By Tom Crompton on May 21, 2009

Responses to Lakoff

This blog was originally posted at Identity Campaigning.

Yesterday, I posted a piece by George Lakoff, How We Talk About the Environment Has Everything to Do with Whether We’ll Save It. Lakoff’s piece, which appeared on Alternet has elicited several responses from others: See, for example, this really helpful and thoughtful reflection from Adrian Ivakhiv, who is Associate Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont.

George Lakoff’s perspective is criticised on the grounds that it’s simplistic to suggest there are just two dominant ‘deep frames’: a progressive one, and a conservative one. This may be the case, but what interests me most about his work is his assertion that successful political movements achieve clarity about the deep frames to which they appeal – and that they recognise the importance of policy in shaping these frames. Of course, these aren’t biologically inate frames – they are created and reinforced through political process – including the policies that government enacts: even to the point, Lakoff suggests, that the Republicans have historically adopted policies which they knew would fail because, in failing, they served to promote the conservative ‘deep frame’ that it is their long-term goal to embed.

So it seems that both Lakoff and Ivakhiv would find common ground in acknowledging the importance of political process in helping to shape the values which must come to underpin any systemic and successful environmental movement.

Tom Crompton

About Tom Crompton

I'm Change Strategist at WWF-UK. For five years I headed WWF-International's Trade and Investment Programme (working on World Trade Organization issues, for example). While I was (and still am) convinced that international trade policy is crucially important in sustainability terms, I was frustrated by the glacial pace of change on this agenda - and the fact that even those trade negotiators I got to know who were personally quite 'radical' nonetheless felt impotent in a system where there was so little political space to pursue the changes that are needed. This led me to ask how organisations like WWF might begin to work to help create the political space for more ambitious change. What leads to more vocal expressions of public concern about sustainability issues? What motivates people to bring more pressure to bear on their elected leaders? These questions led to work with social psychologists and political scientists, and the publication of a series of reports: "Weathercocks and Signposts: the environment movement at a crossroads" (2008); "Simple and Painless? The limitations of spillover in environmental campaigning" (with John Thogersen, 2008), and "Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity" (with Tim Kasser, 2009). These pieces of work culminated naturally in our new report, "Common Cause".