Photo: Sosia, Easter 2013, Joe Smith

It isn’t possible to mark a birth date for the modern conservation movement and its conjoined twin environmentalism, but the hat feather boycotts of more than a century ago offer as good a date as any.  They were driven by concern at the ‘murderous millinery’ that consumed vast quantities of exotic birds. These permitted the enthusiastic displays of wealth that marked the growth of the exploding middle classes at the end of the nineteenth century. Figgis and Co. alone shift 1,580 Condors’ worth of hat in 1911. In the same period the sight, sound and smells of the cars of wealthy motorists led to this ‘luxury apt to becoming a nuisance’ being taxed for the first time. Toad of Toad Hall is an Edwardian environmentalist tract.

The first wave of contemporary environmentalism was marked in the early 1970s by cultural works that explored consumption in everything from children’s books to apocalyptic films. Dr Seuss’ 1971 The Lorax centres on the chopping down of Truffula trees to produce the ‘Thneeds that everyone needs’. Sci fi film Soylent Green is a consumption driven narrative of a rather different kind, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘human resources’.

Across more than a century campaigns and creative works have helped to shape an environmentalism that is organised around concerns with excess, denial and jeopardy. The die was set early. The result is that one of the most significant ethical and political innovations of the last two hundred years has struggled to find an idiom that sits comfortably or authentically with ideas of progress. Progress is a difficult word. But it is so deeply embedded in the way we organize discussions about politics, economics and our own community or individual lives that it is essential that anybody interested in making changes to the way the world is needs to work with it. Put another way, environmentalism needs to talk about the making, getting and maintaining of happy hats as much as ‘murderous millinery’.

Personally I’m much more responsive to any discussion that seeks to bind thinking about environment-human relations into ‘the rest of life’. This might relate to the nature of work, friendship, or how we think and feel about our place in or contribution to the world.

Tolstoy’s parable How Much Land Does a Man Need? helps me in this respect: it explores sufficiency and the good life by reference to its opposite. It notes the Devil’s nimble work in distracting people with the prospect of unearned but also unrewarding gain. An extraordinary promenade theatre work by dreamthinkspeak took me back to Tolstoy’s themes this week. It prompted similar questions for me about work, economy, consumption and personal ambition, though they offered a collective rather than individual human narrative. Environmentalism needs to connect with these everyday and macro concerns if there is to be any significant break in trends in habitat destruction, greenhouse gas emissions or resource depletion. Regarding this, I’m always puzzled when environmentalists express concern that environmental issues tend to come around fourth in ‘top five/ten concerns’ polling (a pretty consistent position over 25 years or so). Do we really expect people to prioritise abstract, distant or future concerns over issues such as tax, health or security? Rather the research and policy community need to work harder to show how environmental risks and opportunities are embedded within these everyday concerns, whether these concerns belong to the governor of the Bank of England or head of the IMF, or yours or my mum/dad.

Tolstoy plots the unhappy progress of ambitious peasant Pahom as he seeks more land than he could possibly need. On a larger canvas, but in much the same vein the wonderful In the Beginning Was the End walks the audience through a half-century of economic, technological and social development that leaves us in a state of utter atomization and alienation. A route to redemption was signalled by a very humane/human revolution in the customer care centre of the long-tentacled corporation they conjured. No such redemption for Pahom. The answer to Tolstoy’s question: ‘six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.’
Happy Easter.

Metal badge. Element from Clare Patey’s installation for Festival of Interdependence 2009

I’ve still not managed to get to see Ken Loach’s film based on documentary footage of the birth of the welfare state, but heard the producer Rebecca O’Brien talking about it at The Story 2013. Not sure where it’s going to leave me. Wistful at past times? Cheered at humanity’s capacity to ‘get it together’ now and again? David Kynaston’s wonderful history of the period reflects the plurality of voices that added up to a radically new way of thinking about the economy and its relationship with society.

A couple of tweets over the weekend invite a knitting together of the Spirit of 45 and climate change. First Andrew Neil, BBC Politics show host, asks: ‘Here’s an existential question to which I don’t know the answer. Is the whole global warming schtick over?’ Not sure about the use of the word existential here, and not sure whether the ‘schtick’ referred to is climate research or policy, but lets just assume he enjoys stirring it up. Quite a few climate researchers politely invited him to get in touch and find out more about the current state of knowledge direct from the horse’s mouth. I sincerely hope he does. But his tweet did confirm the dismally low political ratings of climate change in Westminster – for Andrew Neil and colleagues that really is all that they generally know or care about.

Separately Alice Bell posted a question: ‘Has anyone written an essay comparing Beveridge’s “Giant Evils” with the notion of “wicked problems”?’ I’m not aware of a piece of writing that explicitly does so, but I’m finding Carlota Perez’ a useful reference point, and Michael Jacobs has been writing on green social democracy in directly relevant ways. 

My own view is that the lack of confidence in the capabilities of the state within all mainstream political parties is the largest reason why they have struggled to come up with an inspiring and imaginative response to the complex interdependent problems associated with both global environmental change issues and a globalised economy.

