We're losing faith in global change as local causes boom
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Version 0 of 1. Localism is all in the interpretation. So to Eric Pickles, it's decentralising planning. In surfing culture, it's the right, assumed by local surfers, to chase non-locals off their wave breaks. And now environmental localism is beginning to mean something too. Something big. Might it even refresh the parts other green movements can't reach, and take them mainstream? Certainly, the London venue where I hosted the Observer Ethical Awards last week was bursting with eco talent from grassroots organisations. This has been the case over the past two years – a surge of entrants and finalists who aren't waiting for legislative change or government leads and are forging ahead with sustainable plans in their own communities. Case in point: the winners of our inaugural community energy award, Lancaster Co-housing, who fought off property developers to claim their site and have constructed an impressive co-housing community. According to a new report from the Fabian Society, Pride of Place, this grassroots, people-power approach is on the money. Not only is this a trend – it's also something that needs to happen if environmentalism is to have any chance of mainstream traction in the UK and, you might contend, any chance of achieving anything significant. As it stands, environmentalism is not pulling in the punters. The report's authors, Natan Doron and Ed Wallis, lay the blame at the feet of a movement with too great a dependency on three things: elite-level engagement, the rationalism of climate science and the agency of top-down legislation. Environmentalism, they argue, should begin at home, focusing on issues that people are actually concerned with, rather than "abstract" international issues, such as climate change. Suggesting all this to Rob Hopkins, who set up the UK's first Transition Town, in Totnes, south Devon, in 2005, is the very definition of teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. The theory behind the Transition network is that communities build resilience through sustainable blueprints for energy, food and transport and more. This will enable them to cope when the world runs out of oil or climate change kicks in. In practice, the apocalyptic motivation seems to have been eclipsed as communities in 43 countries decide it's just quite a smart way to live. "When people are presented with big-scale stuff they have no influence," says Hopkins. "You have what we might call 'a national debate' but what's that? If we had taken our energy blueprint the national government route and tried to lobby on a national level, we'd have found so many obstacles in our way, including resistance and barriers from lobbyists for national energy companies." Instead, he says, working at grassroots level means they could just "get on with it". Consequently, a Transition hub such as Totnes already has 600 families in homes generating renewable energy (mainly solar) and saving upwards of 1.3 tonnes of carbon each year. "Yes, the government's new energy strategy does look a bit like it's trying to catch up," says Hopkins, who is ever modest and doesn't like to brag that they got there first. But they did. He also believes that a lot of Transition is actually a gateway to the bigger issues. So you come for cheaper energy and end up engaging with global issues. This would be welcome. A high percentage of those surveyed for the Fabian report felt little or no connection to big issues such as climate change, viewed it as highly abstract and rated it at the same level of concern as dog fouling and litter. I've taken part in enough eco debates to know that when the session is opened to the floor, question three is always about dog fouling and question four is always about the council shovelling snow from one road but not another. The public interpretation of "environmental" is nearly always personal. It's rather gutting to hear that the public at large feels totally disempowered to do anything about the big issues. But then I'm one of the small percentage of what Sally Uren, chief executive of environmental NGO Forum for the Future, calls the "Global Green Watchdogs", people highly interested in eco justice. You may be too (nearly 20,000 people voted in this year's awards). Unfortunately, we still amount to a paltry 8% of the population, and that's not enough to shift the status quo. We urgently need more friends. "One of the reasons why environmentalism hasn't mainstreamed," adds Uren, "is because business and government haven't been deliberate enough about where interventions are to be made." What's more, if people don't want to change, no campaign can make them. Says Uren: "You need something that moves you from the abstract to the specific. Behavioural change is really complicated." She agrees that environmental localism is important, but warns against too simplistic a diagnosis: "Critically, behavioural change has to have a benefit to the individual, such as cutting their energy bills. We've been rubbish at communicating that. But we need a whole ecosystem of actors to bring that environmental mindset to the mainstream: interventions and changes in the market and policy infrastructure, but also awareness-raising, including big campaigns." The future role of the Big Eco campaigns and NGOs is fascinating in this context. Naomi Klein caused a stir some months ago with a heartfelt salvo against Big Green Groups (though it was directed at US behemoths such as the Sierra Club, rather than Greenpeace). She accused them of taking an "astronaut's eye world-view" – looking down on the planet (and more often than not using a globe as their symbol). This conformed to a top-down regulatory approach favoured by global government, lacking in energy and efficacy and not something to excite mere mortals. One of the recommendations of the Fabian report is that the big eco NGOs should spend less time and money lobbying at international level and direct resources into community initiatives. When asked about Greenpeace and environmentalism, one respondent surveyed said: "That's when they go and do things to the ships and stuff" – which doesn't sound massively galvanised. But on Wednesday night, as Frank Hewetson, one of the Arctic 30, took to the Ethical Awards stage to collect a lifetime achievement award on behalf of Arctic Sunrise captain Peter Willcox, who was already away on another mission, it was difficult to hold back the tears. We saw again footage of the Russian coastguards firing "warning" shots into the water around the Greenpeace dinghy. We saw 30 of our finest activists chained up in jail. In a short speech, Hewetson articulated the terrible sense of responsibility on Willcox's shoulders. I defy anybody not to connect with these heroes. It made me realise that however local we need to be to court support and convince people they're part of the debate, frontline campaigns, fuelled by the bravery of such activists, are a vital part of the mix. |