Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Extreme makeover?...

Are environmentalists "re-inventing themselves?" From here:
Stephen Hounsham, a spokesman for Transport 2000 - a group working to reduce the environmental impact of transportation - explained that the green movement needed to retune its message, becoming more positive and more realistic in dealing with the public.

On issues such as climate change, Hounsham said, groups like his had tended to be needlessly highhanded, or to relentlessly predict disaster resulting from global warming.

While that approach may resonate with activists, it caused wider audiences to tune out or became apathetic.

"We assume that everybody is like us, with a thirst for environmental disaster and a thirst to do something about it before they go to bed at night," he said.
I just wonder how this will actually resonate with the enviro-whacko base:

"We're not appealing to their core values," Hounsham said. "We're asking them to drop their core values and adopt ours."

The green movement should start adopting messages tailored for each issue, emphasizing how citizens can gain immediately from tackling a specific problem, he said. Activists could move away from the image of "lefty hippie people with beards."
and
"We don't want to chain ourselves to things, we want to engage with our peers," she said.

Adopting a negative attitude when dealing with the media often translated into unhelpful articles. When activists focused on bad news, reporters in turn produced depressing features.

In a survey of 320 articles on climate change in British newspapers between August and November last year, Futerra found that 59 percent focused completely on the negative effects of global warming, and offered no possible solutions.

As a result of going through this "meat grinder of guilt and recrimination," many people simply decided to ignore the whole issue, Townsend said.
Just goes to show... you can dress up a moonbat; but in the end, isn't it still a moonbat? Why is it that the ones on the left are the ones always seeing the need to 're-invent' themselves?

It will be interesting to see if they can actually pull this off. Or at the very least it will make for some great entertainment.



(Filed under enviro-whackism)