Yesterday attended a talk at university by Dr Wojke Abrahamse of Surrey’s RESOLVE working group, about their research project to encourage lifestyle changes in the home in response to climate change. Their project used a mix of information provision, goal setting and tailored feedback over the internet, and achieved significant changes.
This has a lot of crossover with my own research in this area (indeed, one of the questions asked was whether anyone had tried using groups – I held my tongue but will email the relevant parties later). It also has the same limitations – self-report risks of inflating results, preaching to the converted, etc.
Three things of interest:
(1) there is some evidence that environmental changes are more likely to take root when accompanied by other big lifestyle shifts, particularly moving to a new home. Seems obvious now it’s been pointed out. Something to keep in mind anyway…
(2) one of the participants in Wojke’s study was so enthusiastic he tracked carefully the energy usage for each shower by each member of his family… among his detailed conclusions? “The strongest indicator of shower energy use is hair length”. Hee! Is Greenpeace ready to start a “short hair will save the planet” campaign?
(3) this came out in discussion – Wojke felt that the very different circumstances of each person make it difficult to advise people in general where they should start if they want to make some changes, but I think her own data tells a different story. The right place to start is with the very easiest things. All behaviours are not created equal, and some can shift markedly without much difficulty (e.g. stopping the use of standby on your appliances, shifting to low-power lightbulbs) while others demand much more to shift (e.g. using your car less, shifting to home-cooked food from prepared processed food). In her own data, car use patterns hardly changed, even though change in other areas was distinct; this is precisely to be expected. It just seems obvious to me that people should start with the very easiest things (regardless of the relative ecological impact of those things) because each change builds up context for, commitment to and moves identity towards environmental responsibility. (This also betrays my bigger diagnosis that individual action is primarily useful for its consequences in the political marketplace, making politicians act like this stuff matters to voters.)
Category: small group action
Freeze for Climate Change
This Friday there’s going to be a Freeze in many centres around NZ. Random people will assemble at 1pm and freeze in place for 5 minutes. Volunteers will hand out little flyers about climate change to people.
It’s for the UN’s World Environment Day, June 5. This year’s host is Mexico City, whereas last year it was good old Wellington, NZ – not that you could tell. Although the Freeze guys did their first run then too:
They expect many more people this time out. The WED theme this year is specifically climate change oriented: ‘Your Planet Needs You – Unite to Combat Climate Change’. There’s a specific focus on the Copenhagan meeting in December, which adds to the messages out of the massive Kyoto Science and Technology Forum in December, which identified Copenhagen as the crucial moment; and the recent talk by Bill McKibben of 350.org pushing for a global day of action in October. You’ll be hearing a lot more about Copenhagen as we get closer to the conference, but the take-home message is that everyone involved in climate change response is looking at this event. This will be where things happen, or don’t happen, that set us on our global course.
So: Friday. Standing still in a street. If you click the videos in my Friday Linkys you’ll know I’m a sucker for that kind of street theatre-intervention. Will it save the world? Of course not. Will it help? A bit. And every little bit helps. Check out the website and head along. If you’re not in NZ, figure out what your area is doing to mark the day – there’ll be something happening. Keep your eyes open and if you can have some fun along the way, great.
Oxfam NZ has a petition on this same subject.
Another reason to care about Copenhagen: it is the stomping ground of REPTILICUS.
Give A Little
Kiwis: I commend to your attention givealittle, “New Zealand’s online giving community “. It’s pretty neat. and could do with a bit more attention than it’s getting, so consider taking a look.
How it works is: charities and project funds set up pages on the site, and people go and give ’em money or just sign up to support and watch them. This is a general fit with a big trend online in the last couple years, of using the power of social media to drive many small acts of philanthropy with good feedback systems. (Some of this was covered in CauseWired, the book I read last year; recently Jamas wrote about his experiences with a giving system called Kiva.)
It’s a neat, painless interface and a good way to make a contribution that sticks around in your life rather than disappears into a collection bucket never to be thought of again. That’s important, I think – this kind of technology allows us to connect with our actions, which is a surprisingly powerful thing in terms of creating the self that we want to be.
They’re looking for more causes right now. That’s a sensible approach – each cause they get on board means another set of people trying to bring others to the Givealittle storefront, and you get the network effect kicking in. So if anyone out there has hooks into a non-profit, a volunteer organization, a charity, etc., consider passing them this link to check out.
Do check it out. If you like how they roll things, then you might even want to sign up.
Reappraising CauseWired
A couple months back I reviewed CauseWired, a book I’d been comp’d. It was not a glowing review, but it wasn’t that negative either.
