alexlockwood.net

Two economists in the US have shown why geography is likely to be key to green activity. Matthew Kahn and Ryan Vaughn, at the University of California at Los Angeles, looked at the patterns of green consumerism in California. As reported in the Economist last month:

They noticed that Berkeley, California, just a few hours up the coast, has lots of Priuses, organic food, solar panels and public transit—and no Hummers.

When extrapolated out to the rest of California’s 349 counties, as the Economist notes, the usual suspects came out top, raising questions of why the “politically green huddle together in the same sorts of locations.”

One of the authors, Dr Kahn, suggess that “small initial differences… such as being close to a beach or public transport, may create the initial seeds of green communities. This in turn attracts ‘green businesses’ such as tofu restaurants and bike shops, and this in turn attracts more greens.”

Importantly:

The process culminates when greens have enough political clout to elect politicians and enact green regulation that further enhances their community’s attractiveness to environmentalists. Though greens are a small minority in America generally, concentrated in certain locations, they can have a strong influence on local policy.

It is this influence on local policy that is going to be critical in developing local low-carbon economies, one council or county at a time. Local media can play a key role in local policy. And it is this meeting point between policy, people and media, around the nexus of environmental issues, that could be a real opportunity for the big regional media companies in the long-term, and particularly online.

Local means: get out and do it
Local media grew out of a desire for communities to access news that was relevant to their lives. With the advent of radio, TV and the internet, both access to relevant news and what is relevant itself, have increased and eased in terms of access.

But where you live is still where you will walk, talk, breathe, in most cases work, and grow plants. No matter how many people send me a Lil’ Green Patch request on Facebook, I still ain’t going to be able to eat the vegetables grown there. Where you live and what you can do in that place is critically important for reducing carbon emissions and pressuring local and, through them, national policymakers to green up.

Take, for example, the time when I lived in Brighton. While I was there (two years) I became part of one of Britain’s greenest communities. I had the opportunity to:

• Edit the Green Party’s newspaper, Greenleaf
• Run a monthly eco-friendly spoken word night in a veggie cafe, the Sanctuary
• Work for Rocks Magazine, the local eco-magazine
• Run environmental writing workshops at Sussex University, the only British University on a patch of land identified as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
• Help out at GreenSpeak, the monthly green evening of debate
• Eat at the many, many vegetarian, locally sourced restaurants, such as Terre a Terre

In Sunderland, depsite it being the fifth most environmentally friendly city in the country… There ain’t so much. The Green Party’s South Tyneside page isn’t working, there’s no veggie cafe, there’s no eco-mag and little appetite for it. The Council don’t compost. There’s no car share scheme.

And what about the media?
Compare the local newspapers, the Sunderland Echo and the Brighton Argus. The only ‘green’ supplement in the Echo is the Green Driving mag. The Argus has the Going Green section and the Argus Eco-Business Awards. And take a look at SFGreen.com, which serves the Berkeley area. It’s the green living section of the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper online.

It doesn’t have to be a chicken/egg conversation. In the end, it doesn’t matter if the paper has to follow its audience, or if the paper can campaign and form opinion, as I quoted Trinity Mirror’s Neil Benson saying from the blog yesterday.

Some recent data from Canada shows that people don’t buy a local paper for local news any more. Which is fine. In Brighton, the Argus bought Rocks Magazine because they saw it as a competitor. And it was, doing fantastically well. Ergo: The future is magazines, supplements, and media portfolios of online and printed issue-based products.

My experience of Brighton was that the local media–the Argus, Rocks Magazine, the Green Party’s newsletter–all helped reinforce the behavioural changes that people there wanted (anyway). You didn’t pick up Rocks Magazine for the news, but for the communal address for listings, yoga, green living. That’s why the Argus bought it up. For regional media, which has seen its share price dive over the last year, the opportunity of changing behavioural patterns and energy/fuel squeezes means there is a long-term opportunity to redefine the role played by localised community media.

In its article on why the green live in Berkeley, the Economist noted, “evidence suggests that, despite tangible financial rewards, most people do not make even small environmentally sound changes at home, such as installing energy-efficient light bulbs or not leaving the television on standby.”

But if local media can tap into the growing green consciousness, or even drive it itself, then it has the opportunity to establish a new role for itself online. This is the role that local media can play in pushing the argument for bioregionalism, put forward by the poet Gary Schneider, among others. I’ve written about it before. It is the argument for staying where you are, knowing your environment, and being in balance with it. It is a low-carbon, respectful way of living.

If it’s possible in Berkeley and Brighton, it should be possible in Sunderland. Here we go…