Eingana - Australian Association for Environmental Education

Ingredients of Transition: How Others
See Us and How We Communicate
Rob Hopkins looks at how we communicate the transition
message, and says we must do so in a way that is inclusive,
engaging and accessible.
People who are passionate about issues that
necessitate change in others (most green issues fall
into this category) can sometimes lack an awareness of
how they communicate their message. For many,
green campaigners can appear fanatical, naive,
uninformed, smug, judgemental, patronising or
offensive (very few embody all of these, but I have
seen talks by one or two people who managed it).
Communicating Transition without such an awareness
can, ultimately, be self defeating.
I remember when I lived in Ireland in the late
1990s, and was involved in developing one of Ireland’s
first eco-village developments, and in the run-up to
our submitting our planning application, we held a
public meeting in the Village Hall. We were inspired,
young and naive, and were convinced that because we
thought it a fantastically exciting project, so would
everybody else. We compiled our drawings, slides and
maps and our reasons why it was such a great idea and
set off for the Hall. Once the event was underway, we
found ourselves stood in front of a hall filled with local
people with their arms crossed and with suspicious
looks on their faces.
I had been involved with environmental projects
for years, but had never previously encountered the
perception of ‘greener’ options as being an inherent
criticism of how things are presently done. When we
talked about how we were going to build green, low
energy houses, back came the tight-lipped question
“what’s wrong with my house?” When we talked
6
about mixed, diverse land use and sustainable food
production, the question came back “what’s wrong
with my farm?” I had never previously encountered
this perception of sustainability as an inherent
criticism of current ways of doing things, but in the
years since I left that Hall somewhat crestfallen, it is an
experience which greatly shaped my thinking.
Over subsequent years I rapidly developed a
sense of what gets people engaged, and what turns
them off. I also developed a recognition that within the
environmental movement, there is often a lack of
awareness of what turns other people off: we can be so
convinced of our rightness that we don’t need to pay
any attention to how the message is communicated,
the fact that it is communicated is enough. The
ultimate example of that was the dreadful film
produced by climate campaign group 10:10, ‘No
Pressure’, which showed people who didn’t believe in
climate change being blown up1. A humorous in-joke
perhaps, but when viewed through the eyes of people
outside the immediate circle of those who conceived it,
an awesomely unpleasant, bewildering and totally
self-defeating piece of work.
I never use the word ‘eco’, as in Ireland it conjured
up a mental picture of guys with dreadlocks in trees
trying to stop development, ‘eco-warriors’. I rarely say
‘sustainable’ as no-one knows what it means. The issue
of how we come across is a fluid one. I often think of
doing Transition skilfully as being, in part at least, the
ability to change hats depending on who you are
meeting. I present Transition very differently to a
Council, to a group of businessmen or to community
activists. With each there is different language that
engages, and language that leads to a switching off.
Talk of communities having fun, of communitybuilding,
of the psychology of change, tends to leave
Councillors cold. Talking to businesspeople about
economic contraction, showing graphs of peak oil and
waxing lyrical about planting nut trees will rapidly
lead to their glazing over. They want to hear about
opportunities, about how to get things done with little
time available to make it happen. They want, often, to
know about the bottom line. Speak to people in their
own language, and about what fires them up.
When you get invited to speak somewhere, do
your homework first. Who are you speaking to? Why
have they invited you? What attracts them to hearing
about Transition? Dress appropriately… you wouldn’t
wear a suit to speak to the local school, but you may
well to address the Council. I always like the idea of
EINGANA – Journal of the Victorian Association for Environmental Education – Volume 33, No. 3, December 2010