In their last edition (16/05) The Independent on Sunday asked several leading ad agencies to produce mock ups that could run during campaigning in any future referendum on electoral reform (specifically the Alternative Voting system proposed as part of the coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats).
I recently came across this really interesting website: http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/.
It allows you to make a blind comparison of the policies proposed by the different political parties for the next General Election and to base your vote on policies rather than on personalities or prejudices. I did the survey myself (although I am not entitled to vote in the UK) and the results are pretty interesting.
I think it’s a great tool to foster participation and political awareness, although I am not sure that if you were intending to vote for the Greens and that after taking the survey it turns out that you “should” vote for the BNP you should necessarily take up this advice…
Below is a graph showing the turnout rates of the General Elections since 1945 (http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/turnout.htm)
Earth Hour is a global event organized by WWF asking households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change.
Check out the video of Earth Hour 2010 held on 27th March from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time.
Green is funky, Green is sexy, Green is wacky!
If you think that climate change and sustainability communications are dull and boring, well think again. Here is a sample of exciting comms that intend to showcase environmentally friendly behaviour as cool and sexy.
“God save The Green”
These three short movies directed by Nadege Winter aim to inform people about energy efficiency by diverting the traditional codes of environmental activism. Imagine that you run into a peep show. You see a beautiful pin-up naked, but instead of engaging in an erotic conversation, the beautiful woman gives you a lesson of ecology.
Unfortunately you can see these only from France. But here is the teaser that will, I hope, feed your imagination.
“Fuck For Forest”
FFF is a project created by a non-profit environmental organisation founded in Norway. The two persons behind the concept adopted a refreshing perspective to help addressing deforestation issues. FFF basically produces pornographic films whose profits go directly to reforestation projects. They were officially backed by the Norwegian government and received seed funding to help launch the concept.
You can buy their videos here.
“Green Porno”
Green Porno is a series of short movies written and directed by the ex-model and actress Isabella Rossellini. The quirky little movies combine ecology and pornography. Both comic and instructive they are the result of genuine scientific research and observation. They help viewers understand how gnats, cockroaches and other bees reproduce. An anthem to biodiversity….
You can watch the three episodes on Sundance Channel.
Author Caroline Martinot
It’s a fact: Climate change communication can sometimes be dim and dull. Few communication campaigns succeed in reaching their targets, raising awareness and sparking off a reaction. Add to this that many campaigns are aiming at hitting an unidentified and obscure target known as “the people”. Defining your target, digging into its aspirations, motivations and the channels to reach it, is the preliminary step of any successful communication campaign.
This task can be even harder when you try to reach an audience which defines itself as “not mainstream” and is fighting hard not to be labelled or targeted. But this is exactly the challenge that Greenpeace and the Blacksmoke art collective tackled when they set up a project to communicate climate change issues to the British underground “scenesters”, a young British sub-culture group (“urban middle class adults and older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture” –Wikipedia).
The Danger Global Warming Project is an independent multimedia initiative aimed at raising awareness around climate change issues through the medium of art and digital media. Artists from all over the world were asked to incorporate Greenpeace’s black and yellow warning tape motif into artworks of any forms. As a result, multimedia pieces of art (video, image, installation…) were submitted from all over the world.
The collective has efficiently dug into its audience culture to highlight its motivations (the hunt for exclusive arts) and aspirations. The campaign features sharp music bands like Utah Saints and underground stars such as Bruce LaBruce and Billy Childish; artists few people know, but icons for the British underground scene. Blacksmoke is going against a majority of climate change campaigns that feature global celebrities such as Leonardo Di Caprio, thus aiming at reaching the wide majority of “people”.
Blacksmoke aim at creating a buzz in the British underground scene and on the internet. Visuals and clips are relayed on the web through Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube etc.
One can however question the efficiency of such an unconventional campaign. Indeed the use of alternative artists pushes the target audience to focus more on the communication channel than on the actual message. Just flick through the comments posted underneath the pieces of art on the internet and you will see that the majority of posts are actually more interested in the artistic happening than in the message conveyed.
The campaign manages to reach its target audience (get a foot in the door) but actually fails to transmit the message (pass the door) and therefore inspire action. This observation leads to the question to what extent climate change communication can be tailored to an audience’s motivations and “scene” without dissolving the message in everyday life inspirations.
As an example of the material featured in this campaign, you can watch below the Danger Global Warming tune, remixed by Utah Saints and video clip by Alexandre Athane, “As an allegory for recycling, influential musicians and DJ’s from around the world are remixing the official Danger Global Warming theme tune, featuring lead vocals by Hugh Cornwell and a 35 piece orchestra”.
