Part of being able to make a good argument is holding on to the core of something that is true and being able to represent it in language that means something to the other person. Being prepared to go to where they are, to try and reach them and bring them with you. It’s not about you and your ego and what you need to say – you can get anything done if you don’t mind who takes the credit. The end justifies the means.
Conceptualising things in terms of the cost and value is a way of making things analogous, or at least finding some way to consider very different things. A way to meet and discuss things with people who might not share the same emotional attachment. To be able to make choices.
What if the means make it harder to get the ends though?
In trying to make the case for environmental action, we’ve spoken in the language of economics. The hard crunchy things that people care about, or at least can use to reach decisions. The factors that respond to the boxes and templates on the various applications, briefings, funding requests that are the ways of getting things done in lots of organisations, lots of parts of society.
Nature has a value of this. Without bees we’d be c.£120bn worse off per year. Energy inefficient rental homes cost the NHS at least £145m a year.
Framing things this way also helps to create a veneer of normality for trade-offs which would otherwise seem monstrous or unacceptable. It also helps to reinforce the frames and parameters – a tacit agreement that this is the ‘right way’ to look at things, to make choices, weigh up options. A shared language for things, or more perhaps, a seemingly shared language but really it belies some big differences in priorities, values, how to weigh things up.
This distancing from the emotional then maybe creates some stress – knowing that there’s a disconnect, putting your faith in something you don’t entirely trust, not feeling like you’ve got much control or agency. Feeling a bit shabby and tawdry, like you’re selling out, or being dishonest because the framing feels stifling, hiding the things that matter.
More importantly though, this framing hasn’t catalysed sufficient action.
Environmentalists, and indeed people working on other issues such as civil liberties or health for instance, have done the things we’re supposed to do. Spending precious time coming up with assessment methodologies to put a ‘value’ on a tree or landscape, or work out how much someone’s bad housing has ‘cost’ the NHS. Then watching as the things we care about get traded off against other things – often things which will make what we care about worse such as new roads or runways.
In lots of ways that’s fine. As I wrote in ‘Picking your poison’ – making decisions is about making trade-offs, accepting that you can’t necessarily have it all and therefore you have to choose. Losing an argument isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes your ideas or proposals aren’t right, could be better, have areas of weakness which need to be reviewed and reassessed. It can create a space to build better connections with other subjects, organisations or coalitions of the willing.
Sometimes though, losing the argument, and then keeping on losing, just makes it more urgent to win sometimes. From climate and biodiversity perspectives, the longer it takes to ‘win’ the argument, the more worrying things become in terms of impacts. Therefore the more action needs to be taken to try and respond, which is then less appealing to more people. So we go round that loop again and again.
In a different time and in relation to a different context, Gramsci said ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ There are currently plenty of ‘morbid symptoms’ in the UK and internationally – on migration, health, civil liberties and, well the list is a very long one. The sense ‘That’s your bloody GDP not ours’ seems to still be true for many. It feels like the lack of space for care is part of what has created these symptoms. That people are protesting about the effects and looking around for politicians, proposals and stories that offer something different.
Feeling optimistic at this point can by turns feel naïve and necessary. Yet I love the quote from Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Hope in the dark’, where she takes the idea of hope as something passive and turns it into something more active. She says ‘“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.’
It feels like the current situation creates the space and need to shift from the stories we’ve been telling about the financial value of things, and gives more urgency to telling different stories. Ones which resonate better with people – both those who hear the stories and also, for many who are telling them. Most of us can’t do something directly about the stories politicians tell, even those we would expect to be doing better. Trying to find ways in our days and actions to tell better stories ourselves and to try and make the case to care is something we can and must do though.
We need new stories... 