Communicating Sustainability

Margaret Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317332770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Communicating Sustainability is a book of evidence-based strategies for making sustainability vivid, accessible, and comprehensible. To do this, it brings together research from a range of specialties including cognitive psychology, visual perception, communication studies, environmental design, interpretive exhibit design, interpretive signage, wayfinding, storytelling, courtroom litigation, information graphics, and graphic design to illustrate not only what approaches are effective but why they work as they do.

The topic of sustainability is vast and complex. It interconnects multiple dimensions of human culture and the biosphere and involves a myriad of systems and processes, many of which are too large, too small, too fast, or too slow to see. Many people find verbal explanations about all of this too abstract or too complicated to understand, and for most people the concepts of sustainability are regarded as quirky, peripheral, and not essential to everyday life. Yet the challenges of sustainability concern the very survival of most species of life on Earth, including the human species. In order for life as we know it to survive and thrive into the future, sustainability must become broadly understood—by everyone, not just activists or specialists. This book offers tools to help make complex systems and nuanced, abstract ideas concrete and comprehensible to the broadest range of people. The goal of communication, and of this book, is to build understanding.

PART I
Perception and Communication

1

CONTEXT: WHY IT MATTERS

About This Book

This book is not about how to motivate behavior change, which many others cover in detail. This book focuses on the role of communication in building understanding. It is about how understanding can be nurtured and ideas can be made more clear. Effective communication begins with an understanding of how the human brain works, then uses practical skills grounded in this understanding. After we build some knowledge of cognitive psychology and perception, we can learn practical approaches to good communication from a range of specialties, including how storytellers reach audiences, how interpreters design museum exhibits, how environmental designers facilitate wayfinding, how graphic designers lay out pages, how information designers make graphs and diagrams, how trial lawyers communicate to juries, how web designers make useful websites, and how writers and speakers of all sorts communicate clearly. In the course of this book we will try to understand not only what approaches are effective but why they work as they do.

You will find the same themes appearing repeatedly across these specialties: figure/ground, landmarks, chunking, pattern-seeking, association, contrast, and story. We will consider how our goal is not only to increase our audience’s knowledge of facts, but to help them to think their own thoughts and to make their own connections based on better understanding. As an interpreter with the US National Park Service said, “Interpretation… facilitates democracy. It allows for and stimulates a conversation of multiple meanings and points of view” (Larsen 2003, 73). It is true not only of interpretation, but of communication in its many forms. There are multiple scales at which to work, there are multiple arenas in which to work, there are all kinds of people living all kinds of lives with all kinds of worldviews, and in this time of consequential planetary changes, we need them all. Effective communication will be essential in navigating the challenges and opportunities of life in the Anthropocene Epoch (Folke 2013, 27).

Sustainability: Life in the Anthropocene

Sustainability is about systems. They operate at every scale, from the microscopic to the planetary. Human society and economies are connected to and intimately dependent upon these systems. Yet our brains are not wired to process interconnectedness and systems thinking; we are wired to see primarily simple cause and effect (Makower 2009, 269). And so a significant part of our goal in communicating sustainability is to make the work of the biosphere visible, including the ways ecosystems are intertwined in all the dimensions of life on Earth: environmental, economic, and social (Folke 2013, 27).

Sustainability means enduring into the long-term future. It refers to systems and processes that are able to operate and persist on their own over long periods of time.

In the modern era, however, the planet faces many problems that are connected, including poverty, impaired health, overpopulation, resource depletion, food and water scarcity, political instability, and the destruction of the life support systems on which we all depend. We live on a planet that is changing fast. Since 1960 the human population has more than doubled, global consumption of water has more than tripled, and the use of fossil fuels has quadrupled (Foley 2010, 54). Synthetic pesticides and heavy metals are found in the tissues of every animal on earth. The end of cheap fossil fuels is looming. The planet’s sixth mass extinction is underway, with 50 percent of species alive today predicted to be gone by the year 2100 (Wilson 2002, 102). Ninety percent of large fish have disappeared from many ocean fisheries, victims of overfishing. Where rivers empty into oceans, runoff laden with synthetic fertilizers has pulled oxygen out of coastal waters and left dead zones devoid of animal life. Coral reefs are dying and mollusk populations shrinking as carbon dioxide concentrations make ocean waters increasingly acidic. Mountain glaciers are melting, deserts are growing, sea level is rising, and waves of climate refugees are likely in the near future.

Collectively our consumption currently exceeds Earth’s carrying capacity by 40 percent (Ewing et al. 2010, 18), and we are on track to exceed it by 100 percent by the 2030s (Gilding 2011, 52). That is, we are already in overshoot, the condition in which human demands exceed the regenerative capacities of the biosphere by depleting its natural capital and overfilling its waste sinks.

