E3G

Address to Green Alliance 25th Anniversary

By Tom Burke

The Green Alliance has always been a catalyst, accelerating the delivery of environmental solutions, opening up new avenues for environmental action, re-defining the boundaries of the possible. We began in the year Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States and John Lennon was assassinated. CNN began broadcasting the same year.

I do not think any of us really thought then about where we would be in twenty-five years time. Somewhere, in the most secret recesses of our hearts,  we might have wished that our job would be done and the environment would be at the centre of politics. I do not think that any of us had really grasped the scale of the task we had set ourselves.

Well, times have changed. The need for the Green Alliance has grown rather than diminished. We still have that catalytic role to play in the environmental community. But the tasks facing that community have changed too.

There are three strategic challenges that we must address as we go forward into our second quarter century. Each is important in its own right but together they comprise the breakout by environmentalists from the green ghetto.

The first is to communicate better. I do not mean more. We understand the environment better than we do people. We often seem to think that if we tell people more about the issues, give them more facts, better pictures, a deeper analysis that is all we have to do to protect the environment.

This means we too often sound as if we are only concerned with our own preoccupations and have no interest in theirs. We need to frame our arguments in terms that resonate more immediately with others.

Without a stable climate national security and economic prosperity are impossible, the world will not be fairer, communities will not be stable, families will be hurt, personal opportunities will be limited, our children’s future will be stolen . But we rarely sound as if we are talking about those everyday concerns.