Fear is not the best motivator

It's easy enough to scare people about climate change. But there are other ways to capture imaginations and create momentum

Mark Dowd
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 September 2009 15.45 BST
The chances are, if you are reading this, that you might also have seen either The Age of Stupid or An Inconvenient Truth. To those who fight to get climate change to the top of the agenda, these two movies are essential campaigning tools. Now I don't dispute their power and Messrs Gore and Postlethwaite are to be credited for sticking their heads above the parapet, but I have a problem with them: they left me feeling numb and overwhelmed. Gore stacks up the evidence of the momentum towards dangerous tipping points so effectively that by the time he gets on to "solutions" very near the end of his hundred minute presentation, you feel you are about to be demolished by a juggernaut.
I had a similar reaction when I first saw The Age of Stupid. At the end of a packed screening earlier in the year, one of my Operation Noah colleagues stood up and bluntly asked the audience: "So having seen that, who wants to get involved in campaigning?" There was a chilled and muted response. It may be me, but a very large amount of the film left me thinking that all the images of flooding, drought and destruction which Postlethwaite uncovers in his film archives are inevitable. From his futuristic vantage point of 2055, he shows a world that, in a mere 40 to 50 years, has gone to the dogs. And in a world where denial is still very much a factor, it's amazing how quickly people switch from denying the scientific evidence for human-induced global warming, to embracing the view that it's all too late and we're all doomed. Of course, that "flip" still allows you to go on behaving as before. "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
Which raises all sorts of questions that lobbyists and campaigners have been grappling with for years now on all this: what is the best way to engage the human imagination on the issue of our time? Guilt and fear are very limited in their appeal and, more often than not, only induce a greater desire to turn away and carry on as before. What's encouraging is to come across so many schoolchildren who are getting more and more familiar with the notion of stewardship. It's a term that has both appeal to religious and secular mindsets: namely that because of our lofty status in terms of biological and intellectual complexity compared to other species, this carries with it a responsibility to cherish our surroundings. Man's intelligence, as we have seen from history, can be put to a variety of creative and destructive uses: compare lunar landings and the discovery of penicillin with war and genocide. Ahead of December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen, we are now facing an epic collective decision as a species: business as usual and sleepwalking towards all sorts of potential horrors, or reverting back an understanding that sees ourselves not as usurpers of nature as a commodity, but as protective guardians of a wondrous world that is threatened – uniquely, by its own most intelligent life form. Fossil fuels which took millions and million of years to be formed by slow natural processes are being released into the biosphere at a dizzying rate with destabilising consequences which are there for all to see.
I believe virtue and example are contagious. Look at what happened recently with the launch of the 10:10 campaign, which the Guardian is backing. No sooner had Ed Miliband signed up to cut his own carbon emissions by 10%, than we were being told the whole Tory front bench were getting ready to endorse the pledge. Within 24 hours, the entire cabinet had also jumped on board and Liberal Democrats announced they were looking at moves to make this a resolution which would bind the whole party. Cynical politicking? Maybe in part, but this is all about momentum and taking the notion of stewardship beyond the perceived domain of the elite middle classes into society as a whole.
We are gnawing away at the very womb that sustains us. Reversing that trend needs as big an army of stewards as we can possibly muster.
Mark Dowd is campaign strategist for Operation Noah