Green activists want us to change our lives to include more ‘sustainable’ choices like biking to work, eating less or no meat and generally turning our back on a good deal of the technological progress of the last several decades.
But people haven’t bought into the green dream, and hippies are wondering why:
‘For years we’ve tried to ‘sell’ climate change, but a lot of people aren’t buying,’ Townsend says. ‘Threats of climate hell haven’t seemed to hold us back from running headlong towards it.
Their answer to this lack of progress is better marketing. Less stick, more carrot:
We must build a visual and compelling vision of low carbon heaven. And this vision must be desirable. ‘If [it] isn’t more desirable than what we’ve got now then why bother reaching for it?’
If marketing a vision of eco-heaven doesn’t work, they appeal to our pocketbooks:
in some cases the peripheral benefits of lifestyles that exert less impact on the environment should be highlighted, such as the savings that can be made by running an energy efficient household. ‘If the moral environmental argument doesn’t resonate, then perhaps the financial savings could.
And if that fails, the hippies want schools to teach a new economic vision which doesn’t rely on pesky economic growth:
He points to education as the key sector and says sustainability should be embedded across the school curriculum, ‘at the moment we train them for society as it is rather than a vision for how it could be’
The article begins reasonably enough, it wouldn’t hurt to do a few things more efficiently. But by the end we’re right back to the reason that greens always fail to persuade us. Deep down they want to change the fundamentals of our economyand there’s no way to market that to a free-thinking public. We hope.
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