EcoAmerica is soon to make public a report on the framing of the environment called "Climate and Energy Truths: Our Common Future." The New York Times, on May 1, 2009, ran a front-page story on the report by John M. Broder called "Seeking to save the Planet, with a Thesaurus." It amounted to a belittlement of the report.
Broder quoted Drexel University Professor Robert J. Brulle as saying that "ecoAmerica's campaign was a mirror image of what industry and political conservatives were doing. 'The form is the same; the message is just flipped,' he said. 'You want to sell toothpaste, we'll sell it. You want to sell global warming, we'll sell that. It's the use of advertising techniques to manipulate public opinion.'"
The story missed most of the main issues, but at least it was on the front page. Broder, a fine environmental policy reporter, did his best with a very limited understanding of framing. I am glad that Broder and the Times saw that the issue is significant enough for the front page.
This is an attempt to make better sense of that story.
Framing is Understanding
How the environment is understood by the American public is crucial: it vastly affects the future of our earth and every living being on it.
The technical term for understanding within the cognitive sciences is "framing." We think, mostly unconsciously, in terms of systems of structures called "frames." Each frame is a neural circuit, physically in our brains. We use our systems of frame-circuitry to understand everything, and we reason using frame-internal logics. Frame systems are organized in terms of values, and how we reason reflects our values, and our values determine our sense of identity. In short, framing is a big-deal.
All of our language is defined in terms of our frame-circuitry. Words activate that circuitry, and the more we hear the words, the stronger their frames get. But if our language does not fit our frame circuitry, it will not be understood, or will be misunderstood.
That is why it matters how we talk about our environment.
But the frame circuitry in our brains doesn't change overnight. Just using the language of scientific facts and figures does not mean that the significance -- especially the moral significance -- of those facts and figures will be understood. That moral significance can only be communicated honestly and effectively using the language of value-based frames, preferably frames already there in the minds of the public.
What makes this hard is that there are two competing valued-based systems of frames operating in our politics, one progressive and one conservative. Parts of the conservative framing system is actually at odds with a realistic understanding of the environmental problems facing us.
For many years, the powerful conservative Republican messaging system in the country has communicated a greatly misleading picture to the public, successfully getting their frame-circuits established in the brains of a large proportion of the public. Meanwhile, the environmental movement and the Democrats have done a less-than-sterling job of communicating the reality of what we all face.
Luckily, a large proportion of the public has versions of both conservative and progressive value-systems in their brains, applying to different issues. Many Americans are conservative on some issues and progressive on others. It would be nice if political value systems were not involved here, but they are. The good news is that it may be possible to activate a realistic view of our situation by using the fact that many swing voters and even many Republicans are partially progressive, from the perspective of the value-systems already in place in their brains. If we are to talk about the environment effectively, we need to make use of this neural fact to bring about a true understanding of our situation through honest communication.
What the Times Missed
The summary report, commissioned and publicly presented by Bob Perkowitz of ecoAmerica, discussed the results of message research done by Celinda Lake and Drew Westen. Lake is one of the most prominent Democratic pollsters and Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University, is the author of the excellent book, The Political Brain. These are people to be taken seriously. They had been asked how environmentalists should be responding to right-wing attacks on climate and energy issues.
What about Robert J. Brulle? He is a sociologist who has written studies about the sociological divisions in the environmental movement. He seems unaware of the extensive research on framing in the cognitive sciences. He comes from a social movement tradition that uses the concept of "discursive frames," which are conscious and superficial, though not inaccurate. He discusses movements that have different "discourses," -- preservation versus conservation, versus deep ecology, versus environmental justice, versus ecofeminism, and so on. Correct but superficial, not at all getting to what values are the same across these social movements. Nothing about unconscious value systems and frames physically realized as neural networks in the brain. And nothing about how to respond to the Right's attacks. Of course, Brulle would see Westen and Lake as selling toothpaste. And not surprisingly, Broder, a reporter on environmental policy not cognitive science, would miss the brain-based determinants of public understanding. Brulle and Broder are both fine folks with all-too-common limits on what they understand about how brains work.
Unfortunately, the ecoAmerica report plays into that misunderstanding. Much of the report uses the language, not of understanding the significance of the scientific facts and figures, but of sleazy marketing: "winning messages," "appeal to," "generate positive emotional responses," "Americans like ...," "top messages beat ..."
The framing report could have been framed better.
What Westen and Lake Get Right
I've spent a number of years studying, writing, and speaking publicly about environmental communications, based on results from the cognitive sciences. Westen, in his contribution to the report, makes many of the same observations: speak the truth, stick to the high ground, play offense not defense, appeal to the best in people.
