Don't Even Think About It (21 page)

For linguistic expert George Lakoff, this language creates a false division. It creates the impression that the environment is some external entity that has to be protected or saved from an enemy that seeks to destroy it. Lakoff calls this a frame, but it is more recognizable as an archetypal narrative that has come to shape a large part of the environmentalist worldview in which people are divided into those who care and those who do not.

This leads, inevitably, to a judgmental streak. Al Gore famously said that people who believe the moon landing was staged and people who believe that the earth is flat “get together on Saturday night and party with the global-warming deniers.” Considering that over a quarter of Republican voters are confident that climate change is
not
happening, it’s going to be one hell of a party. This is a large constituency to offend.

Environmentalists are drawn to an anti-human rhetoric too, some of them talking about humans as a plague or virus that eats up the natural world. Chris Horner, Myron Ebell’s fellow traveler in the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a cute phrase: “Greens have the terrible toos: too many people, using too many resources.” (To which one could reply that libertarian climate deniers have the “terrible frees”: free markets and freedom from government.)

These generalizations do not reflect the diversity of the environmental movement or the continued work of many within that movement to build bridges with other constituencies. One major initiative, the Blue Green Alliance, was launched in 2006 by the Sierra Club and United Steelworkers and now involves fourteen of the largest U.S. unions and environmental organizations with a combined membership of fifteen million people.

The problem is that whenever environmentalists try to reach a wider audience, we cannot seem to resist reinforcing the frames that can lead other people to marginalize and ignore climate change. Consider this:

There is a low rumbling drone in the background (what documentary makers like to call “tone”) while a string of very short-cut images flash across the screen: a hurricane, a turtle swimming over a coral reef, icebergs, a hurricane, thick smoke, burning oil wells, flies crawling over a dying child, rush hour in Mumbai. Now the drone has turned into a moaning choral lament and the images are flashing by: plucked chickens on a conveyor belt, a polar bear picking though garbage, rows of hogs in a meatpacking plant, a freeway interchange, skyscrapers, burning forests, an iceberg crumbling.

The title fades in: “THE
11
TH HOUR.”

This film came out the year after Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth
and in many ways is a companion film. It is more of a montage—talking heads intercut with eye-catching images, and occasionally its creator, Leonardo DiCaprio, pops up in a storm drain.

It’s a bit earnest but makes intelligent points and it works well for me. But then of course it would, because every single image, argument, and speaker screams ENVIRONMENTALIST, and I am one. The images are codes and, being one of the gang, I carry a mental copy of the codebook. Garbage = wasteful consumption. Polar bear = melting ice caps. Melting ice caps = global warming. Starving baby = a poor victim far away. Indian rush hour = overpopulation in a poor country far away. Skyscrapers = faceless corporations.

I also know that even the title
The 11th Hour
is a double metaphor. It says that humans are very new to the planet and that fossil fuel burning is very new to humans. And it’s wheeling out the old plywood Atomic Clock again with the warning that we are approaching midnight.

These codes are another strong reason why so many people ignore climate change: The visual and metaphorical language that surrounds climate change marks it, irredeemably, as an environmental issue. These images, constantly reinforced in every news story and media item, create a tightly interlinked schema by which climate change is detached from the other issues (employment, economy, crime, defense) that people care most about.

And it is worse than that. Many of these images are not even about the environment but about the worldview of environmentalists. This is an important distinction. People with different values have their own codebooks, and they contain entirely different, and even contradictory, meanings. Lee Baringer, a former steel worker who now campaigns against climate change, recalls his initial hatred of the “small group of environmentalists in town who kept raising hell about the pollution from the steel mills. The air we breathed was truly foul, but to us it was the sweet smell of money because it paid the bills.”

So, for many working people, meatpacking plants, factories, power plants, and traffic jams mean development and paid employment. Multi-lane freeways mean mobility and freedom. When I lived in Taiwan in the 1980s, a fried chicken fast-food chain used to show videos of mechanized chicken-gutting operations inside its stores. For its Chinese patrons, these represented cleanliness and modernity.

Even as an environmentalist, I cannot watch those sweeping aerial shots of freeways, gleaming skyscrapers, and Las Vegas at night without feeling a surge of excitement about the glamour and bravado of the modern world. They may be dirty, but they
do
look fun. Just as I cannot watch that classic Christmas movie
It’s a Wonderful Life
without feeling that the nightlife in Bedford Falls has greatly improved under the management of the revolting Henry F. Potter.

The people who campaign against action on climate change understand these different codings intuitively and build their communications around them. Back in 2006 the conservative D.C. think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute was frustrated by the publicity building up around Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth
and decided to produce a short video to put out its own view.

The thirty-thousand-dollar budget required a very simple in-house production. CEI general counsel Sam Kazman worked up a script and passed it around the office, and then they pasted it together with some generic stock footage and music. Kazman smiles when I ask him whether they tested it in focus groups. There was, he says, no testing of any kind. It was what they liked and, because it worked for them, they just put it out.

A further thirty thousand dollars booked just enough advertising space on cable TV that they could claim that this would be a national campaign. The real goal, of course, was to generate free media coverage in contrast to Gore’s documentary. Kazman says that it “went viral before people even said things like ‘went viral.’” It got the right-wing media but then went further: NPR, the BBC, National Geographic, even a quiz show. CEI got hate mail and angry phone calls. Greens hated it, but they still linked to it and passed it round.

