how to save the world

• With the indifference and ignorance of the modern electorate in most countries, the politician who can grab the most media attention (unless it’s really bad attention) is almost sure to win. You need to either be a celebrity, or buy celebrity, to get that attention. Get that attention, and you get power.
• Big corporations know that the purpose of advertising isn’t to communicate or inform the public about your product, it’s to get your attention. If they can get your attention, they can get your dollars, enough to buy up competitors so they have no opportunity to divert that attention.
• Extremists of every stripe know that if they can get public attention, they can accomplish much more than by trying to articulate their message coherently or passionately.
• In the business rat race, you’re much more likely to get ahead if you do one or two things well that really garner attention, rather than a dozen things competently but invisibly. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
• Tall people succeed more than short people, and loud people get more response than soft-spoken people, for no other reason than that they command more attention.

I’ve been writing this blog for five years, and developed an astute and delightful readership, but I don’t really get much attention. So far that hasn’t concerned me — I’m content to inspire readers whose knowledge and energy and capacities are undoubtedly way beyond mine to act on what they learn here and inspire others to act. But they often lament that they can’t get much attention either.

So what are some ethical strategies for getting more attention for knowledge, ideas and insights that are important? How did the anti-smoking gang, and Al Gore, and the Earth Hour gang, manage to get as much attention for their causes as they did?

I’m looking for your ideas on this, since if I had the answers I’d have applied them. How can we get attention? How can we get people to listen? Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:

1. Make the message simple, compelling, personal and memorable. That makes it easier to hold attention, and to allow people who hear it to get the attention across to others, virally.
2. Repeat the message often (but not too often). Sometimes people need to hear something a few times before it really registers.
3. Show, don’t tell. Use a story or photo or graphic example to convey the message instead of lecturing or beating people over the head with your argument and analysis. When people get it from a story, they’ll fill in the blanks to make it their own, and then it’s their learning, their story, not yours, so they’ll memorize it, and retell it.
4. Be passionate (your enthusiasm is infectious and persuasive), but don’t be hysterical.
5. Be sincere. If you don’t really care, you can’t expect others to. You can’t fake this.
6. Don’t try to change people’s minds. Tell them what you believe, and why. Give them information, not argument. If they’re ready for what you have to say, they’ll pay attention. If not, don’t waste your time.

What else? What have you done that has received more attention than anything else you’ve done? What was it that made the difference?

. . . . .

And now that I have your attention: This Friday I’m off to Australia (mostly Victoria) and New Zealand (North Island) for a week of business meetings (knowledge management, sustainability and education), a week of training (Open Space etc.), and a week of vacation (nature photography). I’ll be back before month-end, and I’ll try to post from time to time, but articles will be sporadic.

From February 2004:

Read the rest.

If I’m honest, though, I have to admit that the amount of change necessary to really make our economy sustainable is almost certainly beyond the capacity of our economic system to achieve. Business needs to be ‘persuaded’ to be responsible and sustainable, not just by taxes and regulations and incentives and strategic arguments about reducing risk, but also by a drastic change in customer buying behaviour.

How do we achieve that change in buying behaviour? After all, we, the customers, are also mostly producers of some goods or services in a business. As customers we respond the same way that we do as businesspeople — we change our behaviour only when we have no other choice, or when something so astonishing occurs that it changes our whole worldview.

When it comes to our worldview on responsibility and sustainability, we are informed by how we perceive ourselves relative to our society and our environment. Our modern, individualistic Western culture teaches us that we are responsible only for and to ourselves and those we love (“we are not our neighbour’s keeper”) and that ‘the environment’ is something apart from us, something that we manage, own, and keep under our control.

This is analogous to our brain’s belief that it — ‘we’ — are something apart from our bodies, and that we are somehow not responsible for ‘them’ or ‘their’ well-being. Such a belief is ludicrous — and we cannot live without or apart from a healthy natural environment any more than our brains can live well if the rest of our bodies are dying, poisoned or exhausted. But human culture and belief systems are mealleable, and we can, with enough propaganda and reinforcement of others, be persuaded to believe almost any absurd idea.

