Environmental communicators are told to tone down, balance out, or avoid ‘negative' messaging. The argument is that it ‘shuts people down’ or pushes them to panic. The theory and fear is this. In the face of the truth people will regress into fearful, conservative, regressive and defensive modes of being. This, it is said, is counterproductive to action. It will undermine the co-operative aims of the environmental movement.
Countless papers, commentators and communications consultants agree. The argument is so common it’s become a kind of orthodoxy in the environmental movement. Often, we respond by offering ‘solutions’, no matter how tenuous or far-fetched they are. If people aren’t given positive solutions, we are told, they will ‘give up’.
There is evidence to support this. I used to work at WWF-UK. One of my colleagues was Dr. Tom Crompton, an expert in altruism. He went on to establish The Common Cause Foundation. Common Cause’s founding report includes the recommendation to: “Avoid relying on messages that emphasise threat and loss.” My friend, psychologist Dr. Niki Harré, from the University of Auckland wrote Psychology for a Better World: Working With People to Save the Planet. In it she enjoins us to “draw on positive emotions.”
But this was never meant to become an exclusive approach that precludes all others. In the hands of less sophisticated practitioners it’s led to an oversimplification of psychological, sociological and anthropological cause and effect. Yes, it’s important that people do not completely lose hope or their sense of agency. But climate change and extinction are not happening overnight. Messaging around them is not the only messaging people are receiving. Our responses are not a one shot deal, and they’re not all the same.
For me, losing connection with reality is the way to lose all hope.
Yes, we might be shocked and numbed by our first realisation of the true scale and depth of our predicament. I certainly was. But that’s not the end of the story. We can take the time to absorb, respond, recover and overcome the shock and numbness. We can reach the other side, ready to act with a better grasp on the facts. That, to me, is a better approach than trying to tip-toe round the facts or pretending they aren’t facts at all.
Some even suggest not being positive enough makes you complicit in people’s, especially young people’s, despair and suicide. I think that despair is more powerfully driven by the fact that people know what’s going on, know it’s negative, and yet nobody will have the conversation. This leaves them feeling not only “negative” about the world, but also isolated and insane for that. It would be like me getting to college without my Cure records.
My father died when I was 10. So far it’s the single most traumatic experience of my existence. It wouldn't have helped if everyone suggested he would come back to life any day now, if I bought the right soap or remembered to turn the lights off.
Many conflate acceptance of negative facts with a negative attitude to them, or life in general. This is reminiscent of the kind of lunacy exhibited in World War One propaganda. Proud British soldiers were forever compelled to whistle songs about smiling through stiff upper lips that were about to be blown off by a stream of machine gun rounds. The point is that there are some things in life it’s best not to be positive about.
In truth, there are a myriad different responses to our situation. Most of them will benefit from being better informed and looking the problems square in the eye. Instead, we have been increasing the potential for shock and paralysis when realisation finally dawns. Because we're increasing the gap between what people think is happening and reality.
The question needs to be asked - what’s the plan? Putting tighter and tighter blinkers on to avoid communicating anything ‘negative’? “Don’t look at the burning planet, look at the lovely windmills?” We're attempting to deal with the most difficult situation humanity has ever faced by ignoring most of the information.
Another concern about this myth is that it rests on arrogance. It relies on elitism and a total lack of respect for an informed democracy. It suggests that those in the know have the right to assume that others can't handle the truth. We must shelter the ‘plebs’ like the babies they are. We must hide or muffle the facts. We special few are the only ones grown up enough to deal with this without panicking.
This is playing out in politics too. Successive governments only have two basic modes of operation. Neither of them actually addresses civilisation’s unsustainability and decline. The first, which is relatively short lived, is where they say “look at the state the last lot left us in.” They pretend their party has never been in power, or that when they were they set the country on the true path to Utopia. When they’ve been in power long enough for everyone to start blaming them for the continuing problems, they pretend those problems don’t exist, or are just about to be solved. They keep it as positive as possible until this wears so thin that everyone sees through it and votes them out. Then the next lot repeat the process.
No government on Earth has the balls to simply say “we’re out of control”. They’d be out of power before they could rob the towels from the state bathrooms.
All the political parties have two things in common. They all say they have the solutions, and they don’t.
The same arrogance feeds the urge to oversimplify very complicated and complex issues. “They're too stupid and distracted to take this in, so just tell them any old shit you can put into bullet points...”
This elitism is hardly surprising. NGO communications departments are largely staffed by an elite class of university graduates from the dominant demographics in their society. This is being exacerbated by the growing popularity and competition for the work.
I went for a job in the communications team at WWF-UK in about 2002. I held an honours degree in English with History. I had a Master’s Degree in Language, Arts and Education. I was a qualified and experienced senior journalist. I'd been working successfully in WWF-UK’s fundraising department, in the same building, with the same people, for more than a year. I had also turned my hand to field photography in places where things bite and kidnap you.
I was pipped for the job by someone direct from the BBC...
Read any ad for these roles. See the requirements for tertiary qualifications. See the hints at the need for extended periods of working for free in internships. These are only possible in families affluent enough to support them.
