What are the great British public actually doing to combat climate change? Certainly public understanding of climate change, its causes and effects, has moved on enormously over the last ten years and more than ever in the last three. The language itself has moved on. The public used to talk about “rainforests” but now that term has been superseded by “global warming” and “climate change”. I still feel that nothing has quite caught the public imagination as spectacularly as CFCs and the ozone layer did twenty years ago, but contemporary images of melting ice caps and rising sea levels come close.
There is a tendency to present the British public as car-loving, technology consuming couch potatoes, but personal actions to help the environment have moved on enormously. Ten years ago the only personal action most people could think of which might help the environment was saving paper (“I always use both sides..”). That has evolved into a wider concept of recycling and now includes a range of energy saving measures. The fact that even apparently benign actions such as google searches have an impact on the environment is now more widely known and accepted. People often want to know what they can do to do more.
However, in my work which involves interviewing people in their homes, I much more often come across accidental sustainable behaviours than deliberate ones. People and families are full of contradictions. I recently met a retired couple who moved close to the airport so they could take advantage of dozens of cheap flights every year, yet lovingly grew their own vegetables and recycled everything. When I do interviews with married couples there is often a lot of bantering about who undermines who in saving energy measures such as switching lights or the heating off.
I am a passionate believer in action on climate change myself, so during interviews I do have moments of hopelessness which have to be suppressed. One recent conversation springs to mind.
“How do you get your clothes dry?”
“Tumble drier”
“But I notice you have a rotary drier outside”
“Yeah, but I don’t use it because, um, you know, a bird might crap on it or something”
There was also the retired couple who claimed the reason they kept on two cars was to help pick up their grandson from school. Initially I thought this fairly reasonable until I found out the grandson was a strapping lad in sixth form old enough to drive himself. Couldn’t he get the bus or cycle, I wondered. The truth about behaviour is that most is just habit and below the level of conscious thought. There is also quite a lot of buck-passing and spouting of excuses I have heard too many times before. The most crushing excuse I always find is the “they can’t do anything anyway, people will never change”.
I also have moments of hopefulness. The desire to create and nurture is strong. I have stopped being surprised when I visit high rise council flats and find lovingly tended gardens on the balconies. In fact I have come to the conclusion that they exist not in spite of high rise living but because of it.
People long for community and explicitly say so. Closer knit communities have less need to hop in the car several times a day and more opportunities to act together to improve their local space. It’s true that British householders are fond of consumption but most people are fond of Britain too. The Transition Town movement which aims to foster sustainable local communities is an experiment in environmental localism and dare I say, patriotism too. Complicated carbon calculation is beyond much of the population who want to experience something collectively rather than worry if they’ve got their recycling sorting right. . After scores of interviews with members of the public I have come to the conclusion that the right sorts of instincts and desires exist amongst people to live sustainably; we just need to find a society to match them.
