Pi-Consulting

“Save the planet? Of course everyone wants to save the planet. What planet are YOU from?”. This view seems to have become near-universal in many Western societies. The growing concern about global warming and its consequences is already too widespread to be “just a minority view”.
How quickly things change. It seems strange now, but less than twenty years ago “Green-mindedness” was to most Europeans a bizarre new creed being propagated by a visionary minority, (or a “strident bunch of alarmist zealots”, depending on your point of view at the time).

It’s not easy to establish exactly where in Europe the Green movement first emerged, but Sweden has a strong claim to that distinction. There were reports at the time about a Swedish wood-pulp company, whose paper-making process involved large quantities of chemical bleaching agents being run off into local rivers. A small but vocal pressure group was mad as hell about it. While the newly-emerging planet-savers made headlines in the mainstream Swedish dailies, the company’s ceo coolly made his own headlines in the business press. He insisted that his chemists should not only halt the river-pollution, but improve profits at the same time. And they did.

The story may appear tame enough today, but in the context of the “damn-their-eyes, profit-no-matter-what” thinking of the early 1980s, it seemed amazing.

It took several years before “green” got to be the most over-used word in the world’s newspaper headlines. From little acorns mighty oaks do grow, but that tends to be the way with big shifts in social values. What starts as a “nutty idea” among a marginal group of issue-focused activists suddenly grips the news media’s imagination, spawns a clutch of (more or less sensationalised) TV documentaries, then mutates rapidly into conversation-fodder around the water cooler. Finally it ends up ‘going mainstream’. Pretty soon (a) you’re either weird or an incurable curmudgeon if you persist in holding a contrary view; and (b) no-one can remember when people thought any different.

In the case of the Greens, politics also played a part. It’s twenty years since Germany’s newly-hatched Green party took its first seats in the Bundestag, and what an exotic bunch they seemed. But soon Green parties became part of the governing coalitions in both Germany and France, and Greens got posts in the governments of Belgium, Finland and Italy. As The Economist put it, “greenery itself lost its rebellious tinge, and became unfashionably conventional”. Not so long ago the German Green party’s annual congress incautiously voted to triple petrol prices within ten years. Appalled by the resulting slump in their public support, they had to do some immediate back-tracking.

There’s a paradox at work here. The French call it banalisation. The more widespread a particular view becomes, the less we seem to go on about it. In both America and Europe, people’s articulated concern for the environment was declining steadily through the 1990s, (except, curiously, among the French and Spanish, over half of whom persist in voicing strongly Green opinions. This may be a reaction against earlier national policies. Many still remember when France’s leaders were enthusiastically nuking deserted Pacific atolls in a spirit of scientific curiosity).

In Britain, an emerging “ho hum” effect is clearly visible from trends over the last ten years. Those of the British most strongly concerned about the environment have dwindled in number, while those with only neutral attitudes on the subject have increased. It remains to be seen if the recent inrush of global warming stories will reverse the trend.

In the long run, Green attitudes may have mutated following their early success in changing people’s minds. Perhaps, if you’re a pressure group, the worst thing that can happen to you is that everyone starts to agree with you. You end up being right, but who cares?