3 December 2009 second post

News from the inside

Part of a social experiment at the Climate Conference

We came for the Climate Change Conference but we have found we are also part of a social experiment. New Life Copenhagen http://www.newlifecopenhagen.com is organised by www.wooloo.org. They asked Danish families if they would open their homes to climate guests and have managed to find 3,000 willing hosts. New Life Copenhagen is an arts project and social experiment of which they say “if it works will be a powerful act to teach and remind us that the basis for sustainability is collectivity. And that life can be lived differently if we want it to be.”

Before we left the UK we had exchanged brief e-mails. As we are here for two weeks we will be staying with two different families in succession. It all seemed very friendly but I didn’t really think much about how unusual it was at the time. I was too busy trying to get all my work done before I went away. I failed of course!  Hayley Bell and I arrived at 10am in Copenhagen central station and then went our separate ways to find our host families. Inger Stauning, my host, had e-mailed me ahead with very good instructions on how to reach the nearest station and she said if you call I will pick you up. We hit it off straight away. Inger is a 70’s feminist who co-founded Copenhagen’s first hostel for battered women. She is an engineer, has a PhD and four children. Inger is now a lecturer in sustainability at the university who has taken up singing and painting since her children have grown up. What a woman!

Inger opened a parcel from New Life. It had a “guest book” which she gave me. Inger has a host book. I had to rush of to join my colleagues to run some workshops at the Climate Exchange but took it with me. I came back for dinner with Inger and her 25 year old son Victor. He was busy studying for a maths exam, but the table was cleared of paperwork and equations for Inger’s climate friendly dinner of rice steamed in one pot with onions and beetroot plus some meat and gravy. I have noticed that the Danes eat a lot of meat and don’t have many vegan or veggie options when eating out.

Over dinner we got to talking about sustainability. From what I know of the Danes, they seem really green, cycle a lot and are community minded, so I can’t understand why their carbon footprint is so high. Inger explained she thinks it is because people are equal and are all quite well off in Denmark. Also she thinks they have too many electrical appliances.

I went to meet my work colleagues Hayley, Jennie and Freya and we looked at the guest book from New Life. Most of it is a questionnaire with what must be two hundred questions which are obviously designed to take you out of your comfort zone and make you think. I am supposed to fill this in. Here are four of the questions. They don’t really do justice to it, but this is meant to be a blog not an essay!
“Would you rather have; more time, more money or more skills?”
“What is your biggest fear in life?”
“Find an item in the home of your host which you find strange”
“Do you believe in public suicide as part of a demonstration?”

We enjoyed some of the questions but found others pretty distasteful. We thought we spend a lot of time trying to counter the impression the mainstream has of environmentalists and this sort of thing might just reinforce it. Inger told me later she thought it was a bit crazy and she wasn’t sure she would fill it in.

But leaving aside some of the flaky questions, there is a kernel of truth in the New Life Copenhagen experiment. I have seen it standing out so clearly in our work. In the end achieving, or worse not achieving, sustainability is going to be down to human behaviour and we are not logical. Let’s hope science and logic triumphs over human nature at Copenhagen in the next two weeks. Then, after that if we are to have a hope of actually achieving the carbon reductions and sustainable resource use we need, the most important professionals in the world might turn out to be the psychologists.

Sue Riddlestone
Executive Director & Co-Founder of BioRegional