It’s time we started selling sustainability

A woman walks toward a well through clouds of dust raised by cattle in the wadi outside Louri village in the Mao region of Chad. For generations, the people of this bone-dry region lived off their herds, but climate change has meant that the normally once-a-decade droughts are now coming every few years.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being harangued by tweedy academics and tree huggers about global warming. David Suzuki’s baleful countenance seems to hover everywhere, like the bitterly disappointed father figure of your worst Freudian nightmare, inconsolable at how we’ve screwed up humanity’s habitat with our stupidity and lassitude. It’s enough to make you want to Occupy a Prius.

It’s no longer reasonable to question whether it’s really happening ~ Monday’s release of the latest dire news from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reinforced that. And it’s no longer reasonable to think that the cause of our inaction is a lack of awareness of the problem, or how we might be contributing to it. Enough of us already know what we need to do. We just don’t want to. That makes this a marketing problem.

If I shut off my car at red lights or turn my thermostat down to 19 degrees, I have to contend both with the fact that these gestures will not be understood charitably by the people around me, and with the feeling that I’ve somehow capitulated to someone’s moral judgment. As much as we may not like it, this is how humans, social animals that we are, function. If we want people to change their behaviour, we have to pander. Pointing a bony finger at them will only make them defiant; making change personally relevant and socially useful will motivate them. This is, after all, how we sold them those SUVs in the first place.

It’s time we started selling sustainability rather than treating the threat of climate change as some kind of punishment for capitalism. We know how to do this. The basic principles of marketing have proven themselves over and over, for better and for worse. The marketplace is our commons, the place where we agree on what matters and what does not, from politicians to lattes. That’s where this battle must be fought. All we have to do is get activism off its bully pulpit and pander a little to the people. In this battle, maybe more than in any battle in history, it is far more important to be happy with the outcome than to be right about it. If we aren’t careful, it won’t be SUVs that destroy the world. It will be sanctimony.

Re-post of In climate change battle, it’s time we started selling sustainability from Ottawa Citizen.