I’ve long found the development of welfare states a valuable reference point in terms of thinking about sustainability policies and politics. The closing essay in Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth casts around for historical/political comparisons that could speak to these issues. The book is a quirky multi-author volume put together at some pace. I like the pluralism and positive tone that consistently runs through the book. All the pieces work away at the question of how we might prudently respond to environmental knowledge while sustaining – even enhancing – quality of life. One or two climate contrarians have identified the book as heinous radical green campaigning, neglecting I suspect to open the cover and see David Cameron’s name attached to a chapter. Nevertheless they have used it to mark me as an ‘environmental activist’. For the record I don’t think I am one: and don’t think I’d make a very good one if I tried. I lack the singlemindedness that marks the campaigner, I change my mind too much and I don’t think any of this stuff is amenable to easy simple answers. But I do think that the best available knowledge on global environmental change issues and the last five years of economic news taken together do all point to the need for some big bold new thoughts in politics, and they will need to be rooted in ‘collective public goods’ of the present and future. Those thoughts will also have to be big enough to be sustained through changes of government much as the postwar welfare settlement was.

Philip Pullman‘s contribution to Do Good Lives quotes Samuel Johnson on effective storytelling: “The true aim of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Well said. I think it sums up what we tried to do with that book well. The true aim of politics ought to be the same surely? The Do Good Lives book came out of the Interdependence Day project, which brought together a mix of geographers, architects, artists and policy and media people to explore complex global interdependencies and test ideas and forms of communication that might help humanity to cope with them better (our ATLAS sought to gather some of the threads of a very interesting few years of meetings and events together in one place).

The opening and closing essays of Do Good Lives were jointly written by Andrew Simms, new economics foundation fellow, and myself. There are things Andrew and I have been debating for years now. I don’t agree with him on setting up ‘dates with destiny’ regarding climate change (in the manner of 100 months), although I remain at a loss as to what the right quality of urgency might be in relation to this thorny topic. I think that some of the world’s biggest businesses are important and positive change agents, whereas he is much more sceptical. I also argue against WW2 austerity nostalgia in responding to climate change, though Andrew managed to slip a couple of references into our essays nevertheless… But there are plenty of things we agree on. We think good natured, honest and lively debate matters. And we think above all that political imagination and leadership are the main missing ingredients in terms of responding to the difficult knowledge we have received over the last two decades around global environmental change issues. 

We also firmly agree that the best foundation for political leadership is to argue that the place we are going can be better than the place we are now in environmental, social and economic terms. Reference to Beveridge and the Spirit of 45 is significant for sustainability politics not because it invites a nostalgia-steeped return to a past political solution to a past moment. Rather it is powerful because it demonstrates that political imagination and leadership can combine with other cultural and economic forces to offer good responses to complex interdependent problems. One of the convictions shared by all mainstream parties in post war Britain (and in similar settlements across the developed world) was that the state can be competent and efficient, and can help provide the seedbed for economic success and social solidarity.

Here’s an extract from the Good Lives essay – pages 239 – 242:

‘[…previous section on ‘security’…] The notion of insurance, perhaps, gives us a more robust metaphor. The insurance industry developed as a means of managing risks and spreading costs across a community – whether a community of traders acknowledging the risk to their livelihoods of their cargoes at sea, or some years later, of householders sharing the costs of protection from the risks of fire damage to their homes.

The metaphor works harder than simply suggesting the spread of risks within a community. Most forms of insurance reward policy-holders who are prepared to reduce risks by adapting their behaviour – for example, fitting better window and door locks, or driving smaller, cheaper, less powerful cars. A reduction in collective costs is then rewarded with reduced premiums. This comparison with insurance will help to explain to people why certain costs must go up, why some forms of adaptation must be invested in and why some practices must change… One of the powerful things about this reference to insurance is that it neatly connects individual and collective risks, and shows a way of spreading costs. But the comparison only makes sense if the ‘insurance cover for climate change’ is universal.

The last comparison in our whirlwind tour is with the development of welfare states in mid-twentieth century Europe. An improbable coalition gathered in the 1930s and 1940s around the idea that capitalist societies needed to strike a new deal between business, Government, workers and the wider society.

Rather than striking or starting revolutions, many in the working class supported a capitalist society that guaranteed them secure work, improving wages and relative comfort in old age. Business accepted that they needed to invest in the health and education of their workforce in order to be internationally competitive (and to insulate against revolution). The state’s role was to oil the wheels of this new hybrid machine. Although the ‘rolling back of the state’ during the 1980s clouds many memories, it is important to recognize how startlingly successful this approach proved to be in the post-war reconstruction of Europe.

The fact that it was not driven by one body of interests or set of arguments, but resulted from an alignment between previously competing forces made it politically robust across several decades. It resulted in dramatic advances in education, health and life chances in the populace.

We are not trying to invoke a revival of a welfare state world repainted with a deep green tinge. The point is that there are features of that deal that resemble a deal that we can – must – make now. This deal is one where the global community might be made both secure and economically vital. The moment we are living through demands a robust coalition of the concerned citizen, the community, the entrepreneur, the NGO that will speak up for the vulnerable, and the civil servant that will weed and tend the new partnerships.

The most important seat at the table, and the one that has been left empty the longest, is for the democratically elected politician who will show compelling leadership… The reason we conclude with the comparison with the welfare state is that there was one group of actors who were essential to its success. Business, workers and the wider society were all looking for a new way forward – but they required the leadership, imagination and patient brokering of politicians to make a new moment, to frame a new direction.

The societies that formed welfare states were not unified in their interests and ambitions for the future – far from it. But they came to a deal about what the most robust next steps should be, and the deal rewarded everyone.

