The Sky is Falling
Is it time to stop using fear as a motivator for change?
The other day I opened my mailbox to see a letter from a political party. On the front of the envelope, written in bright red font, were the words “Code Red for Humanity”
This use of inflammatory language or sensational photos to get our attention has been common as long as advertising has been around, but it is a tactic whose utility I feel we have as a society greatly overused, to the detriment of ourselves and our children.
There is no question that it is an effective way to raise funds. If you tell people they need to save the world and that they can help do it by coughing up a few dollars it seems a small price to pay, and many willingly do so. But is it an effective way to mobilize people to actually “save” the planet?
Fear and its cousin anxiety, in my experience do not inspire positive action. Evolutionarily, when we feel fear we either fight, flee, hide or freeze. What we fear nowadays is not the predator threatening to eat us, where such strategies could be helpful. It is the fear of the future - climate change, deadly viruses, nuclear war or anything else catastrophic from the hole in the ozone to a potential asteroid strike. None of the fight/flight/freeze actions are suited to the modern world we live in, and since none of those actions dissipate the threats, we are left with the residual fear that becomes a kind of chronic anxiety or depression over the disasters we are constantly told are looming in our future.
In a world with almost eight billion people, where as individuals few of us have the ability to change global military policy or corporate investment decisions, trying to use fear to motivate people to act is not helping create a better world. What we saw in the past two years showed us that people motivated by fear (either for themselves, or for others) were willing to hide, cover their faces, or take drugs that the government said they should. But they were not able to overhaul our ailing health care systems, promote a shift to better nutrition, revitalize local businesses anad community centres, transform streets and neighbourhoods to improve access to fresh air and exercise, or any of the other changes that could have dramatically reduced mortality and improved societal health. Such thoughtful approaches can not arise when fear is holding the reins, nor can they be implemented by the average person on their own.
Why would we expect that fear over environmental issues will have any better of an outcome for our planet than our recent fear driven approach did for our health? All the fear that environmental groups and government are trying to create in order to improve the ecology of our planet (or at least our contribution to it) is not actually serving us, and I say that as someone who once upon a time thought it could. Early in my career I worked for a major environmental organization, and part of our communication strategy was to “raise awareness” of the many threats to endangered species. I volunteered, went to protests and marches, and thought people just needed to “wake up” to the big problems, and the way to wake them up was to show them inconvenient truths a la Al Gore.
I now believe we’ve been using such methods for long enough to conclude they aren’t working. People aren’t “waking up”. We are already awake, and we are each living our lives in the best, more moral and thoughtful way that we see possible.
We’ve already heard “code red” many times. We’ve heard the alarms, seen the reports (or at least the headlines about them), talked about the devastation that surely awaits us, and yet here we are, still mostly going along with business as usual. We examine the options for food, transportation and housing in our daily lives and choose from what big business and government make available to us. The three thousand people who have the money and power to make drastic changes to what’s available to us (ie, to give us great public transit instead of highways, or huge national parks instead of mines) have surely read the news, and they aren’t ready to do it. And the rest of us 7.5 billion people who don’t have that power aren’t going to be able to “save the planet” just by recycling an extra can or riding our bicycles a little more often.
I say this not to be pessimistic, since I think the possibilities for our future are endless. Nor am I advising we bury our heads in the sand - such a thing wouldn’t be possible even if we wanted to ignore the impact of human activities. I am suggesting that we shift from scaring others - and ourselves - with worst case scenarios, and focus instead on the many wonderful things happening out there, everywhere from construction materials made of mushrooms to using plants for toxic waste remediation. I simply feel it’s time we all embraced the world as it is, and start promoting the ideas and solutions we want (or creating them ourselves), rather than screaming all the time and hoping that someone out there will fix everything.
I didn’t even open the letter I received. I discarded it (in the recycling bin at least) before my 13 year old came home. He doesn’t need to see yet another piece of alarmist news telling him there’s a bleak future that he has to fix through donations or voting for a different party. I’ll share with him the news about the mushroom homes instead.