Cartoons versus Climate Change
What first got you involved in climate change/environmental issues?
I am fascinated and inspired by wildlife and always have been. A close friend’s dad recently told a story about when I was at kids party, aged 5 or 6, I refused to drink the juice provided as it was connected to Coca – cola who were at that time accused of felling the rainforest. I think I was quite an annoying child…
Do you think creativity can help combat climate change?
I think creativity is important for all aspects of our lives including our happiness, but it can only take us so far. We really need government’s to listen to people not corporations and take firm action on climate change, we can get to pluto so why can’t we can change our energy system?
There is only so much we can do as individuals, and I really thing the best thing we can do is create a collective voice for change. Our current blind fixation with growth will not end well and we need new economic systems that respect people and the planet. Too much of our collective creativity is currently being used to either make people buy more stuff or create things we don’t really need – imagine if we put these minds to use on creating a better world?
Are you doing anything in the run up to Paris 2015?
Crossing my fingers and all other parts of my body – If anyone campaigning for this needs a cartoon just let me know.
What is the environmental problem that concerns you most?
I think they are all connected, I think we look at environmentalism in isolation too much, it is strongly connected to a lot of social injustice. If I was forced into silo’d thinking I think probably anthropocentrism – the idea that we as humans are more important than other species in the animal kingdom, just because we invented things like the toaster and The Only Way is Essex. All other environmental problems arise from this self-importance as a species. For some reason, as a species, humanity seems to favour complexity in the animal. Complexity is such an arbitrary way of ranking things – tape worms for example are totally awesome due to their simplicity, they are a big corporations dream in terms of “efficiency” they even outsource bodily functions like digestion.
Why do you think people always want the newest technology?
Advertising, its a simple and obvious answer. Why else would companies be spending billions on it every year – it works and it urgently needs to be regulated. I find the increasingly emotive adverts highly problematic, they are try to mess with our emotions in order to sell us things. Adverts should just be informing us about a product not making us buy things through manipulating our feelings. If advertisers were trying to inform, rather than manipulate us then wouldn’t there be more graphs and facts in them and fewer talking animals?
How would you get people to stop?
Regulate advertising and regulate companies more stringently – Why are unethical and unsustainable products still available, its not choice its madness. As a species we seem to be intelligent enough to understand the damage we are causing, but somehow not able to change the systems that are causing it. This has lot to do with the messages that advertising and the media are bombarding us with, economic growth, celebrity, sex, wealth. these are just tiny parts of what make us human – there is so much more to us than that. People care, people are actually nice and that is the thing that gives me hope, reading social psychology has restored my faith in humanity – I am a reformed misanthrope!
If you were in charge for a day what would you do?
As a white middle class heterosexual bloke I think my type have probably had our chance at this, so my first action would be to hand over the reigns to someone from a less privileged background, or radically reform our political system so it is more directly accountable to people and is more representative. I would also ask my successor(s) if they would mind reforming the global economic system to something that factors people and the environment into its decision making, either that or banning those wheelie suitcase things…
