Gröna strategier för Nordens konstliv
Stiftelsen Wanås Utställningars femte internationella seminarium
Onsdagen den 13 april 2011, Wanås Konsthall, kl 10-17

Pressen bjuds härmed in att delta vid det utsålda internationella seminariet Gröna strategier för Nordens konstliv, ett samarbete mellan Stiftelsen Wanås Utställningar och Kristianstads Konsthall.

Den 12 april, dagen före seminariet, erbjuds längre intervjutillfällen med tre av de internationella talarna:
• Rachel Madan, världsledande expert inom hållbarhet för museer. Grundare och chef för Greener Museums i London som hjälper kulturlivet att reducera sin negativa inverkan på miljön.
• Joanna Yarrow, brittisk miljöexpert, författare och programledare som tillsammans med Jonathan Smales driver kommunikationsföretaget Beyond Green i London.
• Jonathan Smales, fd verkställande direktör för brittiska Greenpeace.

Syftet med detta unika seminarium är att erbjuda djuplodande diskussioner och handfasta råd om hur museer, konsthallar, gallerier, konstnärer och andra aktörer inom kulturlivet kan hitta ekologiskt hållbara lösningar för den egna verksamheten. Dagen fylls av föredrag och paneldiskussioner med internationella experter inom centrala ämnesområden som museiadministration, utställningsproduktion, arkitektur, konservering, mathållning och publikarbete mm.

Under seminariedagen visas för första gången i Sverige Maya Lins ”Unchopping a Tree”. Detta videoverk ingår i konstnärens nya uppmärksammade minnesmärkesprojekt ”What is Missing?” med syfte att öka medvetenheten om den pågående utrotningen av växt- och djurarter samt deras miljöer.

Övriga talare:
• Sara Grahn, professor i hållbar gestaltning vid Kungliga Tekniska högskolan i Stockholm. Arkitekt på White, ett av Nordens största arkitektkontor.
• Birgitta Sandström Lagercrantz, miljökonsult och projektledare för Ekoteket, ett publikt forum för klimat- och miljöfrågor på Kulturhuset i Stockholm.
• Thomas Harttung, grundare av ekologiska matdistributören Årstiderna. Föregångare inom klimatkompensation för jordbruket. Utnämndes till ”Hero of the Environment 2009” av Time Magazine.
• Marie Vest, bevaringschef på Det Kongelige Bibliotek i Köpenhamn. Expert på resursminimering.
• Tea Mäkipää, konstnär från Lahti i Finland, idag verksam i Leipzig i Tyskland. Medverkade i utställningen WANÅS 2009: Footprints.

Fullständigt program: www.wanas.se/seminarium

Tack till Nordisk Kulturfond, Region Skånes miljövårdsfond och Stiftelsen framtidens kultur som genom generöst stöd möjliggjort seminariet.

Presskontakt:
Eva Bachmann 044-66071, press@wanas.se, www.wanas.se

Presentation at the International Seminar: Art and Ecology

The Wanås Foundation

October 21, 2009

Jacob Lind: Now I want to introduce Joanna Yarrow, eco entrepreneur, media vented, if I may say so, she has been one of the people in London and the UK who has been spearheading new environmentalism. Thank you. 45 minutes.

Joanna Yarrow: Thank you Jacob. And thank you very much to the Wanås Foundation for inviting me here. I am absolutely delighted to be here. It was a great honor to get the invitation. I had a really exciting last couple of days getting here by train. It didn’t take me 39 days and I didn’t walk, but 20 hours and it felt like quite a long time at the time, but some great scenery. I was asked to talk to you about branding, sustainability, and how one goes about that. And the idea of fitting something like that into 45 minutes is quite a challenges, so apologies upfront, I warn you I have 90 slides and 45 minutes, that means 30 seconds per slide, so if I start going gaga and you can no longer understand me, please put your hand up.

Well, I always think when one is talking about sustainability it is worth going back to basics if only for a moment, because sustainability, green and eco get talked about so much these day don’t they. We are all green now. I worry sometimes that there can be this presumption that everyone is talking about the same thing and you can go off on a tangent even before you start. And there are so many definitions of sustainability that are very good. One of the simplest that I really like is this one: “Living on the earth as if we intended to stay.” Now, I realize that I am preaching to the converted here, you will all be very aware that is not what we as a species are doing right now. Not if you live as we do in Britain. If everyone on the planet lived like that, we would actually need three planet earths to support us. In fact, I was reading National Geographic last night it is now 3.1 planet earths. I understand that in Sweden, your ecological footprint is marginally smaller than ours so maybe you are still on three planets, but at the end of the day it is semantics isn’t it, we’ve only got the one planet. And of course as our friends, were the billboards say: “It is only going to get worse”.

