Saying the Green Thing

If you want to take one thing out of this post, it's to keep an eye out for the upcoming documentary We Are The People We've Been Waiting For. The Executive Producer is Lord David Puttnam, and I was lucky to see a hugely stirring sneak preview of the beginning of it. Orson Wells was quoted as saying that

'Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe,'

and this film promises to tell the story of how the right sort of education may be the only way to prevent the catastrophe that would be serious climate change.

If you want to try to find another thing to take out of this post, keep reading.

A couple of weeks back I somewhat gatecrashed a fantastic meeting of Creative Social, a forum for digital creative directors across the ad industry. Some mixture of my honesty and their generosity ended up with me staying for the main event: two fantastic talks about creative responses to the huge challenges presented by climate change, one by Lord Puttnam and the other by Andy, the founder of Green Thing. I've delayed writing this post as I hoped a video might become available of the talks, but it hasn't yet. I'll post a link if it does.

Both talks were, frankly, excellent, powerful and thought provoking. One particular dynamic was how they approached a very serious issue with similar views of the urgency and importance of the topic, but from very different perspectives: Lord Puttnam from the top-down of government and Andy from the very roots-up of the Green Thing's social media. The degree of consensus was overwhelming. This begged the question, if we are all talking about the same thing then what will it take to make the large-scale changes in global political policy and consumer behaviour that we need to stand a chance at preventing catasrophic climate change. I think that the answer is working together to raise each other aloft (D&A).

Before I summarise (totally inadequately) the two talks, I'll warn you that I don't have a cutting analysis to offer - just some interesting thoughts that came out. Neither pulled any punches, and the audience were told in no uncertain terms that if we continue to promote consumerism we should 'go to bed at night wondering why we were put on this earth.' This was not all pizza and Adnams carbon-neutral beer (though there was that too).

Lord Puttnam comes from a background of wonderful and varied experience, but is now putting his reputation behind action on climate change, among other pursuits. The fundamental tension that Lord Puttnam discussed was that between citizens and consumers. We've been drawn into a consumerist society that we feed, and which feeds us, and only now (aided by the recession) are we starting to try to figure out what it means to be a person again. With social right, also comes responsibility, and this is what it means to be a citizen.

A couple of illuminative examples were given of this. To cite just one, not long ago there were 13 regional commercial TV stations, each of which made a sufficient profit and served the needs of the local community. However, the idea of 'shareholder value' led to their agglomeration into one station, ITV, which is now struggling to make a profit and which is less well placed to serve regional communities.

The talk was full of insight and thought, but one last point for me stuck out at the distance of two weeks. For Lord Puttnam, the single most important message is that every action has a consequence - personhood (i.e. citizenship) comes with rights and responsibilities. At the end of the day, government is likely to end up taking some measures which people in their current (consumer) state of mind might find unpalatable. Now's the time for communications to try to soften things up for those citizens (and not make things worse by perpetuating consumerism).

The second talk by Andy agreed with much of what Lord Puttnam had to say, but they have come at it from the point of view that there needn't be this antinomy between social obligation and consumer pleasure. What the Green Thing does so well is to tap into the feelings that lead to over-consumption and align them with actions that are sustainable - they make it cooler not to buy, to walk not drive etc etc. The website is full of examples of this. Not one of the 7 Green Thing behaviours is easy, but through creativity they are made more desirable. How about not buying a MacBook Air? (p.s. this was created before Micky Rourke's return to fame in The Wrestler. Ah well...)