Most people don't understand all the facts and figures thrown at them. People think in terms of fundamental values like freedom and responsibility, and themes that are close to their everyday lives, like health, jobs, and their children's future. Polluting fuels are dirty, both physically and morally, and should be called that.
I'm delighted to see these basic observations from the cognitive sciences finally getting applied. I don't agree with all their conclusions and language recommendations, but that is beside the point. They do get a lot right. It is about time. They deserve real credit.
An Unfortunate Diagram
Unfortunately, one of the things Westen and Lake get right is in an incomprehensible diagram on the back page: an explanation of why discussions of climate fail. It is hidden in a discussion of "associations," an inadequate way of discussing the public's frame-based logic. Climate and weather are usually understood as beyond immediate causation, something you are subject to, but can't just go out and change right away. Climate is not directly and causally connected to the values that underlie our concerns about our planet's future: empathy, responsibility, freedom, and our ability to thrive. They try to say that in the diagram, but the arrows and lines don't communicate it.
What Westen and Lake Miss
The right wing has spent billions of dollars over decades on a widespread system of think tanks, language experts, training institutes for speakers, grassroots organizing, buying media, computer communications, and the daily booking of speakers in the media across the country. They have worked long-term at a deep level. They have gotten their deepest values into the brains of tens of millions of Americans.
The Westen-Lake messaging approach is short-term; something that can be said straightforwardly tomorrow. Much of the argumentation is sensible. Nonetheless, there are huge holes, though they are much more difficult to deal with and one can understand why Westen and Lake didn't go there. Here is what is missing.
First, the public's very understanding of nature has to change. We are part of nature; nature is not separate from us. Nature nurtures us. The destructive exploitation of nature is evil. What is good is the use of nature that doesn't use up nature.
Second, the economic and ecological meltdowns have the same cause: the unregulated free market and the idea that greed is good and that the natural world is a resource for short-term private enrichment. The result has been deadly, toxic assets and a toxic atmosphere.
Third, the global economy and ecology are both systems. Global causes are systemic, not local. Global risk is systemic, not local. The localization of causation and risk is what has brought about our twin disasters. We have to think in global, system terms and we don't do so naturally. That is why a massive communications effort is needed.
Fourth, the Right's economic arguments need to be countered. Is it too expensive to save the earth? How could it be? If the earth goes, business goes.
Fifth, we are the polar bears. Human existence is threatened, and the existence of most living beings on earth.
Sixth, we own the air jointly and we can't transfer ownership. Polluting corporations are dumping pollution into our air. They need to gradually be made to stop, two-percent less a year for 40 years: that is what a "cap" on carbon dioxide pollution is about. And meanwhile the polluters should pay us dumping fees to offset the cost of fuel increases and pay for the development of better fuels.
Seventh, even the most successful emissions cap would only take us halfway. Business needs to do its part to take us the rest of the way. Large corporations need to face up to reality and join in the effort.
Finally, for those in the business world: Corporate interests are constantly putting forth arguments based on cost-benefit analysis. But the very mathematics of cost-benefit analysis is anti-ecological; the equations themselves are destructive of the earth.
The basic math uses subtraction: the benefits minus the costs summed over time indefinitely. Now those "benefits" and "costs" are seen in monetary terms, as if all values involving the future of the earth were monetary.
As any economist knows, future money is worth less than present money. How much less? The equation has a factor that tells you how much: e (2.781828...) to the power minus-d times t, where t is time and d is the discount rate. Now e to a negative power gets very small very fast. Just how fast depends on the exact discount rate (that is, interest rate), but any reasonable one is a disaster. The equation says that, in a fairly short time, any monetary benefits compared to costs will tend to zero. That says there are no long-term benefits to saving the earth!
Cost-benefit analysis is just the wrong paradigm for thinking about global warming.
Those are among the big ideas that have to be understood by the public. Language is needed, imagery is needed -- whatever will communicate the significance of the truth.
Ideas like these have to be repeated over and over. Liberals don't like repetition, but that's what it takes. Why? Because that's how brains work.
The ecoAmerica report, when it appears, should be taken seriously -- and critically. The issues the report raises are too important to be belittled.
I'm no neuroscientist, I'm just a marketer trying to talk to people in ways that will make them greener, so I can't comment on all the science. But here's what I hear in our focus groups all the time: save me money so I can feel more in control. Make green more accessible - let me buy it where I normally shop at a price that's not more expensive than the conventional product. Make it easier for me to make greener decisions.
