Save the planet – become a vegetarian!

Well that’s according to Sir Paul McCartney anyway.

If Macca is to be believed, we need to become a nation (world?) of carrot-munchers in order to tackle climate change.

OK, so it’s slightly flippant of me to refer to vegetarianism as carrot-munching (I was, after all, one myself until the smell of bacon the morning after the night before got the better of me). But are we really supposed to believe that the flatulence of our native Friesians is the cause of the UK’s contribution to global warming?

Flippancy aside, I think this latest piece of advice on what we should be doing to protect the environment and reduce our carbon footprint raises a serious point about how the effects of human behaviour on the planet are communicated and discussed and subsequently reported in the media.

Sir Paul is quote as saying, “I would urge everyone to take this simple step to help our precious environment…”

Let’s think about this for a second. It might be a “simple step” to a long-time, passionate vegetarian, but to the average meat-eating punter who lives for roast beef and Yorkshire puddings on a Sunday and the ‘kill or cure’ rasher sandwich after a heavy night on the beer, it’s not that “simple”.

Asking people who have eaten meat all their life to “simply” give it up is, I would argue, a very BIG step. Failing to recognise this can do more harm than good in the battle to get more people to be climate conscious.

Views around climate change tend to be polarised around two extremes: on the one hand you have those who believe that it definitely exists and if we don’t do something soon we’re all doomed, and on the other hand there are those who dismiss the whole idea as little more than scare mongering and science fiction.

For the great mass of people in the middle, the bickering that goes on between these two extremes of opinion is a real turn off and just results in them tuning out of the green debate altogether.

If we’re serious about being green and getting more and more people to think about how they can reduce their carbon footprint, then these are the very people we need to be engaging with – not alienating!

And the key to engaging people is to find the issues that matter to them, things they are passionate about; not telling them that something completely alien to them is a “simple step” that should be adopted without question.

So if you try and retune someone’s radar to your agenda you’re on a [cow] hiding to nothing. To be successful, you need to understand what people care about and retune your issues to those things.

Right, I’m off to do my research into whether a field full of farting cows produces more methane than a field full of vegetarians.

Add it!