What is Environmental Communication? By Robert Lundahl http://planet-rla.com/what-is-environmental-communication/ Rachel Carson, Chico Mendes, David Suzuki, Simran Sethi, and Bill McKibben all do it. All of us involved in discussing, debating, educating and advocating about all things environmental do it. Even the oil companies, the logging companies, and the climate change deniers do it.
Rachel Carson, Author, The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring. As an activity/phenomenon, environmental communication incorporates all of the diverse forms of interpersonal, group, public, organizational, and mediated communication that make up the social discussion/debate about environmental issues and problems, and our relationship to non-human nature.
How these conversations take place, when they take place, how arguments are framed, and who participates in the conversation determines, to a large part, how effective an argument is. The field has changed. Following 911, the 2008 economic recession, and the 2009 defeat of "cap and trade" bills to moderate carbon emissions, some sounded the "death knell" for the American Environmental Movement. Victories that were forged in earlier times through a political process of concession and dealmaking and sometimes pure momentum, began to unravel. Nicholas Lemann writes in the New Yorker "When the Earth Moved, What happened to the environmental movement?": "The story of the Environmental Defense Fund is illustrative. E.D.F. (is presented) as a raggedy group of amateur activists on Long Island, whose motto was “Sue the bastards!” It helped to get DDT banned in New York and elsewhere, and successfully pushed for water-safety standards nationwide. By the mid-eighties, though, it had become moribund, and a new president, Fred Krupp, then thirty years old, advocated an accommodationist direction for the movement, focussed on deal-making with big business and with Republicans. In the summer of 2006, Krupp and a few allies began assembling a coalition that met regularly at the offices of a professional mediation firm in Washington. He persuaded a number of major corporations with heavy carbon footprints, like Duke Energy, BP, and General Electric, to join. The coalition became an official organization called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, funded primarily by a handful of major philanthropists and foundations. Shortly before President Obama’s Inauguration, USCAP released the fruit of its labors: a draft of the illfated carbon-emissions bill." Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger write in 2005, The death of environmentalism: Global warming politics in a post-environmental world, "We believe that the environmental movement’s foundational concepts, its method for framing legislative proposals, and its very institutions are outmoded. Today environmentalism is just another special interest. Evidence for this can be found in its concepts, its proposals, and its reasoning. What stands out is how arbitrary environmental leaders are about what gets counted and what doesn’t as “environmental.” Most of the movement’s leading thinkers, funders and advocates do not question their most basic assumptions about who we are, what we stand for, and what it is that we should be doing." As Lemann continues he points a finger toward a different era, most unexpected for a generation or two of environmental communicators and policy makers.
"In the summer of 2009, Democrats in the House of Representatives, joined by a handful of Republicans, passed a bill based on the USCAP framework. It was fourteen hundred pages long. Almost immediately, corporate members dropped out of the coalition; as the grand alliance unravelled, the bill languished in the Senate. After Harry Reid, then in a tight reëlection campaign against a Tea Party candidate, dropped it, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, blasted the environmentalists’ political ineptitude at a private meeting. (Bartosiewicz and Miley obtained a tape recording.) The big environmental groups had promised the White House that they could deliver a few key Republican votes in the Senate. Instead, Emanuel said, “They didn’t have shit. And folks, they were dicking around for two years. And I had those meetings in my office so it was not that I wasn’t listening to them. This is a real big game, and you’ve got to wear your big-boy pants.” As the political process in the United States has become arguably more corporatized, a fact of life that whatever is left of the "environmental movement" has become increasingly inured to, the game has become more clearly understood. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger writing in Yale Environment 360, The Flawed Logic of the Cap-and-Trade Debate, say "both (James) Hansen and those he criticizes focus on pollution regulation and pricing to make fossil fuels more expensive, rather than on innovation to make clean energy cheap. This approach ignores the history of technological breakthroughs, which has primarily been driven by public investment. And public investment in clean energy is what is needed today, because no effort to achieve deep reductions in carbon emissions, domestic or international, will succeed as long as low-carbon energy technologies cost vastly more than current fossil fuel-based energy."
Earth Day began as a "Teach In", 1970. Ultimately, the environmental movement needs to learn to win with more effective strategies. That means not only what it communicates but how. What had been won and lost in the courts or in the halls of the House and Senate must now again be fought in the streets, the free market of capital and ideas. Ironically this harkens back to the age of earlier activists following the First Earth Day. As Lemann notes in the NewYorker, "Earth Day’s success was partly a matter of timing: it took place at the moment when years of slowly building environmental awareness were coming to a head, and when the energy of the sixties was ready to be directed somewhere besides the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement‌ Earth Day had consequences: it led to the Clean Air
Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and to the creation, just eight months after the event, of the Environmental Protection Agency."
