Don't scare the kiddies

Green activists have long been advised to not scare people with doomsday scenarios. People's eyes will glaze over and they will tune out, the activists are told. We may call this the Don't scare the kiddies syndrome.

At one level, the advice is realistic. People don't want to hear bad news, much less have it shouted at them.

Our question is: how can we engage people in coming to grips with the fact that we are in an ecological crisis and things are getting worse?

One tip comes from an instructor at the Institute of foreign affairs in Washington, DC. He observed that if a group was practising conversational French or German in a circle, and the instructor made a correction from across the circle, people experienced the correction as criticism, and responded defensively. He discovered, however, that if the instructor went around the circle and gently whispered the correction in the person's ear, the correction was received as helpful coaching.

Perhaps the principle here is friendly intimacy versus confrontation. It is true that people do not want to be lectured at. Perhaps if we can create conversational spaces in a context of mutual regard people will come to grips with the enormity of our situation, and begin to think proactively about how to deal with it instead of tuning out.