Reading the phrase in your "only through linguistic "frames"" makes me wonder if you have actually read any of Lakoffs work and understood it (reading your blog post makes it even more probable that you haven't)? This is not "just" a matter of linguistics and words, not at all. This is a matter of cognition, how people experience the world around them and what make them act in certain ways. If you don't get this right you will succeed only by chance.
BTW - What kind of "actions" and "practices" is it that you envision that doesn't include some sort of language use? The point is that only the right use of language (knowing what people will react to and how) will ever make people change their behaviour.
rune66:
People change their behavior for all sorts of reasons and often without reason. They do it because there are incentives in place to facilitate behavioral change (economists tend to focus on this level of incentives); they do it because they desire some object or an image or feeling associated with it (advertisers work with this kind of desire, and it's obviously not only language that's used in successful advertising); they do it because they are convinced through reasoned argument -- which means not only the "right use of language" but the effective use of imagery, argumentation (a certain sequence of ideas presented logically, etc.), and example (Aristotle's pathos, logos, and ethos); they do it because of peer pressure, e.g., to "keep up with the Joneses"; and so on. They are not always "made" to act a certain way, because people are not automatons or machines. Behavior change occurs as a result of a multitude of causes which involve the cognitive dimension, the affective, the social and cultural, and also the practical possibility for acting differently.
As long as you focus only on one of these ("only the right use of language") and deny or ignore the others, you won't have the full picture.
An example I stumbled upon this morning is the mapping of Pascal's Wager [for us as individuals] onto going 'green' [for us as a species.]
Revolutionary self-powered engines and generators are expected to replace the need to plug-in a plug-in hybrid. A 2 kW generator is on the horizon. It will eventually demonstrate a compact, inexpensive, capability to end the need to plug-in.
Since no fossil fuel or battery recharge is required, existing engines are likely to become obsolete. Consumer purchasing patterns could begin to reflect a new reality, with the market deciding most future cars will never need fossil fuel.
When a substantial number of vehicles powered by such systems fill a parking garage, wireless power transmission technology can turn it into a multi-megawatt power plant.
The cost of many vehicles might be paid for by utilities, as they purchase electricity whenever needed.
The parked cars, trucks and buses, each become decentralized power plants - a rapid, cost-effective alternative to the many tough and costly challenges of constructing new coal burning and nuclear power generation facilities.
Auto makers will have no trouble selling fuel free cars that need no batteries or recharge, and can pay for themselves.
Imagine the potential for stimulating the world economy.
Auto makers and utilities have a unique opportunity to lead the nation and the world.
I know it is hard to think in geologic time rather than human life spans, but it should be obvious that only human activity could produce these observable phenomena in only a few decades.
I suggest, Dear Sir, that the conservative talk show hosts [and their call-in enablers] will not view the report in quite this manner. And, unfortunately for considered discourse, they are experts in 'framing'*.
* The word also carries another connotation as in the phrase 'We've been framed!'
I do have a problem with Cap and Tax.
Taxes aren't the solution for everything, people.
If not a disincentive toward fossils, what do you propose?
Taxes aren't the solution for everything, but solutions don't pay for themselves, and people don't tend to do the right thing unless you make them.
A book called Heat by George Monbiot makes this case very well: That if we leave environmental decisions up to individuals, we will simpy fail.
Smacking your flippers together like a seal and barking "Taxes are bad" is not the solution to anything at all. Read what the vast majority of the scientific community is telling us every day. A disturbing number of them have already given up.
Why would you have a problem with capping emissions, and taxing according to them? You want to preserve the rights of industries to pump crap in the air without consequence?
You might be personally very "green." That's not enough. You can be green as St. Patrick's Day, but if you aren't pushing for truly green policies on a global scale, then you are making no difference at all, except possibly a negative one.
Democrats think like Al Gore. Al Gore is not scientist. He is good writer and made good point from everything, what his friends-scientists explain to him. All of them have right on their opinion. I am, as reader has right to disagree with them.
Al Gore has huge popularity in the world maybe because of election 2000. He author of Earth in the balance, 1992, An inconvenient truth, 2006, co-author of movie. He has support in mass media in the world and more dangerous in my opinion, supports from Government of USA.
I think that he is wrong and implementation of his ideas will bring huge damage for world economy, His good intention could bring huge damage to nature.
Al Gore explains global warming by increasing amount of carbon dioxide, which trapped infrared radiation, and heat the air. This heat evaporated additional amount of water vapors which also greenhouse gas and trapped infrared radiation, which additionally heat the air.
