The H&M Foundation’s latest report opens with an interesting idea from acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh: “The climate crisis is a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”
The resulting “Pop Culture: Bursting the Climate Communications Bubble” is the fruit of the Swedish retailer’s nonprofit arm and New Zero World’s year-long partnership forged in September, when the H&M Foundation provided the climate communications initiative with “critical funding” needed to create new tools and platforms deemed vital by the initiative’s “A New Era in Climate Communications” landmark whitepaper.
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“So often we treat the climate crisis like a test, where we just need to tell people the right answers and they can go away and solve it,” lead author Ross Findon, New Zero World’s director of communications, said. “The truth is that so much of how we behave is not governed by having the right information, but by how we make sense of information and that is exactly what culture helps us do.”
The resulting 93-page guide leverages data from the likes of Kantar and the Yale Program—backers of that whitepaper—as well as behavioral change specialists like Dr. Marcus Collins and creative industry influencers to suggest there’s no one-size-fits-all model for change; why not use pop culture to “bridge” the action gap?
By explaining data (which the Global Change Awarder claimed most consumers are oblivious to) by way of visually compelling storytelling (instead of pure facts and figures), emotions come into play. Thus, they may motivate climate action more effectively than external forces.
“An invisible hand exerting force on practically every aspect of daily living, from the food we eat to the clothes we wear, where we work, who we date, how we vote, or if we vote at all,” Collins said in the report. “No external force is more influential on human behavior than culture—full stop.”
With this in mind, the current climate communication model—focused on information dissemination and the Deficit Model—creates more apprehension than action. The crux of this concept relies on the idea that “data tell us what to change, culture is why we change,” as per the report. Therefore, to stop freaking people out to the point of inaction, leveraging existing motivations (internal ones like well-being and external ones like social status) could be the missing piece.
“Stories shape how we see the world and they can either inspire action or lead to inaction,” Karolina Fabó, communications strategist at the H&M Foundation, said in the report. “In a world flooded with doom and gloom narratives, we’re excited to collaborate with New Zero World, which focused on improving climate literacy and storytelling in the creative industries. Together, we aim to build a new climate narrative that sparks home and drives real behavioral change.”
To that end, Collins argues that culture is not static; rather, it evolves and adapts based on what’s happening in the world—getting into a stranger’s car instead of a taxi, for example, went from an after-school special to an app. This is where the concept of a “culture capacitor” comes into play. Think about it as an ecosystem approach that visualizes the interplay of those internal and external factors that, ultimately, influence our behaviors and choices.
“Consumer society is not an artificial and catastrophic social invention. It is a culture with its own systematic properties,” Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken said in the report. “And we are not devouring beasts who deal with the devil. We are creatures who depend on the meanings contained in the material world.”
Applying this idea—that meaning originates from the things we tell ourselves in order to survive in the world—to physical, consumable goods takes shape in four unique ways, per New Zero World. The first of these “fashioning systems” is easy to understand when thinking about the streetwear brand Obey. Considering this system comes from creativity and advertising, “where cultural characteristics are built into consumer products through messaging and decoration to give them meaning,” T-shirt slogans are political.
“The intended meaning of Obey clothing is rooted in the countercultures of punk rock and skaters,” the report explains. “Obey channels the disregard for conventions, commercial marketing and popular politics that is held within these cultural frames and instills them in a product to supplant what would normally be merely a T-shirt.”
For what it’s worth, Obey founder Shepard Fairey allegedly uses the four-letter word in big, sans serif font as a “sarcastic critique of societal propaganda.” These sarcastic critiques are available for purchase at Urban Outfitters, Zumiez and PacSun.
