Optimism vs climate despair: why we should remember the NASA janitor
By Stuart Lambert, co-founder
Among the most common questions we are asked by brands is this: how do we encourage our consumers to make the behavioural changes needed for us to deliver our sustainability targets?
This question is, in so many ways, the crossroads at which Purpose marketing and ESG strategy meet.
Because it’s all very well a beverages company investing in the most advanced deposit-return scheme as part of its Environment strategy, but if individual people don’t return their bottles, the plastic will still end up on the street, in a river, in the sea. It’s all very well an energy company investing in renewables as part of its decarbonisation plan, but if individual homeowners are still heating empty rooms or leaving lights on unnecessarily, that’s still wasting energy. It’s all very well a supermarket selling wonky veg to reduce its food waste footprint, but if shoppers continue to buy more than they need and chuck food in the bin at home, there’s still far too much food going to landfill.
A company can put in place the most rigorous, responsible ESG programme, but if it doesn’t connect its Purpose and inspire its customers to take the individual action necessary to support, reinforce or deliver that programme across the value chain, then it’s only doing half the job.
The problem is, of course, that getting people to ‘do’ something is hard. Getting them to change existing, often ingrained and habitual, behaviour is even harder.
And when it comes to action on the E of ESG it’s the hardest of all.
Not because the public is apathetic or sceptical but, perversely, because of the opposite: the scale of the problem is increasingly known, and that knowledge is horrifying.
Climate depression is real and “spreading fast among our youth.” Climate anxiety is “widespread in children.” Climate despair is making people “give up on life”.
Climate grief in all its forms is the most contemporary trigger for the most prehistoric of our animal traits: that of fight or flight.
We can take action; or we can run, or hide.
The outcome we should most fear is that in which the majority of us – consciously or subconsciously – opt for the latter.
Why would that happen? Quite simply because people feel helpless in the face of a problem so vast, so technical, so interconnected. With each of these dynamics our individual capacity to make a difference feels impossible to grasp. Like being handed a single brick and being told to start building a cathedral.
No action by an individual citizen or company, no matter how motivated, will make the difference.
But it can make a difference.
And this is crucial. Because the alternative is helplessness, hopelessness and then, finally, surrender and inaction.
This is the biggest threat to successfully navigating the climate crisis ahead. Individual surrender and inaction is an insidious, contagious disease: if I don’t visibly care or speak out or do something different, then we are less likely to do so, and then they – the governments which are answerable to us, the companies that seek our hearts, minds and wallets, the fund managers who invest our pension savings – will feel less pressure to use ‘their’ power (which is really 'our' power) to drive systemic change.
It begins with us, which means it begins with, for each of us, “me.”
But how to communicate this? How to land that message, that truth, in a way that engages people? How can brands inspire and effect behavioural change among their consumers, without being sententious or trite?
The scale of the climate crisis, and the connected plastic and biodiversity crises, feels so big that all the old tips for being ‘green’ seem laughably inadequate. After all, if the Earth’s prospects really are as bleak as we are told by David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth (“it is much, much worse than you think”), by Greta Thunberg, by the IPCC and by indeed pretty much every climate scientist, then what difference will my turning the bedroom light off, or walking rather than driving the kids to school, or using fewer carrier bags make?
But this is not a zero-sum game. Two things can be equally true: one, that all those actions remain as innately sensible and ‘green’ as they ever were; and two, that they alone will not save the habitability of our planet. We need to do more, far more.
The ‘things’ we need to do are many, varied – and perfectly doable.
Buy less stuff that we don’t really need. Throw less food away. Eat less meat. Insulate our homes. Recycle our electronic devices properly. Make our next car purchase an electric one. Fly less. Move our savings and pensions to ESG, SRI or climate impact investment funds. And so on and so on: the full list would cover pages.
The point is that many or most of us know this already. We might be doing some of it. But few of us will be doing as much as we could or should. And the big reason for that is that it feels futile in the face of the assumptions we make of other people’s behaviour: what’s the point of me going to all that ‘effort’ when other people won’t? It won’t make a difference. It’ll be for nothing.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman writes extensively on the behavioural neuroscience underpinning this Catch 22 situation, in Humankind (a book which should be taught in every school in the country). His work proves that we are almost always wrong in our negative assumptions about one another. We wrongly think the worst of our fellow citizens, and that tragic misperception frequently holds us back from taking collective action to improve society and the world.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and brands certainly mustn’t fall into that trap.
There is an apocryphal story that tells of a visit President JFK made to NASA’s HQ during the determined moonshot Apollo programme in the 60s. According to the story, as he walked the corridors, JFK asked a janitor, who was busy mopping the floors, why he was working so late.
“Mr President,” came the sincere reply. “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
We need to all be that janitor. We need to understand that our small actions can and do make a difference, so long as millions of other people do the same.
And we need to believe that other people are, like us, listening and responding.
That’s the trick. And that’s the answer I give to any brand asking the question at the top of this article: think about how you can show (not tell) people that they are not acting alone. Think about how you can help your customer truly believe that your other customers are all taking action, are all taking part.
Show me that my brick is a crucial part of that metaphorical cathedral. Make me feel proud of placing it. Invite me to watch it being built. Celebrate everyone else’s bricks.
Every sustainability or ESGP brief for a consumer brand must begin by affirming this truth: we can all make a difference. And if we all - individual citizens and corporations - do that then we will collectively make the difference.
Brands need to be honest – there’s no hiding from the parlous state of the world – but they don’t need to be downbeat, or to hide their positive personality out of misplaced fear of looking like they’re not taking the climate crisis seriously. We need more positivity, not less. More personality, not less. More humour, not less. More optimism. More belief – in one another, in our capacity to solve problems, in the fact that there are solutions to the challenges we’ve created for ourselves.
Brands that remain positive and optimistic in tone about the solutions and demonstrate how people can genuinely help, and continue to reinforce that message by showcasing the difference being made, are the ones that will get these briefs right.
As terrible as the Covid pandemic has been, it has proven one powerful thing: that when the shit hits the fan, infinite money can be found to do the seemingly impossible. In this case, creating a brand new vaccine from scratch within a year. It's a shame that the shit has to first hit the fan, but that's human nature.
As Kim Stanley Robinson brilliantly dramatizes in The Ministry For The Future, governments and banks will act, when they are forced to. And they are being forced to, now, slowly. We can speed that up as individuals by demonstrating not just public demand for action, but the existence of a consumer market for solution-based products, services and the brands that provide them.