Prospectors
Of course the Settlers are only half the picture in terms of the conventionally ‘disengaged’. The other problem group for climate campaigns is the Prospectors. These are the people who the Concerned Ethicals love to blame the most. Fun seeking, hedonistic and fashion following, the Outer Directed Prospectors don't just look conservative and head-in-the-sand like Settler denialists, they positively revel in getting the latest must-have thing. If you've got, flaunt it, is a Prospector reflex.
This deeply dismays the Concerned Ethicals and they tend to respond by lecturing Prospectors about 'over consumption', and the need to lead better, more ethical lives. They often fail to connect with Prospectors because their favoured channels of communication are used mainly by Pioneers (eg the current affairs sections of 'serious' newspapers) but when they do connect, the effect is often to annoy.
Hence, as I've reported before in this Newsletter, the reactions to environmental campaigns from Prospectors along the lines of "if I hear one more thing about what I shouldn't do - my next car's going to be a Ferrari", or "I know we've got to save the planet but there's more important things as well" [verbatims].
Fortunately we also know how to get Prospectors to take 'climate action' by matching asks and offers to their particular values. The best example is the work of Global Cool [www.globalcool.org]: motivating the uber-Prospector 'Now People' group to turn down their central heating by following fashion and wearing jumpers, avoiding flying by using Eurostar for hedonistic holidays, incentivizing bus travel with lessons in how to chat up strangers, and cutting embedded carbon with Swishing parties.
Caroline Fiennes, Direct of Global Cool points out that it sells the action, not the problem. Unlike conventional ‘climate campaigns’ it doesn’t take you through the problem to get to the action.
At its ‘public engagement’ or front of house website, Global Cool describes itself as a ‘green lifestyle’ organisation. Not a ‘campaign’. See www.globalcoolfoundation.org for a more ‘rear of house’ website which gives a more conventional NGO explanation of the organisation.
So as this works, whereas preaching ethics doesn't, should more climate communications resources be targeted in this way? Obviously yes (as I have probably bored you with for years). But WWF UK disagrees.
Why Common Cause is Wrong as a Strategy for Campaigns
In Common Cause, Tom Crompton and others argue a form of moral hazard, in other words although this values-matching might work, it will have a perverse effect of reinforcing a bad behaviour because of its motivation, even if it's a good one in terms of outcomes. It's the motivation that Common Cause authors dislike: the desire for more, latest stuff or trendy behaviours. This, they argue, is a weaker basis for a good behaviour (eg which cuts carbon) than an ethical, internally driven or "intrinsic" one. They reject the pragmatism of Saul Alinsky who noted that the ‘right things’ are rarely done for the ‘right reasons’. Consequently there is nothing for it but a crusade to change the people.
This argument is fundamentally flawed for a number of reasons.
Reason One - Un-Met Needs Give Way Once Met
First, Maslowian needs are not conscious but unconscious, and the sequence of needs identified in Maslow's Hierarchy is not just a segmentation of needs but a sequence of un-met needs . We cannot change them by asking people to reflect - we cannot get Prospectors to become Pioneers by talking to them about it.
By the same token, once the underlying dominant unmet need is met, a new one takes its place. So if Settlers meet their needs for safety, security and identity, they become Prospectors seeking esteem of others, and then self esteem. If meeting a need (eg to belong or to be safe) simply reinforced that need, we would have a uniform population of security driven Settlers - they would not have developed a desire to find the esteem of others. It is this search for esteem which drives them to acquire and display symbols of success, which in our society has long taken the form of material goods and services, and which so annoys the Concerned Ethical subset of Pioneers.
So, if Prospectors meet that need by getting enough stuff and following sufficient fashion etc, they do not stay Prospectors but develop other needs - ie they become Pioneers. Does this happen? Yes - otherwise where did the 41% of the UK population currently inner directed (Pioneers) come from? Unless, as is not apparently the case, Crompton et al think Maslow was wrong and some people are born with these values. There is also substantial evidence that Maslow was right and that if conditions allow us to have the right experiences, we meet previously unmet needs and new ones emerge.
For example: - The attitudes and beliefs mapped in huge detail in CDSM's British Values Survey (1,000 questions put to 8,500 nationally representative adults) clearly map into the three main Maslowian Groups. Very similar systems have produced the same results in many other countries: for example the work of Shalom Schwartz in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Sociovison in France, and Environics in Canada.
