Truffula

Somebody Else's Problem

sustainability

In trying to tackle some of the world's unsustainable practices, of which there are many, we really are up against a lot. Not just the usual Captain Planet villains: the industrialists, the capitalists, the marketers and heavy polluters who operated with slave labour conditions and pollute without guilt. There are also many psychological and practical barriers to sustainable behaviour, and likewise, psychological and practical motivators for relatively unsustainable activity. In many instances these have been baked into the systems which we take for granted in our day-to-day life: our transport infrastructure which often favours the fast movement of cars over the safety of pedestrians, our systems for trade such as supermarkets which de-socialise the simple act of purchasing food in the name of efficiency and profit margins— but often reframe such losses as benefits such as "convenience".

The individual actors in these transactions and behaviours— the shoppers and shopkeepers, the motorists and pedestrians— are not to blame, individually, for their unsustainable behaviours; they are systemic, and systemic problems cannot be solved by individual behaviour, as much as we would like to think so. Instead, they require either systemic change, or social action— the kinds of action which spread through social influence. These are the same social forces which create unsustainable behaviour: the desire to mimic, to meet expectations, to adhere to a common social and moral code and to do things together.

I have been thinking for a while that the environmental movement was limited in its success for many years due to problems with its image— particularly the stereotype of commerce-hating, tree-hugging hippies— and also its marketing. It has often utilised negative emotions of fear and disgust to motivate people, which has limited efficacy when competing with the much more comfortable and appealing images of consumer culture. With a few rare exceptions, it has, until recently, failed to grasp the importance of effective marketing in delivering a message. People don't need to be guilted into behaving a certain way, as they will ultimately end up resenting the message and the messenger. The new behaviour (or in some cases, the older, usurped behaviour) needs appeal, it needs to be more attractive, tangibly beneficial, and attainable without substantial additional effort.

Part of this process is perhaps an increasing awareness of the externalised impacts of the systems we use— the compromised safety of pedestrians, the living conditions of manufacturing workers, the decline in wildlife and so on. But life's various pressures, and the sheer number of responsibilities we have thrust upon us in modern life— to our families, jobs, dying children in Africa, the whales and dolphins, Asian factory workers, the rainforests and the companies we owe money to— all make it impossible to deal with every problem effectively, especially when no tangible, accessible and affordable options seem to be available. So we block it out, cringe for a moment and pick up the same product we have always bought, or perhaps the one next to it with the encouraging leaf on the label and the dubiously suggestive brand name, and the claim that problem #57 of 3462 was not made worse by your purchase.

Real change needs to be attractive, sociable, well-marketed (or visible) and accessible.

I was recently encouraged to read about the Seattle Neighbourhood Greenways group shifted the language they used to talk about different modes of transport, in a way that humanises people instead of categorising them into oppositional groups: instead of pedestrians, people walking; instead of cars, people driving; instead of cyclists, people biking. Not only does this humanisation shift the conversation away from the polarising stereotypes which can stir up and galvanise anger and resentment, it also makes the activities involved more real and personal, so that you can imaging yourself doing them, which I think is a critical tool in the psychology of behaviour change. Some people might think they would never be a "cyclist", if they picture cyclists as competitive, lycra-sporting fanatics, but this, at least to me, is not the image conjured by the phrase "people riding bikes". This is marketing brilliance, of the most friendly and community-minded kind, and judging by the changing landscape of Seattle's people-moving systems, it has been very successful indeed.

This article is a response to Robert Crocker's article, 'Somebody Else's Problem'.

Robert Crocker, 'Somebody Else's Problem': Consumer Culture, Waste and Behaviour Change— The Case of Walking, in Designing for Zero Waste: Consumption, Technologies and the Built Environment, ed. Steffen Lehmann and Robert Crocker (London: Earthscan/Routledge, 2012), pp 11-34.