Commentary

The Half-Naked Fakir's Guide To Environmental Action

Last weekend, my family sat down to enjoy a three-hour history lesson: “Gandhi,” the award-winning movie about India’s most famous political figure, by Richard Attenborough. For my wife and me, it was a long-overdue revisit: for my kids, it was an introduction to an India they never knew and never imagined, a time when the very idea of India as a country was shaped, twisted and forged. 

Every time I watch this movie, as in any great story about a great human being, I see new dimensions to the figure of Gandhi. Today, the world has edited Gandhi into some kind of smiling, saintly figure who magically freed India using little other than stirring speeches and personal sacrifice. This is an injustice to the man Winston Churchill called “that half-naked fakir.” The fact is that Gandhi was not just a great spiritual leader, he was also a brilliant political strategist and an absolute genius when it came to human beings and their motivations. It is a only half the truth to say that he used non-violence to defeat the British. What he really did was use civil disobedience at strategically chosen opportunities, to intimidate and shame the British into surrender. Opportunities that seemed too small and insignificant to others were fanned by him into huge national debates: a farmer’s famine in a distant part of Eastern India; a tax on clothes not made in the UK; and a minor tax imposed by the British government on salt. You could say he was the first proponent of social media, without being too clever at all. 

So once again, we come to the question: what does all this have to do with green?

I have written on several occasions about incentives and their power to change behavior. This flies in the face of standard marketing wisdom, which usually centers around the word “emotion.” There is nothing wrong with considering an approach that evokes emotions: the problem is when we don’t pick the right emotion, or when the emotion we are going for is simply laughter, or amazement at the clever stunt you just pulled off. When you look at emotions as incentives, on the other hand, you have a real campaign. 

Thus far, I have mostly written about positive incentives — tapping into the feelings we all have for our children and so on. But now I’m going to take a leaf from Gandhian civil disobedience and suggest that we focus on spotlighting wrongful actions and then using the power of shame to get people, organizations and politicians to change their stance and their behavior. 

Let me talk briefly here about the Dandi Salt March of 1930. By focusing on the salt tax, Gandhi took a very small issue — but one that affected every person in India — and blew it up into a national struggle. He then defied the government by marching 240 miles to the ocean to make his own salt, sparking large-scale acts of civil disobedience by millions of Indians. The British mistake? Underestimating the enormous emotional power of a small act. Not to mention the power of social media, which in those days was sparked by radio and newspapers and then spread the old-fashioned way, by people talking to each other. When the British finally figured it out, they responded by attacking some of the marchers. These actions were reported worldwide and inspired widespread revulsion, not least in the UK itself — thus giving politicians there an urgent incentive to act. 

Today, what would civil disobedience look like? At its most dramatic, it’s that tiny Greenpeace boat standing up to the giant whalers. But in a market economy, it could take the form of a boycott of companies that persist in environmentally destructive actions. More importantly, those individual actions should be aggregated into a huge and very public database where everyone can see the actions being taken by the companies, the effects they have on the environment and the backlash from consumers. At an individual level, maybe utility companies could show the effect of every watt of electricity used, in polar bears or penguins or acres burned by forest fires. Children are our best hope and a message that puts environmental damage into real terms — like the salt tax did for the complexity of imperialism — will motivate them to appeal to their parents. No parent wants to be shamed in front of their kids. 

Gandhi called civil disobedience “satyagraha” or “truth-force,” and fighting climate change is nothing if not about facing the truth and feeling its power. In India in the 1970s, a small group of rural women put Gandhi’s teachings to work to protect their livelihood and environment, by simply wrapping themselves around trees to prevent them from being felled. That one simple act grew into a national agitation and the introduction of forest-friendly policies. 

And that was pre-Twitter. Imagine what we can do today.

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