Mark Watson’s crap at the environment

I just caught the first instalment of Mark Watson’s Radio 4 Book of the Week this morning: the story of his ‘one year of doing the environment better’ that he’s put together in his new book, Crap At The Environment.

Fair play to Mark for taking on the subject, and doing it in both a committed (in terms of time) and common sense way. The way he talks about climate change fixes firmly in the vernacular, and that’s an important way of addressing the subject. Humour helps too. However, although he apologised for being crass about it, this I found highly unfunny:

“Deforestation? Have a look on Google Earth, there seems enough of it left to me.”

Deforestation is a massive climate change and equity issue. There’s just no need to take cheap shots while doing something so worthy. This below, however, is more interesting and opens up the point from which Mark started his internal-investigation into his own crapness towards the environment (there are four more instalments this week). On the programme today, Mark said this:

“Climate change is a tedious subject. And there’s no room in my repertoire for tedious subjects. I’m naturally skeptical, it’s my job to take the piss out of things… it’s not one of those things you can really think about when you’re developing a career as a stand up comedian.”

What I found interesting about this was that the comment suggests it’s Watson’s attitude that is hindering him being someone who’s “good at” the environment. But that’s not actually the case. One more quote to help me explain why. Steven Poole in the Guardian reviewed the book as:

full of useful detail on issues such as meat, plastic bags and travel, even if Watson’s obsessive, self-indulgent insistence on his own crapness at many things (except comedy, of course) becomes rather wearing.

This self-indulgence is the issue in the book. And it feels to me too damaging, in that it undermines the potential good of the book; that’s because it communicates a norm (crapness) rather than an attitude (I don’t think of the environment). As suggested by Cialdini (2007) in relation to environmental actions, “what people actually do is much more influenced by norms than attitudes” (quoted in Roser-Renouf & Nisbet, 2008).

So while writing about being totally crap at the environment and failing to change lightbulbs, Mark’s book is more likely to be reinforcing the ‘crap at the environment’ norm–making people feel ok for being crap–rather than helping to change attitudes. It misses the ‘positive communal address’ that Segnit and Ereaut (2006) find doing so much positive work in the regional press to change people’s behaviours (through changing the ‘norm’ of what they feel able to do) around the environment. The bottom line is: the normative framework of how we relate to the environment needs changing if we are to shift attitudes and behaviours.

So, other than that slightly major issue, there are two more reasons why I think Mark Watson, or at least this infotainment, is getting too much airtime.

First: Because, what will, in Mark’s own words, actually get people to do more is, quoting the strangely paired researchers Kaiser and Fuhrer (2003) is knowing what to do, rather than why or how, and Watson’s own personal journey is not focused enough on the what. This is important, because:

procedural knowledge—knowing how to take actions—has a stronger relationship to an environmental behaviour than does declarative knowledge—knowing, for example, that energy use produces damaging CO2 emissions. (quoted in Roser-Renouf & Nisbet, 2008).

Second: Because most of the people who are ‘crap at the environment’ and are likely to be informed by the down-to-earth repertoire, the people who perhaps need to hear it most, don’t listen to Radio 4. People from the upper class/income brackets do in general do more. Why didn’t Mark go for serialisation on E4 rather than Radio 4? I’d challenge Mark to go outside of the comfort zone, something he excels at (I couldn’t get up on stage) and get Crap into daytime TV on UK Living. That’s what Al Gore did with the ‘WE’ advertising campaign in the US, moving it away from the news audiences into the mass market. (To answer my own question, Mark’s a regular on Radio 4, and E4 probably wouldn’t take it, so that’s an unfair rhetorical question, I accept that. I want to be more positive, but I’m not sure all talk is good talk.)

I’ll be listening in tomorrow to see if the story takes a more productive line. I’ll be listening, because if Mark’s book can be productive as well as funny (and not at the expense of the rainforest) then it will be a useful addition to the efforts to get people  motivated to do something good. Or at least start.

As Prins and Rayner argued in the pages of Nature last October, “Climate change is not amenable to an elegant solution because it is not a discrete problem.” The scruffy, messy, deal-with-shit ways that Mark Watson has looked at his own relationship to being ‘good at’ the environment is a necessary addition to the range of approaches that can help tackle climate change, so let’s hope he’s not missed the opportunity by giving it all up just to be funny.

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Tagged as: climate change, media coverage, Radio 4