- numerous cases of individual values transitions can be seen in everyday life, eg the fashionista celebrities and serial achievers who suddenly decide that "there's more to life than this" and get into ethical causes (ie have become inner directed Pioneers)
- in the UK there is a preponderance of Settlers and Golden Dreamers (entry level Prospectors) amongst younger teens, and the increasing number of Now People and Tomorrow People (later sequence Prospectors), and Pioneers, at student age. This is consistent with needs groups emerging as the population reaches adulthood and some move on from being Settlers, which all start as (ie all children are initially Settlers)
- inter-generational shifts in values have been mapped across whole societies, from Settler to Prospector and then to Pioneer, as socio economic change has improved conditions, as predicted and charted by Ron Inglehart [4] and others, and, eg in the UK, the recent drop-back of some Prospectors to Settlers in circumstances of recession**
So there is no reason to think that the dominant Maslowian needs of a person are immutable, and as meeting them causes new needs to dominate, that is not ‘a problem’. At any event it is infeasible for any campaign group to exert enough influence over existential conditions for any conceivable campaign plan could affect the unmet needs of large audiences. No campaign group is likely to have the resources to meet individual psychological needs - which requires providing people with experiences that have that effect - for any significant number of people.
Even so, do social conditions make it harder than is desirable for people to meet needs? That's a huge political question as it presages fundamental social engineering. Might for example it be that advertising and product development makes it harder for people to satisfy the need for stuff? Possibly so - and that might be one of a number of reasons why the US is a Prospector dominated society than those in NW Europe.
Yet even if this were the case, it is going to be far easier and so more practical to get Prospectors to undertake low carbon behaviours by making those behaviours generate esteem, as Global Cool do, rather than to try to change the entire commercial culture of a society to remove all products or services which are associated with environmental damage. Nice perhaps but wishful thinking.
In values terms that is the root of the debate over use of values - between what would be ideal and what can be achieved. I am obviously in the latter camp.
So, to revert to the case of Kansas, the Common Cause approach would say no, this is wrong - instead of getting Settlers from Kansas to cut carbon for their own reasons, we should be trying to convert them to universalist, ethical, holistic thinkers of the sort that you might meet at a Schumacher College seminar or in a Deep Ecology retreat. The Common Cause approach would also say it is wrong to be getting sociable, esteem seeking predominantly female, young and fun loving fashion followers to adopt green lifestyles, as Global Cool does, because they should be somehow educated out of their extrinsic motivations and persuaded to act for ‘intrinsic’ reasons. Common Cause doesn’t give any suggestion of exactly how this will be achieved.
Reason Two - Taking No Account of Strategy
The second main reason why I think Common Cause is wrong as a guide to campaigning is that it draws conclusions without taking account of strategy. Strategic change can be used to lock off the opportunity to undertake ‘bad’ behaviours in outcome terms. Indeed the whole point of campaign strategy is to get a big result with the greatest efficiency in terms of effort, assets and resources.
There is, for example, no reason why esteem-generating behaviours cannot be decarbonized. For instance, getting a car is obviously a status enhancing event in many places because it enables you to do many things, including social activities that are otherwise more difficult or impossible. That is a 'problem' if cars emit carbon but not if they are made electric and run on renewable energy.
Similarly, campaigns might aim to change markets so that ‘market forces’ drive a desired change. For example if the price of a product like a solar electric panel was dependent on scale, a campaign to drive down the price by market building and upscaling production, or to ensure a new technology was applied by breaking a new entrant into a market, might create a new market leader whose product would then dominate the market. If that was cheaper to own than other forms of power, it could then crowd out other sources of (more polluting) energy. Here the strategy would not involve changing decisions by all consumers but only a certain group, whose actions were enough to bring about the change in commercial activity which had the inevitable consequence of changing the market for good.
Electric Cars - Potential Perfect Storm
In fact of all the carbon-transition developments which we can now see are likely to happen anyway - that is, the opportunity will be created for campaigners rather than them having to initiate it from scratch - the entry of affordable, performance-comparable, conventional-brand electric cars onto developed-country markets is probably the most important. In a country like the UK, it is also imminent: electric cars are going to be on the mass market soon.
