Robb Barnes's blog

Here’s where environmental messaging hits a brick wall. You’re trying to get people excited, and all you have to offer is bad news.

“Climate change!” you say to a roomful of your fellow citizens. Eyes glaze over and people feel helpless.

“Biodiversity loss!” People ask themselves if they should feel guilty for eating breakfast that morning.

“Gutting of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act!” The policy wonks in the front row start salivating while everyone else looks at their watches.

I’ve spent the summer working in media and communications for Sierra Club Canada’s head office. It’s been inspiring but also quite frustrating, as I’m tasked again and again with Mission Impossible: get people onboard with a message that’s mostly very dire.
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After reading about the tar sands for some time, I think I’ve cut down the clutter to the mainstream argument for their existence. It sounds nice so everyone’s saying it, from the Alberta PR department to the doe-eyed CAPP billboard men to every politician worth his salt. Here it is:
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When future civilizations look at our era they’ll see the market as one of our most audacious creations. While it may be an old concept, the market’s current incarnation is a perfectly modern mess – equal parts hieroglyphic complexity, megaproject insanity and globalized hyperactivity.

So, how do you spot a market?

1. Look for mystical power conveyed by sheer invisibility

It’s not easy to get a handle on the market, so we measure it in traces. Where is it going? Where has it been? There is no hard answer, only reams of data coloured red and black. Indicators, stock prices, confidence indexes – the ghostly presence of supply and demand. 

2. Look for people holding an invisible hand
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Ideology is a dangerous thing.

In the never-ending debate over values and priorities there is a constant temptation to form opinions. While it can be said the wisest among us know we know nothing – so goes the famous Socratic line – many of us are tempted to at least venture the odd thought. And humans have a remarkable preference for consistency. Over time, we arrange our opinions accordingly, expunging the notions that don’t mesh with the shape of the larger picture.

To my mind that’s all well and good. Socrates may have been a stand-up guy, but without decisions and opinions you’re a formless lump. The trick is ensuring there is room for doubt – and so more questioning, more reflection, refinement of pre-existing arguments, forever and ever.
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I recently listened to David Suzuki interviewing Jim Prentice on CBC. What struck me most wasn’t the government’s approach to climate change – which is widely and rightly condemned – but the government’s approach to logic.

Once upon a time, I was a philosophy student.  That line of study provided a fascinating opportunity to look at logical continuity. It’s not rocket science: you start from a set of premises, and work your way to a conclusion in a consistent manner. In theory, problems of politics find their root in incompatible premises – opposing worldviews that can lead two sides to dramatically different positions. Luckily, one would think, the climate change debate is largely scientific and so depends on empirical observation. As long as everyone accepts the premise that science provides objective insights into the ways of the world, we should reach similar conclusions.
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