The video starts with images of people sitting in a park on a summer’s day, a jogger running down a beach, forests, and wild animals. Carbon dioxide, the voice-over tells us, is essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in. It has freed us from a world of backbreaking labor, lighting up our lives, allowing us to move the people we love. As we hear this, we see images of Times Square at night and children being helped into the backseat of a car.

But there is a lurking menace. Over that ubiquitous documentary tone, the voice-over says that now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed? What would our lives be like then? As these words are spoken, the images of Times Square and the children in the car fade into black.

Over the black the voice-over says, “Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life,” and the screen fades back to a young girl in bright sunshine blowing a dandelion clock into the wind. It leaves a lasting impression of the wonders of the life ahead for her. “I’d love to meet that girl one day,” sighs Kazman.

It is devious, exasperating, and outright mendacious. But it is also damned good communication. So
maddeningly
good that I too have become an unwitting vector in its transmission—inviting people in my communications trainings to watch it and learn how to construct a narrative around positive universal values. It is a textbook example of how to speak directly to the emotional brain. As Fred Smith, the CEI founder, says, “It should always bring a tear to your eye.”

The video is an artful compilation of frames for life, civilization, health, safety, hope, and salvation. And by contrast, the image of Times Square and the children fading into darkness speaks equally well to metaphors for decay and death—as it would in every culture in the world.

Which makes it curious, to say the least, that the World Wildlife Fund uses the same metaphors at the core of its largest public engagement exercise around climate change, Earth Hour. Every year it encourages us to turn off our lights for just one hour. Its website shows clips of the lights turning off in entire cities and national monuments: the Eiffel Tower, the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio, and, yes, New York’s Times Square too.

Changi Airport in Singapore is also a regular participant in Earth Hour. It dims its lights for an hour and boasts that this saves as much electricity as would be used in an apartment over three months. A fine achievement if one forgets the emissions of the 70,000 planes that land there during the same period.

Earth Hour co-founder and executive director Andy Ridley stresses that it’s not about saving power: “What it is meant to be about is showing what can happen when people come together.”

So this is a huge symbol. Politicians like it because they love big, cheap empty gestures. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offers his support with the words “Let us use 60 minutes of darkness to help the world see the light.” British prime minister David Cameron tells us that Earth Hour is “a huge symbol of global solidarity, an inspiring display of international commitment.”

The World Wildlife Fund thinks it is a huge success—a small, simple, visible act that generates a social norm, and is, let’s face it, a wonderful vehicle for its public profile and fund-raising. And of course, many thousands of committed environmentalists express their solidarity in spontaneous Earth Hour events, sitting in the dark and feeling their sense of shared involvement.

But there is no avoiding the fact that, if one is going to play in the world of symbols, one had better get it right. However you read it, a universal frame for decline, decay, and death is being promoted on a vast scale all around the world as a symbol for climate change.

Deniers understood this immediately. The blogger Alan Caruba posted an aerial photograph of an entirely dark North Korea at night with the caption “It’s Always Earth Hour in North Korea. Electricity is the difference between the Dark Age and the present age. People who hate civilization are welcome to live out in the wilderness and burn dung to cook their meals.”

The real problem, though, is that Earth Hour is not in the least interested in what Caruba or his sympathizers think. It makes sense to people who share the values and can read the codes (solidarity, shared commitment), and that is good enough. Environmental messaging around climate change is not deliberately exclusive. It would
like
to reach other people, but because it is not interested in reflecting other people’s values, it keeps takings bricks out of the bridge that unites people around a common interest in their future.

25

Polarization

 

Why Polar Bears Make It Harder to Accept Climate Change

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's a gray autumn Sunday
afternoon and I am following Aurora, a giant animatronic polar bear, the size of a double-decker bus, as she stalks the streets of London, pacing, sniffing, roaring. Around her neck are strips of cloth bearing the names of three million supporters. She is preceded by three ice spirits with glitter and wands doing some kind of free-form dance. All around me are people in white face paint with blackened noses, woolly white hats, and stick-on ears.

Now, I know that this is a Greenpeace protest against drilling in the Arctic, but without my codebook, a forty-foot-long icon bearing three million blessings being pushed by two thousand people looks more like the annual procession of the Hindu chariot of Lord Jagannath—known to the world as the Juggernaut. I wonder if we should throw ourselves under its paws.

Of course this is not a religion and it would be silly to say it was. But nor it is a carnival or a big press stunt either. It is revealing that when I invite the people in the march to tell me about the puppet, they don't talk about
it
at all—they immediately start talking about their concerns about polar bears, the climate, and the future. To them Aurora is a powerful representational symbol onto which they can project their collective values and concerns.

Polar bears are the ubiquitous symbol of climate change. The magazine cover, B-roll footage, stick-it-in stock photo agency picture for any climate change story. When
Time
magazine ran its first special issue on climate change, its cover headline, “Be Worried. Be Very Worried,” accompanied a photograph of a lonely polar bear perched on a tiny iceberg looking at us with anxiety, hunger, desperation . . . well, with whatever expression we wish to project onto it.

As a result, people in focus groups choose the polar bear as the number-one icon of climate change, saying that they are drawn to it because it represents “the idea of a pure fragile environment most affected by change.”