Ed Dowding

I love this graph.

WOT = Well Off, Thoughtful
LIL = Low Income Lifestyle

Basically it says “Yes, you may recycle and think you’re green and lovely and one of the people who should survive The Great Reckoning, but actually you’re about 3 times more environmentally impactful than that fat TV watching pikey you feel so superior to.”

The main differences are the amount of things we buy, and the amount of flights we take. However we also just consume more of everything, which pushes us into an American level of planet abuse.

We do turn off our lightbulbs and insulate our roofs, though. So that smug, warm feeling is definitely real, it’s just misattributed.

I’m not suggesting Puritan self-flagellation (though I can think of some people who should try it), just some consideration for the alternatives.

If you’re thinking of popping off to Morocco for the weekend, of flying to Geneva for the week to go skiing, take the train. And if you’re thinking about buying something,  spend the money on a memorable experience instead – it lasts much longer.

Source: Peter Harper, Centre for Alternative Technology: Sustainable_Households a presentation given to the Transition Winchester conference.

This is what happened to the Biosphere. A great metaphor (is it a metaphor if it’s so literal?) of what happens to a neglected Earth.

I’m so glad we live in an age where people are doing large scale psychology studies, trying to discern the facts about our behaviour which our perceptions mask.

This has fed into the mainstream thanks to books like Nudge and Freakonomics, and is being used politically to great effect (viz Obama). (There are fears that it just means that those in power have more opportunity to exploit us, but that has always been the way. Now we are more aware of the collective effects of our cognitive fallacies, and availability of knowledge and information is never a bad thing.)

It’s a shame it’s not being used more by the green lobby, but .. well I digress.

The point is that some great psychology and neuroscience studies were published in 2009. Here are a two from a recent list which I hope you’ll find interesting:

If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with the experience. According to a study conducted at San Francisco State University, the things you own can’t make you as happy as the things you do. One reason is adaptation: we adapt to all things material in our lives in a matter of weeks, no matter how infatuated we were with the coveted possession the day we got it. Another reason is that experience, unlike possession, generally involves other people, and fosters or strengthens relationships that are more edifying over time than owning something.

Playing video games could be an unlikely cure for psychological trauma. Researchers at Oxford University hypothesized that playing Tetris after witnessing violence would sap some of the cognitive resources the brain would normally rely on to form memories.  A well-structured study in the journal PLoS One confirmed the finding–Tetris acted like a ‘cognitive vaccine’ against traumatic memory. Memory research suggests that there’s about a 6-hour window immediately after witnessing trauma during which memory formation can be disrupted.  The results of this study indicate that if you happen to have Tetris or a game like it handy during those six hours, it’s the cure for what ails you.

Source: Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About on BrainSpin

I’ve been thinking for a while what we do when Copenhagen fails. And then I waited to see if it actually did. And it did, so no surprise there. But no points for calling it correctly, either.

I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to get involved in, and here’s my criteria:

1. It must amplify the effect of the individual. The classic format for this is “for every 10p you give, we’ll give 50p”, but that’s a little unimaginative, (also also makes the organisation which gives the extra look self-serving and shallow).

   It must give the individual leverage they are unaccustomed to. TheyWorkForYou.com do this excellently, and it is probably most people’s first experience fo writing to their MP.

2. It must seek action, not ideas. Everything’s already been said, we just need more people to do it. In many ways I think we should just burn cars in London. It’s simple, relatively safe, but it looks great on TV and it really works for the French, when they want to keep getting farm subsidies.  Ideally they’d be really expensive inefficient cars so that powerful people get pissed off.
3. It must appeal to selfish motives, to wit: money, pride, sex. Because if we get the same 1 or 2 million people who give a damn signing petitions again and again we’re still screwed. The message needs to get to people who DON’T care. And if they don’t and won’t care (possibly for seemingly rational reasons, like ‘I’m a single mum and don’t have time’ etc) we have to make the debate about something they DO care about.

   And I reckon money, pride, and sex are the base motives we’ve been encultured to respond to.  So eg a tshirt with “Sexy girls ride bikes.” or investing in green stocks, or pointing out that Johnny Foreigner pays less for his energy because it’s from renewable sources. 
   

Following on from (3) and (1) there are two areas which are going to have the most effect: How we spend money, and how we make money.