Communicating the Message

I recently came across an article on BBC.com titled "Media attacked for: Climate Porn". I'll be honest here, I'm not sure if it was the climate or the porn that caught my attention. In any event I read the article on a released report: Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better? by Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit. I think I read it twice and still couldn't make make heads nor tails of what the author of the article was trying to communicate.

The gist of the article was that the report was looking at how the climate discourse was playing out in mainstream media in the UK. The article goes on to say that the report found that many media outlets, especially the tabloids in the UK were taking an alarmist approach to sell papers or raise awareness depending on which side you're on. What I was not able to work out was whether the report was trying to say that the state of communication on the environment (in particular global warming) was a mess, ineffective and that we should all just go home and forget about it. A bit baffled by this (both my apparent lack of reading comprehension and what the article was trying to say), I set out in search of the actual report to see if I could make a bit more sense of the whole situation. Well, when I found the website for the Institute for Public Policy Research yesterday, I discovered that I was actually one day early; the report was set to be published today.

I was able to take a first past on the full report tonight, and have to say I'm not exactly sure what the BBC reporter was driving at. The report is very accessible, not very lengthy, or technical and I recommend if you have a few minutes to take a read over it. I haven't had enough time to digest it to give my complete thoughts on it, but this I will say: It has been my observation, which is highlighted by this report, that the "green movement" has struggled with communicating the sustainable message. It seems that those in the movement go around wringing their hands saying "Why doesn't everybody get it?!". It's kind of like how in college that physics professor of 20 years experience, shouted back at the class "What do you mean you don't get it, it's right there on the board, it's so simple." A quote from the report's executive summary puts it perfectly:

More generally, the challenge is to make climate-friendly behaviours feel normal, natural, right and ours to large numbers of people who are currently unengaged, and on whose emotional radar the issue does not figure.

One of the major hurtles is just what the above quote describes: making sustainable living normal, a part of everyday life; making sustainability a way of thinking. I think this is one of the major points that can be drawn from this article, but I'm still stewing on this one and I'll have to let you know what I cook up.