You no longer need to be reading the specialist press these days to know that the trends are against us. I think this is well encapsulated in a piece of math called Factor 10. Which simply goes that world population projected growth compounded with economical growth (slowed down a little bit now, but is still going up) means that in order to have the impact we are having on the bio sphere that we are having today, that we know is unsustainable, by 2050 we will need to be 10 times as efficient in everything we do. That is Factor 10. So, in terms of the way we got to the seminar today. In terms of the way we produced the snack we that you have just eaten and drunk. In terms of the way that this Power Point is powered. Factor 50 means by 2050 we will need to do this 10 times as efficiently. That is the scale of the challenge. That is why we have in Copenhagen in December world leaders coming together to talk about 90% reductions in carbon emissions. So when people talk about green, when people talk about eco, it is no longer fluffy. It is a real challenge. Just as a practical example, in the year 2000 there was 500 million cars on the world’s road. Factor 10, that experiential growth, means there would be 5 billion 2050, unless we start to do things more efficiently. That is the scale of the challenge.

The American writer Wendell Berry puts this very succinctly when he says that “every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads back to the question of how we live”. These are not new abstract, academic problems that have been flown in from somewhere else, that have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, they all actually relate to how we as individual, institutions, nations organize our way of life. And that can make you feel like shit, can’t it? It can make you feel really, really guilty. I try not to feel like that when I wake up in the morning. I try to think of it as an opportunity.  My colleagues and I are very fond of the phrase “the upside of down”.  We did not invent it, it was a writer called Thomas Freidman, but seeing climate change and the other sustainability challenges that we face, as a challenge that gives us innovators, entrepreneurs, artist an opportunity to create change.

So what we do is we spend our time trying to design environment, buildings, places, products services, communication materials which make it easier and more attractive to live sustainably. Because if those problems do come from how we live, we need to find new and better way of living that gets us out of this situation. Otherwise nothing will change.

So for me, as probably one of the environmentalist that was being talked about in not such polite terms earlier this morning. This passion if you like, came fairly early on and it was really rooted in experience I think.  I was very fortunate I grew up in a woodland in Sussex in the south of England. By Swedish standards it is very small, 60 acre, which I believe is about 15 ha. But what it did give me was a very unusual I think, in British terms, hands on relationship with the outside would. I remember at the time every adult I met said to me what an amazing opportunity, what an amazing childhood. I was like whatever: “I haven’t got a TV, haven’t got a car, my clothes are all second hand, my lunch box is filled with stone grain, whole mill, organic brown bread sandwiches, wrapped up in recycled grease proof paper and an apple from my parent’s orchards when everyone else has Mars bars and white bread. This is embarrassing.” But somehow, despite that, it stuck. And I think that, despite the embarrassment of being green in the 1970s as a teenager it just did and is still with me a personal connection with the natural world, recognition that I was a part of that natural world. Which as I grew up I could not dismiss. And it gave me a real schizophrenia if you like this duality in my interest and where I put my focus in life. On the one hand I did feel very strongly about the environment and on the other hand I saved up my pocket money to buy Vogue magazine. I was not quite sure where to take it from there.

Well, what I did is I studied Human Sciences at university looking at both the biological and the sociological aspects of what it means to be human. At that point I realized I had as well as a passion for the natural world I was also very interested in people and what makes them tick. Human motivation, what drives us all? And after university when I was working for Amici della Terra Italia, the Italian Friends of the Earth, on European environmental campaigns, I was fascinated by the fact that you could be working on a topic which in its basic sense was so unifying, the environment, and you could be talking about a facet of human experience which in the western world seems so common, traffic congestion for example, water quality and if you had people from different parts of Europe sitting around a table talking about that common experience they had such different perspectives. Someone from London, someone from Stockholm, someone from Rome talking about traffic congestion believe me have very different priorities. Fascinating!

I then did a masters degree in London with an organization called Forum for the Future which is a national think tank specializing in sustainability. At the age of 23 it was an amazing eye opener, because not only was I learning about sustainability from a sociological, demographic, ecological, economic perspective, I was also doing one month placements in different organizations around the UK. So the House of Lords for example, Saatchi and Saatchi, the communications company, the Environments Agency. Again, I was seeing the world through their eyes and I was seeing sustainability challenges through their eyes. And I realized that there really is no one common solution to these problems we all share, there is no one right approach. You really have to get inside the minds, inside the head space that those people are tackling these issues from.

