I’ve been thinking a lot about environmental messaging and the unique messaging that needs to be done within Los Angeles. It’s hard not to yell, “fire, fire!!” at every turn or proclaim that the sky is falling whenever possible. I mean, the sky kindof is falling as far as environment is concerned but the point is that we often harm our message by overwhelming people with too much information that’s saturated with ever increasing intensity and emotion. Environmental education needs to be just that- educating people on the issues and incentivizing them to change.
Chicken Little may have been right in the end, but she sure didn’t give anyone a reason to look up. What she did to was give them a reason to tune her out - and the sky fell anyway.
Guilting people into change has never worked. We’ve seen fear work for a time, but the resentment it breeds is gangrenous and devastating to any long term, genuine behavior shifts. So how do we endear people to the enviornment? To their food? To an agricultural system that has, for all intents and purposes, been completly removed from them?
While walking down a busy, concrete street in LA, my brother and I started talking about our divorce from nature. I see three or four times more buildings and advertisments than I do earth or trees… even sky. I forget that I’m part of an ecosystem, with various natural processes happening every day to sustain my life.
Which leads me to a final thought: perhaps this is why Southern California has had such a hard time making progress on the enviornmental front. In the green, rain-swept Pacific Northwest or even Northern California, nature is more present in the everyday lives of people. More green space, (geographically speaking, we live in a desert, after all), a greater sense of weather to impress the importance of planetary processes come a bit more easily to these areas. If we want to promote an enviornmental movement in a car-centric, cement-loving place like LA, we have to create a movement that dosen’t rely on emotional, guilt-breeding messaging to offset the lack of natural impetus humans have for nature.
Maybe as a recipe I could break this down to:
1/4 cup complaining
1/2 cup understanding LA’s challenges
1/12 cup of frusteration
1 cup imagining a better future.
1 tablespoon of Chicken Little alliterations
Mix together and bake until something good happens.
Say it!