It is salient - as cars are ‘in my life’ for many people in a way that power stations or sea level rise is not - and it is tractable because cars are consumer purchases, and understood. It is clearly strategic as widescale adoption of electric vehicles forces or is constrained by power infrastructure and/or policy, and fiscal policy and interacts with mass popular culture. It has the potential to make oil look and feel un-necessary. The transition to electric vehicles has the potential to be a perfect storm of change in decarbonizing economies - all without having to ‘change people’. It is an example of how campaigns could bring about lock-in or close off options for behaviour, and to create aspiration, recommendation cascades and norms, if the campaigns are designed and targeted strategically.
In terms of achieving change therefore, even if it were possible, trying to ‘change the values’ of someone who might at some point buy a car, as a way to change the outcomes of car buying and use at a population level, would come way way down the list of strategic options for campaign design.
A strategy to exploit that opportunity means looking at and understanding the dynamics of car buying, and the commercial interests in play within the market and understanding how that interacts with government tax and subsidy and what signals will have an effect on politicians, officials, manufacturers, distributors, the business press and so on. We already know what social signals would best motivate Pioneers, Prospectors and Settlers to go out and get an electric car, and who to start with and how not to talk about the behaviour as well as how to do it.
Carbon itself could also be made unfashionable - desocialised. If carbon slimming became as aspirational as being physically slim, it would soon spread amongst Prospectors. Not easy to start but possible to achieve.
And most obviously but apparently ignored by Common Cause , no decent campaign strategy should set out simply to convert an entire population, one by one, as in the manner of government social marketing schemes. Indeed if that is the thinking behind Common Cause then WWF UK and its partners might better ask themselves why they are not more successful in engaging the 41% of the population who are not esteem-seeking Prospectors or security driven Settlers but Pioneers who are much more willing to think about ‘issues’ and accept personal responsibility for taking action on them.
It was once said that capitalism is the operation of the market without the intervention of human intelligence. To try to initiate campaigns without strategy is the equivalent in NGO terms - a broad brush crusade which will soon squander its resources and exhaust its assets.
Reason Three - Practical Politics
The third practical reason why campaigns should not be modeled on the Common Cause formula is that they won’t generate political space for population-wide measures. Politicians in government are only too aware that governance is the art of the possible and that they must bring along or gain consent from constituencies far wider than those who may have elected them.
Even if they are unaware of unconscious motivational values, and have never heard of Maslow, almost any politician, and even more a government with many officials, departments and agencies, is going to sense whether or not a proposition has broad support. That’s not just a question of numbers but of qualitative evidences - signs that ‘different types’ of people will accept it or want it. Which means that any campaign designed to sell a big political idea, as many (probably too many) are, needs to have some sort of support base amongst all three Maslow groups - Prospectors, Pioneers and Settlers. Politically and socially these people tend to look different, sound different, act different and think differently.
It is clear therefore that if your project sets out to tell Settlers and Prospectors that they are wrong to hold the values (expressed as attitudes and beliefs) that they do, and instead should think like Pioneers, you are going to generate rejection and debate rather than signs of agreement and support. Politically you will simply create evidence that your idea is not a flier, has no legs and is a difficult political cause, best avoided.
If you doubt this and sympathise with the sentiments in Common Cause, then try a simple thought experiment. You will probably have heard of the Tea Party. They scarcely could have had more publicity than they have in the past year or so. So you will have become at least as aware of their values, attitudes and beliefs, as they will be of yours. And most Tea Party approved candidates at the recent US Elections were hostile to the ‘global challenges’ embraced by the authors of Common Cause, eg climate change. So are you persuaded? They have been vocal in promoting their ‘values’. Did it make you agree with them? Think they are right? If so, then maybe Common Cause is correct but I find that unlikely.
As it happens, we do know something about the values of the Tea Party. A recent US study using samples gathered via Facebook and asking questions which enable mapping of values in terms of the ‘Schwartz dimensions’ (much discussed in Common Cause), surveyed supporters of the Tea Party, the Democrats, and the Republicans, and can be compared against UK political affinity results (previous CDSM surveys reported at www.campaignstrategy.org and www.cultdyn.co.uk - CDSM pers comm).