One of the things I realized as I was doing the masters degree was that a missing link I felt, this is now 11 years ago, was communications. There were lots and lots of people out there doing amazing things, whether they were in NGOs, whether they were in political lobbying groups, whether they were in industry, whether they were in media, but they were all talking to each other.  They were having seminars, like this one, they were writing pamphlets to each other and meanwhile the rest of the world was going in the other direction. And I felt that the media needed to be a really important bridge. After all, certainly in the western world, certainly in the UK, television and the other mass media are where we get, the majority of us, the majority of our information and a lot of our opinions are formed. And back then, ten years ago, as my colleague said earlier this morning, the only real perspective that we had on the environment was the adulation of beautiful nature: fluffy pandas, koalas, the amazing whales, what a wonderful world this is and really nothing about our roll in it. Or at the other end of the spectrum, there were the hell headlines.  There were already and had been for a while the ”we are destroy the environment”, ”oh look there goes the rainforest”, “oh the poor polar bears are going to die because their icebergs are melting”, “oh look sea levels are rising so much we are all going to have to swim” and so on. Cuddly pandas, hell and nothing much in between. Talking about our roll in this either in our contribution to the problem really how is this happening or in what we can do about it. Not very empowering.

The only other thing that I saw out there was the sort of save the planet heroism communications. Greenpeace: “Give us your money, don’t worry we will solve the problem for you, we’ll get out in a dingy and you can watch us on the news at ten”. I am caricaturing slightly, I now live with a former Director of Greenpeace, so I have to be quite quiet. These were the main types of mainstream communications on sustainability, the environment and green issues back then. And then I guess, in the last ten years, seven, eight, nine years ago, in the UK we did start to see some public campaign that were really talking about us as individuals and how we might relate to this. This was a big government funded multimillion pound communications campaign. Are you doing your bit? It was on leaflets, stickers, in the newspapers, on the television and it was about light bulbs and switching the TV off, but the inevitable question I think it raised was doing my bit of what? Why should I? And why are you asking me? Why isn’t anyone else? So, they were starting to talk about individual action, but they weren’t really doing much more than making you feel guilty, at bit itchy or frankly quite cross.

At this point in my career, I came across an organization called the Earth Center. So this was in the late nineties. This was a project up in the north of England, in Yorkshire, which was set up by Jonathan, my now partner, who was former Director of Greenpeace. What he wanted to do was mark the millennium, by setting up an institution, a physical place, which in the same way the century before the grand exhibition galleries, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and so on had been talking about the state of the world then, the state of the nation, the state of the industry what should we do now a century later to mark the millennium? So he decided to establish a place called the Earth Centre, somewhere that people could go nationally and internationally to learn about sustainability and the state of the planet, but also to explore solutions. And rather than choosing a site in London, which has so many museums and so much cultural attention already and very little space frankly and it is quite expensive, he chose this site, quite a challenging one. 400 acres of South Yorkshire, very economically deprived and the site of two former coalmines. So not only were there no trees, there was no soil.

The first few million pounds were spent just creating soil and planting trees. It was a millennium funded project, it had European funding as well and it started out very small scale, as a local project, with local people planting trees and raising fish farms and very, very hands on. It suddenly got lots of international attention and got a huge 120 million pound project in five phases. This was the master plan.  You have the 400 acre ecology park around that, 26 acres in the heart of it, pavilions, demonstration gardens, water purification, energy production, international competitions for designers, architects and landscape planers and so on, to come together for the first time, certainly the first time in the UK, showcase a different way of doing things.