The resulting arrogance is laughable in the internet age. Everyone has all the information at their fingertips anyway. It doesn't really matter what people in the big NGOs or political parties might like to shield us from.
How do people who believe the public can’t even handle the information about their situation think the masses are going to handle the actual experience?
There are very difficult times, with tough decisions on the horizon. They will require mass participation by ordinary people. We’re arguing they should not be told the full truth, or worse should be deliberately misled.
This kind of half-truth telling leaves the gaps in which it is all too easy for people with different agendas to insert them. If we aren’t telling them the negative truth, then someone else will, with their own spin. Cue QAnon and all the rest.
There’s an important, if somewhat philosophical, point here too. The truth is the truth is the truth. The truth doesn’t care whether you think it’s positive or negative. It doesn’t care whether you like it or not. It is impervious to preference. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are not going to drop because we all feel terribly positive. Feeling groovy is not going to return one extinct species to life. We need not be gloomy, but there’s a real case for taking these things very seriously indeed. Being relentlessly positive does not achieve this.
Demanding that everything that is delivered to you is done in the positive manner is of course also a central tenet of consumer culture. It's an intrinsic part of what's driving many of these problems. It has sadly infected our entire way of seeing ourselves and being in the world.
We are bombarded with marketing. It has convinced us that the primary way to evaluate something is whether or not it makes us happy. In adopting the marketing approach, NGOs have railroaded themselves into pandering to the same selfish instincts.
It’s psychologically inappropriate to be positive at all times for all people. Say, for example, you see someone stumbling out of a car crash that has killed the rest of their family. If they only spoke about the experience in positive terms you would be checking them for a head injury.
We are looking down the barrel of some very dire circumstances. It’s psychologically healthy to allow ourselves time to feel the shock and grief.
What kind of monsters don’t grieve for the loss of more than half of the world’s animals, the onset of climate change, the toxification of an entire planet? We don’t need to stay there, but we do need to go there. That is, if we really want to be psychologically re-adjusted enough to have any chance of getting over and on with it.
What are we being so positive about? Our affluence? Our comfort and convenience? The unsustainable status quo? Are we really trying to deal with this situation then? Or are we just trying to feel good about doing our little ‘bit’, while getting paid and laid and not upsetting anyone?
Positivity, by its very nature, undermines urgency and the willingness to take risks. This is especially true in the environmental realm. Reducing our impact on the world requires sacrificing some of the things we feel most positive about. Wealth. Security. Eating family sized chocolate bars in the bath.
Mild mannered pleas, gentle nudges and 'baby steps' are not going to help the mainstream make or deal with the immensely radical changes ahead.
I’m not suggesting that we should be relentlessly negative. We should not be deliberately or unnecessarily so. I’d even go further, and suggest that we are positive wherever possible and credible. But when it’s not possible or credible to be positive, we shouldn’t stipulate that this is the required response. And when we're told we always have to be positive, we should be concerned.
The myth of positivity is also, of course, a component of the mega myth of continuous progress. At this point in history it’s useful to notice that, contrary to the cheery pop song, things can’t only get better. In a declining unsustainable civilisation, they can get quite a bit worse. And they’ll be worse still if we stumble into them naively.
We need to start refusing to accept that there are only two binary states of being, “positive” and “negative”. We need to present information in the full range of feeling tones and from a range of perspectives.
Let’s assume our audience can cope. That they can select how they choose to respond in a variety of ways. Our work will be more varied and interesting. Our audience will be less inclined to respond to us as if we are trying to sell them a used Toyota Corolla.
I was trained, and have trained others, to write as if our audience were children. How about accepting that they’re not?
I agree with a lot of what you say - "baby steps" is a term that makes me cringe and although I can see some value in nudge-like approaches I don't want to be someone who nudges others. At the very least, nudging misses the opportunity to work with others rather than trick them into doing the right thing. But I think we can separate the emotional valence of how we go about messaging and debate from the messages themselves. It is possible, for example, to get a terminal diagnosis and still be "positive" in the sense I want to promote. I don't think being positive is about being in denial or telling untruths. It is about trying to maintain a certain grace, wisdom and humility, and never claiming to know for sure how things will turn out and who is right and who is wrong. Being negative by my definition is conveying your sense of fear, chaos, anger and despair as if these are the only way to be. To be clear, I'm not saying these emotions are inappropriate, it is more whether they should simply be accepted or actually celebrated. To go back to the health analogy - is the person with a terminal illness who rants and raves against their fate somehow more truthful than the one who accepts what is happening with a certain calmness? Does the former or latter person help others act well in the face of extreme threat? To be clear again, I'm not saying that ranting and raving is bad and it is certainly very human, but the alternative isn't denial. And I guess I am also saying that I think we do better collectively when people are able to centre themselves somehow. I don't know if/how one can prove any of this - maybe it is all about style and my own preference for listening to people who aren't ranting and raving!
Another goodie Andy. Your paragraph on politics is bang on. Reminded me of this never to be heard speech from Kirk Hall - https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/664976fb-8b91-49d2-be49-8202597b157b
Your article theme also had me think of a quote from Bill Rees "Call me a realist not a pessimist."
I often wonder how these writings are received by your fellow SBN team.
Cheers