Caroline Martinot
By Ben Ferguson and Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Monday, 30 November 2009, Independent
Only seven days to go now, in the Countdown to Copenhagen – one week until 192 nations come together to try to negotiate a new international climate treaty that will allow the world to deal with the potentially catastrophic threat of global warming.
Most world leaders, from US President Barack Obama down, will attend the meeting in the Danish capital which begins on 7 December and lasts until 19 December; it will be one of the largest international gatherings ever seen, with about 15,000 delegates and diplomats working behind the prime ministers and presidents who will make the final decisions.
But there is another gathering taking place in Copenhagen, running in parallel with the main conference, and that is the coming together of environmental activists from all over the world, who are flocking to Denmark to cheer the conference on, as it were, and also to give it a few sharp prods – to remind the presidents and the prime ministers doing the deciding that the situation is serious and needs an adequate response.
There may be 10,000 of them. There may be 20,000. There may be even 30,000. Their official focus will be Klimaforum09, the alternative “people’s summit” which will host speakers such as the anti-globalisation activist Naomi Klein, the author and climate campaigner George Monbiot and the radical Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva. “Klimaforum’s aim is to provide an opportunity for the public to enter into discussion,” said its spokesman Richard Steed. “We’re going to be looking at radical solutions.”
Plenty of people will be offering them. Naomi Klein, the Canadian author whose book No Logo became a key text for anti-globalisation campaigners, contrasted Copenhagen with the “Battle of Seattle”, the angry confrontation with the authorities at the World Trade Organisation conference in 1999, which she took part in.
This time around, she believes, “it’s really tricky for activists in terms of figuring out how you interact with a summit like this. There’s a different dynamic [from Seattle], because the fact is that the people in the streets overwhelmingly support the mission of the meeting in Copenhagen. And, so, they’re not saying ‘no’ to the idea of a climate summit. In fact, they’re saying ‘yes’.”
Friends of the Earth International (FOE) have organised one of the major actions during the conference, known as The Flood. Part of the Global Day of Action on 12 December – the middle Saturday of the conference when the city centre will become a carnival of parades – this will consist of about 3,000 members of the public taking to the streets dressed in blue. They will march towards the Bella Centre, where the main climate conference is being held, after joining up with other groups. “System Change, Not Climate Change” is the slogan for the less formal actions being organised by Climate Justice Action (CJA), the umbrella group for an international network that includes Climate Camp, Focus on the Global South, and the Indian Social Action Forum.
The organisations marching that day plan to convene outside the Bella Centre to show the level of solidarity needed to cut carbon emissions at an appropriate rate. As well as attempting to persuade governments to commit to these targets, the demonstrators will also argue that market-based ideas such as the trading of carbon emissions are merely opportunities for companies to profit from pollution. Most of the protesters reject the involvement of the World Bank in international climate finance.
Exhibitions by members of indigenous populations from Peru, the Philippines and the Arctic will discuss the policies of developed governments, such as the idea of carbon offsetting as a method to reduce carbon emissions. NGOs including The Third World Network, Focus on the Global South and Jubilee South will participate in the official conference and lobby against the dangers of these proposals to local communities.
Crowds are expected to gather in Copenhagen for the arrival of the high delegates on 16 December. At 7pm, during “Earth Hour” the lights of the city will be turned off, sending a message about the need for a commitment to a global climate deal. On the same day, demonstrators will attempt to enter the Bella Centre en masse, turning the debate into the People’s Assembly for Climate Justice.
“We’ll definitely be met with violence from the police,” said UK-based protester Isabel Jama. “CJA has a guideline that we’ll only use our bodies in the protest, and we’re anticipating police tactics to be an obstacle to get around, not to confront. However, this will be different to UK protests where police don’t use teargas, and we’ll be working with legal and medical teams on the day. Danish kids are rowdy and the police use dispersal tactics there.”
Danish officials have taken a firm stance against activism in recent years, and UK protestors are expecting to witness the type of resistance seen in the dismantling of the “Ungdomshuset”, a youth community centre run by activists and musicians in the centre of Copenhagen. When police emptied the building in March 2007, more than 400 people were arrested and teargas was used against the crowds.
The Danish government announced recently that they have turned warehouses and gyms outside the city into temporary prisons, and a new law has been hurried through parliament ahead of the summit to allow police to arrest anyone who they suspect might breach the peace.
“Protests have begun to combat these infringements of civil liberties, and whilst there’s an ideological perspective to their action their point is informed by the environmental agenda that requires a constructive outcome,” said Danish student Seb Ross.