I got involved in 1998, just before the sort of grand opening for the millennium. My roll was at that time I was working as a freelance consultant specializing in sustainability communication. I was working predominantly for corporates at the time getting a bit disillusion with that world. You know writing a leaflet for Tesco on their sustainability when they at the time didn’t actually have a sustainability policy. It was a great relief for me to find the Earth Centre and start trying to find ways of helping them to interpret this amazing, if you like, cathedral of sustainability that they were building to all the people who came here, whether they were school children, families, corporate groups, local authorities and so on. This really for me was like a second incarnation of this realization I had had back at the wood, the importance of the power of experience. That you can give people as many statistics or scientific pieces of information as you like, for a lot of people it is not until they actively become engage in some way, they are given some form of experience that touches them that they start relating to the topic and seeing it as their own. So here we have got on the left, young children doing reverse pond dipping. So rather than going out to a pond and picking up a complete food chain in a jar they are now putting together the algae, the mini beasts, the bugs, the green life so they are creating a food chain and then giving it to the pond. On the right, they are in a Mongolian yurt learning about how other cultures live. Here on the left, they are exploring the organic gardens, and on the right, they are learning about the story of pooh. That is a living machine, which is a sewage waste water cleaning system. Here we have got, the entrance, just as it was opening you can see the coal spoil on the right, which has been exposed to create a beautiful spiral. On the left, locally sourced timer restaurant building. This was the first locally sourced organic restaurant in northern England. On the right, a gallery designed by Future Systems, built into the side of the hill where inside an interactive multimedia exhibition designed by… I’m terrible with names… You’ll know them all… designers, opera specialists, sound installation artists from around the world creating an experience where people could explore, quite artistically, the relationship between the natural world and humans. The idea originally behind the whole Earth Centre experience was to make it speak for itself. And literally every stone that was there had been sourced for an incredibly detailed sustainability perspective. Every piece of wood, every curve had its reason. I think because the people who were involved it, were so involved, and coming from such a pure perspective. I remember showing, probably at the time the UK’s most highly referred environment journalist around the sight two days before it opened. And he took me aside afterwards and he said, “Where are the signs?” “What signs? Oh no we are not having signs, it is interactive interpretation and we are having actors who for time to time will appear as the sun.” And he said “No, no people are going to want to understand this and they are not going to understand it just through the experience”. So ironically, after years and years of planning, I and another intern, we were both in our early 20s at the time, sat down for 48 h without any sleep, typing the stories behind all these installations and experiences and sticking them up with blue tack all over the exhibition with all the designers coming after us trying to take them down. And he was right. When we opened people wanted to know what this was going on about. There was such a thirst and hunger for information, this was 1999, so this was ten years ago. People knew there was something going on, they knew this was something they needed to know about and we had misjudged it completely. They actually wanted that hardcore information. Very interesting.

This is the inside of that organic restaurant I told you about. This is the entrance which at the time was the largest flat area of solar volt-tech panels in Europe it was a European research project, held up by recycled telegraph poles.  This forms the entrance canopy. Again, this was early on, so the site had not started sort of growing and building, but you can see here ponds. This is where the children did their reverse pond dipping. We have got these sort of tee pee structures that were pine thinnings which planets grew up and as they decade into the ground. An amazing landscape.

The sad thing about the Earth Centre was that I think it was ahead of its time. The concept was put forward 15 years ago now. Sustainability was seen by some in Britain and some in Europe I quote “as a passing fad”. We did not get a lot of funding for that reason. The European funding wanted it to be a standalone visitor attraction from day one. Which frankly if you have ever been to South Yorkshire where you have got some of the most deprived people in Western Europe and it is two hours from London, so Londoners think it is in another country and so on, it was never going to be just a visitor attraction. We tried making it much more diverse. We built a conference centre, we built an education centre and a hotel and the idea was to make it much more multi-audience, much more multi-use.  We put together a public-private partnership, but unfortunately because of political reasons at the time, after 18 months of planning it did not go ahead. It was taken over by the local authority. They put in a pitch-and-put crazy golf course. The play area that had been designed by HAGS, your Swedish play designers, it was the prototyping of what I think is now a lot of mainstream wooden play equipments in Sweden, was replaced by a fiber glass pirate – and so. It was turned basically into sort of low grade, local tourist attraction and then closed a year later.

It is still there. You can go. It is in South Yorkshire. The ecological park is beautiful. After ten years the remediation of the soil is complete and I think if it were to open now, it would have immense success. But it was I think ahead of its time. The good news is that the architects, designers, landscape designers and so on from the UK, Europe and worldwide who started really their first projects there are now some of the most successful in the world and all now have their own thriving sustainability practices. For all of us who were involved it was really a steppingstone to start learning from what we had found there to taking it on to the next steps.

I’m going to have to speed up… I went to LEDAC after that and had very hands on experience in sustainable living. When I came back Jonathan, my partner and I, wanted to set up an organization that really explored this question of where and how we should live. So we set up a company in 2001 called Beyond Green. Really what we do is we help organizations understand the sustainability agenda and then put together strategies for delivering authentic sustainable development. This focuses on where we live, but also how we live. We do a number of projects ranging from community design inquiries, to sustainable housing, lots of community engagement, branding and communications, behavior change strategies and campaigns.

