Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (2 page)

• Beattie, G. and Sale, L. (2009) ‘Explicit and implicit attitudes to low and high carbon footprint products’,
International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability
,
5
: 191–206. (
Chapter 6
in this book).

•—(under review) ‘How discrepancies between implicit and explicit attitudes on green issues are reflected in gesture–speech mismatches as the unconscious attitude breaks through’,
Semiotica
.

• Beattie, G., McGuire, L. and Sale, L. (2010) ‘Do we actually look at the carbon footprint of a product in the initial few seconds? An experimental analysis of unconscious eye movements’,
International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability
. (
Chapter 7
in this book).

• Beattie, G., Sale, L. and McGuire, L. (in press) ‘An inconvenient truth? Can extracts of a film really affect our psychological mood and our motivation to act against climate change?’
Semiotica
.

All reasonable efforts have been made to contact copyright holders but in some cases this was not possible. Any omissions brought to the attention of Routledge will be remedied in future editions.

Stephen Waldron, Rod Coombs, Richard Seeley and David McNeill all made very useful comments on an earlier draft of this book and I thank them for their input. Lastly, I would like to thank my PA of ten years, Sylvia Lavelle, who has always managed to hold the fort efficiently and effectively (and with an engaging smile), thereby giving me the opportunity to think, write and channel my worry on the topics in the book itself (rather than on all of the other things that I could be worrying about, probably unnecessarily!).

Everybody needs a vista on the world, and this is mine. A bright airy office lit by lamps huddled in every corner of the room, three desk lamps hugging the corners of the desks not covered in paper, six more lamps standing tall and proud with chrome and off-white shades, one with a white paper shade billowing out, giving out a dull glow, lighting the dead misshapen twigs emerging triumphantly out of a chrome bin. They look as if, even in death, they are stretching out for life by the window in this warm cocoon of an office. There is an old-fashioned clock on one wall, which ticks loudly; it looks old, like something from the fifties, chipped and white and blue, the colour of old-fashioned crockery, but it is a modern copy, a cheap copy already with flaking paint, which somehow manages to make the sound of the original. It is loud and regular in its beat, marking out time, but you can only really hear it when you listen carefully, and you notice how tinny it is. It is a modern, bright office, without the normal strip lights, efficacious and efficient; the noise of the computer whirring in the room makes the whole room feel alive. That’s the sound I prefer, the sound of activity and life. I like the glow when students enter the room. It’s like coming in from the dark and the cold, into the light and the warmth. They always say the same thing, ‘It’s very cosy in here.’ ‘I live here,’ I say, ‘it has to be.’

I look down onto a tree-lined street through the main university campus. I can see a large part of my world, the optimism of the future, students hurrying by, their coats pulled tight against a cold windy Manchester autumn, grey
in early October and they still all look happy. I love that optimism of university life, it’s all about the future and possibility; anything is possible, any dream, no matter how ridiculous. I can see the offices opposite; it’s an administrative block, human shapes, people I don’t recognize, working at set tables, administrators in greyish suits, occasionally moving to check some figures at another table, and then moving back to their first positions. The message they send is stability and continuity, that great university machine working endlessly into the future, the hub of learning. In the afternoon I can see the school kids taking a shortcut to Oxford Road, past my famous building where Rutherford split the atom and then later the very first computer in the world was assembled, the building where Baby was born. And I can see the new recycling bins, all nine of them in a neat row with blue or black tops and a bright orange chute thing on the top, just inviting you to recycle and save the planet. They turned up recently; they line the side of the building like sentries, just standing there watching you, on guard.

I sit and look out of my window and watch one man carefully and tentatively approach the bins. He has come prepared, everything has been sorted well in advance and he stands there in the grey drizzle placing each item carefully and neatly into the correct box. The students hurry past, hardly noticing him; I just notice his ill-fitting trousers and his haversack, purple and green, the colours and fashion of twenty years ago, maybe more. His pullover looks tired and recycled, probably from an Oxfam shop. He is a living embodiment of one of my cultural stereotypes – the repressed eco-warrior, on his own little pathetic moral crusade to save the planet. Quite alone in his efforts, my suspicion is that’s what he likes most. It makes him feel different and unique. I catch him glancing up at my room: what attracted him to look up I’m not sure, perhaps it was the brightness on this grey afternoon. He looks up not in a challenging way, but in a vacant sort of way; at first, he is just drawn to the light, and then and only then do I see the mild look of disapproval when he sees me sitting there. It’s sometimes dangerous to read too much into a fleeting facial expression,
but sometimes it’s hard not to. That fleeting look said something about the earth’s limited natural resources, and finite sources of natural energy; it said something about academics who should know better. It said something about me and him and the gap between us, in a vertical rather than horizontal plane; it said something about moral and intellectual superiority. I hate people looking down at me. I always have. It never provokes change, just a hardening of attitudes, and a host of ready-made rationalisations. I said something under my breath and turned away. For some reason that look of his had made me momentarily angry.

There was a knock on the door. It was one of my recent graduates, Laura Sale, a former student working with me on how the brain sends its complex messages through gestures and speech to other brains during conversation. She came into the room and visibly sighed, looking round slowly and deliberately at each of my lights. ‘Do you need all of those on?’ she asked. I like her directness. She reminds me a bit of my mother, who would come out with the first thing that was in her head, regardless of the situation. She too had a thing about lights and heat, but for an entirely different reason. Then it was all economic in the grey days of working-class Belfast of the Troubles. ‘Turn those bloody lights off,’ she would say, ‘not a bit of wonder our bills are so big. I’m a widowed woman, we can’t afford to put two bars of the electric fire on, or those bloody lights. Get them turned off.’ Perhaps that’s why I do it, perhaps I’m celebrating the fact that my life has moved on from those days in the streets of Belfast, perhaps I’m signalling my small stake in consumer culture, gratuitously enjoying my days of material possession. I had heard Steve Jones, the geneticist, on the radio, saying that we lived at the very end of evolution and that when anyone asked him what the Garden of Eden was like, he told them to imagine the present. I love the present, I’m embedded in it; I’m part of the action, not like the resentful and superior man with the haversack.

