Changing tacks

David Cameron is saying that ‘its time we admitted that there is more to life than money’. He is proposing to begin to measure ‘general well-being’ as a better sign of progress than GDP and describes improving our sense of well-being as the central political challenge of our times.
Meanwhile a new report entitled ‘Common Cause’ sheds light on how to develop a environmentally-sensitive, values-led economy.

A year after Lehman Brothers collapsed, President Sarkozy launched an enquiry into ‘happiness’, commissioning the Nobel prize winning academics Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to look at what the relentless pursuit of ever increasing Gross Domestic Product was doing to human society. This was the first sign of a shift at the top towards better measures of success, like the index of sustainable economic welfare, which has been championed by the environmental movement for many years. And now David Cameron is following suit. Details

Yet in practice, there is a problem. What is almost certain to happen is that the UK government will simply graft on a few new measures to their existing social indices and not really engage with the deep level clash between pursuit of material gain and concern for soul and society.

Meanwhile the Common Cause report, written by Tom Crompton and published by WWF and other agencies, looks at environmental campaigning and how it could work more effectively. The report is based on extensive psychological research showing that people respond to an issue like climate change, with much less rationality than we pretend to. In fact what determines our response is our value system. If this thing challenges something in our value system, we will reject it, or disbelieve it.

Up to now many environmental campaigns have mimicked other marketing methods and segmented the population into different target groups, and then campaigned towards each group’s self-interest, appealing to their financial, status and other perceived needs. This report argues that appeals to ‘extrinsic’ values like money and status, actually set off all the wrong signals in our brains and diminish the empathic response that could lead to more responsible behaviour. It seems that what one should really emphasise are the intrinsic values like concern for ecosystems, working together for the common good, the plight of rare species, and the potential devastation of the poorest peoples.

The conclusion is that environmental organisations should be absolutely up front and unashamed about their values and work from these, not dress them up in market-friendly clothes. It also suggests that it would be most effective for organisations that share values to work together in new coalitions on the environmental challenges that we face.

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