There is evidence that human societies and other creatures not living wildly out of balance with their ecosystems have an utterly different worldview, one that recognizes that they are inherently and absolutely a part of those ecosystems, one that respects the ecosystem and all-life-on-Earth as sacred and inseparable from them.

But now we live in such artificial, overcrowded circumstances that many of us have no concept of a natural environment — we spend so little time in places even remotely natural we cannot even imagine what it means to be a part of a place, to belong to it, to be intimately and utterly connected to everything else in it. Our human constructs are fragile, unsustainable, and disposable — we can no more be a part of them than a brain can be a part of a robot. If we were somehow able to raise and sustain, for awhile, a brain in a robotic, artificial ‘body’, that fragile creature would not be human, and it would be unable to form any attachment to any ‘living’ creature. Likewise, humans raised in fragile artificial environments cannot establish or even really imagine a connection or attachment to all-life-on-Earth, because they are essentially apart from it, separated, detached.

There are now not enough natural places left to reconnect most of us, even if there were time and will to do so. The nature visits that we send our children on as part of their schooling don’t reconnect them — they merely reinforce the social illusion that the environment is ‘apart’, separated from us like animals in a zoo are separated from us by cages.

Is it possible for us to imagine being a part, given the three million years of our species’ history as a part, which is profoundly coded in our DNA and just waiting to be remembered? Alas, I don’t think so. We are by nature experiential learners. Without direct experience, ‘being a part’ is only something we can dimly ‘remember’, the way we ‘remember’ when we walk into a rainforest that this is, somehow, our natural home.

If we want to be of help, making the world a better place, we need to do what we do when we want to learn a new and strange language — immerse ourselves in it to the exclusion of our ‘normal’ surroundings. That means immersing ourselves in a natural surrounding with as few trappings of civilization as necessary, living simply in self-sufficient, responsible community with people we love who seek to rediscover and share the primal worldview of being a part of all-life-on-Earth. That doesn’t mean isolation or deprivation or ‘going back’ — Internet information and communications, renewable energy, shelter and appliances sufficient for comfort and food preservation and preparation can actually help us do more with less.

By doing this, rediscovering working models of how to live and make a living sustainably, responsibly and joyfully, we can, in a way, reinvent the world. Not our civilized world — it’s almost certainly too late for that. Rather, the world that the survivors of the collapse of our civilization will inherit, hungry for models that work.

We can’t save the world, but we can help those who will create the next, humbler, simpler human society, one that can learn from our mistakes.

And in the meantime, in that joyous, astonishing reconnection with all-life-on-Earth, we can rediscover who we are, and why we’re here,and all the wondrous things that we’ve forgotten.

A business colleague has since sent me a paper and a video of a presentation to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales by Rob Gray of St. Andrew’s University. Gray argues that what currently passes as ‘sustainability reporting’ is, at best, meaningless rhetoric and, at worst, dangerous greenwashing (dangerous because it gives us a false sense of security that we’re effectively dealing with the problems). There is no correlation between ‘sustainability reporting’ and more socially and environmentally responsible business practices, he shows, and those practices, at any rate, are not even beginning to address the problems our planet and civilization now face.

In essence, Gray is saying:

• Business sustainability and the sustainability of our planet and civilization are, ultimately, connected (if there’s no planet there’s no business), but in the shorter term they are not necessarily correlated and may in fact be inversely correlated (what’s in the best interest of the short-term bottom line of the company may harm society and the planet). By extension, appealing to business to focus on business sustainability may actually make the situation worse.
• We all, including business, have a responsibility to take the drastic steps needed now to try to ensure the sustainability of our planet and civilization. For business to say that this is government’s job, and that they will cooperate with regulations but otherwise be passive in addressing this threat, is an abrogation of that responsibility.