CauseWired is the name Watson gives to social causes that leverage online tools, particularly social networks… Watson is clearly a very switched-on guy and he’s explored social activism in great detail, but the book left me feeling underwhelmed and convinced that it will date rapidly…. I wanted Tom Watson to ask himself harder questions. Instead it feels to me like he’s played safe and contents himself with giving a tour and quoting extensively from others. To give credit where its due, it is a very good tour of the online cause state of play in early 2008, but I can’t see this book retaining much value beyond 2010 or so. In that sense, it isn’t really for me.
Next part of the story. Only a few weeks after reading CauseWired, there was a change in government here in NZ. The new govt. acted fast and suddenly climate change policy was up for review. I felt like a response was needed – something to give a steer to the new government away from indulging the hardcore climate sceptics of their partner party. It soon became apparent that no-one else was stepping up.
So I did. With some frenzied behind-the-scenes work from a team of helpful souls, the Don’t Be A Rodney campaign was born. And it was a success on its own terms, generating at least a couple dozen and maybe as many as a hundred hard-copy letters to the new Prime Minister urging him to put his foot down on climate change.
The campaign would not have happened if I hadn’t read CauseWired. It is that simple. I think I knew everything I needed before the book, but CauseWired gave me something that I hadn’t given it credit for in my earlier review: detailed, specific inspiration. The examples in that book gave me some confidence and momentum I would otherwise have lacked.
If its effect on my life is the measure of a book’s worth, then CauseWired ended up as the most valuable book I read in 2008. And that’s something I never would have believed when I wrote that first review.
Monbiot on Marshall on Climate Change
In his fascinating book Carbon Detox, George Marshall argues that people are not persuaded by information(15). Our views are formed by the views of the people with whom we mix. Of the narratives that might penetrate these circles, we are more likely to listen to those which offer us some reward. A story which tells us that the world is cooking and that we’ll have to make sacrifices for the sake of future generations is less likely to be accepted than the more rewarding idea that climate change is a conspiracy hatched by scheming governments and venal scientists, and that strong, independent-minded people should unite to defend their freedoms.
He proposes that instead of arguing for sacrifice, environmentalists should show where the rewards might lie: that understanding what the science is saying and planning accordingly is the smart thing to do, which will protect your interests more effectively than flinging abuse at scientists. We should emphasise the old-fashioned virtues of uniting in the face of a crisis, of resourcefulness and community action. Projects like the transition towns network and proposals for a green new deal tell a story which people are more willing to hear.
George Monbiot column: “A beardful of bunkum”
Meanwhile, the Don’t Be A Rodney campaign has ended. A bunch of letters got sent. My feeling is they did have an effect, in that John key has clearly given a quiet steer to committee chair Peter Dunne to slap down Rodney’s nonsense. Ultimately, though, we have to wait and see how it goes down.
I sent a letter
Don’t be a Rodney!
That conversation last week went somewhere:
Don’t be a Rodney, John Key!*
I’m a believer in the power of paper. This is a campaign to get people writing letters to John Key, telling him to put Rodney’s barmy climate denialism in its place, and get NZ up to speed on its climate change obligations. Write a letter. Bureaucracies run on paper; governments are bureaucracies; therefore paper works.
Thanks to the circle of advisers and geniuses and busy bees who helped pull it together – you know who you are.
Anyway. That’s what I did last night! So if you’re a Kiwi, make with the clicky and see why you should write a letter.
* also available in Facebook
CauseWired review
Tom Watson’s book CauseWired is about the rise of online social activism. I was informed by Johnnie that advance copies were being distro’d free to bloggers to generate some online buzz, and seeing as this sounded right up my alley, I signed on up. Not too long after a proof copy turned up in the post. Neat! Thanks, Wiley!
CauseWired is the name Watson gives to social causes that leverage online tools, particularly social networks. It’s the name of his supporting blog as well. It’s also the first mark against this book for me. It’s a clear case of buzzword-creation, trying to add a new phrase to the lexicon like “tipping point” and “long tail” came along in recent years. That’s no great sin in itself, but “CauseWired” is an ugly, ugly ohrase, complete with the oh-so-00s capitalisation in the middle of the compound word. It’s a name that looks horribly dated already and the book isn’t even out yet.
And that, in a nutshell, is my problem with the book as well. Tom Watson is clearly a very switched-on guy and he’s explored social activism in great detail, but the book left me feeling underwhelmed and convinced that it will date rapidly.