Who’s who: The activists
Never Trust a Cop: anti-capitalist network which formed in April 2009 to mobilise against COP15 and link social struggles and climate activism.
Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: art-activist group from Bristol which is teaming up with Climate Camp, pictured, unleash civil disobedience on Reclaim Power day.
n La Via Campesina: movement which coordinates peasant organisations of small and middle-scale producers to search for sustainable agriculture.
Food Not Bombs: grassroots movement which shares free vegan and vegetarian meals at demonstrations.
Climate Justice Action: global network committed to taking the urgent actions needed to combat climate change
Indian Social Action Forum: national forum of more than 500 social action groups, people’s movements and progressive intellectuals that resists globalisation and defends democracy in India.
Act on Copenhagen
UK Government’s ambition for aglobal deal on climate change
www.actoncopenhagen.decc.gov.uk
Author - Rosemary Randall
Psychoanalysis has a complex view of the human psyche and its motivations. Its theories assume that we do not necessarily know ourselves well, that we hide our less worthy motives from ourselves, repress our unacceptable passions and that our sense of self may be contingent and fragile. How might such theories help us understand issues of identity in relation to climate change?
The sociologist Anthony Giddens calls the current period one of ‘late’ or ‘high’ modernity, a post-traditional order characterised psychologically by doubt and existential uncertainty. It is a period in which capitalism has become intensely consumer focused, its reach and systems have become truly global and aggressive marketing techniques – often making use of psychoanalytic insights to do with sexuality and desire – have become the norm. Objects of consumer desire are created and coded around identity markers: people ‘like you’ buy this or that. People ‘like you’ will be excluded or become social pariahs if you do not. Identity appears at this level to be a matter of individual choice, selected from a range of market-influenced options.
The questions and issues that patients bring to the consulting room have changed. Although the same bedrock of depression and anxiety can be discerned, the troubles of late modernity are filtered through preoccupations with ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where is my life going?’ and doubt and dissatisfaction at what life offers.
Moral commentators might see such questions as indicative of decadence or self-indulgence. However psychoanalysis notes in them a fragility and vulnerability in the basic sense of self that has damaging consequences for the individual who suffers from it.
Such people need constant confirmation and affirmation from others, are subject to experiences of fragmentation and disintegration, and easily experience the crippling emotions of shame and self-consciousness when faced with even the mildest criticism from self or others. Their very existence can feel in doubt and this inner self-doubt is often mirrored by outer self-aggrandisement and omnipotence.
In the UK the work of Winnicott and in the US the work of Kohut have led the way in unscrambling the early, pre-oedipal origins of this vulnerability. It is well summarised in Phil Mollon’s aptly titled book ‘The fragile self: the structure of narcissistic disturbance’. While we see this fragile self writ large in the consulting room, we also see it writ small in day-to-day encounters and in the well-noted difficulties that individuals have in making the life-style changes that climate change requires of people in the developed nations. Where a vulnerable identity is supported by buying into the ‘right’ consumer options and life-style, change is hard.
Tim Jackson and other commentators have noted the complex relationship between material goods and a socially constructed sense of identity but I would like to suggest that psychoanalysis can offer help in how we try to effect the necessary social change.
If we understand the vulnerability and fragility of self that underlies the attachment to material goods then our approach to climate change shifts from a focus on engaging the public through convincing/persuading/messaging to a focus on supporting/listening/understanding.
Instead of looking for the ‘right’ way to communicate we should explore how to create social settings that both respect people’s fragile identities and establish and nurture alternative social norms. We can use both existing networks that offer alternative foci for people’s identity (for example faith groups, neighbourhood groups, cultural groups) and create new forms of support that take account of the fragile ‘I’, strengthen new social identities and break the relationship between consumer goods and a functioning sense of self.
In the ‘Carbon Conversations’ project, which I presented recently at the Manchester International Festival, we use small, facilitator-led groups, that focus on values, emotions, meaning and identity to explore how people can reduce carbon emissions.
When people have space to explore their personal relationship to a high-carbon, consumption-driven life-style and when their vulnerability around identity issues can be supported, they develop the confidence and the staying power to make significant life-style changes. Clearly good facilitation is key to such groups. Facilitators need good relational skills and sensitivity to unconscious group process combined with technical knowledge, in order to deliver these groups well. However, when these qualities are present the pay-offs for members of these groups are significant: a new-found capacity to make measurable reductions in carbon emissions and a lasting and genuine commitment to creating a different kind of society.