Humans have become a geological force on a planetary scale. We live at the beginning of a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene, an unprecedented period in which human activity has become such a powerful force that it has major, planet-scale impact on climate and on every living system. A proposal to formalize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, that is, at the same hierarchical level as the earlier Pleistocene and Holocene epochs, is currently being considered by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the official scientific body which formally establishes the geological time scale (Anthropocene Working Group 2016). The Anthropocene epoch is generally understood to have begun around 1800 CE at the start of the Industrial Revolution (Crutzen 2002, 23). Beginning in 1945, the Anthropocene entered a second stage researchers identify as the “Great Acceleration,” when multiple aspects of human impact including population, resource use and environmental deterioration began expanding exponentially (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007, 617).

The Holocene has apparently come to an end, and humanity faces novel conditions it has not encountered before. We face multiple, global-scale issues including food scarcity, aquifer depletion, pollution, habitat destruction, extinction, depletion of renewable and nonrenewable resources, climate destabilization, social inequity, failing states, growing control by powerful corporate interests, and widening gaps between rich and poor. Many of these issues are what are known as wicked problems, problems that are difficult to solve because they are complex, interconnected, and continually evolving (Steffen 2014, 1). Behind them all lie two fundamental drivers: consumption, built on the economic growth model, and human population growth.

The question is not whether we will change, but how, and what form the transition will take. Navigating the shifting conditions, fostering transformations in the sociocultural realm while we strive to avoid crossing planetary-scale thresholds into an undesirable state-shift in the biospheric realm, will require that we find ways to live better and to work together like never before.

We will need to shift rapidly away from fossil fuels, power our lives with renewable energy sources, and use energy more efficiently whatever the source. We’ll need to reduce per-capita resource consumption, provision ourselves from zero-waste circular economies, reduce population growth, and provide food to increasing numbers of people without converting new areas of land or destroying habitat. We will need to use renewable resources no faster than they can regenerate. We will need to live within the planet’s capacity to support us and our fellow creatures into the long-term future.

We will need not just technological adaptations, but social and political ones as well. Sustainability will depend on having informed, ecologically literate citizens working toward healthy ecosystems, genuine social inclusion, and equitable distribution of resources. We will need strong communities, networks of all kinds, and participatory governance at multiple scales, as we build the foundations for a thriving, sustainable human civilization and biosphere (Engelman 2013, 17).

Humans have gone through several major transitions in their history: the discovery of fire, the development of language, the development of agriculture and civilization, and the Industrial Revolution. Today we live on the threshold of what has been called the “fifth great turning” (Heinberg 2011, 284), a turn away from a fossil fuel-powered, climate-destabilizing, growth-based industrial economy and toward a sustainable, regenerative society.

Better communication is a missing piece. Thanks to decades of scientific research, we have ample information to understand the severity and causes of the global problems that face us, and projections of future trajectories of these problems are remarkably consistent (Groffman et al. 2010, 284). We have enough understanding to be able to halt and even reverse these trends. Yet year after year surveys find that the level of concern over climate change and other environmental issues remains relatively unchanged despite increased public debate and media coverage (Gallup 2017; Makower 2015). Apparently, pure facts are not enough. A fundamental goal for all people who work to educate or to foster positive change is to make the issues and potential solutions of sustainability visible.

Why are the realities of the threats to sustainability so hard to acknowledge and understand? For one thing, because they are invisible to us; they are very large, very small, and very slow. We think of many of the impacts of climate change, for example, as in another time in the long-term future, or in a distant place, such as the melting of glaciers on faraway mountaintops. The primary cause of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, is an invisible clear gas that acts slowly over time and does not lead directly to immediate or noticeable impacts (Kunkle and Monroe 2015, 150). The changes seem undetectable and not immediate, and so we don’t think of them as relevant to us and our individual lives.

Our brains did not evolve to look generations into the future (Marshall 2014, 46). We are descendants of hunters and gatherers whose lives were short and dangerous, and who stayed alive longer by watching for immediate threats. So human brains evolved to focus primarily on the present, which is where danger lurked. Today our brains still react sensitively to sudden, short-term changes such as movement or loud noise, but we hardly notice slow changes, and we tend not to notice slow-moving threats (Ehmann, Bohle, and Klanten 2012, 6). Threats that catch our attention are concrete and immediate, such as a charging lion or an approaching car. Threats such as pollution or climate change, by contrast, are abstract, distant, and invisible (Marshall 2014, 56).

Our brains are wired to scan masses of incoming stimuli for clues that tell us whether we should pay attention. The issues that demand our attention are in front of us, now, with a clearly visible threat from an identifiable danger (Marshall 2014, 97). Our brains evolved to look for immediate benefits, too: shelter, a mate, water, or something good to eat. We who face short-term needs in our daily lives do not easily recognize incentives toward delayed or intangible benefits (Jacobson 2009, 30).

Information Overload

In addition to all that, we are awash in information. Communicators must compete with voluminous quantities of information and visual pollution. Our perception is selective, as it has to be; we would be overwhelmed if we were aware of everything around us. We are wired to see what we expect to see. In order to deal with floods of multiple stimuli and to prevent information overload, people use selective attention to filter out information that doesn’t match what they are looking for. Attention is a valuable commodity (Ehmann et al. 2012, 6). A speaking coach for presenters at TED Talks says, “In a society with too many choices and too little time, our natural inclination is to ignore most of it” (Gallo 2014, 126). In this era of information overload, finding ways to make information visible is essential.