CauseWired consists of ten chapters describing a number of online tools and projects, like Facebook Causes, Kiva, Razoo, DonorsChoose, Change.org and MyBo. It discusses key people behind the scenes and relevant anecdotes to represent the power of the new models. The message is very clear that these online tools lower the barriers of entry and enhance organizational capacity so that it is fairly easy to build and communicate with a network, and that makes some radically new infrastructures possible for philanthropy and political organization.
It is something of an exhilirating tour, and more than slightly humbling when I note that 90% of the people leading these projects are younger than me. However, its a tour without a thesis. Watson isn’t arguing any case, or projecting any particular future as likely, or saying anything more than “this is a thing that’s going on, and right now it looks like this”. There seems to be an unwarranted confidence in the power of the new platform; the massive success of the Obama and Hillary primary campaigns was certainly enhanced by online tools and distributed yet tightly-managed structures, but it was probably more important that it was a clash of potent identity-politics to anoint a challenger to eight years of the most toxic rule in American history. This is a perfect storm of conditions and probably doesn’t indicate how any future effort will work out.
In the final chapter Watson gives more than token acknowledgement to some of the real problems with online tools, such as saturation, which will inevitably become a huge issue as online cause platforms multiply and fight for sunlight. However, Watson doesn’t do much more than acknowledge the problem, then move on to other issues. It is trivial to see that online social activism sites and tools cannot expand infinitely, but what the consequences of their growth might be is not given much consideration.
Ultimately, I think the problems I have with CauseWired are because I wanted Tom Watson to ask himself harder questions. Instead it feels to me like he’s played safe and contents himself with giving a tour and quoting extensively from others. To give credit where its due, it is a very good tour of the online cause state of play in early 2008, but I can’t see this book retaining much value beyond 2010 or so. In that sense, it isn’t really for me. It’s something to give to, say, a charity director who is wondering what is possible online, or someone who hasn’t previously considered the ramifications of “web 2.0” – the stories and examples here will get them up to speed very quickly. But it doesn’t seem to have much to say to those already involved in social activism, or whose experience of the net is already two-way.
So by that measure I guess I can’t recommend this book to most of the readers of this blog. It may be I’m being rather too hard on it, and asking far more from it than I really should do. To that end perhaps I’ll embrace the Web 2.0-ness of it all and invite questions and queries from readers. Are you intrigued by this book’s premise? Ask me in comments about whatever interests you and I’ll do my best to shed some light. There might be a whole constituency for the book that I’m just not seeing.
Waste Minimisation Bill enters law
About two years ago, I tried out that small group action thing I’d been talking about. Three friends and I got together and decided we were going to do something – we chose to make a submission on the Waste Minimisation Bill that was then in committee.
In February 2007, we fronted up before select committee to speak to our submission. I wrote about the experience here.
Now, a year and a half later, the bill has passed into law. It has changed a bit from its earlier form, and you’d have to be a bit of an optimistic reader to find any evidence of our specific submission contributing to the changes, but I feel a kind of ownership nonetheless. This bill coming into law is an important step towards getting this country to sort out its relationship with waste and recycling.
The passing of the Waste bill has mostly gone without comment – largely due to the passing of the Emissions Trading Scheme the same day. The Greens put out a press release but that’s about it – you can read that here.
Anyway, its nice to be able to draw a line under that action. Key lessons:
(1) lawmaking takes a long time
(2) NZ’s system of government is genuinely open to participation from everyone – we have enormous power to influence things, if we only spare the time and energy and interest to use it.
Nice one.
Small Groups In Action
Today my Monday Psyc tutorial completed two weeks of action, during which they had tried to adopt more environmentally sustainable behaviours. They’ve been working away in their small groups, facing challenges and negotiating around them, and generally coming face to face with the difficulties of behaviour change even with the best of intentions. (And, of course, of the difficulties being increased when your enthusiasm is only lukewarm.)
It’s great. They’re all engaged and full of ideas, and learning a lot as they go. This is the second year we’ve run this programme, but it is much changed and improved this year with more effective links to social science theory and a better, more fun, basis for group formation and action. Last year it was a mixed success in terms of education, fun, and sustainable outcomes; this year it looks like a definite success in terms of education and fun at least. Still waiting on the sustainable outcomes aspect – how successful will their efforts be? There’s still one more two-week intensive behaviour change period to come, after the holidays, and then we’ll see for sure. My instincts are positive, though. The trick will be whether my thesis is supported – that people who identify strongly with their action groups will be more successful at behaviour change.
Its neat to see this going on. This has come a long way since my thoughts about small group actions first turned up on this blog in October 2006.
It feels good to be doing something concrete to work towards change.