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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
I didn't want to be an eco-jerk. So I consulted a "global warming negotiator." That's when the fun began.
Editor's note: Excerpted from "Almost Green: How I Saved 1/6th of a Billionth of the Planet" (Skyhorse Publishing).
By James Glave
Read more: Environment, Science, Environment & Science
Nov. 27, 2008 | BOWEN ISLAND, B.C. -- Each night before climbing into bed, I went through the same routine. I shut down the laptop, killed the TV, fired up the dishwasher, checked the doors, and switched off the lights. I peeked in on the children, then headed to the bathroom and reached for my toothbrush.
Then, as I scrubbed a lifetime's worth of crowns and fillings and my precious few remaining lumps of intact enamel, I would idly wander over to the bedroom window and spend the next two minutes staring at my neighbor's floodlights.
Five of them were mounted across the front of his house. I had not inspected them up close but each likely contained a 65-watt incandescent bulb. As far as I could discern, they illuminated his front yard for no particular reason.
Security is certainly not an issue. We live on Bowen Island, a 25-square-mile glacial hiccup just off Vancouver, Canada. Crime is minimal, and on my street, there's no shortage of nosy neighbors -- including two police officers -- who note the comings and goings of those who belong and those who don't. We also share a moat three miles wide. The last ferry pulls away from the island's dock at 10 p.m. each evening, marooning any would-be visiting cat burglar until morning.
I am a mildly obsessive man. For many nights, I had been lying awake in the silent blackness thinking about what those lamps represent. Here on Canada's West Coast, the electricity is not as thick with hidden greenhouse gases as it is in many other parts of North America; a scant 10 percent of our juice contains CO2. But those five beacons across the way were still doing atmospheric damage. I had already done the math on what we might delicately call my neighbor's nocturnal emissions, and as best as I could calculate, the lamps were kicking up something in the range of 95 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.
In the grand scheme of things, that's atmospheric chump change. It is the equivalent of about three return trips to Grandma's house in my father-in-law's hand-me-down Lexus SUV, and I easily find ways to justify those excursions. Hell, I probably endanger more polar bears just by vacuuming the house and doing my laundry, which amasses around my house in great fuzzy piles like Tribbles on the Starship Enterprise.
It was unfair of me to pick on my neighbor, whom I shall call David. But there was something about his all-night Light Show for Nobody that I couldn't quite keep my mouth shut about. In my head, his lamps had come to symbolize all the little things we all could be doing to save ourselves from extinction if we only knew better. If each of us took all the baby steps to overcome unconscious bad habits we didn't even know we had, we could dial back the planetary thermostat. We could unleash staggeringly good changes.
I am far from faultless. And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's an eco-pariah. But knowing what I do about the mess we've gotten ourselves into, knowledge has become a lonely burden. Each of us is at a different point on the road to green, and sometimes I find myself biting my tongue in the name of keeping everything copacetic.
But the lights, the lights ... I just couldn't let them go. They were the low-hanging fruit, rendered in glass, tungsten, copper and aluminum. Just by embracing darkness, David could make a difference. Both of us would feel better -- well, OK, I would, at least until I found some other hapless slob to blame for our looming mass extinction. For nights when he felt the need for a little illumination, he could pull out a stepladder and replace the bulbs with compact fluorescent versions, which would slash the juice for the same job to a slow trickle.
The trouble is, there was no easy way for me to communicate either option to David without putting him on the defensive. If I approached him, the first thing he'd doubtless do would be to rightfully point to the SUV in my carport, which leaked many times more pounds of carbon each year than the fixtures mounted on his cedar siding. But I was working on that. I was trying to ditch it, via Craigslist, although so far my efforts were going nowhere. I knew I was no emissions angel. But how could I break the ice with David without crippling our healthy, over-the-hedge relationship?
I needed help. Technically, I needed what green-activist groups call an "engagement strategy." It was time to call in the big guns. I started working the phone, dialing friends of friends involved with enviro groups. I was looking for someone with advanced negotiating skills -- someone who grasped both the stakes of our global situation and the depths of my domestic obsession.
That someone turned out to be Solitaire Townsend, cofounder of Futerra, a consulting firm in London, England, and a leading authority on the tricky business of talking about global warming in a way that inspires action, not antipathy. Townsend recently coauthored a fascinating pair of documents chockablock with strategic advice about climate-change communications: "The Rules of the Game," commissioned for the government of the United Kingdom and released in 2005, and "New Rules, New Game," released the following year. Both papers are rooted in lessons learned, rather than assumptions made, about how we might talk to one another about this stuff.
