The F Word

Use the F word.  Go ahead. Feels good to turn heads and command attention, doesn’t it?   Those of us who care about sustainability need to sprinkle what we say with the F word.

Which F word did you use?  Several F words capture attention and motivate action: Fortune, Family, Faith, Freedom, Fairness, Fame, and Fun.  Were you thinking of another word?  You’re right, it certainly motivates behavior; but in polite company, it’s probably best to classify that activity as Fun.

Fear is another four letter F word that attracts attention.  But it is overused.  I recommend we deploy it infrequently and strategically.   Doom and gloom messages about timber famine, ecological collapse, the 6^th great extinction, rising sea levels and related apocalyptic scenarios are red meat for environmental fundamentalists, but the same messages sound shrill and hollow to many who have faith in humanity and God.  Even if the fear message penetrates those we hope to motivate, the resulting fight or flight response is erratic and short-lived.  Fear generates a survival response prompting immediate action against a perceived threat: we strike out against the threat or flee from it.  Since the most pressing environmental challenges are hard to perceive and harder to affect, recipients of the fear message are left agitated and helpless, they may even resent the messenger.  We need another message, with carefully chosen words.

Look at national polls of what people care about.  The top issues typically include jobs and economy, war and national security, health care, budget deficits, taxes, and religion.  The “environment,” even biodiversity and climate, tends to be much further down list, often not showing up at all.

Can a sustainability topic become relevant in this hot political potato context? Can it even get discussed when so many other issues have lighten rods attracting media energy? Absolutely.  But not if we only use enviro-techno speak.  We need to link our message to values that dominate political debates, and frame messages in ways that illustrate sustainability’s social relevance. F words are key: Fortune, Family, Faith, Freedom, Fairness, Fame, and Fun.

Scientific and analytic tendencies often get in the way of mobilizing political action because these practices, unfortunately, intentionally try to ignore values and we end up talking about things most people don’t care about.  Moreover, we deceive ourselves and insult others by thinking scientific advice deserves credibility because it is value free (it is not). A typical response of a science-trained environmental professional to those who disagree with them is to offer them education: “if only they know what we know, then they would agree with our advice!”  Attempting to educate the public to think like us is not only arrogant, it is ineffective.  Not only do we need to change our message (the topic of this blog), we probably should change our research and professional goals to reflect pressing social concerns (a topic for another blog, or three!).  We have much work to do, but success is within reach.

Allow me to focus on forests as an example.  Forests are a difficult sell.  They rarely make it into the light of public debate, and if they do, it is usually about deforesting the tropics or burning homes with wildfire—i.e., narrow but charismatic issues that ignore most of the challenges and benefits of forests. In this way, forests are like most other environmental topics—technical, nuanced, and difficult to sell with a sound bite.

Few efforts better illustrate the convergence of forests, sustainability, and real politics than the 1992 United Nations’ Earth Summit. The summit produced, among many things, a Statement of Forest Principles and a plan of action for the 21^st century called Agenda 21, which resulted in a meeting in Montréal in 1993 that began the process of identifying indicators to defining sustainable forests.  The Montréal Process continues today to expand its relevance to different forest types and to refine and monitor specific indicators that countries use to evaluate the sustainability of their forests.  The Montréal Process indicators are to be applied to all the forests and thus provide a means to hold each country to comparable standards—a laudable and important goal.

Seven criteria are used to define sustainable forests.  They are framed within the technical rationality of ecological and economic science (see the chart below). Each criterion, in turn, has multiple specific indicators that lend themselves to affordable and reliable measurement: hectares in forest, numbers of species, tons of forest products. Unfortunately Montréal criteria and indicators do little to capture public attention or portray social value.  We need some F words!