Achieving a good life for more than 6 billion people, without further threatening the ecological systems on which we all depend, is the greatest challenge of our age. Yet this statement – made many times by many people – easily looks dead on the page. What the authors in this book have shown is that there are so many ways in which our dominant measures of personal and economic success are incomplete – and often perverse. Taking a fresh look at the world, we can see that good lives don’t need to cost the Earth – indeed they offer our best chance of preserving it. This realization needs to become the central political idea of our time.’

The Arctic

I’m digging around in the proposed changes to the UK curriculum, including geography, which to date has been the main home of school learning about environmental issues. Climate change and sustainability are entirely absent from a 221 page document. Drafting error? The consultation document appears to kick this stuff out in favour of sturdy learning of flags, rivers and country names. Lets hope some of these places don’t get wiped off the map. Here is my current draft of a contribution to the consultation:

Michael Gove’s proposed revisions to the Geography curriculum appear to erase mention of climate change and sustainability. These issues promise to influence the lives of today’s young people lives in far reaching ways. They also give a sense of purpose to learning about physical and human processes, and the interaction between them. Indeed these interactions have always been at the core of this distinctive subject. No doubt geography teachers will continue to teach resource and environmental change issues under the proposed curriculum. They are popular with students and teachers, and help to bring the subject alive. Their place in the curriculum was given a boost in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s groundbreaking speeches in 1989 on the global economic and social threats posed by a range of environmental issues, above all climate change. It also reflected developments in geographical research and teaching in universities globally.

What use is it to be able to label places, rivers and flags without acknowledging the literally vital ways in which all people and places are bound together in a common fate? Introducing concepts like sustainability and interdependence, and knowledge of climate change or biodiversity loss, into the curriculum reflected cross-party consensus and the gathered wisdom of the research community.

Their removal appears political: playing to imagined prejudices of a Tory right that recalls a globe half draped in the Union Jack. It is a melancholy fact that Mr. Gove and his Cabinet colleagues are unlikely to experience the worst of the anticipated consequences of the current lack of political vigour on environmental issues. It is the young who will get to fill in the gaps in their geography curriculum first hand across the course of their lives.

You can find the consultation here, though the e-participation tool is currently offline.

https://www.education.gov.uk/aboutdfe/departmentalinformation/consultations

and the document itself is here:

http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/n/national%20curriculum%20consultation%20-%20framework%20document.pdf

Photo: The Hovertrain track at Sutton Gault, Joe Smith, January 2013

Embarrassing really: I’m assuming that plenty of headline writers have ground out this one before me. In truth I’m not sure what to think about UK government proposals for High Speed Trains. Economic and transport geographers and similar seem pretty well distributed on the topic. Given mixed views you would think we would have had a livelier public conversation about how we might spend a very large pile of cash on proclaimed economic and environmental goals. Here are some inconclusive and sometimes contradictory thoughts and a bit of themed history trivia:

How many people do you need to build an HST?: I come from one of the world’s greatest railway towns (Derby, of course) so start predisposed to wave a flag for major rail infrastructure projects. Jobs, jobs, jobs etc. Very tempting notion. But am guessing that in terms of jobs and meaningful long term economic development for your buck you’d get a whole lot more out of updating our dismally dated and tired rolling stock and (re-)laying some lines that go between more or less anywhere and more or less anywhere else other than London.

Get me to London – I need to distribute wealth!: I’m puzzled by the notion that fast physical connections to London equal a ‘solution’ to the North-South ‘problem’. The knotty bundle of issues behind the shape of the UK economy are to do with plenty of things, including decades of under-investment in everything from engineering apprenticeships to schools, hopeless industrial relations and a couple of centuries of deep veined elite prejudice. None of this is going to be solved by trimming an hour or two off journey times (my great OU colleagues Doreen Massey, John Allen, Phil Sarre and co. did a sharp job of analysing the geography of Britain’s political economy in the 1980s (1988) – they’d be good people to ask about this latest turn of events).

Slow work: one thing white-collar workers lack in open plan offices and inbox-burdened daily lives is a little time to themselves. So don’t take it away from them with the distinctly ambiguous gift of shorter journeys. (Anyone who needs a little thinking space in their working lives knows how delicious it is to be able to fib ‘I’m just going into a tunne…’

Future work: sure, co-presence matters, but does it matter in the way that it used to? And might it matter even less, possibly very much less, as the kinds of tools we use today to meet virtually (skype etc.) become richer and more intuitive. Indeed virtual meetings are likely to have some real benefits over face-to-face meetings as we get really good at the design and use of these tools.

All trains are green?: Train travel in general enjoys a green glow. But a poorly loaded train or bus can make a 1982 Jag look like the carbon counter’s choice. And a high speed train isn’t so far off air travel in terms of emissions, though it has the great advantage of being electric, so in theory could be driven by renewables / nuclear etc. if that matters to you. But with a limited pot to spend on economic regeneration and environmental transport systems I’d start with cycle lanes and pavements, work up to bus routes and shared car lanes, and then improve existing services. Then repair some of Beeching’s cuts. Then consider new lines.