It is my hope that the next few years will see many more projects using insights from psychoanalysis and other therapeutic models to facilitate change in a broad range of social contexts.
I attended the UK Premier of ‘Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai’ from the Green Belt Movement. Taking Root tells the dramatic story of Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai whose simple act of planting trees grew into a nationwide movement to safeguard the environment, protect human rights, and defend democracy.
The Green Belt Movement (GBM) was founded in 1977 by Wangari Maathai (Nobel Laureate 2004). Green Belt Movement’s approach is based on the premise that truly sustainable development can only take place through recognizing the link between the environment, democracy, and peace.
Through its holistic approach to development, Green Belt Movement addresses the underlying causes of poverty and environmental degradation at the grassroots level. Green Belt Movement programmes use a ten-step development model that mobilizes communities to take action in their local environments. As a result over 40 million trees have been planted and hundreds of thousands of women in rural Kenya have lifted their families out of poverty.
I recommend seeing the film as it a true inspiration to all environmental campaigners. I believe it’s available on DVD at takingrootfilm.com/purchase.htm
The Green Awards Best Green Campaigner category is for those sorts of individuals. See www.greenawards.co.uk/categories_x_16/categories_x_16/best_green_campaigner_award We’re looking for any campaigner who has set a goal or campaign target, has set about achieving it and can explain what they were able to achieve against the odds. Campaigns can be as local as your street, school, college or company or may involve a town, city, borough or even a national campaign.
The Campaigner of the Year will be the individual who is judged to have been most creative in getting results for their chosen issue, regardless of the size of the campaign or the budget.
Wangari Maathai became the first environmentalist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She overcame unimaginable obstacles that most of us never experience in daily life and yet still maintained a vision and reached into the consciousness of ordinary people to empower themselves to protect the environment and in doing so alleviate poverty. I think one thing I took from last night was the thought that no matter how big the problem is we face we can all make a difference and we should never just sit back through apathy when we hear of environmental degradation happening in other parts of the world such as the destruction of the forests. Because ultimately the planet will survive but the human race might not be quick enough to adapt to the changes that lay ahead because of the effects of global warming and climate change. We need to be focussed on our own survival and we need inspirational leaders to engage the mass consciousness. According to Wangari Maathai’s,Oslo, 10 December 2004, ”In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.”
To enter the Best Green Campaigner Category visit: www.greenawards.co.uk/categories_x_16/categories_x_16/best_green_campaigner_award
For more information on the Green Belt Movement who is an Institutional partner for this year’s Green Awards visit: www.greenbeltmovement.org
I think sometimes you’ve just got to get out from under the pile of e-mails and overbearing work schedules to mobilise yourself and generate awareness through mass protest for the issues one cares about. I often think of the quote by Martin Luther King Jr who said “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that happen.” I did wonder how easy it would be for people to show any sort of freedom of expression in the Square Mile with so much regulation, control and overbearing protectionist systems in place preventing the public from diverting from their ‘acceptable’ forms of behaviour, dress and actions. The closer I got to the centre your’e reminded that we’re in a society where we’re being denied some of our basic freedoms with CCTV cameras everywhere and roadblocks herding us through predefined routes. One of my favourite books is the Traveller by John Twelve-Hawkes which muses over a battle in society between randomness and one driven by systems. It’s quite frightening to realise Britain has more surveillance than any other state in Europe. And as communication is a cornerstone to civilization it’s worrying that more people are more institutionalised than ever, armchair-ridden followers of fashion and not willing to stand-up and fight for what they believe in. Anthony Robbins neatly puts it that were immersed in and deluded by this ‘all pervasive hypnotic culture’. Even though we’ve all been very institutionalised and our ideas homogenised as citizens,if it’s a debate between nature and nurture I think we all have the inbuilt capacity to get out there sometimes and shout as loud as we can. I suppose that’s why football matches play such an important role in society as they provide an outlet for people to reconnect with their tribal roots of solidarity and group expression. If we don’t mobilise now as the earth faces the catastrope of a 2 degree temperature rise we’ll be all responsible for the slow suffication of our innate communications skills and more worryingly witness to the slow degredation and further exploitation of our planetary scarce resources. We must maintain a voice and wake up! On a more positive note this week it was good to see docu films such as ‘Who Killed The Electric Car’ aired on national TV last night. And by the way, it was a sunny, chilled out, peacful and positive day on Bishopsgate today. I’m definately off to the next Climate Camp. So how is it that The Evening Standard showed the front page like Armageddon. Oh yes…of course the state apparatus having it’s say.