Laura was still looking at me. There was something in that look that I really didn’t like. ‘What’s your problem?’ I asked her. ‘Do you actually believe in global warming? Have you not noticed that in Manchester winter lasts from
October until May, and that it rains every day? My view is that you should only believe what your senses tell you, and mine are telling me that it’s getting colder around here. Perhaps I should have a “Stop global cooling” sticker on my door. That might do the trick. You could join my movement. It might start small but I’m sure that it would grow.’

She didn’t take the bait and didn’t respond with any anger or any kind of discernible emotion. But that may be temporary, I thought. ‘Stop global cooling,’ I chanted quietly; ‘Stop global cooling,’ I said more loudly in that provocative manner I have that really irritates people. She just smiled in that way that women do at men who aren’t behaving in a totally mature fashion, at men who should know better. ‘But say there was something in the whole thing,’ she said. ‘You’re a psychologist, wouldn’t you find it rewarding to try to do something about it?’ ‘You mean, like the guy with the moth-eaten pullover and the little haversack?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said. ‘What pullover? What haversack?’ ‘Basically, you want me by the bins down there,’ I said, ‘recycling bits of my very busy life? Checking out who’s watching me, showing that I have all the time in the world and the patience and the moral authority to sort all of the crap of my life into little neat piles and then stick them one by one down that bloody orange chute? And you want me to do that slowly enough so that everyone can see what a great guy I am, and not that selfish bastard that some suspect that I really am?’

‘No, that’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘I want you to use your psychology, everything you know to work out what we would have to do in order to make a difference.’ I made a ppppfffffff sound at her cheek, a sharp expulsion of air, a primitive rejection of the idea that seemed to do the trick, although the basic onomatopoeia here, which could form the basis for the word ‘piffle’, probably helped. ‘What would the basic principles be?’ she asked. I glanced away, breaking any sort of bond. ‘Treat it as an intellectual journey if you like. You don’t have to believe in it at the start.’ She paused. ‘But have you ever thought that the reason that you don’t believe in it to start with is because the whole thing is so massive
that you might not have the psychology to help you? Perhaps you just feel helpless in the face of great challenges? Perhaps this is a classic case of avoidance behaviour by a psychologist who should know better.’

She knew that I would find this confrontational for highly personal reasons. That week I had been on ITV1 providing expert analyses on
Girls Aloud
in a haunted house, then in a TB hospital for
Ghosthunting with Girls Aloud
. ‘If you’re out there why don’t you fuckin’ well show yourselves?’ Cheryl had screamed into the nothingness with Kimberley perched precariously on her knee. I had said something about the fight or flight response and what happens to the human body and the human brain when it is prevented from fleeing by social or physical constraints, including Yvette Fielding’s constant, and well-practised, challenges – ‘You’re not going to bottle it, are you Cheryl?’ – and Kimberley’s ample bottom. It was not what I had imagined myself doing with my degrees in psychology.

I went back to staring out of my window. The problem presented now as an intellectual challenge had everything, even I could see that: social identification and the man with the moth-eaten jumper, risk perception and the fact that I love warm, brightly lit offices and that I’m too busy to think too much about the future, attitudes and behaviour and how to change both, the unconscious mind and conscious reflection, the reasons behind behaviour and the way that we can rationalise our actions, beliefs and knowledge, empathy with others in other parts of the world, cynicism and scepticism about commercial involvement, human perception of the world as a small ecosystem or a giant disconnected macro-system, our emotions and our logic, our feeling that we live in the Garden of Eden or at the very end of days, our belief that evolution is over or that a new cultural evolution has just begun, our innermost thoughts that we can do something or that in the end we can do nothing. Laura smiled back at me. It was the face of optimism. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s think about what psychology might have to offer.’ It was a conversational opener, to keep her on board, nothing more. ‘Where would I start?’ She came back that afternoon with the first paper for me to read and placed it neatly on the side
of my desk next to one of my lamps so that it wouldn’t be displaced. She also placed it with the words facing me so as to minimise my effort, to cut down my excuses as to why I hadn’t time to read it. That was her little bundle of unconscious messages.

The paper was predictable enough in its content and tone. It was the doomsday scenario paper: I am sure that you can imagine the tone. I read it carefully, but embarrassingly it did nothing for me or rather it didn’t do what the author clearly thought that it was going to do. She came back later and sat over in the corner of my room while I finished reading it, occasionally looking up, as if I could not be trusted to finish the job in hand. The arguments in the paper made some logical sense, as far as I could see, but the problem was that I was no expert in the field and I felt overwhelmed by the insistent, relentless arguments. It might have all been true, every single word of it, but then again none of it might have been true. It was hard to tell.

But the real problem as far as I could see wasn’t the logic or lack of logic or even my ability to discern logic in action, it was in my emotional response to what I was reading. I felt no fear or nowhere near the level of fear that the smug git of an author guessed that I would be feeling. And there was something else. It was as if the article didn’t concern me and my behaviour: it was almost as if the article wasn’t about me or, dare I say it, my planet. It was written for other people, living less busy lives, with time to reflect and find the recycling bins, and time to grade their rubbish into neat piles, with time to walk to busy appointments, instead of running from their cars, and time to browse in supermarkets and make green considered choices instead of running up and down the aisles at five to ten with the assistant with the bad skin shouting that the shop was already closed, and me shouting back that there was at least another three and a half minutes before closing time and what was his problem.