Fortunately, these criteria and indicators can be cross-walked to freedom, family, fortune, faith, fun, and fame.   For example, freedom is closely aligned with homeland security, which is enhanced to the extent we have a reliable supply of forest products to fuel our economy and meet our future energy needs, and to the extent we can mitigate terrorism via wildfire.  Freedom is also associated with private property rights, which is a specific indicator in Montréal; many landowners fear losing the freedom to use their forests as they see fit.  Forests also deliver family values in the form of clean water, flood prevention, and clean air that protect the health and safety of loved ones.  Forests also provide good, wholesome entertainment and privacy.  Fortune, obviously, is easily linked to forest related jobs, investments, and economic impacts that are well represented in the list of criteria.  The linkages between forests and carbon bring climate change to the fore, which others successfully link to family safety, economic development, and national security.

Faith is a powerful frame for America, especially during this era of religious revival.  Most religious denominations now preach environmental stewardship, some even promote Creation Care as a path to salvation.  Conserving biological diversity can be framed as stewarding God’s Creation.  People worship God in nature, communing with the Word written directly by the hand of God. The Bible is a book inspired by God but translated by humans–Creation is God’s first Good Book.  Spiritual people outside the mono-theistic traditions worship spirits dwelling on Earth, manifesting in other life forms. Even the agnostics among us find deep spiritual meaning in wild places and wild things, experiencing oneness with the cosmic process of evolution or a smallness relative to universal scale.

Forest-based fun is certainly not trivial, and is probably underrepresented in Montreal indicators.  Much of our early conservation successes can be credited to hunters, anglers, birders, hikers, photographers, and other avid recreationists, such as Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, John Burroughs, and members of outdoor organizations such as the Boone and Crocket Club, the Sierra Club, and the Boy Scouts[1].  Visits to natural areas continue to nurture a political consistency for land management agencies and fuel regional economies through tourism.  In fact, most people think of forests as parks.

Montreal ignores two Fs. Most importantly, indicators of fairness are missing. It is difficult to tell who gets the jobs, profits, recreation opportunities, clean water, and other benefits sustainable forests produce.  Lessons from environmental justice suggest that the distribution of environmental benefits and costs is not always fair. Wealthy and powerful groups probably capture more of the profits and amenities associated with forests while poor minorities get exposed to more pollution and environmental degradation. The second F missing from Montreal, personal fame, is a significant motivation for personal action in our culture.  People work and sacrifice to achieve social status and personal dignity.  Montreal ignores the social standing of professionals and advocates within the forest community.  Regrettably, forest and environmental professionals tend to be held in relatively low regard compared to lawyers, doctors, architects and other professionals that service society’s needs.  Clearly we have work to do to prove to others our relevance.

Perhaps the most important but least emphasized consequence of the Montreal Process is social learning.  Building on the adage that it is easier to create a future than to predict it, planning processes such as Montreal provide opportunities for stakeholders to learn about cultural and ecological systems, respect and influence each others’ values, and collaboratively craft scenarios and motivate actions that lead society towards a sustainable future.

Social learning occurs because the planning process situates people in the unfolding trajectory of history, giving us roles, defining settings, and giving direction.  It thereby motivates and engages us in creating that future.  By articulating criteria and indicators of sustainability, we identify and refine our values.  By using the indicators to monitor changing conditions, we learn whether our individual and institutional behaviors are having desired effects; whether we moving towards or away from desired future conditions.  And perhaps most importantly, as desired conditions become realized or sacrificed, we learn about ourselves, our values and what we deem to constitute a thriving and sustainable society.

We likely will change our minds along the way. For example, Montreal has defined sustainability in narrow ecological and economic terms.  In the future, as we succeed in producing these conditions, we may realize that other criteria are also important, or even more important.  We may want to focus less on the content of the forest (hectares, species, tons) and more on the ecological processes and ecosystem services that flow in and from the forest.  We may come to more greatly value the cultural opportunities and local economies that flourish when communities are surrounded by working forests.  We may emphasize less the products and more the experiences of a sustainable forest.

By engaging in a process, by attending to the consequences of living, by being explicit about what we value and why, we can invent thriving, sustainable and resilient communities.
Example Montréal Process Indicators of Sustainability

[1] Opie. Nature’s nation.  Huth 1957.