My hunch that a casual driveway chitchat with David might turn ugly, as it turned out, was bang on. Rule 18 of "New Rules, New Game" flags the "sod-off" factor, which researchers more properly call psychological reactance: "This means that many people's automatic reaction to 'You must do this' is a simple 'No!' "
Meanwhile, another pointer cautions, "Don't criticize home or family."
Clearly, I had my work cut out for me. So how could I motivate David to turn off his floodlights once and for all? To save the world, it seemed, I needed to start thinking more strategically. I needed to operate more like a PR guy.
I sketched out my quandary to Townsend, who cooked up a game plan for me on the spot. "One of the first things to realize is that the things that have motivated you to act may not be the same things that have motivated him," she counseled. "One of the big problems of this movement is that it assumes everyone reacts in the same ways. Unfortunately, and wonderfully, people are motivated by different things."
What prompted me to start doing something about global warming was my preschool-age offspring. But the first bullet point in Futerra's first study is "Don't rely on concern about children's future." Indeed, my neighbor and his wife have no kids.
"The first thing to ask yourself is, 'Why does he have the floodlights?'" continued Townsend, a former actor who went on to complete a graduate degree in sustainable development. "It could be that he likes seeing what is outside. To understand where people are coming from, their reasoning has to be understood. He may be emotionally attached to the floodlights."
That was certainly not out of the realm of possibility. I am emotionally attached to a source of 24-hour electrical illumination -- one that my wife, Elle, and I had installed in our living room wall. We own an instrument called a Geochron, a wall-mounted rectangular box about the size of a large atlas opened up flat. It reveals, in real time on a slowly scrolling world map, where the sun is shining on the Earth. The Geochron is a cool gadget, nothing more -- a wedding present from an old friend. It runs on a small electric motor and a pair of slender fluorescent tubes.
At night, the Geochron casts a faint blue glow across the main floor of my home. Its light spills out my windows, such that my neighbor can see it from his place in what is otherwise my pitch-black house. Like his floodlights, perhaps, it serves no useful purpose other than decoration. Unfortunately, the damn thing is not nearly so easy to switch off. To do so, I need to partially pull it out of the wall, a delicate operation. If it were as simple as hitting a button, I would simply power it down each night on my way upstairs like everything else.
"The second thing to know," continued Townsend, "is 'Thou shalt not' or 'Thou should not' is the wrong way to do it. So is, 'I am perfect.' The best situation you could have is that he chooses to get rid of the lights without you having ever said anything about it."
It seems I needed to sell David on the benefits of blackness, even while I cast useless light into my own living room and balcony all night long. I needed him to think that we're all in this together, that we're each doing the best we can. If I played it right, I'd start to see those bulbs burning less and less when I wandered over to the bedroom window at night. If all went well, he'd think it was his idea.
As a journalist, I find this notion a little uncomfortable. I've dedicated my career to countering spin and questioning advertising, to exposing manipulative and persuasive language. Now I was supposed to embrace it?
Townsend was sympathetic, to a degree. "If we genuinely and truly believe what is happening with the climate is, in fact, happening -- if we are convinced of that -- then we have to pick up the tools of marketing and communication that have been used exceptionally well to sell us a huge set of behaviors for a long time," she said.
"A lot of people are very coy about picking up these tools. Because, yes, they are manipulative. They feel that if we just educate the public enough, then people will change. It doesn't work like that. It may feel strange to you. But if it takes a bit of social engineering to have a conversation with your neighbor about changing his lights, then that's what it takes."
"It feels more than strange," I replied. "It feels disingenuous. But I suppose at least it's disingenuous for the right reasons."
"One of the issues we face is that most of the people who are very good at influencing other people's decisions have gone into marketing," she said. "So either we pry them out of there and make them come over to our side, or we are going to have to suck it up and learn how to do it ourselves. We are not always going to be in our comfort zones with this stuff."
No kidding. To get David's lights off, I was going to fashion myself into a leader of sorts, a new kind of suburban activist -- one armed with the latest global-warming sales-and-marketing tactics. I was not going to use images of pending doom; I was just going to make darkness seem sexy and desirable, just as Cameron Diaz has done for hybrids. And, by taking a page from "New Rules, New Game," I was not going to do it alone. I was going to use what Townsend's paper calls a change group.