"Then, forty years after Earth Day, in the summer of 2010, the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, announced that he would not bring to a vote a bill meant to address the greatest environmental problem of our time—global warming. The movement had poured years of effort into the bill, which involved a complicated system for limiting carbon emissions. Now it was dead, and there has been no significant environmental legislation since. Today’s environmental movement is vastly bigger, richer, and better connected than it was in 1970. It’s also vastly less successful. What went wrong? " I saw, from my perspective as a professional communicator at ground zero, in the San Francisco Bay Area, that the movement split into two camps, with the Ecological Modernists positing a rudimentary understanding of technological interventionism in climate change scenarios through the implementation of "smart technologies," and "technological mega-projects," and traditional conservationists favoring mitigation if not elimination of impacts to natural ecosystems. The Ecological Modernists including many well placed and well heeled names like former Vice President, Al Gore, Kleiner Perkins Partner and Technologist, Bill Joy (Why The Future Doesn't Need Us http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html), Sun Microsystems' later Kleiner Perkins' Partner John Gage http://www.cnet.com/news/suns-john-gagejoins-al-gore-in-clean-tech-investing/ (who in all fairness left after two years) and others.
It was a time of great "hoopla" in the Bay Area, with environmental wannabes scrambling for influence. There was little thinking about what might occur should the technological interventionists get it wrong. And get it wrong they did in the deserts of Southern California. A plethora of large solar technologies, developed at Sandia Labs in the 1980's were trotted out as "shovel-ready" once ARRA stimulus funds became available. Many of these technologies like Stirling engines https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2008/solargrid.html were overly complex and difficult to manage, yet were to be deployed in huge numbers. Despite high conversion of sunlight to power, the Stirling engines leaked hydrogen, sounded like a 1950's lawnmower, and at a test bed in Phoenix, required one human "minder" for each of the 50 units there. Over 35,000 "Sun Catchers" would be deployed at Imperial 2 Solar (which was to be built on a Native American burial ground) (See my film "Who Are My People?" http://whoaremypeople.com) another 35,000 would be built at the companion "Calico" project. The technologies had never been tested at scale, and hence embodied a level of arrogance and poor engineering that was truly stunning. In the time since, the agenda, advanced by ecological modernists has been debunked http://goo.gl/9lcxPQ, see New York Times "A Huge Solar Plant Opens, Facing Doubts About Its Future." http://www.kcet.org/news/rewire/solar/concentrating-solar/palen-solarproject-canceled.html Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger don't distinguish between rooftop solar close to load and remotely sited industrial solar. Would public investment in rooftop solar implementation yield better results? The American Environmental Movement had forgotten, quite simply, how to communicate with people, in the face of abuses by corporations and government. Instead, they partnered with those corporations in the name of combatting climate change. "Isn't it great that the large environmental groups and the utilities can lock arms on strategy, It just happens to be a very high impact strategy‌" Bill Powers, PE, from "Who Are My People?" Š2014 Robert Thorp Lundahl. Excellence in communication had been the hallmark of the early environmental movement following the creation of the first Earth Day. David Brower, then head of the Sierra Club had worked with the Public Media Center, a non-profit ad agency founded by Herb Chao Gunther and Ad Exec turned Author Jerry Mander "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television." After receiving his M.S., Mander worked in advertising for 15 years, including five as partner and
president of Freeman, Mander & Gossage in San Francisco. Mander and Brower worked together, managing the Sierra Club's advertising campaigns to prevent the construction of dams in the Grand Canyon, to establish Redwood National Park, and to stop the U.S. Supersonic Transport (SST) project. Mander served as the executive director of the International Forum on Globalization, which he founded in 1994, until 2009 and continues on its staff as a Distinguished Fellow. He is also the program director for Megatechnology and Globalization at the Foundation for Deep Ecology.