Mega projects go wrong. Nearly always: Danish social scientist and planning academic Bent Flyvbjerg’s work on why planning is difficult to do right is a good reference point in all this. His (co-authored) book Megaprojects is the most relevant to HST. In short ‘Megaprojects are central to the new politics of distance… There is a paradox here however. At the same time as many more and much larger infrastructure projects are being proposed and built around the world, it is becoming clear than many such projects have strikingly poor performance records in terms of economy, environment and public support’ (2003, 3). Be interesting to know what he thinks of e.g. Oresund bridge now it seems bedded in.

Historical trivia matters but I’m not sure why: Two weeks back I more or less stumbled on an early experiment in high speed rail (my pic above). The experimenters laid a track for the Hovertrain monorail system along the line of the Old Bedford River at Sutton Gault. Hovertrain was being toyed with at the same time as the hugely expensive French Aramis project that aimed to provide personalised rail-based transport in the early 1970s. Crazy business. Aramis was the basis of Bruno Latour’s first book-length work, which was almost as crazy as the project. Did more than ‘following the thing’: gave the thing a voice. Difficult read but funny and interesting. Hope he writes about the Google car.

There are just a few concrete stumps left over now from the Hovertrain project, sulking more than brooding in the wide-open fens. Their only significant role in life is as a perch for the thriving birdlife. I suspect there is enough political energy behind HST to will it into being. Flyvbjerg and Latour would both suggest we go carefully.

Flyvbjerg, B., Bruzelius, N. & Rothengatter, W., 2003. Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition, Cambridge University Press.

Latour, B., 1996. Aramis, or the Love of Technology, Harvard University Press.

Massey, D. & Allen, J. eds., 1988. Uneven Redevelopment, Hodder Arnold H&S.

Spurious (?) image of Lubetkin’s wonderful, now redundant, Penguin Pool, London Zoo, Joe Smith, Nov 2012

[Edit 18.42 13th Nov: It has been pointed out to me that I exclusively mentioned climate researchers but didn't mention climate bloggers/tweetters that I've benefited from engaging with. Apologies. I'm learning a great deal from to-and-fro on social media with various people, and omission on my part not to make space to acknowledge that. I've particularly swapped notes (and arguments) with @BarryJWoods and @clim8resistance but been challenged and learnt new things from following @omnologos @clim8resistance @etzpcm and @aDissentient too. Thanks all]

Does climate change need more explaining – and if so which bit of it? A recent report that will be debated tomorrow investigates how climate science might be better communicated. I can’t be there, but there is a good group of contributors and bloggers going. It is one response, commissioned by government departments and research bodies, to the ebbing tide of public and media engagement over the last two years. In the preface to the report Lord Stern suggests that ‘The quantity and quality of coverage of climate change has undoubtedly declined’. Indeed: Painter and Boykoff and Mansfield offer good empirical evidence on this. And if I’m to read this as suggesting that climate contrarian voices are having a very good run of it I’d agree with that too. But should we be surprised? The last quarter of 2009 saw an inflated bubble of (monotonous) climate-worrying stories. Even in June of that year you could more or less book a ticket to watch the media bubble bursting in the days that followed COP15 that December. It didn’t require an intriguing Climategate or a disappointing Copenhagen conference: editorial and public boredom would have dished the news value of climate change with no further effort from anyone.

I do think it matters that people are invited into a good understanding of climate change science, but I think it matters far more that there is some good quality debate on the politics of it. The fact is we might have already had sufficient of the former in order to do an adequate job of the latter.

Alongside the report my screen is peppered with coverage of Hurricane Sandy and the last days of the US elections. Obama has chosen to dodge mention of climate change throughout the course of his presidency, let alone the campaign. A good call I say, but deeply frustrating for US environmentalists and many in the environmental research and policy communities around the world. George Monbiot emotes on the topic today in the Guardian. Whether Obama’s team has been directly taking the council of former Republican spin Surgeon General Frank Luntz or not, they are certainly following the same line of thought. After supplying Bush with tactics for delaying action (‘focus on doubt’) Luntz took an about turn and presented anyone that would listen with a line that is designed to work for people who have ideological wax blocking their ears: ‘don’t get het up about communicating science – talk about clean American energy and jobs in a new efficient, competitive economy’.

An interview with Luntz in in the Daily Beast quotes him thus: “It doesn’t matter whether it exists or not… What my position is on that issue and what anyone’s position is actually doesn’t matter when it comes to legislation.” Putting aside the science he spotlights  “the economic benefits, the health benefits, the national security benefits…” The whole interview is worth a read, but the closing paragraph suggests that government departments may be looking in the wrong place if they think communicating climate science is the route to a solid public base for policy action:

Smerconish: I feel that the bigger headline would be a headline that says Republican pollster Frank Luntz believes in man-made climate change and global warming, and is making the argument that even for those who don’t, there’s a case to be made that we’ve got to make changes. But it doesn’t sound like that headline is yet to be written.

Luntz: You can write that headline. The only problem with that headline is that it emphasizes what I believe —

Smerconish: —Right, but you’ve got credentials on the right side of the aisle. I for one would pay attention to what you say.

Luntz: Well then write that headline. There you go.

In other words, explaining a complex body of science, and extruding novel ethical compounds from it isn’t really going to cut it in a Sheboygan diner. A similar ‘no regrets’ framing of climate change is offered by an Oregon school teacher’s magnificently simple home produced 9 minute video: ‘The most terrifying video you’ll ever see 2’  (6 million views and counting for 1&2).

