Selling the future

Today the environmental movement does a great deal more marketing than activism, which is excellent...for the market

The environmental movement often assumes that if we provide people with accurate information they will act appropriately. They will make the changes needed to protect the environment. 

However, this theory, like most theories, is cobbled together from a bunch of shonky assumptions. To start with, there’s the assumption of good faith on the part of the organisation communicating. But careerists at organisations desperate for cash will say some very dubious things. And we can all get carried away with our own ideology and mythology. This can make us come to believe that promoting them for the ‘greater good’ is more important than telling the truth. 

Here's a real example. I worked for a couple of years at Greenpeace New Zealand. At the time one of our main campaigns was against deep sea oil drilling. In 2017 the oil company Anadarko, which sounds like something from a Batman comic, abandoned its drilling rights and left the country. This was largely triggered by two failed $300 million well attempts in the face of rock bottom oil prices. For weeks after the Greenpeace fundraisers hit the phones claiming they had seen off the company with some rubber boats and strongly worded banners.    

Aside from this kind of truth bending, NGOs don't always know the real facts or their context in the first place. Many are blissfully isolated by their certainties from such things as extensive debates with experts in related fields, especially ones hostile to the NGOs ideology. They just don't do third party peer review of fundraising material.

NGOs are not always wrong. But many operate on the assumption that they’re always right. The marketing and communications departments, in effect, are propaganda departments. They are not called ‘the conversation department’, or the ‘considered debate’ department. Their stated aim is to promote particular points of view, rather than others. That inescapably means not telling the whole truth all of the time. Often, for example, this means blaming one group of people for what’s going wrong, farmers, oil executives, without being clear about everyone's complicity. 

The nature of this approach is also betrayed in the term “awareness raising”, as I pointed out last week. This has a similar Theory of Change behind it. If only people were “aware” of what is “really happening” then they would then be moved to do what we think they should do. 

There are fundamental flaws in this. In 1961, for example, when WWF was founded, it was fair to say the average Brit was unaware of the plight of the African White Rhino.

In 2022 it's absurd to suggest an average person is not aware of climate change, or of the impact of our consumption on the natural world, unless the average person truly is a fuckwit, in which case we’re all wasting our time. 

It’s not that people don’t know. It is tempting to think that they simply don’t give a shit. But this too is an oversimplification. It is more that people have a vested interest in not upsetting their stolen apple cart. The systems we live in also keep us very busy. This makes it difficult to find the time for real politics, let alone activism. This is really the challenge we face. It's not about overcoming people’s ignorance of trophic cascades, the circular economy and the IUCN Red List.

Industrialised political systems keep their participants peaceful by steadily increasing their affluence and/or punishing them if they misbehave. Disrupting the status quo ensures you will struggle to make a living in these societies, where the cost of living is rising rapidly. You'll probably get arrested. Persist, and you'll be imprisoned. 

For example, when I was in my 20s I knew a young Welsh activist. We’ll call him Adam. He had been studying for a Phd in artificial intelligence. Then he fell in with hunt saboteurs disrupting fox hunts. He graduated from there to activism in various animal rights, humanitarian and environmental causes. He was standing next to a 15 year old Palestinian activist when an Israeli sniper shot the kid dead. I admired him immensely. I bought him drinks from my pay packet as a junior reporter for a local newspaper. He ended up living on the floor of a kitchen in a squat, hiding from the police, with his mental health hanging by a thread. I was slowly promoted. I rented a lovely historic cottage. I saved up my money. I learnt marketing and communications techniques working for some of the organisations that were supposed to be on Adam’s side.     

In the words of Banksy: “You’re an acceptable level of threat. If not, you would know about it”. Or as Billy Bragg said: “If you’re not picking up flak, you ain’t over the target.” NGOs that ostensibly challenge the status quo pick up a surprising lack of flak, don’t you think? 

Today NGOs do a great deal more marketing than activism. But marketing, at its core, is the business of convincing people to buy things. The implicit Theory of Change here is that we can ‘sell’ people the idea of protecting the environment. This inherently also links this to ‘selling’ NGO services to raise money.  

This creates fundamental problems. These have been well explored by the team at Common Cause in the UK. Their work is based on their research into the operation of values in our culture. The point is essentially that environmental protection and restoration is, surprise, surprise, not the same as a packet of biscuits or a brand of hair gel. It’s not just another product or service. By using the techniques and terminology of marketing we are consciously and unconsciously inferring that it is. This directly bolsters the commodification of life on Earth, which is the very problem we are up against. It’s like doing a pub crawl to raise money for Alcoholics Anonymous. It also leads directly to consumer based decision-making. 

We see an advert for a new car one moment, and ‘marketing material’ from an environmental NGO the next. This inevitably leads us to compare them in our minds. Should we buy those new clothes we feel we need, or donate that money to a worthy cause and receive some more charity marketing material? 

Our society is swamped with messaging about personal, individualised values. So it’s likely the cause will lose out, or at least become a trade off or an afterthought. $1 for our conscience for every $100 on crap we don’t need, which puts the planet about $99 behind. This conflation of values might even help assuage our rightful guilt about our constant consumption, by constantly making us feel good for doing our tiny ‘bit’. This may mean that environmental NGOs are actually helping to oil the wheels of the consumption they are supposed to be up against. 

The Earth's life support systems are priceless. But the environmental movement feels compelled to frame its cause in commercial, capitalist and scientific terms - and effectively putting a price on everything. Sacrificial, spiritual and experiential terms are left out of the frame. This leads directly to bastardizations like “natural capital”, “natural resources” and “environmental services” as if the entire planet were a gigantic supermarket.

This just reinforces the lie that nature only exists to be exploited by humanity and turned into money. This is particularly absurd now, when the value of any given currency bears very little relation to the value of any physical resources. Money today is mostly created by computers in central banks. Much of the 'trading' is now in financial instruments, rather than in actual commodities. 

As Matthew McConaughey ad libbed about the modern financial system all too accurately in The Wolf of Wall Street: “It’s a fugazi, a fugazee. It’s a wazzy, it’s fairy dust, it doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It’s no matter. It’s not on the elemental chart. It’s not fucking real.” 

There is a very real danger, then, when we frame the natural world in these financial terms. It infers that we can continue to exchange the natural world for this imaginary thing called “money”. It suggests decisions about the future of the natural world can be made by ‘balancing’ how fast we destroy priceless irreplaceable things with how fast we can accumulate pieces of paper and numbers on a screen.

It’s the environmental equivalent of “How many camels for your daughter?” Except camels have genuine value and are not notional, theoretical camels bet against the future goat market. 

Then there's digital currencies like Bitcoin. They are now wasting huge amounts of electricity to make computers do pointless sums. This would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so mindlessly suicidal. We’d almost be better off just giving up on progress entirely and using all that processing power to let everyone play Call of Duty Nine until the lights go out and we can fight it out for real. That might ultimately be what Mark Zuckerberg and his mates are suggesting with all this “meta” bullshit.

Meanwhile, despite what people like me might have told you about emissions trading, carbon offsetting, conscious consumerism and donating to environmental causes, the forces of nature are entirely immune to bribery.  

Conscious consumerism is the natural follow on from this madness. It suggests we can ‘solve’ consumerism with conscious consumerism. This is like saying one can cure alcoholism with conscious alcoholism. Today our consumption addiction and its mounting ramifications is more like all the bottles of alcohol on Earth have been turned into Molotov Cocktails and we’re still all desperately trying to drink from them, while smoking cigars.