Our work on where we live, ranges from projects like, running all the consultation for the London Olympics, the sustainability strategies for the legacy for the Olympic Park, everything that happens after the Olympic game, working with the leaders of city councils such as Manchester, putting together city climate strategies, working with utility companies, working on the growth of place, we just started the sustainability strategy for the regeneration of Earls Court, which is a big, big area in the west of London. So that is really the place, whether it is buildings, community, neighborhoods, but we also obviously look at how we use the place, because you can build the greenest building in the world but unless people actually start behaving in a different way you are only going to start achieving part of the effect.

So this is where I work on particular looking at how we live. Whether it is working with clients such as the Premier League, looking at how they design their stadiums, how people use their stadiums on match day and how they then engage with their million football fans to start thinking about their life styles differently or whether it is with car companies, or car carpet companies, but also mainstream communications projects. So taking the message away, just from consultancy, where I think the fear is that the people you talk to are either already interested or paid to be interested.  How do you reach those wider audiences? I work on big brand consumer lead behavior change campaigns. I write books. You can see there and these are in the shop. And these are very much on 1,001 ways to save the planet, How to reduce you carbon footprint. I agree. That really is not enough, but the publishers seem to think there is enough people out there, worldwide who needs lists, so they sell. And I also present television programs, so again getting out to very mainstream audiences.

I am going to touch a little bit on the theory before going into a few more practical examples to finish off.  The IPPR is the Institute for Public Policy Research, a very well esteemed think tank in the UK. In the last five years in the UK there has been a lot of thinking, a lot of navel gazing perhaps, on this issue of how do we communicate sustainability? How do we address the need for moving from awareness to action on climate change? In 2006 they produced a report called Warm Words in which they really quantified this trend that I mentioned earlier, which is the fact that at time the media in particular, advertising to some extent, was very good at selling Hell. They called it climate porn. These big, extravagant messages about ice caps melting, receding glaciers, deluges of climate refugees, droughts and agricultural crisis, which of course are all true, but the risk is if that is all you hear you create a sense of distance, you create of despair, you certainly create a sense of disempowerment.  And at the time, still the majority of solutions that were being purposed to the general public just seemed insanely mundane in comparison. So you have got the government, you have got all sorts of NGOs and big organizations saying: “Guys, our problems are massive! If we do not change our directory way are going to hell in a handcart! Can you change a light bulb please to save the planet?” Just does not really ring true. People thought if the problems are really that big, why is not something really big happening? And the conclusion that they came to, which I agree with, is that we need a brand. How do corporates create a brand? Well it is not just about a color; it is not just about a logo; it is about glorifying solutions, promoting products, using people’s emotions. The IPPR concluded that ultimately positive climate behaviors need to be approached in the same way as marketers approach active buying and consuming. It amounts to treating climate friendly activity as a brand that can be sold.

So how do we sell heaven? Is it Eco Chic? As the guys were talking about before the break, a few years ago, certainly in the UK, there was a sudden rush, amazing, on the newsstands. I used to buy every issue of anything that vaguely mentioned the environment or people would put them on my desk for me, all of a sudden there was an avalanche, I could not read everything – Marie Claire, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle. I actually co-edited an edition of New Women Magazine, which is a big women’s magazine in the UK, and we did print it on recycled paper, and the advertisers got very cross because the models in their cosmetic ads had grainy skin. I did a feature in Harper’s Bazaar were I spent a week with their editor at large, greening her lifestyle, we wanted to print that on recycled paper and the advertiser threatened to pull out. But it was exciting, very exciting times and that is still coming out, each of these publications has their annual green edition. I think this sort of 2007, early 2008, raise of the Eco Chic was very exciting, but even at the time I was a bit worried, because the thing about fashion is that it is fleeting. Eco Chic, great at raising people’s aspirations, but the inevitable backlash, I think, was that people said firstly: “oh wicked Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing that, Madonna is doing that, I’ll have one of them”.  Six months later, when the fashion is on the wane, and you start getting recession. “Oh Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing that, Madonna is doing that, must be really bloody expensive, I’m not doing that anymore”.