I suspect Obama and team don’t need to labour the point about Hurricane Sandy being at-the-least an example of what climate change threatens with those already primed to listen. But those that can’t hear about climate science (or evolution or…) can hear about American energy security and competitiveness. Monbiot calls for statesmanship, but Obama has been investing in statecraft. With very limited political space to act on climate change my guess is that Obama has used it as best he can. A win tomorrow for Obama should open up more room to engage with the question of what a green economy in the US might look like. Naomi Klein and other currently frustrated commentators will have plenty of advice on how to move more briskly away from fossil fuels.

But how could that policy and political debate move forward with a broad base of support? On another occasion Luntz argued that if you want to talk about climate impacts and actions – you must locate them – very locally. This calls to mind one of my favourite pieces of climate communication: a lolly (candy on a stick) produced by Manchester council that was printed with ‘Lets Lick Climate Change’. It was part of the Manchester Is My Planet initiative, a bundle of activities that took the issue seriously and shared ownership of the challenge, yet that also worked subtly to suggest that acting on climate change can also bring some very positive local and personal outcomes.

These kinds of approaches were informed by social science that showed that policy and political debate needs to start from where people are and what they’re currently doing, not from an assessment of what scientific knowledge they lack. Plenty of research over the last decade points in the same direction. Some of the most revealing work is subtle and fine-grained qualitative research undertaken within and with households and communities. Take Russell Hitchings writing on gardening and uses of air conditioning, or his collaborations with Rosie Day on older people’s energy uses and needs for example.

It is no bad thing to get more people aware of the basics of this or any science (more on a positive response to this at the end), but I think it’s a mistake to think that that is where the problem, or any kind of ‘solution’, to political action lies. I suspect that the authors are themselves well aware that their conclusions could have been drafted at any point across the last fifteen years (:‘The results of the focus groups have highlighted the value of involving the public in shaping communications strategies. This provides evidence supporting a broader approach to public engagement with science’ – yes please…).

But my point is: lets not get stuck on the science. Climate change is a vast and widening body of investigation and debate: science is now barely the half of it, and in terms of political outcomes it is not the thing that counts. In the last month I’ve read new articles or books in a mad mix of fields, including philosophy, poetry, politics, psychoanalysis and electric vehicle charging points. I wouldn’t be able to prioritise a reading list for people amongst these (but for a variety of reasons recommend you start with Nick Drake’s wonderful Farewell Glacier – above all the voice of the future).

Communicating climate change requires that we greatly expand the pool of commentators from the research and policy community. On the whole the relevant voices should come not from the science community but rather from technology, design, social sciences, industry and the arts. And these research, business and policy communities need to have much more plucky and urgent exchanges in public. For their part, most journalists need to work harder to expand their contacts book and also their sense of the scope of the issue. This morning’s coverage of the WCL Blueprint for Water report is a nice example of a media treatment and policy literature that allow climate, land use and resource management to come together in ways that connect everyday and very localized concerns to long term horizons. It can be done.

But the report also prompts a heretical thought: might it simply not be useful or necessary to worry about the fact that nearly half of the UK population may be ‘uninformed about and uninterested’ in the science of climate change? How interested are they in actuarial science when they pay car insurance? Or in the biology of cancer when they shift to eating more fruit and veg? If you frame the IPCC process as a steady ongoing review of scientific understanding that informs a policy risk management process (albeit on a grand scale) then you really can afford to skip taking people through the detail, and get them on to talking about the ‘doing’.

Admittedly that doesn’t really address the finding that ‘one-third of the UK public do not trust climate scientists to tell the truth about climate change’. But might those be the same third that don’t trust scientists to tell the truth about anything? The report goes on to make precisely this point, but doesn’t this only confirm the fact that we’ve already invested too much in ‘communicating climate science’ and not enough in debating the politics of global risks of all kinds – whether they be environmental, economic or military. Those debates need a different cast list, a different set of questions and a different kind of invitation to the media than a discussion centred on ‘communicating climate science’. There is good news in this last bit: political, business and social action to address climate change sits within very mainstream and constantly sustained storylines about tax, well-being, competitiveness and security. Hence fewer bubbles and bursts of interest.

And there is also already evidence of ‘a broader approach to public engagement’ in the science. Increasing numbers of top rate climate researchers are discussing their science in public, including Richard Betts @richardabetts, Chris hope @cwhope, Mark McCarthy @markpmcc and Doug McNeall @dougmcneal.  Tamsin Edwards (@flimsin) went a step further with her blog All Models Are Wrong and actively invited climate contrarian engagement in her work as a climate modeller. I’m also a big fan of social scientist  @AliceBell’s blogging on science, communication and society. My Open University colleagues Mark Brandon (@icey_mark) and Vince Gauci (@MethaneNet) invest plenty of time and effort in ‘showing their working’ as climate scientists. They have found various ways of leaving open the lab door through their work supporting TV, web projects and their tweets and blogs. And I defy anyone to leave a popular talk by my OU colleague Stephen Peake on climate leadership and not think that climate change is important and urgent, but also difficult, funny and, well, just interesting. But these remain relatively rare examples of scholars who eke out some space in the gaps of very busy professional lives to do this kind of work. Institutions need to support these practices.

