“Shortly after, the inhabitants of Easter Island resorted to cannibalistic civil war before disappearing entirely.” Though it sounds like a line from a B-list horror movie, this quote came from Dr. Jared Diamond, a professor at UCLA and an actual expert on human geography. His work focuses on how societies of the past succeed or fail, and two Mondays ago, he gave an evening lecture at Benaroya Hall that suggested if we didn’t learn from the mistakes of collapsed past societies, we would repeat them.

The following morning, environmental advocate Philippe Cousteau spoke to a group of Garfield students. Cousteau, besides stealing women’s hearts and plugging the Discovery channel a lot, delivered a message of environmental urgency. He played a video of a decaying reef, and emphasized how horrified his grandfather would be upon seeing the oceans of today.

After hearing these two speakers, I should’ve been motivated to go out and rescue infant polar bears or commit some other act of environmental heroism. Instead, I felt uncomfortable and mildly frightened for only about ten minutes afterwards, and from the look of it, the crowds around me experienced similarly brief moments of angst. Despite their charisma, despite the evidence they presented, something kept Diamond’s and Cousteau’s talks from packing the punch they should’ve delivered.

It could be that I’m wrong and that every other person who heard these two men speak is currently outside, aggressively tree-hugging and rallying in the streets. However, it’s far more likely that the audiences failed to connect with the speakers because of the fear their messages carried.

Diamond wanted his audience to fear mankind’s destructive power and to fear our society’s approaching end, while Cousteau wanted us to fear the loss of our world’s oceans. It’s true that these topics are scary and that they do need to be addressed, but trying to broadcast just how scary they are is an ineffective way to get people springing into action. When people get scared, they don’t act rationally, they don’t sit down and think. For the most part, they hide under the bed until the problem goes away.

It seems that most of the reports on the environment that I’ve seen over the last ten years or so have been delivered in this same, fear-plagued manner. The ice caps are melting! There’s a hole in the ozone layer! Cute things are dying; humans are evil; booga-booga-booga. Thus far, not a lot seems to have changed on any of these apparently planet-threatening topics. It’s time for a new approach, one where messages of fear and despair are replaced with recommendations that can give people a way to help alleviate the problems the planet faces.
Unfortunately, getting news organizations and environmentalists to transition from using scare tactics to providing helpful information isn’t something that’s going to happen on its own. Painting oneself green and assaulting the local newsoom is one option, but there are some milder alternatives.

Call King-5 or Komo-4 and ask them to offer segments on ways people can help alleviate environmental problems within their communities. Write a letter to the Seattle City Council or to Mayor Mike McGinn, the particular topic isn’t important. The important part is identifying some environmental concern that matters to you, and then bothering important people about it.

The shift won’t happen overnight, and it won’t happen unless someone tells the politicians, the media and the environmentalists themselves what they’re doing wrong. That someone ought to be all of us.