Expensive, exclusive and ultimately dispensable, how do we get beyond that? Well I think the way we need to get beyond that is by demonstrating that living sustainably is actually better. And it is not just better is because you reduce your carbon footprint, because most people do not think about that when they get up in the morning. We need to demonstrate that actually living in this way is about real enduring self-evident quality; it has got to have other benefits, whether there, it is your health, your pleasure, your leisure, or just simply making your life slower and easier. And this whole movement has been encapsulated internationally now by something called Low House, Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability which I imagine is starting to appear in Sweden, certainly in Japan, is it a major cultural phenomena right now. We need to make sustainable living relevant. We cannot keep it dry, academic, distant. It needs to be about things people care about anyway. It needs to be assessable, it needs to be exciting, it needs to needs aspiration and it needs to be personal and I need to speak faster…

So a few of the things we have done. Well, this was one of the first television programs that I made. This was back at the end of I think 2005/2004, and this was a weekly program called Tonight with Trevor McDonald. It goes out at 8 o’clock on a Friday evening, it is current affairs light really and it has a viewing of about 7.5 million people. For this program I very simply spent a week with a normal British family, two parents, two children, hadn’t thought about green, doing simple things like making compost, gardening, showing them that there was an organic farmers market closer to their house than ASDA, getting them to share lifts with their neighbors, make their own cleaning products and so on, and demonstrating a very, very, very, very first base simple things: saved them money, improve the wife’s eczema, gave the children more exercise, got them to see their neighbors. And it was in its own terms a real success and lead to a lot of other things. I then started doing programs on GMTV, which is the sort of national breakfast television; it is what everyone watches while they are getting ready to go to work. We did a green week in 2007, where every day of the week I was working with families who had — green, literally, each day getting them to do different things.  Going to Germany, seeing what they were doing there, going to different parts of the UK and Europe seeing what they are doing there, lead to big things. And now every time there is something in the news that has something to do with eco, whether it is Japan repealing their laws on whaling, or it is the EU regulating on light bulbs I go on at 5 o’clock in the morning to 8 o’clock in the morning and talk about it, but from a consumer perspective, from a normal person getting their children ready to go to school perspective. This is the consumer campaign I talked about earlier. This is the Ariel, big washing brand, with the National Energy Saving Trust which basically works on public awareness of energy saving. And we did a big multi-media campaign; this was a big multi-faceted web campaign, talking basically about how you do your laundry and encouraging people to wash their clothes at lower temperatures. Which if everyone did in the UK would save enough energy to power half a million homes. Highline: very simple, save you money, save you time and then using that as a way as of talking about other behavior change all across the how, and it have a massive impact. Basically these guys get into everybody’s homes.

One of the things that really came to the forefront of my mind increasingly during this work, there is no one way of being green.  You write books like these and you get people saying “Oh Joanna, for our Christmas edition can you do your top-10-tips for a greener new year?” Well my top-10-tips for a greener new year are probably very different to yours, because I care about certain things in my life which will be different for yours. Ultimately it is like going on a diet. If you take someone else’s diet plan and you really, really stick to it for a few weeks you probably will shed a few kilos. But it will be really hard work and ultimately your willpower will dissolve and life takes over and you go back to your normal way of doing things and you forget about it and you probably put more weight on. Well it is the same, I think, with being greener and reducing your carbon footprint you need to work out the changes which will work for you whether it you at home, whether it is you as an organization, whether it is you as a company, whether it is you as a political party, the agenda has to become yours, otherwise real life takes over again. And this was really brought to light in a series that I did for the BBC3 called Outrageous Wasters. What we did was work with really, really wasteful families. These were families that had like five cars, fifteen TVs, throw away four dustbins of waste per week, I mean they were like all of us but worse. We exposed how wasteful they were and we then took them to a house of correction which was basically a Mongolian yurt, in a field in Whales, with no running water, no electricity, no gas, no packaging, no food for more than 20 miles, their idea of hell. And we made them go cold turkey, live-without-for-a-week and do a series of challenges which really highlighted for them how extreme their normal lifestyle was. And these were people who in the beginning of the week said no climate change is not for me, I don’t care, this is not interesting blablabla, by the end of the week oh, OK, now I understand various things. So this was a family who never recycled anything and we put the waste that they produced in a month, bagged it and put it in the beautiful pond lake at the farm we were staying on and they were like: “That’s disgusting, how can you do that to nature, that is awful”. And I said to them: “Well, look, there is a different hole in the ground, but every month your rubbish, that you can’t be bothered to recycle, is going into a hole in the ground. So spend the afternoon with this boat going and getting it and I’ll teach you how to recycle”.  This family recycles a lot now. This was another family who we got rid of their five cars and gave them electric transport. Basically the second week is back at their house, once they have learnt the lesson; we did eco-makeover of their house. Giving them things that we felt would challenge them to do things differently and to live to our rules. In the space of two weeks each of these families went from being absolute-I-don’t-care to converse. And we filmed this, nearly two years ago, they still write to me, telling me what their children’s school is doing, telling me they have changes their hair salon, they are now a green business, they are working with the local hospital. They had this personal connection. That experience gave them some relationship with the issues and they choose things to take forward which related to them and in their own lifestyle. So they built up their personal portfolio of lifestyle changes. That is not something you can do by just having a list.