At the Open University we have designed a platform that makes it easy and quick for environment researchers to offer a public and dynamic account of their work and why they feel it matters. The Creative Climate project is a way of telling environmental change issues as unfolding stories, where anyone can hold their own account of how they’re trying to understand and respond to environmental issues. In 2010 and 2011 we co-commissioned a very diverse mix of radio, TV and online material to kick it off and it all appears, along with a few hundred other entries on the Creative Climate site. After a quiet twelve months we’ve regained some energy and are going to have another burst of activity in coming weeks and months, and will be inviting plenty of researchers and indeed anyone else engaged in environmental change issues – from whatever perspective – to  come and share their story in their own words at Creative Climate. We also put some top-quality free learning materials within easy reach. It is less a public understanding of science programme; more of a practical experiment in public understanding of scientists and vice versa.

(Lordy: sorry this was such a marathon. Meant to be a quick note, but y’know – just flooded out… Thanks to Mark Brandon and Alice Bell for comments and links).

Please wait for green man, Joe Smith, Kings Cross 2012

Today the Guardian publishes a joint letter I signed that states: ‘On current trends, there are around just 50 months left before we cross a critical climate threshold. After that, it will no longer be ‘likely’ that we will stay on the right side of a 2 degree temperature rise’.
Andrew Simms, who put together the letter and kicked off the 100 months campaign, asked what the signatories thought they would do differently to respond to the urgency demanded in the letter. My answer appears below. First though, a qualification. The 100 months campaign is brilliantly clear and eye-catching. Free of the weaselling and procrastinations of the academic seminar room. But I will tuck in a line or two of weaselling here in this quiet corner of the blogosphere in any case. I don’t think the science of climate change allows us to put a number on when a critical climate threshold has been passed. Rather I see the work of the 100 months campaign as being a political device, and I see any definition of ‘dangerous climate change’ as a political act not a scientific fact. That doesn’t make it any less urgent. Indeed politics is the right place for urgency once the science has provided a pretty robust risk analysis (it has).

I’m going to start a swear box – I’ll put £1 in every time I find myself thinking ‘crisis’ instead of opportunity, or suggest that climate change is a ‘special’ problem. No. It is an every day problem. Yes, society needs to cut emissions and prepare to cope with unpredictable changes in climate that are almost certain to come. But insisting on these things in exclusion from everyday concerns has been counter-productive. Environment specialists have failed to explain that climate change isn’t something that can be bumped down the to-do list until you’ve fixed the economy.

So I’m going to stop suggesting climate change is special. It is just one item on a list of societal risk management problems. We’ve had such problems before and we’ll have them again. It is admittedly a risk management challenge on a grand scale in terms of geography and time, but it is one that can probably be diagnosed and treated. I’d recommend starting by focusing on the global price of carbon.

Our buildings, streets, vacuum cleaners, electricity networks, sewage plants, trouser presses and mobility systems have all grown up in an age of low cost coal, oil and gas. But along with glorious freedoms the era of cheap fuel has brought with it hidden ugliness and cost. Drafty, damp and cold housing for many of the poorest and oldest; miserable and time consuming commutes in routine traffic jams; unrepairable products that break down when a small component fails; the collapse of businesses and loss of jobs as low cost freight constantly undermines locally rooted economies.

Here’s a simple action that will boost robust and more resilient locally focused economies worldwide and get everyone recognising that the economy and the environment are inseparable.  Put all of the political energy that in the past has gone into the Kyoto mechanisms into pursuit of a global carbon tax. Let individual countries resolve precisely how it is raised and spent. I’d argue that the UK should cut a good slice off income and corporation tax. This will help spark a rush of economic development that is ‘carbon-wise’. Keep a slice back to ensure that the poorest have good access to comfortable housing and public transport; keep another slice back to support those communities near and far who are vulnerable to the worst effects of climate change in the present. Not special action, just wise.

The interviews in the course of the Leveson inquiry point to many of the same conclusions. Some aim at the consumer: ‘you get what you pay for’ and ‘get the media you deserve’. But mostly they point to governance and regulation: democracy needs quality journalism, and that requires purposeful nurturing and protection.

You have to hope that Leveson is a turning point, but the conclusions are likely to be weighty and lengthy, so here is a simple and naïve proposition in the meantime: can we today start a campaign for fairtrade journalism. What might an established broadcaster, paper or new-kid online source need to do to win the badge?

• Fair payment: media consumers should accept that quality comes at a price. A fairtrade journalism logo on the masthead will give them the warm glow of satisfaction that their license fee or £1.50 or so a day for a paper is going to support a well researched, well presented body of content that has been produced in conditions that don’t threaten to shorten the lives of journalists through the sheer miserable dreary overwork that comes with reworking press releases.

• Quality: Supporting a good slice of ambitious investigative journalism, and decent levels of fact checking should be baseline practices for fairtrade journalism. A proportion of revenue should be invested as a matter of routine in research and review time. This is as important in local media as national and international in terms of ensuring scrutiny of government, business and other claims and obligations.

• Traceability: where a story is founded on, or makes reference to, research findings or public policy documents (environment; health; economy; Europe; life sciences and on and on) links to the relevant publication should be included. This is as easy as an html link. Lazy linking will be weeded out by crowd sourced checking. The absence of a link to a publication or other reputable source will have to be explained. And slack journalists, editors and outlets will have their reputation dented if they fail to follow this simple practice.

• Trust: certification as a fairtrade journalism outlet would assume that the whole media content supply chain had been regularly checked over in terms of ethical and professional standards. One thing Leveson has done very effectively is reminded everyone what those are.

