Why Climate and Waste News should Trash the Doom-and-Gloom Narrative

By Sarah Currie-Halpern

Forest Fire wreaking havoc

It’s a question as old as advertising, and possibly as old as philosophy: how do you persuade someone to do something? 

This question is a central focus of environmental activists and organizations, and one waste reduction advocates have struggled with for years. As the climate situation worsens, a great deal of public-facing environmental messaging has started to slide into panicked pessimism. It focuses on the idea that we are running out of time to reduce our impact on the planet. If we don’t completely change course right now, it’s all going to come crumbling down and it’s going to be bad. It’s not always clear what it is.

This messaging isn’t factually wrong, per se. It’s just not convincing. Environmental messaging that uses impending catastrophe as its primary argument makes the problem seem unsolvable. The person on the receiving end assumes they are too small to have an impact. It also implies that whatever they are already doing isn’t even helping—so why bother?

This type of messaging is designed to produce guilt and fear in hopes of pressuring people into being eco-conscious. Guilt and fear, however, aren’t great motivators. In fact, they’re antithetical to effective persuasion.

Instead of appealing to people’s altruism by invoking fear of a crisis, we should appeal to their pragmatism, their wallets, and their concern for their health and the health of their families. Keep it simple: waste reduction saves money, and climate-friendly acts are good for your health. Statistics about microplastics on the ocean floor might not get people to ditch a plastic water bottle, but information about how microplastics in their gut make them sick just might. Combine this with the money they’ll save with a reusable water bottle, and you’ll get results.

Going green has a bad reputation of being more expensive than sticking with existing methods. Many people wrongly assume it requires a big upfront investment, like buying an electric-powered vehicle or solar panels. Waste reduction, however, is a great way to combat this assumption, and bring the financial benefits of green action back into day-to-day life. It’s not difficult to demonstrate how reusing glass jars saves people the money they’d spend on a new box of plastic bags every few months.

Glass jars filled with pickled foods

Last March, Outside columnist Kristin Hostetter ran the numbers and found that incorporating waste-reducing actions in her day-to-day life saved her about $9,000 over the course of a year. Much of these savings came from her commitment to shop thrift stores before resorting to Amazon (saving her “at least $3,500”) and to cook plant-based twice a week (another $1,352). She also made her own compost ($102), grew her own herbs ($352), and replaced her Ziploc bags and paper towels with reusable alternatives ($115 and $156 respectively).

An extra $9,000 a year is an incredible incentive for individuals. Merging it with the potential health benefits will only make it more convincing. Best of all, the information we need to be convincing already exists. We know plastic food containers are filled with chemicals that leach into the food and drinks we consume. We also know that making your own household cleaners and growing your own herbs lowers your exposure to harmful chemicals and pesticides significantly. Let’s use this information.

This proactive messaging is the opposite of the defeatism that feels baked into climate-related discourse right now. That’s critical, since we’re already seeing the negative effects of this doom-and-gloom messaging play out on a generational scale. One survey conducted by researchers at the University of Bath found that over 50% of Gen Z respondents felt “sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty” about climate change. Saving the world feels massive and impossible, but making yourself healthier while saving a bit of money and doing your part feels manageable. 

Healthy food

On a practical level, it doesn’t matter why someone decides to reuse something or buy secondhand. The motivation is secondary to the action when it comes to keeping plastic out of landfills. Waste reduction advocates ought to be focusing on ways to motivate people that actually work. Even something like “For a liveable planet in 2050!” is too enormous and abstract to motivate large swaths of the population. Financial and personal health benefits, by contrast, hit closer to home, with possible benefits that are easy to imagine. That liveable planet in 2050 might just depend on it.