Takeaways from Blue Earth Summit 2023
It was Mark Shayler who said it. The F-word we hate to hear.
Failed.
It was the first night’s wrap-up at Blue Earth Summit 2023 in Bristol. I’d heard incredible pitches for investment from big-thinking start and scale-ups with serious ambition. I’d taken part in a fascinating workshop by Propellernet on how to get ethical products ranking higher up in SEO search. I’d admired Dragon Deborah Meaden on how forward-thinking she’d been in investing in greener businesses and marvelled at the radical way that professional climber, Leo Houlding, was taking his kids into nature. I’d met countless, interesting, passionate people and now Mark was wrapping up the day.
He walked us through musical eras, showing how carbon emissions had risen as the decades went by. He told us that he’d been working in marketing for 30 years - and that he’d failed. Because if that marketing had been effective, we wouldn’t be facing the disastrous state of the planet right now.
Well, those were Mark’s words, not mine, but he got me thinking… In a crisis that doesn’t feel immediate, but actually is, and faced with something that feels so completely beyond a single person’s control, how can you use language effectively to actually make a difference?
Encouraging, relatable or just more hard-hitting?
A senior creative writer recently suggested that substituting ‘climate change’ with the phrase ‘human extinction’ might just help the scale of the problem to land.
I get what he’s saying but I wonder, could it be that the more hard-hitting the words and images, the more powerless and overwhelmed we actually start to feel? If I see a photo of wildfire ripping through a forest I’m horrified, but it makes me feel so helpless that I just want to run away rather than think about how my own behaviour could change things.
Is that also the reaction of the masses? And if so, is that one of the reasons we still have this super-wicked problem on our hands? Because we haven’t found the right way to connect everyday people to the crisis?
What better words might look like
One of the most memorable seminars I went to at Blue Earth Summit was a panel led by Enviral agency’s founder Joss Ford. He showed us part of a behind-the-scenes film, Do Gooders, that followed Enviral’s journey to deliver one of Greenpeace’s most influential campaigns, The Big Plastic Count. Super-inspiring, full of life and colour, the results about household plastic are shocking but the engagement from average households was massive.
Here’s another great campaign from the WWF. Your Plastic Diet uses everyday household objects to show exactly how many microplastics you ingest in a week. It’s incredibly engaging because there’s no scary science terminology to wrap my head around and whilst it’s not yelling horror at me, it will have me choosing the packaging-less fruit and veg next time I’m in the supermarket aisle.
Could campaigns and digestible pieces of information, dressed up in engaging, interesting ways be the answer, rather than the “ACT-NOW-time-is-running-out!” message we seem to have grown immune to hearing?
I don’t know. But I’m definitely willing to try.
We just need to make sure we do it in time.