This notion of fairtrade journalism is of course a really silly suggestion. But of course until relatively recently it was silly to imagine News International execs in the dock, and Murdoch facing intense public scrutiny. It probably seemed silly when a handful of British vicars gently suggested that the price of your cup of tea or coffee should include a fair price to the distant growers. They and their Dutch counterparts went from selling poorly packaged dusty tea in their vestries in 1979 to changing the way that leading brands trade with commodities growers within just three decades. Even without God on our side we can do some simple things to make a permanent change to the relationship between consumers and producers of journalism.

Some progress since 1972, for sure, but time to pick up the pace again?

This post is the script of my contribution to a podcast album that a team of Open University academics have recorded in the run up to Rio+20. There will be contributions from across humanities, social and natural sciences and technology. It’ll appear within the next few days on iTunesU.

Ian McEwan’s protagonist in his novel Solar, Nobel physicist Michael Beard, summarises how many people feel when at the receiving end of a lecture on climate change:

‘Beard sank into a gloom of inattention, not because the planet was in peril — that moronic word
again — but because someone was telling him it was with such enthusiasm’ (McEwan 2010: 36).

Perhaps it shouldn’t puzzle us that that the promise of rapid environmental and social change is greeted with a ‘gloom of inattention’. For forty years these debates have played with the highest rhetorical stakes. But despite Rio+20 being the biggest political gathering on these issues for twenty years most people are barely aware that it is happening. Why is that? The reason might be precisely that the stakes have been set so high, with talk of limits, boundaries and human survival. The balancing concept has always been a utopian vision of a dramatically transformed human economy and society.

This time around, Rio sets out to ‘renew political commitment to sustainable development’. I want to suggest that if it wants to do that then the international community needs to stop conjuring large-scale threats and lurid images of the end of times. We need to turn down the rhetorical heat. Instead we must look in a cool calm way at how we can understand risks better and how we can respond to them in ways that also make the world a better place to live for humans and our companions on planet Earth.

These UN gatherings have a habit of inflating the urgency of our situation and the scale of the challenge, while failing to implement simple practical steps to improve it. It’s a habit that was established right back in 1972. That first UN environment summit in Stockholm forced a contrast between developed world environmentalists and the ambitions of the developing world for economic development.

The Earth summit in 1992 sought to square this circle with the magic bullet of sustainability. The goal of ‘global sustainability’, of integrating environment, society and economy sounds something like pursuit of a ‘global Sweden’. In other words a stable democracy, robust economy, generous welfare system, food on the table – perhaps plenty of cycle lanes and argon filled triple glazed windows.

It sounds like an imaginary place a long way away. But its not just that it doesn’t sound plausible – with apologies to Swedes – it doesn’t sound all that attractive either. My guess is that a more sustainable global society is going to be far more messy, argumentative and diverse than the formal rhetoric of sustainability implies.

The dour rhetoric of planetary boundaries being crossed also tends to disguise the progress that has been made in recent years. In terms of awareness, things are more advanced than one might have expected. New knowledge about biodiversity and climate change is difficult. It demands that we think in new ways about time, responsibility and the future. Environmental science and policy is run through with complexities and uncertainties. Yet after only a couple of decades of being considered at international level, around 70% across the planet are ‘concerned or very concerned’ about climate change.

We are at a pivotal point where most people on doorsteps, in boardrooms and in faith communities think about the natural world in new ways. The great majority of the world’s government’s have signed up to agreements on climate change, biodiversity and human development. These are signs of solid progress, and, in terms of the long sweep of human history, they’ve happened in the blink of an eye. But continuing with the same refrains about enormous and urgent global problems may make it harder to pick up pace.

Instead I suggest UN talks should concentrate on some well-focused tasks. Here are four that I would pick.

First, agree on a global carbon tax, to be balanced with locally identified reductions in other taxes. Bind this together with means of rewarding countries and communities that protect eco-systems and carbon sinks.

Second, revise trade rules such that the principle of fair trade shifts from being a consumer choice to an embedded function of the economy.

Third, chase an urgent expansion in investments in women’s access to education and health services, and in food security: these are the only routes to stabilizing population growth, and they are all a spur to economic development.

Fourth, throw weight behind a global financial transactions tax. This would generate funds for improving healthcare and food security, and make the banking system a little more stable in the bargain.

All four measures are about taxing bad things and investing in good ones.  These moves don’t trash the capitalist system but instead revise the rulebook in ways that make every exchange more fair and sustainable. They mean that every transaction in the economy can reflect a good guess at their full social and environmental costs.

Sustainable development is a tired old phrase, possibly moribund. Rather than trying to resuscitate it every few years with a global shindig we should draw strength from one very important insight that sits at the heart of it: the economy is a human artefact that we make, and can remake, according to changing priorities.

The measures I’ve sketched out here won’t deliver a global Sweden but they do greatly increase the chances of humanity coping decently and reasonably well with the challenges we face. In place of a shouty mix of utopian and dystopian statements we need to just get on with our To Do list. By giving up on the tired rhetoric of eco-disaster, and instead aiming for a handful of ambitious but specific and achievable practical goals, we can convince people that the place we’re going could be so much better than the place we are now.

