My really, really big Do

You know about the Do Lectures, right?

Good.

Every speaker ends with their big Do and little Do - the things they’re committing to do to make the world better. On the last day, every attendee writes down theirs too. The ones I wrote down were good, but probably both could be filed under ‘little’ in the grand scheme of things. I might share them soon, but not quite yet.

But a few things have just collided between my ears and given me a Do. Not a little Do. Not a medium Do, not even a big Do. A really, really big Do. And I’m going to need a little help with it.

I’ve been inspired by my colleague Tom Crompton’s work on how to encourage people’s intrinsic values in Common Cause. I’ve also been scared shitless by the scale of the task we have in making our collective lifestyles more sustainable in the face of billions of pounds of marketing budgets encouraging consumerism, and a government economic policy that demands growth above all else.

The environmental movement is trying hard to affect meaningful shifts in the broad population, but with a few exceptions (light bulbs, plastic bags, maybe fish) these struggle to take hold and bounce off the well-worn mental paths of extrinsic values: bigger, better, faster, more.

Success seems dependent on replacing one thing with another, slightly different thing. There seem to be few models for replacing a thing with an absence of a thing. The best examples that come to mind are war-time calls to the British sense of fair play around rationing (“Make do and mend”, “Go easy with bread, eat potatoes instead”), but I don’t see anyone rushing to invoke the blitz spirit quite yet. Indeed, the post-war explosion of consumerism and consumer marketing and the trends that were set in place in the 1950s are part of the mindset we’re working against.

The theory around the values people hold discusses how the full range of intrinsic and extrinsic values are generally present in all people to a greater or lesser extent - so that even the most status-obsessed shopaholic still loves cute animals, and knows that they deserve to be in the wild, not within the confines of a zoo.

So my really, really big Do is this…

I want to figure out how we make that love of nature that’s present in everyone, and make it bigger, and higher up in their consciousness. 

Wouldn’t it be great if kids revered forests over amusement parks?

Wouldn’t the world be different if Springwatch got higher viewing figures than East Enders?

What if we didn’t need to put a pound-value on an acre of rainforest to make an argument to conserve it?

What if people valued the changing colours of Autumn over the Autumn/Winter 2010 fashions (“Oak is bang on trend this October…”)?

I just have no idea where to start.

Help?