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)
REPRODUCED - Article by Alex Brownsell, marketingmagazine.co.uk, 30 March 2010
The government is to discourage brands from using terms such as “green”, “environmentally friendly” and “eco” when promoting products.
The recommendations are among changes proposed by Defra to its Green Claims Code, which the department is revising for the first time since 2003.
The draft guidelines, which, if adopted, will inform the CAP and BCAP advertising codes and provide a point of reference for the ASA, encourage the legitimate promotion of sustainable products.
They suggest that advertisers should avoid using “vague and undefined” terms in promotions. This would include describing products and services as “sustainable”.
In the case of a new green technology or environmental issue, Defra suggests brands partner public and private sector bodies to help educate consumers, before launching their own campaign.
The draft code recommends “choice editing” by brands, including promoting greener options with price discounts and loyalty rewards, and reducing the prominence or availability of less environmentally friendly alternatives.
Brands making claims about future performance, as energy company EDF has with its 2020 carbon-reduction campaign, would be subject to annual third-party progress checks. If a company did not meet targets referred to in its marketing, this would be “made clear in the public domain”.
Ads such as Crédit Agricole’s green banking activity may also be affected by the guidelines.
Robert Keitch, head of brand and membership at the Direct Marketing Association, said many brands are yet to realise that advertising around greener products can provide a “competitive advantage”.
However, there remain concerns that the revised guidelines would not achieve their goal of rewarding companies that address the impact of their product on the environment.
Blake Ludwig from environmental pressure group We Are Futureproof,said:”The crux of the whole problem seems to be when we define something as ‘green’.
“Something that is less bad isn’t the same as something that is good. At the moment [the code] doesn’t do enough to pull apart those who are genuinely doing things in an environmentally friendly way from those who are greenwashing.”
http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/993420/Defra-proposes-tighter-control-green-claims/
Article reproduced, author: Donald Carli*
Most people will tell you that they care about saving our forests, but they tend to be uninformed or misinformed when it comes to knowing the causes of deforestation or some of the places being affected most significantly by land use change that kills trees, pollutes rivers and contributes to climate change. Until recently the conventional wisdom has been to demonize paper and print media as the major culprit behind “killing trees” and to idealize digital media as “green and groovy” alternative without consideration for the full backstory or life cycle footprint of either.
Pixels Don’t Grow on Trees
Paper and print media supply chains are far from being sustainable, but may be far less of a threat to forests than the “Tree-Wash” claims about how digital media saves trees or how pixels are greener than pages. “Tree-Wash” is my term for a special class of “greenwash” making false, misleading or unsupported marketing claims that ignore the causes of deforestation associated with digital media, or that fail to identify the actual trees and forests allegedly being saved or planted.
However, the Copenhagen Climate Summit and technologies developed to verify land use are likely to play a major role in changing the status quo with regard to foot-printing forests, identifying trees and the calculating the climate impacts of coal-powered IT.
Are You Seeing REDD yet?
Deforestation and the sustainable management of the world’s forests are serious issues that should be top of mind given the world’s focus on climate change. Trees sequester carbon equal to half of their dry weight, and scientists estimate that as much 20 percent of total emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) are emitted due to deforestation, land use change and forest degradation. For that reason, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is a major issue that will be addressed in Copenhagen.
Sustainable forestry will play an increasingly important role in supporting the literacy and sanitary existence of the world’s growing population. In addition to providing millions of jobs and providing the wood fiber used to produce over 350 million tons of paper per year, the world’s forests also serve as the planet’s “lungs” by converting or “sequestering” atmospheric carbon dioxide into woody biomass and providing other important environmental services. In addition, sustainably harvested forest biomass will increasingly be employed by a new generation of integrated biorefineries to replace fossil fuel energy and petrochemical feedstocks.
According to some reports just one day’s deforestation is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of eight million people flying to New York; in order to address such a serious challenge and provide a basis to monitoring the reduction of deforestation and forest degradation, an impressive array of geo-locative and remote sensing capabilities are being developed to map the world’s forests and identify the location of individual trees with startling precision.
For example, as part of the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and its member countries and partners is undertaking a global remote sensing survey of forests covering the whole land surface of the Earth. FAO is also providing technical support for national forest assessments and the establishment of national forest monitoring systems. See: Global Forest Resources Assessment
Do You See the Forest or the Trees?
Remote sensing of forest biomass and geo-locative tagging of trees will become increasingly important as the exemption of carbon dioxide emissions from bioenergy use will only be appropriate if there is a system that also counts emissions from deforesting land and land use activities that degrade forest ecologies. In that way, if biomass for energy use results in deforestation, emissions are counted as land use emissions equivalent to fossil fuel emissions. However, these new applications will also be making it possible to stem the tsunami of “Go Digital, Save Trees” Tree-Wash marketing claims that many marketers of e-billing, e-books and digital media have been flooding the market with.
One of the little known but significant causes of deforestation in the United States related to digital media is the practice of Mountain Top Removal, employed to mine the coal used to generate electricity in states like West Virginia. In 2008 over 41 million tons of coal were extracted by means of Mountain Top Removal in West Virginia. Coal provides the majority of electric power in 32 states, and 99 percent of the electricity generated in West Virginia comes from coal.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that by 2013 an area the size of Delaware will have been deforested to extract coal. In addition to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the energy consumed by digital media’s IT infrastructure, the deforestation, toxic air pollution and water pollution impacts associated with coal mining, coal combustion and coal waste need to be considered before making claims about digital media being greener than print or saving trees.
Truth in Augmented Reality
Deforestation, illegal logging and land-use changes that result in greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental damage are serious matters that billions of people care about. With today’s advanced remote sensing and geo-location capabilities consumers have every reason to expect marketers making claims about their offerings saving trees, or resulting in the planting of trees, to identify the trees in question and account for the life cycle impacts associated with their products. Even if the FTC does not yet prosecute such cases, that would not preclude a competitor from calling on the National Advertising Review Council to review the truthfulness and accuracy of a green marketing claim.
As we enter the “Post Madoff” trust-but-verify age of social-media powered transparency and climate awareness, it is becoming more possible and important than ever to monitor the green message content and supply chain impacts of advertising. Pixels may not grow on trees, but it is increasingly likely that remote sensing and augmented reality pixels can and will be used to hold marketers responsible for the carbon footprint of their media supply chains and the truthfulness and accuracy of advertising claims they make about saving or planting trees.
*Author: Donald Carli
Senior Research Fellow
Institute for Sustainable Communication
http://www.sustaincom.org
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 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.