We have instant access to information, if we can notice it or find it. Unlike earlier in history, when information sources were limited to a few books, or a single news journal, or one television channel which constrained our attention, audiences can now move constantly from source to source (Gallant, Solomon, and Esser 2008, 21).

There is a vast and growing gap between the entire body of recorded knowledge and our limited capacity to make sense of it all. Inherent in that trend is increasing specialization and the resulting fragmentation of knowledge. The more the quantity of information multiplies, the more specialties divide into more narrowly focused subspecialties, each of which may be unaware of valuable knowledge in the others (Chen 2002, 230). We often don’t see the connections between them, and we often miss the bigger picture.

Information is not useful in and of itself. We need to make sense of it somehow and understand what is meaningful. This is the goal of good communication. The challenge for communicators is to present information clearly and succinctly and to help audiences make sense of it (Few 2012, xv).

Positive Messages: Beyond the Deficit Model

Communicators must deal with the problem of confirmation bias, the human tendency to pay attention to evidence that confirms our beliefs, and to ignore information that does not. Search engines and social media intensify confirmation bias by filtering out information with which we disagree. Confirmation bias means that we will not change our ideas about an issue just because we are given new facts (Wijkman and Rockström 2012, 6).

We have been hammered for decades by facts about the threats of climate change and environmental degradation, across a range of media types. We have enough facts, yet as a species we continue to move in destructive directions. Scientists and activists often operate within what is known as a “deficit model,” the idea that communication is a one-way delivery of information to people who don’t have enough knowledge. It holds that if people simply have more facts about what is wrong, they will become engaged (Groffman et al. 2010, 284). It turns out that the opposite is true.

The “deficit model” approach to communication says that people’s perceptions of issues are rooted in ignorance. This approach overlooks the reality that knowledge is only one of several factors in how people make judgments and reach conclusions. In fact, social identity and ideology often have stronger impacts.

Research tells us that scaring people is not likely to make them feel engaged. On the contrary, fearful messages often result in apathy from a feeling that nothing can be done about the situation. People do not like feeling incompetent or helpless. Once they are aware of threats, continued negative inputs cause most people to tune out the messages and move on to other, more pleasant concerns (Robertson 2017, 330).

You can use fear sparingly to get someone’s initial attention, but then you are more likely to reach them with positive opportunities and solutions (UNEP 2005, 13). Once they know that problems are real, then what they need to understand is that there is hope and there are things they can do. People become engaged by a positive vision of how life could be different. The alternatives are more economically secure, ecologically stable, and socially equitable than the status quo; we just need to make them visible (Rees 2014, 198).

Mental frameworks can help audiences make connections between what appear to be isolated events, issues, and solutions, and between those issues and solutions and their personal lives (Groffman et al. 2010, 286). A United Nations communication initiative suggests you think like a modern storyteller, using challenges to provide drama and solutions to provide excitement and story resolution (UNEP 2005, 15). As a storyteller you can present a problem, then complete the story by pointing toward how to fix it (Baron 2010, 223).

Social Factors

Good communication is not only about presenting ideas in ways that are clear. It is also a process of understanding your specific audience so that you can connect with them on their terms and in ways that are relevant for them (Smith et al. 2013). Even though a message may be sent and received successfully, receiving is not the same as understanding. A message passes through personal contexts, belief systems, and social frameworks (Corbett 2006, 289). People will be more engaged and more motivated to change their behavior when they recognize connections between their individual values and their group identities, and the environment and society on a larger scale (Kunkle and Monroe 2015, 161).

Fragmentation among social groups is a challenge in communicating topics such as ecological restoration, social equity, or climate change. Each of us has a belief system about the biosphere and our relationship to the rest of the nonhuman world (Corbett 2006, 12). If we think of this relationship as a spectrum, some are on the anthropocentric end of the spectrum, believing that humans are the most important life form and that resources exist entirely for human benefit and use. Others are on the ecocentric end of the spectrum, and believe that nonhuman beings and even land itself have intrinsic value regardless of their usefulness to humans. Most people’s worldviews fit somewhere in the middle (Corbett 2006, 37).

Our level of economic and social opportunity affects how we receive communication in various forms. People with ample personal opportunity can be powerfully motivated by information about environmental problems and planetary crises. People with ample personal crises of their own are less likely to respond to environmental crisis, and will be more engaged with reports about environmental opportunities that connect to jobs or other economic opportunities (Jones 2009, 110). In one study on environmental attitudes and knowledge, affluent students were more concerned about recycling and destruction of rainforests, while low-income students were more concerned about lead poisoning, lack of good drinking water, and energy shortages (Roper-Starch 1996, 25). In a number of polls, including Gallup, Pew, and others, a larger percentage of the general public give a rank of higher significance to immediate concerns ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• PART I: Perception and Communication
• PART II: Making Sustainability Visible
• PART III: Practical Details
• Bibliography
• Index