Good News so …. Go Test Yourself
Today I stumbled on IMAGINE5, a Facebook Platform for Solutions and Positive Change. The Good News Movement is treading water but we are certainly suffering from ennuie from the Gloom and Doom narrative. Happy joy joy …. just got an email update from Happy Eco News about cigarette butts being recycled in to asphalt in Slovakia and other tit bits of progress There’s another one we follow - Boomerang Alliance which focuses on sending back plastic pollution to the source (to evoke the boomerang going back), and also, The Eco News. But it’s not surprising that these blogs and social media bandwagons can tend to be out-done by the purveyors of gloom. So, very much easier to focus on the bad, because it is out there in stratospheric abundance.
It can be hard work finding the #goodenvironmentalnews. Our question is - does Bad News Sell ANYTHING? I know that I turn off the news when I am exposed to too much negativity and I don’t consider myself to be shallow.
Unless you are preaching to the converted, gloomy images and bad news probably may not carry much weight in changing behaviour.
One must look at whether shock tactics, fear-mongering by Greta Thunberg, extreme stunts such as those performed by Extinction Rebellion (eg worldwide obstruction of major infrastructure and highways to draw attention to climate cahnge) and the overall climate emergency rhetoric are effective.
This article - The Wages of Fear - Toward Fearing Well About Climate Change from Oxford University Press throws some doubt on the degree to which the fear narrative should be tempered with a hope narrative. I love the words of Alison McQueen and possibly of Aristotle that one should “cultivate fear more responsibly”.
The movement within the education and social welfare sector may well be to move away from causing anxiety, given that anxiety and other mental health disorders are on the rise, in this highly troubled post-pandemic world. Here is a NSW Education Dept article that says we should discourage the use of shock tactics to achieve behaviour change, in the School context.
Fear-mongers must ask themselves does the human psyche even function optimally when undergoing intense fear and angst.
Without the space or wherewithal to attempt a truly scientific analysis, one might hazard a guess that constant fear-mongering and posing worse-case scenarios is only advancing the movement so far, because sustainability goals are not being achieved, globally at the pace we would like. One needn’t examine worldwide levels of pollution, household and individual waste going to land-fill or being burned, over-fishing, the Plastic Waste Gyres (Great Pacific Garbage Patch) unproductive soil, desertification, salination, habitat depletion - indeed the list of environmental problems keep escalating. A smarter communications approach may need to be tried, to get people on board, and off plastic… haha.
Photo: Renan Goksin
Spend a day testing yourself - what REALLY works to make you feel motivated to adopt new consumption or waste disposal habits?
Is it an ocean seascape featuring a slurry of micro-plastic waste, or is it a colourful inspiring cartoon. (These are mainly questions for self-reflection. There is no one universal answer as messages and images affect us all differently.)
Perhaps it’s a pristine ocean view that is more effective at instilling the right inspirational message?
Green cuteification as I call it - showing endangered species in an adorable light, rather than merely as they really exist - might work better on children than adults.
Do cartoons work effectively across the board?
Cartoon Courtesy of Rohan Chakravarty - Green Humour
Then there is the effect of using the images and plight of children in a campaign, that might appeal to the heart-strings in the older generations by way of manifesting feelings of guilt! More and more children are taking the reigns in campaigns - a la Greta Thunberg who formed the School Strike for Climate movement and a host of many youngsters mounting legal actions against their governments for jeopardising their climate futures.
Photo above and below: courtesy of My little Golden Book About God, by Jane Werner Watson, Illustrated by Eloise Wilkin, 1956.
How about using humour: a touch of irony or even satire ?
See also our blog on the effect of humour - Enviro messaging is no joke!?
Finally here is a very useful article on message framing from RMIT - 5 Lessons for More Effective Conservation Messaging which seems to take the view that the effectiveness of positive or negative framing will depend on the context.
keywords #solutions #greatpacificgarbagepatch #changemaker #framing the environmental message #goodnewsmovement #greenhumor #environmental messaging