On the first issue, I’m not sure I agree. It may be in the best interests of an oil company, for example, to spend money on greenwashing PR and advertising while its competitors spend money investing in clean technologies. But getting the business to focus on business sustainability can’t make this any worse — the worst corporate criminals are already doing that and will continue to do so. In my experience few people read (or believe) sustainability reports anyway.

There is a concern that governments (usually well-paid by corporatists) may be complicit with greenwashers by encouraging wishy-washy sustainability reporting instead of passing regulations to make business more sustainable. After all, the public has been hoodwinked into believing that ‘free’ trade agreements benefit the majority rather than a corporatist elite (and these agreements are a race to the bottom when it comes to labour and environmental regulation, since it effectively makes such regulation illegal in signatory states). So why not hoodwink us again by selling us on ‘sustainability reports’ instead of ‘sustainability actions’, so the government can essentially do nothing, and allow socially and environmentally irresponsible corporations to do nothing?

I’m not sure there’s anything than can be done to stop or mitigate this from happening anyway — there’s too much of a reward for doing so. Those who want to advance the cause of sustainability need to decide whether to spend their time fighting for honest accounting and reporting, or fighting for real action and regulation. It’s not really a hard choice.

On the second issue, I do agree with Gray. Our whole civilization is unsustainable. We need to drastically lower birth rates to bring human population down to sustainable levels. That can only be done culturally, not politically, and as I’ve said before I don’t think it will happen — it’s just not in our nature.

We also need regulation that makes it prohibitively expensive to pollute and waste, or to consume a disproportionate amount. But more than that we need enforcement of such regulation. Today’s globalized economy encourages polluters, wasters, and conspicuous consumers to exploit countries that either lack regulation or lack enforcement. And even in countries with both, successfully cheating on taxes and other regulations, in today’s cynical anti-government world, is something people actually brag about.

More than that, our entire economy is built on growth in consumption, which translates into greater growth in profits. Without profit growth, the equity markets would (some say will) crash, and our economy will crash with it. If we were to recognize this real white elephant in the room, we’d have to acknowledge that we need both corporations and individuals to reduce their footprint, in many cases drastically, as an absolute precondition to sustainability of our planet and civilization. We need to consume much less, which means we need to produce much less. We need to re-internalize all the externalized costs that, for many corporations, are the difference between today’s extraordinary profits and insolvency. We need to eliminate pollution and waste entirely, not just to start to slow global warming but because no amount of pollution and waste is sustainable. No amount of resource extraction beyond what the planet, over millions of years, slowly replenishes, is sustainable. ‘Sustainable growth’ is an oxymoron.

There are a few companies, like Interface Carpets (full disclosure: I own a few shares in this company), that have come to this realization, and they are beginning to begin to do what would be necessary to become truly sustainable. But they are a tiny part of a massively complicated economy which must somehow all start moving, very quickly and consistently, in that direction. When we have no idea how to do so. When we are rewarded (in fact corporations are chartered) to do the exact opposite.

Therein lies the quandary. To transform our economy would take an unprecedented, herculean, collaborative, and punishing effort by all of us, moving quickly, starting now. The alternative is to throw up our hands and say we’re all fucked anyway, so we might as well enjoy what we have while we have it. There is a terrible temptation to do just that, to embrace the greenwashing and the tepid, inadequate tiny steps towards being a little less grossly irresponsible, a little less unsustainable. To try to convince ourselves that we’re doing our best, and slowly improving. At least until some disaster comes along to force us to do more.

So far, the generations that will follow us, as our planet and our civilization careen over a cliff, are none the wiser. They’ve bought the propaganda we tell them, and tell ourselves. So far.

What will we do, though, when they learn what we’ve done? And what, as we desperately and ludicrously tried to convince ourselves that we were onthe road to sustainability, we failed to do?