Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (30 page)

But we know that (in principle) this kind of attitude– behaviour change can be done: just look at the change in seatbelt use or the way that people now install smoke alarms as a result of specific explicit attitude change programmes (through public-service advertising: see Lannon 2008, for a description of some important and significant campaigns in this domain). Indeed, some great persuasive messages (well beyond the scope of public-service adverts) have emerged in the past few years with exactly that agenda within the context of sustainability and the environment. Some of these are more than just persuasive messages: they are actually great emotional films, things like
An Inconvenient Truth
, but with the specific, motivated aim of changing how we all feel and act with regard to the environment. But have
films like this actually got it right? Do they have any real, demonstrable effect? How should you make people more aware of the risks involved in their own behaviour in terms of global warming? How easy is it to change how people feel inside about core issues like the future of the planet? Indeed, how can you change implicit attitudes at all? I’ll start by telling you (from my own experience) how not to.

My whole life people have tried to stop me from taking risks. The first attempt that really made a lasting impression on me and succeeded in changing my behaviour, but not necessarily in the way intended, was a campaign about drugs. I was a teenager at the time growing up in the damp, grey streets of the Belfast of the Troubles. Life was disjointed and fractured. As a teenager my social life was restricted to the streets around me, endless hours of hanging about ‘the corner’, which was in reality the front of a chip shop with a warm air vent blowing out rancid air that stank of chip fat on cold winter nights. It was a dangerous and unpredictable place: even the chip shop itself was dangerous, both inside and out. The press called my streets ‘murder triangle’. But, of course, I realised even then that there was a life somewhere out there better than this, but it was too far away to glimpse or touch. The world of the
NME
, the
News of the World
with stories about the sordid goings-on of rock stars, images of jeans tucked into green boots, Biba, fast cars. ‘Fast cars and girls are easily come by’ or ‘easy to come by’, I can’t remember which the pop song said, but not here they weren’t. The swings in our local park were chained up on a Sunday lest we enjoy ourselves on the Lord’s Day.

It was a Friday in my local youth club when he came to talk to us. We were all boys, I remember that – it was a funny sort of youth club – and we were asked to pull our chairs out into neat rows in front of the speaker. My fingers reeked of coke and crisps. This was an attempt to get at young minds before they were fully formed, before they had been fixed in a pattern; designed to change our behaviour, designed to fit into the evening’s youth club activities, designed to warn us of the menace of drugs between table tennis and quarter size snooker, before the dangerous walk home through the
streets filled sometimes equally with drunks and terrorists. There was an introduction, then a slide show with images of pills and plants, a glossary of terms, some of which I had heard before, many of which I had not: amphetamine, speed, pep pills, black bombers, dexies, black beauties, black-and-white minstrels, LSD, purple haze, yellow sunshine, blue heaven, sugar cubes, marijuana, dope (‘They call it shit here in Belfast,’ my friend Colin said helpfully, ‘I’ve never seen it, but I do know that. If you want some, all you have to say is “Can I score some shit?” ’), grass, cocaine, coke, Californian Cornflakes. Shit was never mentioned: it was all much more exotic than that.

But to this day I can remember the slides, with shiny red and black pills, white powder as pure as the snow we never saw in our damp streets, exotic plants. From the opening slide I was captivated. It was as if the drugs were jumping off the slides, almost three-dimensional in their appearance. I don’t think I blinked once in case I missed something. Things were being revealed to me, to us all: we were all drug virgins, and pop culture virgins. I had a series of agonising shocks of recognition and clarity. ‘My friend Jack eats sugar cubes’ was no longer a song about a fat teenager with a sugar addiction like fat Albert down the street; ‘Purple Haze is in my brain’ wasn’t a song about pollution and traffic jams and the way that street lights can play odd tricks with your vision when the shipyard was closing and the streets were packed. I was hooked: hooked on the glamour and the glitz, hooked on the terms, with their implicit connotations of something better – ‘black beauties’, ‘yellow sunshine’, ‘Californian Cornflakes’ – hooked on finding the way out from a world where the swings never moved on a Sunday. And when the slides showed close-ups of black bombers, I realised that my rusted bathroom cabinet with the shaky mottled glass door, pinned to the wall in our kitchen (because we didn’t have a bathroom or an inside toilet) was full of drugs, full of black bombers, used by my mother as slimming aids.

That night my friends and I took drugs for the first time, and gabbled away outside the chip shop for hours, hardly noticing the smell of chip fat. It probably wasn’t that much
fun, but we all felt different, separate from everyone else, empowered in a curious sort of way. ‘We’re on the drugs,’ we said to anyone who would listen. And it felt great, dangerous and exciting. It was something that set me apart from the crowd, even though I took a maximum of one tablet at a time, no more or no less than my mother herself, and therefore presumably no more risky. But, of course, it was the context of the taking that gave these small pills their emotional power. For me they were laden with positive emotional connotations, for my mother they were laden with different connotations, connotations of ‘putting on the weight’, ‘and can’t get the weight off’, ‘piling on the pounds, no matter what diet I’m on’: connotations of powerlessness and desperation and necessary medical intervention.

