Back from fighting flu to discus how lifting the 'invisible elbow' can make you happy

Once again I apologise to my group who I left high and dry last week, I can only blame it on those dirty freshers from across the country. Although saying that I am going to except partial blame, as I did travel round the country to 6 different freshers fairs.

Now back on the road in the Cambridge SU tonight to sell my version of sustainability to some more students. It was Leeds this morning, where I managed to get a clap. Why am I writing about this on my blog? Is it related?

I think so, but am unsure whether that is just my personal, academic and work lives, merging into a semi-psychotic abstract reality. Also it justifies why I have tried to merge last 3 weeks reading / seminars + personal interests, into this one rambling blog.

I'm going to trace the main contributory of this stream around chapter 1 of Gill's book The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption. But before I start on that I'm going to go back to the relevance of the original comments.

Why Leeds is important. I did two things in Leeds today both of which were relevant to this course and are current topics from the last two weeks.

1) The role of business and sustainability –

I really enjoyed the reading for this and the practical we did in week 2. The balance between engaging with business and the level to do this, before feeling like you are part of an elaborate green-wash, weighted up against gaining access to resources, is some thing that I have considered many times. The reason I say an elaborate green-wash is that I believe there is some time a consus effort to steer opinion for commercial benefit, but also a potential systematic green-wash as a capitalist system incapable of offering 'real' solutions to climate change, tries to find them.

Obviously the whole systematic green-wash is a matter for debate, as shown by our discussions in the practical week 2 and the paper I read but didn't present for week 3; Mol. (2002) Ecological Modernization and the Global Economy.

In Leeds today I did a vox pop video to be shown to a lot of the major suppliers of student unions across the country. Both the content and the context relate. The context part is that what I said may never been shown after it emerged that a CokaCola logo was going to appear on the intro to the vox pop. Urrgh I hear some of the class murmurer. Organizationally for People & Planet this is not a small thing and is enough for us to not use the opportunity to send a message to a large number of Corporations interested in the student market. We don't want to be part of a green-wash and funding a vox pop could well be seen as this, especially when you look at it from a anti-globalisation environmental neo-Marxist position, which many staff members hold (Mol., 2002).

The paradox in my mind and in the organisational position, which makes me feel a bit schizophrenic (not sure how to ever spell this), is the content which is very much from a ecological modernization perspective; constructive engagement. In particular the ongoing engagement with RBS over it's fossil fuel extractive investment mandate. Even though are key message was increasing leverage, this is still a belief that by altering current capitalist systems we can avoid dangerous climate change.

2) I also did a presentation for about 50 environment and ethical issues student union officers from across the UK. The campaign it was on was Going Greener, which has a strong behavioural change element, which is one of the reasons I am on this course. I'll have to go soon and deliver a much shortened presentation on the campaign to sell it again in 10 mins. As part of it I try to discus the utilitarian, social and psychological, and infrastructure of previsions, approaches, and what these might mean to student groups trying to campaign on their campuses. This all leads into chapter 1 of The New Economics of Sustainable Consumption, which I'll return to start rambling about on the train after this talk. It's almost like this course has been planned, wish me luck.

Back from that, were loads of interesting environment groups at Cambridge, but the highlight was the env consultant soc, who do a range of things including an environmental competition between colleges. Playing on the old utilitarian incentive based approach, with a bit of social norming thrown in as a side dish.

Back to Gill's book really enjoyed chapter 1, even wrote in the book in pen, which given the cost must mean I like it. Going to just pick out why some of these pen stained sections of text interested me, rather than rant as I read.

p6 'However, GHGs embedded in what we as a nation consume are far greater than that in what we produce; developed countries export their carbon emissions to developing countries where manufacturing occurs.' This point is really interesting with respect to the strategies we need to employ to reduce emissions, as disused further in the text. It has relevance to the Ditch Dirty Development campaign I have just been taking about in Cambridge, as well, in an extension to what is discussed in the text. The UKs main industry is now the financial services sector, which on paper looks to have low emissions until the embedded are considered.

This point also reminds me of a criticism I had of the Mol. (2002) paper and it's references to studies which showed environmental improvements in the developed western economises, which I presume took no account of the embedded impact associated with products consumed.

p11-12 This section relates to something that I had read in another paper this week and contributed to half of the tittle of this blog entry. It takes about environmental commitment, activism and altruistic motivators, in the context of social and psychological approaches, to behaviour. This section introduces the 'value-action gap' and how that contradicts the more utilitarian approach to predicting behaviour. The paper it links into is Kasser (2009) Some benefits of Being an Activist: Measuring Activism and its Role in Psychological Well-Being in the Political Psychology journal.

It starts with a quote from Aristotle
'Which way of life is more desirable – to join with other citizens and share in the state's activity, or to live in it like an alien, absolved from the ties of political society.'

The study investigates levels of self reported well-being using a variety of scales relates to levels of self reported activism, and the causal relation between the two. The study finds a significant relationship between well being and engagement in activism, with activist based activities directly increasing well-being in experimental conditions. In the discussion one of the proposed reasons for this is the ability of activism to bridge this value-action gap and led to lower levels of cognitive dissidence.

Although this paper does have limitations which it ready discuses, on a personal level I can relate to this proposal, that even though I am tied into certain behaviours by an 'invisible elbow' (p19) due to socio-technical regime (p18) around me, through activism I can feel ok about these behaviour personally as I am trying to change them.

Extra reasons for activists to be happy this week, a) new coal fired power station at Kings North cancelled by Eon, b) plans for the third runway at Heathrow also dropped by BAA, and c) The Great Climate Swoop this weekend at Ratcliff on Sour Coal fired power station (Good opportunity to do your reading for the book review with your neck d-locked to something).