If you take Universalism for example, which most strongly correlates with the values championed by Common Cause, the proportion of the total US population aged 18-60 in the top quintile on that value is 20.3%, and the UK figure is 19.6%. These people are most like those who Common Cause would describe as having ‘helpful’ values. But if you look at the Libertarian wing of the Tea Party, only 6.7% fall into this bracket - an astonishingly significant result, and an even more microscopic 1.4% of the Religious wing of the Tea Party do so. A pretty steep hill for the Common Cause approach to climb then - as opposed to going the Kansas route. In communications terms it might be a noble endeavour to try and change these people into ethically minded greenies but it is a futile exercise.
(By comparison the UK (affinity to) Conservative Party score is 11.4%, Labour 22.9%, and the Liberal Democrats 25.4%. Only the BNP at 4% look similar to the Tea Party in this respect). Tea Party adherents from the two wings of Libertarians (angry Prospectors) and the Religious (scared Settlers) themselves are split by a values antagonism from stimulation to tradition and conformity but that is another story, which Cultural Dynamics will tell.
The Minds Will Follow
There are also intensely practical reasons to believe that it is more effective to change outcomes in order to lead opinion, rather than to try and ‘change minds’ at the level of deeper attitudes and beliefs. These apply even if you not fully accept the above arguments about values.
An article [5] in Organizational Dynamics recently triggered a round of confused debate about values and behaviour but in two respects the author (Andrew Hoffman) is certainly right. As he said in an email "We live in a world where scientists can talk until they are blue in the face ... but if businesses pay money on it, people will think it must be true". That particularly applies to the way Settlers and Prospectors construct proofs and truths, as has been seen in countless qualitative research and framing projects. It’s the same rationalisation reflex which led many people to conclude after the ‘failure’ of world leaders to agree much at the Copenhagen climate talks, that there couldn’t after all, have been much to agree (or worry) about.
As Hoffman says, like cancer and smoking and the abolition of slavery, an issue, a contested topic, has to mature into ‘social fact’ for wholesale change on it to be acceptable. This is why campaigns ‘on climate’ should, as argued in previous editions of this Newsletter [6], focus on generating those signs, of showing that the response is real, happening now, and mainstream. The material is out there - in the burgeoning ‘green’ industries and jobs (particularly renewable energy) - it needs to be made to resonate and connect with people’s realities, especially Settlers and Prospectors, to be opened up and laid out to see, to be felt and experienced, to be made to count in daily life, so that it becomes experienced as the norm. This is not what conventional campaigns do but it is what they should do now.
It’s the consistency principle or ‘heuristic’, also described in earlier editions of this Newsletter [7], which lies at the heart of this process. Opinions change to stay in step with behaviours. Life and lifestyle has to make sense for it to be tolerable and satisfying, so what you do must make sense, so if government and business are doing renewable energy, and if you are using it yourself or you know a friend, relative or neighbour who is working in it, then it becomes a reality “that works”. The connection to the underlying cause then comes not analytical and reflective and open to debate but accepted as the way things are. Up until recently this worked in favour of fossil fuels, the oil industry and the “climate problem”. Every time you filled up your car with petrol or diesel you were reinforcing the notion that we need to keep on using this stuff. Now there is the potential to make it work the other way around.
* See www.cultdyn.co.uk and Using Values Modes at this website for an introduction to Maslowian values analysis, or http://bit.ly/asEXdn
** but not from Pioneer to Prospector, as consistent with a one-way transition on achieving self-esteem
[1] http://bit.ly/aBvPY8 New York Times article, In Kansas Climate Sceptics Embrace Cleaner Energy
[2] www.campaignstrategy.org/whogivesastuff.pdf
[3] www.wwf.org.uk/wwf_articles.cfm?unewsid=4224 Common Cause: The case for working with our Cultural Values, Tom Crompton et al 2010
[4] Ron Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence published Cambridge University Press, 2005
[5] Climate change as a cultural and behavioural issue: Addressing barriers and implementing solutions, Andrew J. Hoffman, Organizational Dynamics (2010) 39, 295—305 www.eenews.net/assets/2010/10/28/document_cw_01.pdf
[6] See for example Campaign Strategy Newsletter 57 and www.campaignstrategy.org/climate_campaigns_keep_calm.pdf
[7] www.campaignstrategy.org/articles/VBCOP_unifying_strategy_model.pdf
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