I really have so much to talk about and I have got eight minutes, I don’t know where to start, but I think this leads on to thinking about audiences, who are you talking to? Some of you may have come across this piece of thinking, it is called values modes and it relates to Maslow’s theory of psychological needs. And basically we all look at the world through different perspectives, don’t we? Recent research in the UK, divides us, the UK population, into three groups: The settlers about a fifth of us – people for whom security, protection, home comforts, financial security are very important.  They don’t like change very much. About a third of the UK populations are pioneers. These are people who are inner-directed. They are ethical, they are activists, they like exploring themselves, who they are, they value quality and aesthetics, they like change. Probably to be honest, everyone in this room I imagine is likely to have aspects of that, those characteristics. In the UK right now, the biggest group, and the fastest growing group are Prospectors, about 44% of the UK population. These are people who are inspired by esteem, what other people think of them, they live for today, the things they find rewarding are status, fashion, recognition, and these are attributes that really underpin consumer society. So for an example, so if people wanted to install solar panel systems what motivate to set them? The Queens got them. Oh the Queens got them, I’ll have one of them. Pioneers, the inner-directed people, well I’ve heard of a network of interesting people, they are doing it, they are all going to do it together, I’ll join in that. Prospectors, oh I’ll do that to impress the neighbors. No don’t put it on that side, put it on this side please. Well that is the north side of your house, it won’t be so effective, oh but I need the neighbors to see it. Those are the different types of perspectives I am characterizing against slightly, but the point is same issue, different people, different values, different perspectives, and different drivers.

People in environmental organizations tend to be pioneers and communicate to other pioneers. The emotional trigger is that people like us the – greening views are not valued by other groups. The IPPR in a piece of recent research that just came out last month looking at this challenge said actually guys we need to be talking to different people, talking to different audiences, the people we need to be focusing on to get real behavior change in the UK, not sure if it is the same here, but I am sure there will be similar aspects are what we call the now-people. These people are part of that group who are driven by status, esteem, recognition. We want the world and we want it now. If the now-people do something, other people follow, because they are the people who have the highest profile in consumer society… I am afraid. And so in order to get them to change, we need to persuade those type of consumers that living that type of lifestyle, lower carbon lifestyle, will save you money, you will look good, you can do the right thing, don’t worry, you don’t have to become an environmentalist, and you can still be yourself. Once we convince people of that, we have to back it up with policies and facilities to ensure that this is actually affordable, desirable and visible. So this is my point really, it is about individuals, but it is also about the structure, allowing them to take action. These are the types of thing those people like to read about: property, fashion and clothes, private lives, health and interiors and so on. So if we can find ways of challenging into those messages we can do good. I am going to speed up really fast…

So thinking about how we are going to get to those high impact consumers, to embed these consumer behavior changes fast, at the moment, focusing on saving money with the recession, very important. Now this on the left is a campaign which is being run by the Energy Saving Trust and the National Wartime Museum. This is encouraging people to share baths with people you love. The thrift in the UK is suddenly becoming incredibly fashionable. This book on the right is written by Indian Knight who is a journalist who is much more typically known for her adulation of fashion and the high life, suddenly discovering thrift. Now one thing to bare in mind in this is we need to avoid to the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. Which is basically human nature, it is rebound. It is basically if you save money on say for example saving energy, unfortunately it is human nature to spend it on something else, which is often high carbon. Like a quick feel-good mini-break to New York. So we need to find way of making the low carbon alternative more attractive. So we in the UK now have a new phenomenon called glamping, which you can see on that rather fuzzy tea cozy in the middle, glamorous camping. We also in the UK, at the moment have a lot of emphasis on what we call stake patience, which rather than going away on vacation you stay in the UK. The number of high-end glamping organizations, whether they are staying in yurts or tee pees and so on is amazing.