Republicans opposing Al Gore, calculate how much carbon dioxide produce by mankind activity and Nature. They found that our activities are only small percentage against Nature activities.
What if it is not only carbon dioxide?
In this case as Republican, as Democrat-all Senators, our Government going in wrong direction. We need to stop unscientific politic.
CO2 control will have as little effect on Temperatures as throwing a virgin in the Volcano might have had on appeasing tribal gods. No doubt the throwers felt righteous - which is the real motivation and payoff of such actions.
There are many factors, including obviously solar patterns, that effect the earth's temperatures. As nearly all credible scientists have concluded, using the combined results of the various factors is that the earth's temperature has increased and will continue to increase dramatically, and that human actions have played a large role in this increase. To deny this is denying the vast majority of the data.
As Lakoff points out (and Norpag provides a classic example), the right has done a better job of framing a message that convinces the ignorant that they do not need to examine the evidence more than superficially. Like global climate change, successful framing occurs over long periods of time and from multiple sources.
There are four main temperature databases. I chose the Hadley SST database because the thermal inertia of the oceans smooths out the noise from the Northern hemisphere land data. and the earth is 5/7 ths water. This is not cherry picking the data - this is the most reliable indicator of what is going on to be used as a basis for discussion.
No one doubts that the earth warmed up about 0.8 C during the 20th century - continued recovery from the little ice age. Warming peaked in about 2003. The sun - the main climate driver has gone quiet so much so that a return to the little ice ige is at least a possibility.
The Antarctic Ice sheets break up to some extent every year. Google -Cryosphere Today -scroll down to the global sea ice chart you will see that total sea ice is currentlyt about 500,000 kms greater than the 1979 - 2000 average, Glaciers generally retreated during the 20th century - many are now advancing again. The scary warming scenarios are based on climate models which are simply wrong - they all overestimate climate sensitivity to CO2. Look at the actual data and see what is really going on . The whole GM scenario is spin and hype to support a political and in Gores case a personal financial interest.
The leading alternative comes from the heavens, is light, bright, healthy, empowering. Sunlight and resulting life have very positive imagery in most every culture. Water, winds and tides likewise have mostly positive imagery associated with them, though not as completely and deeply.
Do the world's people want a society powered by life giving clean energy from the heavens or do they want to continue to poison themselves and the planet by using fuel created by and from death, that bring us death from the depths of the earth?
Seems a simple "frame" that "sells itself" (is self-evident) in virtually every language and culture. Both inside and outside the faith communities, these simple images need to be shared to bring on the rapid global change that is needed to save ourselves and the planet.
People do not incorporate academic thought into their daily lives and consciousness - the message has to permeate their subconscious. Unfortunately there are still huge sections of population in this country that are actively bucking the green trend to spite humanity or in attempts to prove themselves right (somehow).
Fossils -- oil, coal, gas -- spews from the bowels of Creation; Sunlight from the heavens.
Greed is a summons from Satan; Stewardship a calling from God.
Even the hard liners will tell you that they would love to have alternative fuels but it won't be because of "global warming" or "climate change" but because they want to eliminate foreign oil and the problems it causes. The real problem there is we don't have decent alternatives yet that can either be produced on a mass scale or serve a massive society.
What's changed is that the media has systematically ignored the issue after a couple of years of squeezing whatever ratings it could from the sensationalism, and now it has gone back to talking about the more reliable stuff like Miss California and how-can-we-save-the-Republican-Party and Sarah Palin's family foibles and missing white women and Nancy Pelosi's nasty unpatriotic comments about the always upfront honest CIA, and good old Uncle Dick Cheney, and viewing everything in the universe through the lens of Republican vs. Democrat. Today Chris Matthews did a segment on global warming. Did he have a climatologist on? Of course not. He had a know-nothing Republican debate a slightly better informed no nothing Democrat on an issue neither was qualified to talk about. That's what's turned the public off, even when the subject is only broached every six months or so nowadays.
And so the American people have forgotten all about global warming.
That's what changed.
Not the science. Not global warming. But the media. They're bored with it and don't like it.
As for models being "incorrect"... of course they are: they're models. That's the thing about science: it's not "correct" to arbitrary precision. In the end, all scientific "knowledge" is an approximation.
But not knowing everything isn't the same as not knowing anything. Two years ago the models suggested we were facing 5 deg F warming this century (that's alot). With new data, they are suggesting 7-9 deg F warming (that's alot more than alot). Will these projections change with time? Almost certainly.
The issue here isn't scientific precision to the 13th decimal, but risk management in public policy.