What we say about our lives is central to the way we try to make sense of them. It shapes how we relate to each other and how we act, with its ever present whiff of pretense.
As professional storytellers, communicators on environmental issues have a crucial role to play. We're working to get our collective heads around the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced.
We’re up shit creek, and it’s up to environmental communicators to help explain to everyone what a paddle should look like.
Since at least the late 1990s a consensus has been building around the best way to do this. It’s heavily influenced by insights and techniques from commercial marketing. Over time it has solidified into a kind of orthodoxy. It revolves around concepts like sustainability, solutions and positivity. These are the chosen buzzwords with which we market the future.
But they are myths.
Like most myths they are not always or completely wrong. They came about as useful ways to frame the world, at least for a time. They are ways in which we try to rein in the chaos that we inhabit. But they have a shelf life, and they have started to stink and ooze corruption of all kinds.
The mythologizing process in environmental communications follows that described in 1988 in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. The problem starts with what is allowed to be said, but soon becomes just what we are in the habit of saying, and then what we are in the habit of even thinking.
Fundraising is a major driver of this process. Getting money is a primary concern for charities and non-government organizations. They are staffed by humans with children and mortgages. Career environmentalists like me are rewarded, promoted and allowed to do their work when we do whatever gets the most funding. This means whatever best fits the desires of those wealthy enough to provide that funding.
This process has become an extension of the commercialization of everything in our world. To succeed, environmental communicators like me have to prioritize getting our work published. That means doing what’s approved and paid for by editors or line managers. Because they’ve been more successful in this system, they will likely be even more wedded to it. They have more to lose if they step out of line.
It’s a poor fit with the fundamentals of real environmentalism. The movement has its roots in a direct challenge to the system that creates rich people and insists that money decides our hierarchy and what we talk and think about.
Today, organizations posing the most effective challenge to the unsustainable status quo struggle for funding. Those more in line with the status quo do better. This is limiting and undermining humanity’s response to the dire situation it has created.
Radical honesty is our best option for breaking this deadlock. The myths that have built up to cushion the uncomfortable reality must be dispelled. Not to replace this orthodoxy with another. Grand schemes and simplifications are part of the problem. But to clear away the confusions. That is the only way we can all go forward as we see fit with our eyes wide open.
My first and primary recommendation is simple. Information or ideas should not be dismissed because they are unpleasant or unwelcome. We should focus on whether or not they are true. The information that a truck is driving at me as I cross the road is not welcome. It might cause me to be fearful, or even panic. But it’s important that I know.
The environmental movement talks a lot about being “evidence based”. It’s time we started communicating the actual evidence, and what we as informed individuals honestly think about it.
To do this we need to re-evaluate the tropes and myths that have built up in this movement over the years. We need to stop telling people what we would like to think, or what we would like them to think. We need to be bolder and more creative about saying things people might not want to hear.
The most powerful ally of the environmental movement is reality. This movement is now in serious danger of losing contact with it altogether. This is leaving gaps in the public arena for others with much more damaging agendas than ours. It can only contribute to the inevitable oncoming chaos.
It’s going to take a lot more than just honesty to navigate the choppy waters in store for all humanity. But getting soberly aligned with reality is a primary prerequisite to any such effort. We face complex, unprecedented and interwoven issues. The last thing we should be doing is clinging to orthodoxies that have failed to address them appropriately up until now.
“Sustainability” does not cover the predicament humanity now finds itself in. The concept is generally ill-defined and its real meaning largely ignored. And the situation is not amenable to ‘solutions’.
What has been done to the Earth’s complex living systems cannot be undone by human intervention. And being relentlessly positive about it will not stave off its effects.
Those challenges came about through the very same ways of thinking we are now using to delude ourselves about it. That we are in control. That consumption and money can be used to address any challenge. That progress can be made through arguments and blame.
These are the main ideas I will be exploring in this newsletter. Throughout I’d love to hear what you think about them, even and especially if it’s completely at odds with what I am saying.
Courageous, challenging, honest and deeply refreshing. I’m in.