Oh I am going to go over by about three minutes… We need to satirize high carbon behaviors. I could not find any photos of this I am afraid, but without being narky associating high carbon with unattractive personalities, that people want to distance themselves from is quite important, and in the UK, the last couple of years, SUVs, 4×4:s have suddenly become incredibly unappealing and unattractive. They are known as Chelsea tractors. There are now campaigns were people go and put fake parking tickets under their windscreen wipes and so one, and suddenly everyone is selling their 4×4:s, because it is frankly so last year. The research shows actually that actually helping people feel that they are in control through living a carbon lifestyle is important, because this phenomena called the environment climate change can seem very distant, unstoppable, so things like this is a smart meter, which shows you in your home how much energy you are using, but also how much money you are spending and therefore by implication saving. Real time is becoming very, very popular. Make it fun! Perhaps this is the easiest way to change people’s behavior. If is often social and it is very connecting. It makes you a human and I know that Jacob wants to talk about this in a way, so I won’t talk about this very much, but this is a new campaign called the Fun Theory. You may have come across this, it is a Finnish campaign. Swedish? Ah you are all Scandinavian. Sorry. This is about making greener, less wasteful activity fun. Things like this on the right hand side. This is a staircase in an underground station and they have made the stairs musical. So when you tread on the stairs, it sounds like the keys on a piano. There are fantastic little videos online of people running up and down these stairs and in the time they ran this, the use of stairs went up by 60%. On the bottom right, they put a speaker into this litter bin so when you through something in it made this crazy noise and it sounded like the bin was bottomless and it was going down a well. And when you see this film with people tucking something in and then going back and kids going around and tucking more and more litter in, because it was so fun…

Jacob Lind: Joanna, you are not uninteresting at all, but you are unstoppable. I have to stop you here.

Joanna Yarrow: I have so much more to talk about. Avoid guilt, acknowledge praise… 40% of UK people, this is true, actually think that the more important thing they can do to stop climate change is to recycle. Which is really, really worrying. But I think, the thing not to do then is to say “God you are thick. How stupid can you be?” say “Brilliant, you are recycling more, feel good about that, build upon it”. Avoid the environmental label, unfortunately we can seem self-righteous and smart, people are still surprised I don’t have a beard and wear socks with sandals, just look normal and look good. You need the right messenger. Keep it real and authentic. Pick people who people can relate to. This is a guy called Kevin McCloud, who is an incredibly well-known architect in the UK and he has become a household name because he has this program called Grand Designs where he goes into normal people’s homes who are doing amazing things with their house and he is now one of the best known spokespeople on sustainability in the UK. He is on a greeny, originally, he is a TV presenter.

And last, this is my last point that I am going to whiz through. So that is all great the communications, but unless we get the context right, how can people act. This is Copenhagen train station. UK cyclists are ten times more likely to be killed than Danish cyclists. Why? Well these are little bits of our cycling infrastructure. The world’s smallest bicycle can go on that little safety bit there. We have a bike lane that is full with posts; I mean it is just not genetics. We do not design for sustainable living in the same way you guys do. This is a pretty typical British site piece of signage. Winston Churchill said we should shape our buildings afterwards, our buildings shape us. We need to design places as well as organizations that help people to live in a green way. Actually this is one of the other things my company does now, we have a property developing company, and we are actually conceiving, designing and about to build new sustainable communities. This is our first one, just outside London, 750 new homes, hotel, school, energy center, on-site food growing and so on. This are some plans for a sustainable school where as well as learning about sustainability children lives it throughout the curriculum, throughout the day. This is Manchester, where we are working with them looking at climate change as an opportunity, the upside of down, looking at all their sectors and how they address it. And this is one of the things that I think resonates very strongly with me: Tell me and I will forget. You can give people as many statistics they go in one ear out the other. Show me and I’ll remember. I hope some of these pictures may have helped involve me, I understand, whether it is through design inquiries, this is young consultants on the Olympics, stakeholder workshops, again coming back to this point experience, the Archbishop in Catherbury Rowan Williams said “Many of the things that have moved us towards ecological disaster have been distortions of our sense of who we are, who and what we are, and the overall effect has been to isolate us more and more from the reality we are part of. Our response to the crisis needs to be in the most basic sense a reality check, a re-acquaintance with the facts of our interdependence with the material world and a rediscovery of our responsibility for it”. And last week Rowan Williams was all over the national press launching a new campaign called Dig for Climate Victory where he was asking families to simply start growing some of their own food and it is a very simple first step and I was very excited to see your allotment plots outside. I have lots more to say, but I am not going to say it now. Thank you.