The superstar scientist James Lovelock has given a couple of interviews recently where he suggested he may have overcooked his prose a little in sketching out the pace and impact of climate change across the coming century. The BBC’s Roger Harrabin summarised the interview in a blog post thus: ‘Don’t worry – the earth will cure itself of any CO2 overdose in few million years’.  Hardly reassuring news unless you are a rock. But the main point that caught attention was that Lovelock rowed back from comments in his book ‘Revenge of Gaia’. Specifically it included a passage where he described the last few breeding pairs of humans migrating to the Arctic region to find the last inhabitable place on Earth.

My own assessment when Lovelock wrote that book was that he felt he may only have one more chance to move the climate change policy story on. In his late eighties at the time he may reasonably have supposed that it would be his last popular publication. You can understand why such a charismatic and mischievous fellow would have known that he could further help stoke public attention with such a provocative image.

But everyone I know who knows anything about climate change and who picked up on this racy rhetorical flourish rolled their eyeballs. As with Al Gore’s occasional tendency to overdo it from time to time we all agree that you just don’t need to exaggerate: the risks associated with even fairly modest climate change are scary enough. There will be significant human suffering, waste and ecological disruption with even the two degrees of warming this century that now looks certain, and higher temperature rises look likely unless political engagement with this tricksy topic really ramps up.

But there are no short cuts to public attention. I’ve written previously on why climate change introduces a very distinctive cultural politics, and also why the research-media-politics relationship is so awkward in another post that suggests ‘don’t shoot the pianist: offer a new tune’. Climate researchers, communications and policy people need to work on that tune now more than ever. My guess is that the hummalong chorus should be ‘the place we’re going is better than the place we live now’ [stick to the day job joe]. In other words, we need to design policies that mitigate and help people to adapt to climate change in ways that help to make the world a better place. More obesity-reducing cycle lanes in North American cities? Safe and efficient cookers in rural Africa? Cosy and efficient housing in Britain? This is all the polar opposite of the last-breeding couple stuff, and all the better for it.

NB: A version of this post also appears on the Open University’s Environment, Development and International Studies pages.

My post about ‘climate dyspeptics’ has won a bit of attention here and there from the ‘sceptic’ blogosphere. That’s what I hoped for. But it seems that for some readers I may not have laid out clearly enough that my suggestion that we use the term climate dyspeptic in place of climate sceptic was intended as a joke (admittedly a weak one), and part of my point was to push right over the end the idea of constructing clumsy binaries of ‘believers’ and ‘skeptics’.  If you’ve arrived here for the first time there are a couple of other posts elsewhere on my blog on why I think climate change is a distinctive cultural and political problem. But here I just want to ask for an end to name-calling.

‘Warmists are either stupid or dishonest.’

‘Of course climate deniers are not merely stupid, ignorant… They are also dishonest, manipulative, and arrogant.’

These are two sample quotes picked out in a few seconds of googling. It’s not good is it? Climate change science and policy has risen in prominence in parallel with social media, where distance and anonymity can erode the kind of good manners almost all of us manage to muster in real public places. Sociologists exploring racism or other kinds of discrimination talk of processes of ‘othering’ that make it possible for one group of people to dehumanise another.

Terms like climate sceptic, denier and contrarian have served to cluster anyone with some good questions about climate change science and policy into a discrete group. This has solidified into an identity. ‘We’re climate deniers you know’ said a professional couple to me during a good-natured and intelligent conversation in a bar. Neither were stupid or dishonest, and I don’t think they would have thought that of me, although we disagreed on some significant points. None of those disagreements were really about science – at root they were all about how we thought about economics, politics, risk and the future. I got the sense that they felt that their thoughts about these sides of the question were not just being ignored but being buried under the edifice of ‘climate science’.

But isn’t it patently absurd to suggest that anyone is ‘against climate science’. Similarly it is odd to my mind that some social researchers and commentators talk of climate change science ‘beliefs’. Very few people have beliefs as such about numeracy or grammar, and climate science describes researchers’ attempts to make the best sense possible of a complex set of interactions. It is like saying you are against mathematics or English language: its a nonsense to oppose an area of inquiry. But this research area has sketched out potential hazards that most involved in it suggest hold potentially great significance for society, policy and politics. That’s where things hot up, and the name calling starts.

I’ve worked with researchers from quite a range of disciplines that contribute in one way or another to climate science research. It is hilarious to consider any of them stupid or professionally dishonest. They’ve all chosen to work in academia when their skills set could have provided them with vastly greater salaries. They work (almost all remunerated at fixed pay scales) on questions that interest them. A small number have behaved defensively – even badly  – in the face of some very nasty treatment, much of it in the form of (often anonymous) ad hominems.

I suggest we should let the numerous and varied projects that add up to climate science ‘run in the background’ and ask them to keep coming out and telling us about the new things they’ve found now and again (the IPCC would do this a whole lot more effectively if they spent a good chunk more on communications. I hope the blogosphere will support them in that…). Digital and social media make it easier for that work to be more transparent in process, and indeed for more people who aren’t engaged in science professionally to comment and participate.

But the real action in terms of citizen and political debate should be around how we think about risk and the future. Everyone should feel free to express an opinion around what we should do about the difficult knowledge around climate change without being called one sort of name or another.

(PS: I’m assuming, hoping, the bit about beheading me was metaphoric?)

(PPS: Realise I’ve rather gone on about these themes recently but its now out of my system for a while I hope. I expect to post something about a new book I’ve co-edited in the next couple of weeks)