It’s the culture, stupid

Back to our friends at Transport 2000... Everyone in the climate change business knows that advocating we do less, as well as going about what we do more energy efficiently, has to be part of the answer.

But it must be a bit tricky to start the no transport, pro-transport campaign. It’s not an obvious winner is it – ‘You know that stuff you like doing, that has given you all kinds of warm, fuzzy memories, and we get funded to promote? Well, we want you to stop it.’

However, stop parts of it we must. So how do activists go about it, without 1) being complete kill-joys, or 2) simply failing?

At Train Smart, we figure, like many other parts of the environmental movement, that a sustainable society will be one that:

Rapidly decouples economic growth from a rise in carbon emissions and other GHGs;
While at the same time, harnesses the economy-for-less to ballooning satisfaction and happiness.

Sounds utopian, but it’s really just common sense to anyone who’s escaped the clutches of runaway capitalism for long enough to notice the difference between shopping and sanity.

Many of the things we need to do – slow down, eat well, spend time with friends and adopt a slightly more contemplative approach to our neighbourhood, work, colleagues – all, of course, contribute to a deeper sense of a life well lived. But that doesn’t stop us from pushing them aside for the next shiny bright gadget or bagging the next destination.

So creating mechanisms for locking in choices that serve our own best - long-term - interests has to be one of the ways forward (try economic historian Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence, OUP 2006, for more on this).

But changing the public mood and attitudes plays a role too. This can lead to quick wins as individuals decide to change their ways. Persuade enough to make the leap, and you change the context in which politicians make decisions, too.

For these reasons, the Train Smart team is planning contentious actions. These deliberately aim to polarise the issues to force a public debate. But it will also deploy cultural activism, which is designed to celebrate and reward pro-social behaviour.