Issue 275 Winning Over the Public Craig Bennett, Director of Policy and Campaigns at Friends of the Ear th, asks what it means to campaign in the twenty-teens? For many people, it was public campaigning that defined the birth of the modern environment movement as it emerged just over 40 years ago. The 1970s saw a series of headline-grabbing actions by the newly formed Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, stimulating mainstream public debate on issues ranging from whaling and endangered species to packaging and toxic chemicals, nuclear power and acid rain, and much more besides. This was a young and passionate movement shouting to make itself heard. And it was heard – partly because of the fresh new tactics, and partly because of the fresh new message. Today’s generation of campaigners have a lot to thank that previous generation of campaigners for. Through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, they largely succeeded in winning the argument that the planet was in crisis and that this was happening because of human activity. Political leaders queued up to tick the green box and give the impression, at least, that they were tackling the issues. Remember Margaret Thatcher’s speech to the 1988 Conservative Party conference in which she said, “It’s we Conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth – we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come”? And remember all those world leaders, including President George Bush, turning up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit? There are many people in the movement who yearn for the good old days. “Where has the gung-ho, do-anything-say-anything-spirit of the 1970s gone?” I sense them mutter. I don’t believe that today’s generation of campaigners have any less passion than their predecessors. But I do believe that one of the lasting legacies of the previous generation was to develop many new possible routes to achieving change, and that perhaps the environment movement has been too slow to fully understand this and adapt accordingly. Did we collectively become so bewildered by the choices on offer that we lost some of the focus we had in those early days? What is a campaign? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a campaign as “a series of coordinated activities ... designed to achieve a social, political, or commercial goal”. As a campaigner, I like this definition. I like the recognition that a campaign has to consist of several activities, not just a one-off stunt or report launch. I like the recognition that a campaign has to have an element of design. Good campaigners will always need to be that rare breed of person who can adapt and change plans at a moment’s notice. But this needs to be within the context of a carefully designed political or change strategy. What I most like about this definition, however, is the assertion that any given campaign will exist to deliver a goal (singular), and not goals (plural). This was, surely, one of the secrets of the previous generation’s success. They campaigned to “Stop Whaling”, “End Toxic Waste Shipments” and “Stop Acid Rain”. They knew, of course, that many complex things needed to happen to realise each of these goals, but they didn’t let this complexity confuse their purpose and focus. In contrast, when I reflect on many of the environment movement’s campaigns from the last decade, they seem to me to have been over-complicated and confused. Perhaps this is partly because there are so many people in the environment movement now with deep issue and policy expertise. This can be a problem just as much a gift. As the old adage goes, if you want a simple answer, don’t ask an expert. But I think it is also because we are trying to pack too many objectives into our campaigns now, as if campaigning in the short term for anything less than the totality of sustainable development feels like a cop-out. We need to give ourselves a collective break. If we want to make real progress towards a more sustainable world within the next 40–50 years (and the science tells us we barely have as long as this), we need to divide the quest for sustainability into small, manageable chunks. We then need to allow each other to focus on a particular chunk, Resurgence & Ecologist 55