Pale Green Mainstream

I was wondering about civilization, and about climate change, and thinking as always about how interesting the next century’s going to be. I looked up ‘Civilisation’ in the dictionary, just to be sure that I knew what it meant, and came across ‘Poop’ (it happens all the time. Dictionary-induced ADD).

So I asked some adolescents what ‘Poop’ meant. They were enthusiastic about it, in the way that only adolescents and Leon Schuster can be about all things fecal. If you want to talk to adolescents about the back bit of a ship and you want them to pay attention and concentrate, then don’t call it a Poop.

Same with climate change. Don’t call it global warming in public unless you want some armchair expert pounding out letters to the editor about how much snow there’s been in Antarctica lately and that last time he checked that didn’t mean warm.

There’s glitch in the ECM (effective communication matrix) with regard to the telling of the climate and emissions story. It does need to be told like a story, and with pictures too, because that’s what ordinary people all over the world respond to. They don’t relate and certainly can’t respond constructively to papers by A. Climatologist et al. Actually, there are some marginally more-informed people who don’t respond terribly constructively to them either, as a quick look around the comments section of climate-related articles in MIT’s Technology Review will tell you.

For a good few decades now, climate scientists have been trying to say what they need to say but can’t say in words that most citizens (even ones who read Popular Mechanics rather than People) can relate to. The beleaguered scientists wave graphs around and talk about ‘albedo’ and ‘hockey sticks" and ‘ITCZ’ and people either pity them, or think they’re crazy and should get out more, or that it must be a conspiracy by eco-terrorists against Our Way of Life. The Greens, you know. I pay my taxes, I don’t hurt anyone, I put a Ronnie Bag on my pavement at least once a year, leave me alone.
There are poets and artists and other assorted activists who do understand the scientists to some degree but they almost always end up dementedly joining Greenpeace and are thus further lost to the world of reason, which does not help the cause. (By the way, Germaine, your comment in public about the crocodile guy getting his just desserts definitely doesn’t help the cause, even if it is true)

It’s Joe Soap who could, if he chose to, contribute to a huge whack of mitigation. Instead of to a huge whack of catastrophe. He won’t choose to, though. He has to be made to, and bullying isn’t allowed so manipulation is necessary.

Someone has cottoned onto this and is looking at how best to deploy the manipulation. It’s the British Institute for Public Policy Research (described by RealClimate.org as “a UK based left-leaning think tank”), and they’re using a company called Linguistic Landscapes, which has some nice window dressing but who are basically about PR and marketing. While there’s something about this affair between Marketing and Climate that makes me want to scream, it might be fairly good work. Depending whose side you’re on. Pale Green might become mainstream because you can depend on marketing to sell stuff or die trying, and that’s what they’ll be selling with this. They’re using language like “…we need to work in a shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement… treat climate change communications in the same way as brand communications… Approach positive climate behaviors in the same way as marketers approach buying and consuming”. I’m biting my tongue.

The astonishing ongoing success of the Eden Project in Cornwall had mostly to do with horticultural determination in the beginning, but I bet marketing helped with getting the vital millions of visitors in. All those visitors leave with a smile that didn’t necessarily come from consuming stuff, and that’s cool. They also leave knowing what "waste neutral" means, and that’s very valuable in ways that money can’t buy.

I have this fantasy in which the mega consumers of Bedfordview get sentenced to a month’s tourism in Cornwall instead of Dubai and come back to happily convert their previously pastoral but now hideous suburb into an undulating valley of bubble domes and vegetable gardens, with little padstals along Kloof road. It’s nice, that dream. Sunbeds swopped for gaily fluttering umbrellas, gyms turned into concert venues, peace love and flowers man. Can you dig it?