This, of course, is just an anecdote, a single case study about the disaffected youth of Belfast one rainy Friday night a long time ago, but it reminds me of the challenge that any attempt to change behaviour faces. Get it wrong and you can, on occasion, get it badly wrong. You can actually make things worse than if you hadn’t bothered. The speaker that night with his slides and his spiel did not have a clear understanding of my friends and me, or of our social situation. When you communicate you need a clear model of the audience, their mental state, their needs and aspirations. He had no such model. You have to be able to read other minds. He couldn’t. You also need the right approach. He went for a cognitive, rational approach and explained patiently to us that drugs were dangerous. But this meant very little to us. Going for a pint of milk was dangerous where we lived. Telling us that drugs affected the biochemistry of the brain cut no ice either: a night outside the chip shop with the drive-by shootings and then the backfiring cars messed up the biochemistry of your brain. We all knew that. We all had friends who had cracked up after hours spent hanging about the corner doing nothing. None of them needed drugs to help them along. And the presenter underestimated the great emotional pull drugs had for us corner boys: the emotional connotations, London, Biba, long blonde hair in the wind, the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, fashion, rebellion, life in your own hands, not the hands of others;
living dangerously because you wanted to, not because others wanted you to; empowerment, sex, especially sex.

But climate change isn’t like drugs, I hear you say. Where’s the glamour in global warming? What’s so attractive about the submergence of the San Francisco Bay by the Pacific Ocean, or the disappearance of the area around Shanghai which is home to forty million people into the sea due to global warming? Well maybe I’m odd, but I grew up on disaster movies. I can see the human challenge in catastrophe. These films showed me what that challenge was. I can see the glamour in the whole thing. I understand the individual against the elements, the primitive process of survival played out against the most pitiless of backdrops. I close my eyes and I can visualise
The Poseidon Adventure
, where a luxury liner capsises and the passengers trapped in the bowels of the ship have to find their way to safety, with Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters. I can see Shelley Winters now in my mind’s eye, and that panic written on her face in that billowing white dress (I hope that this is the right visual image; I may be transporting images of Shelley Winters from another film into this film: the mind can after all be a very constructive device). I run through
The Towering Inferno
in my mind, where the world’s tallest building is destroyed by fire, with Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. Who wouldn’t want to be tested like this in the presence of Faye Dunaway?

This might all seem a little perverse but there is a point here, namely that one shouldn’t always assume that every individual has the same emotional response to any situation as everyone else, or even the same logical or rational response. When it comes to doing something about climate change we need to think carefully about the psychology underpinning the whole process and reflect that what works for some individuals might not work for everyone. It may be that some people do not understand the logic behind the scientific arguments for climate change (and are too embarrassed to confess this). It may be that some people feel little emotionally about climate change (and are too concerned to confess this). It may be that some people get a slight buzz out of the impending disaster (and are definitely
far too sensible to confess this) and what they are relishing is that they, and they alone, will be tested like Gene Hackman, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman and they are waiting with anticipation, and with genuine visceral excitement, for things to deteriorate to give them the right sort of filmic backdrop for their heroic recycling and climate-sensitive actions.

Those great advocates of doing something immediately about climate change do recognise that both rational thought and emotion are core to the persuasion process (although they clearly either haven’t met or paid much attention to people like me who might generate some emotional response, but the wrong one, to some of the core messages).

Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth
(2006) is probably the best-known and most lauded single communicational message about climate change ever made, obtaining both the Nobel Peace Prize for its author and an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It is in many ways an extraordinary accomplishment: not much more than a lecture with some graphics thrown in, but very engaging and very powerful at a number of levels. It does clearly make you pause to think, and it has produced a strong emotional effect in audiences worldwide.

There are many powerful scenes and arguments. The shots from space of the small blue planet, ‘our only home’, at the beginning and end of the film (I call this section
the history of the human race
) grab our attention, with both a cognitive and an emotional hook, and feel highly motivating. This particular vista on our earth makes us stop to wonder, to see things differently. The point Gore makes is that the entire history of the human race is contained in this little blue dot, the only home that we will ever have. He presents us with other powerful images and metaphors to understand the nature and the extent of the problem we face. He illustrates the rise in population growth using the time span of his own life to show how the population has changed (clip –
baby boomers
). He tries to manipulate our emotional response with an animation of a polar bear trying to climb onto a floating raft of ice (clip –
drowning polar bear
) that is not thick enough to hold its weight. The message is very concrete and very emotional.

The effects of global warming are illustrated in a scene showing how in the future some of the great coastlines of the world would look if the ice on Greenland were to break up and melt, or even half of the ice on Greenland and half of Western Antarctica, which some scientists see as highly plausible (clip –
rising sea levels
). Al Gore also attempts to explain some of the major paradoxes of global warming, such as the fact that it not only creates more flooding (with an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons across the globe) but also creates more drought. The images here (clip –
paradox
) are of Lake Chad on the edge of the Sahara Desert.

He is keen to show that this whole thing is a global issue, involving every industrialised and every developing nation. We see film of China’s industrial progress (clip –
China
). China has huge coal resources to exploit but it is still using old technologies in coal-burning power stations to meet its rapid economic expansion. The message here is that we all must cooperate to do something about this global problem, including the US and China, the two biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, a film like this cannot be all doom and gloom, and Al Gore does try to present an argument and a powerful set of emotional images (images that derive their emotional impact from the implicit message that harm can be undone, that time can be reversed, that we can indeed travel backwards in time ‘to pre-1970 levels of emissions’) that are essentially empowering for the audience. The argument is basically that every little helps, that we can all do something, that because aspects of consumerism were the root cause of the problem they can be a major part of the solution, and that if we just use more efficient electrical appliances, more fuel-efficient cars, etc., we can do something significant about climate change.

I found a number of these sections of the film (seven in all) to be among the most powerful and provocative (they form the basis for a new study in
Chapter 14
and will be described in more detail), in terms of either producing the most compelling arguments or producing the most significant effects on my individual emotional response. In
addition, these were some of the segments of the film that had the most enduring effects on what I remembered.