Today is the International Day for Biological Diversity, so attempts are being made to drum up public concern about biodiversity loss in time-honoured fashion – by asking: “how much is it worth?”
Well, the ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ (TEEB) report for Business will be published in July, and – according to today’s Guardian – [...]
This piece from Common Dreams provides a great and condensed overview of Lakoff’s political thought, and how it’s rooted in an understanding of neuroscience. It provides an account of why progressive political argument fails when it relies on logic and neglects the importance of emotion.
There’s a whiff of social engineering to identity campaigning, says Justin Rowlatt, BBC’s ‘ethical man’ on last night’s Analysis.
The piece opens with Soli from Futerra recounting her ‘magic wand’ experiment: she asked a group of environmentalists how many of them would magic away climate change if people were left unchanged after its disappearance. Apparently, precious [...]
Here’s Do The Green Thing’s spoof promotion for Nothing:
Pretty cool, eh? Do the Green Thing say:
Shopping is a buzz, an energy, but it uses energy too, all the energy needed to make all the things we shop for. So if you’ve got to shop but want to see the global temperature drop, buy the green [...]
Solitaire Townsend, Director of Futerra ‘Sustainability Communications’, writes:
The notion of changing the audience rather than the message is at the heart of the ‘identity campaigning’ concept led by WWF. Identity campaigning argues that we shouldn’t accept the basic psychology of our audience – but seek to change it.
This means re-programming people’s values away from consumption, [...]
Adam Corner just pointed this ad out to me. What are the likely impacts of an advertisement like this? Ed Gillespie suggests that it will be counterproductive, because…
the danger is that by pumping up the high octane drama of an ad, you increase the risk of viewers feeling manipulated and dismissing it as pure propaganda
Another [...]
George Monbiot does us all a huge service by underscoring the importance of beginning to understand and respond to the psychological impact of an awareness of climate change.
Old men, George Monbiot suggests in Clive James isn’t a sceptic, he’s a sucker - but this may be the reason (today’s Guardian), may be more [...]
Shouldn’t advertisements that deliberately work to drive positional consumption be banned, working as they do to undermine the values that must underpin concern about global challenges like climate change?
Which is more damaging - the highly polluting car (219gCo2/km) or the psychological havoc that Lexus’s ad agency wreak in selling it?
How will we come to view [...]
The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a speech on the environmental crisis last night. Much of it resonates with our identity campaigning approach.
“Many of the things which have moved us towards ecological disaster have been distortions in our sense of who and what we are, and their overall effect has been to isolate us more and more [...]
The Institute of Public Policy Research has just published the results of deliberative workshop research on public responses to climate change. See the coverage in yesterday’s Guardian or download the IPPR report itself here. The work draws on the Values Modes analysis as championed by Pat Dade at Cultural Dynamics.
There’s much in this report that [...]