Don't Even Think About It (22 page)

No environmentalist I spoke to could ever recall a formal decision in their organization to select a polar bear as a campaign icon. The National Wildlife Federation justifies the emphasis on polar bears because they are “the proverbial canary in the coal mine” but this is a weak (and zoologically confused) metaphor. The long-term future is not looking good for polar bears but there are very large variations in predictions for them in the short term, with some populations (especially around Hudson Bay in Canada) declining and others rising following the suspension of hunting.

The real reasons that polar bears became an icon are that climate change initially focused on the Arctic and that environmental organizations have always used iconic megafauna to symbolize complex resource issues. No other progressive campaign constituency would have chosen this emblem—there are no bears of any kind in the materials of human rights, refugee, health charities, trade unions, business organizations, or faith groups. The British development charity Christian Aid even attacked the icon in a poster that showed Africans on cracked earth on one side and cracking ice on the other, with the caption “Climate change threatens more than just polar bears and ice caps.”

More basic organizational dynamics are at work too. Like dolphins and panda bears, polar bears combine excellently with the dynamics of large-scale fundraising. Different organizations compete for the best package of spin-off merchandise, tote bags, a “Save Our Ice” water bottle, a “Celebrate Mother's Day” photo of mom and her two cubs. A large donation to the National Wildlife Federation earns you a four-foot-high stuffed polar bear of your very own.

And they make great costumes, no small consideration for protests that are less about confrontation than about generating a media image. So polar bears march with a placard reading “You fly, I die” or sit holding a begging cups with a sign reading “homeless.”

The biggest problem with polar bears, though, is that they play so poorly to our cognitive biases. An issue that suffers from a lack of proximity has chosen as an icon an animal that could not be more distant from people's real life. Indeed, outside a zoo, people are far more likely to have seen an activist in a polar bear costume than an actual polar bear.

Maybe ice works better. Certainly, it does tap into the mental model that we all have from our own experience, that ice melts on a sunny day. But you cannot show an absence without showing a presence, and a large block of melting ice is still a large block of cold ice. There is a reason why ice, penguins, and polar bears appear regularly in advertisements for freezers rather than ovens. After all, if we were running a campaign against global cooling, would we think it reasonable to have the camel as its central image?

Semiotics is the name given to the interpretation and study of nonlinguistic signs, such as images and icons. Judith Williamson, a pioneer of the study of the semiotics of advertising, says that there has been a recent “avalanche” of artworks—novels, poems, paintings, photographs, and advertisements—that celebrate snow and ice, polar bears, penguins, and glaciers.

She argues that this focus on what is vanishing means that we are perpetually looking backward rather than forward, gazing at what might be gone rather than at what might come into being. It is a visual iconography that speaks of loss, and is tinged with melancholy.

“How powerful an image ice is for slow, dripping loss,” Williamson says.“How many of our emotions are frozen too, along with this imagery! We stand at the brink of something, hoping it can be prevented. The idea of preserving the glaciers and polar bears channels the wish to freeze the world as it is, to hold on, not to let things go.”

26

Turn Off Your Lights or the Puppy Gets It

How Doomsday Becomes Dullsville

In that creepy way we
know from horror films, the camera glides along a darkened landing toward an opened door. Inside we can see Dad, cuddled up in bed with his daughter, holding open a storybook.

“There was once a land,” starts the father, “where the weather was very strange. There were awful heat waves in some parts and in others terrible storms and floods. Scientists said it was caused by too much CO2, which went into the sky when the grown-ups used energy, and the children of the land would have to live with the horrible consequences.”

As he speaks, we see the pictures moving around in the book. A black cloud of carbon dioxide with an angry face forms in the sky. Lightning strikes. A cute cartoon puppy waves one last time before going under the rising waters. Hang on, we start thinking, this isn’t any ordinary bedtime story (and clearly, many people reckoned later, this isn’t any ordinary dad to be reading a kid this stuff).

The little girl looks up with her big, moist eyes. “Daddy,” she asks, “is there a happy ending?” Cut to black. “It’s up to us how the story ends,” the voice-over says and tells us to go to a government website called Act on CO2. But the actual message is pretty clear: Turn off your lights
or the puppy gets it
.

This nine-million-dollar advertising turkey was launched on October 9, 2009, during the commercial break halfway through Britain’s most popular soap opera. Within a week, it had been pulled, after the Advertising Standards Authority, an independent agency that polices advertising, received more than nine hundred complaints about the commercial being political, misleading, and frightening to children.

Communications specialists marveled at the creativity with which this campaign broke every recommendation they had ever made to the government on how to talk about climate change. Clearly the brief had included a requirement to be as depressing, judgmental, manipulative, untrustworthy, and condescending as possible, but the absolute genius—for which the advertising agency surely deserved some award—was framing a deeply contested scientific issue as a children’s fairy tale. “It’s utter rubbish,” said Ed Gillespie of Futerra Communications, which had previously advised the government to communicate a positive and aspirational vision. “It is about as much use as a marzipan dildo.”

The reaction to this ill-conceived campaign goes to the heart of a debate that has reverberated through every report, documentary, and article since the very first warnings of climate change: To what extent should communications concentrate on climate change as a disaster?

Cognitive specialists suggest that we need to feel that climate change is a
dread risk
before we will act. Professor Elke Weber of Columbia University’s Earth Institute writes, “It is only the potentially catastrophic nature of rapid climate change and the global dimension of adverse effects that have the potential for raising a visceral reaction to the risk.”