Jerry Mander Herb Chao Gunther wrote 10 Principles for Effective Advocacy Campaigns which is created from an awareness of American Realpolitik. The full explanation may be read here http://www.thegoodmancenter.com/resources/newsletters/10-
principles-for-effective-advocacy-campaigns/ 1. Communicate values. “Americans need to hear there are certain things that are good or bad for the country,” Gunther asserts. “Absent that kind of moral clarity, people aren’t going to pay attention to the details.” 2. American political discourse is fundamentally oppositional. People are more comfortable being against something than for it. Again, Gunther draws his most convincing examples from politics. Negative ratings for candidates didn’t exist 16 years ago. Today these ratings are routinely gathered by pollsters and closely scrutinized by the media. 3. The undecided in the middle determine the outcome of a given fight. PMC’s work with the National Abortion Rights Action League reminds Gunther that principle #3 is alive and well today. When an issue polarizes as strongly as abortion, public interest groups should not waste time and resources trying to convert true believers at either end of the ideological spectrum. As Gunther told Planned Parenthood while planning a recent campaign, “Our fight is for the muddled middle.” 4. Americans want to be on the winning side. Based on this inclination, “undecideds” frequently choose the side that appears stronger. “Americans don’t like to feel stupid, and going for the winner is a reflection that their selfesteem constantly has to be stroked and renewed.” As evidence, Gunther points to post-election polls which consistently show more voters claiming to have voted for the winner (as many as 15%, in fact ) than actually pulled the lever. 5. Make enemies, not friends. Identify the opposition and attack their motives. “A fundamental tenet of democracy is accountability,” Gunther emphatically states, adding “Naming names is all about accountability.” Gunther proudly points to PMC’s campaign against the proposed theme park, “Disney’s America,” that featured an advertisement portraying CEO Michael Eisner as “The Man Who Would Change History.” Gunther believes the vilification of Eisner was critical in forcing Disney to cancel plans for the park, and he encourages public interest groups to employ a similar strategy. “CEO’s are confined to a statesman like role. This limits their ability to fire back. Don’t be afraid to attack!” 6. American mass culture is fundamentally alienating and disempowering. “Most people don’t think they belong to this country in one way or another,” says Gunther. Several factors stoke these feelings of alienation: racial and ethnic divisiveness, class conflict, the sheer size of the country, and technology that leaps ahead faster than our wisdom to use it. Consequently, Gunther believes it’s more important than ever for public interest groups to educate, empower, and
motivate their target audiences as part of their campaigns. 7. Target a few key audiences and strategize for social diffusion through opinion leaders, not by reaching the mass audience. “When surveys say the majority of Americans feel they don’t count, why spend so much of your resources trying to talk to them?” Gunther firmly believes it’s better to have somebody else talk to them directly, so PMC’s ads are designed to find and educate that select group who will deliver the message for you. And exactly how many people are we talking about? “Nine times out of ten, you need to convince about a thousand people.” 8. Responsible extremism sets the agenda. “What Rosa Parks did was a responsible extremist act in her time. Aside from the anarchists, what happened in Seattle around WTO was responsible extremism.” Given this definition, Gunther maintains principle #8 is still valid, even if it relies on the work of controversial or so-called “fringe” groups. “The reason that Sierra Club negotiated a settlement with a lumber company is because Earth First was doing what they do.” 9. Social consensus isn’t permanent and must continually be asserted and defended. “I have to characterize citizenship in this country as a state of somnambulance.” Given a sleep-walking populace, Gunther warns public interest groups that the passage of a law or election of a candidate is not the end of the fight. David Brower, founder of Earth Island Institute, once said, “There are no victories in the environmental movement, only stays of execution.” Principle #9 extends this maxim to all public interest issues. 10. Strategic diversity is essential to the success of social movements. “Biological diversity is nature’s strategy for survival,” Gunther says, “and we have to recognize the message for our movement.” When you put out a single message, he warns, you make it very easy for the other side to figure out how to respond and how to take you out. You also fail to recognize that you probably have to move several constituencies at once (e.g., the public, business leaders, politicians), and each constituency deserves its own highly-targeted message. From the advocacy perspective, Environmental Communication is values driven, designed to persuade and engage, and differentiate itself through strong positioning. It targets opinion leaders at key "choke points" and utilizes media to achieve "social diffusion." It also attacks weak points of opposing organizations though these organizations may be more powerful. As Chao Gunther points out “CEO’s are confined to a statesman like role. This limits their ability to fire back. In the interim years since Chao Gunther's 10 points have been written, corporations and their legal and risk management departments, playing an
increasingly important role, have become even more reactionary and backward facing -- less capable of participating in a values driven conversation in any form. Values therefore become an even more significant element of differentiation because in shifting the debate away from tactical rhetoric and into authenticity and moral clarity, we engage on terms for which there is often no credible counter argument. ###