In conversation, many experts are of the view that it would be dishonest not to tell things how they are. The pioneering investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan says that his professional business involves telling the truth and, sadly, the truth about climate change really
is
apocalyptic. The Australian academic Clive Hamilton tells me that environmentalists constantly confront him with homilies about his pessimism. When they demand that he be more hopeful, they are, he feels, coping with their own kind of denial.

The problem, as the reaction to the advertisement showed all too well, is that when people feel threatened and isolated, they can adopt a range of strategies to diminish their sense of internal fear: denial, uncertainty, playing down the threat, fatalism, and anger toward the communicator. Psychologists call these responses maladaptations, in that they are responses that do nothing to reduce the actual level of risk. The wider research into fear responses shows that people can also become desensitized and may require ever greater urgency or threat to stay interested.

For this reason, some communications specialists argue for a balanced narrative that starts with a positive vision to offset the bad news. There is a cognitive basis for this approach. Because the emotional brain leads in decision making, its initial impressions will sway subsequent decisions. In experiments, people are far more inclined to agree to make personal sacrifices if they have first been invited to generate, in their own words, the longer-term positive reasons for changing their consumption.

Dan Kahan of Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project, though, is none too impressed by this approach, which he calls the “goldilocks dialectic,” because it suggests that people can be motivated by “neither too much alarm nor too little but just the right mix of fear and hope.” He stresses that the perception of risk is formed by the norms within social groups and that effective communications need to respond to these values, rather than seeking some perfect cocktail.

The communicators, too, are subject to their own cultural biases in the way that they construct disaster narratives. Although they are simply trying to motivate people by stimulating a sense of “dread risk,” they cannot avoid shaping the message around their own values and worldview. The psychotherapist Sally Weintrobe wonders whether apocalyptic messaging is a coping mechanism for the communicators who are unwittingly projecting their own anxieties onto the people they want to engage.

And the deniers
are
right about some things: There really
is
a lot of disaster stuff around environmentalists.

The rise of the environmental movement is all bound up with the lexicon of apocalypse. The words
doomsday
and
apocalypse
—despite their ancient religious origins—really take off in popular usage only in the 1960s. As one skeptic (a physicist, of course) writes, for “warmers” it is Halloween all year long.

Here, for example, is the environmental novelist John Atcheson with his own “I have a dream” speech: “Imagine a world where vast regions of an acidic ocean are dominated by jellyfish. The land? An unending series of drought, flood, fire and famine. The coasts will be their own special blend of hell on earth.” Sounds super. And there is much, much more where that came from.

People who hold the world to be just, orderly, and stable have a deep-seated loathing of this kind of apocalyptic messaging. The idea that they could be subject to arbitrary impacts upsets their belief that the worthy are rewarded and that only wrongdoing is punished. In an experiment when people with these “just worldviews” were presented with apocalyptic messages, their belief in climate change fell dramatically.

One of the videos they were shown in the experiment is worth mentioning in detail: A man is standing on a railroad track as a speeding train comes ever closer behind him. “Some people say the irreversible consequences of global warming are thirty years away,” says the man. “Thirty years? That won’t affect me.” He steps off the track, and we can see that hidden behind him all the time was a young girl. With the train now mere feet away, up comes the slogan “There’s still time—fight global warming.”

This television commercial was made in 2006 by the Environmental Defense Fund. I doubt that anyone other than dedicated greens (and possibly even not them) would respond well to it. Certainly it is powerful and grabs one’s attention, but it generates no sense of efficacy—the best thing you can do in the face of a runaway train is to jump the track, pulling the little girl behind you.

I have already shown that people evaluate new information in the light of their recent experience. In rich Western countries they will have little available experience of environmental or social collapse, but they will have a large mental library, often in the form of polished stories, of failed
prophecies
of collapse. It is these that most readily come to mind.

The greatest, and longest-sustained, postwar fear was of imminent nuclear apocalypse, which then morphed seamlessly into the fears of nuclear power and the early environment movement. As an article in the
Age
, a skeptical Australia newspaper said, under the heading “A Climate of Fear,” “The Bomb was back, like the ghost at a banquet of anxiety. From Al Gore to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, everyone had grim news for the planet.”

Environmentalism has its own unfulfilled prophecies. The Club of Rome’s
Limits to Growth
report, which became a founding text of modern environmentalism, predicted imminent global collapse from “overshoot.” It included, even in 1972, two pages dedicated to climate change. It sold an astonishing twelve million copies and prompted a torrent of pessimistic prose.
Time
magazine’s story on the report, headlined “The Worst Is Yet to Be,” told us that “in Los Angeles a few gaunt survivors of a plague desperately till freeway center strips, backyards and outlying fields, hoping to raise a subsistence crop.”

And still the warnings come. There is mad cow disease, bird flu, swine flu, Y2K, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, terrorist scares that never eventuate, and various health, nutritional, and economic “time bombs.” All of these are entirely plausible and many are as valid as ever. It is just that they never seem to happen when anyone says they will, and people have only a limited capacity for staying on red alert.

The commonly used story for failed prophecies, which has appeared regularly in the climate denier discourse since the early 1990s, is the fable of Chicken Little, who, after being hit on the head by a falling acorn, persuades her fellow animals that the sky is falling. The local wily wolf exploits these fears and persuades the gullible animals to find safety in his cave, where he then eats them.