The Root of All Evil

I read an article recently about a bicycle "upcycling" (the sexier added-value marketing version of recycling) operation in Daylesford, Victoria where the author claimed that any technology developed after the Stone Age was to blame for the planet being “in a mess”. This sort of woolly thinking is pretty common amongst the rank and file of the environmental movement, and the article finally prompted me to pull some of it apart for closer inspection.

Now, first off, unless the author is citing the Flintstones as his primary source material, the wheel is not a Stone Age technology. The oldest known wheel was built by the Sumerians in 3500 BC. I’ll also skip the fact that double-butted steel tubing, aluminium alloy, and the pneumatic tyre are also considerably more contemporary and, especially in the case of aluminium, hardly enviroguilt-free.

Then there’s the tacit assumption that the world is “in a mess”. It isn’t. Globally we have never been so healthy, wealthy and peaceful. Yes, there is suffering aplenty still going on. There is inequity, repression and violence in some parts of the world, but there are also large parts of it that are stable, reasonably peaceful and allow their citizens more freedom, food and subsidised dentistry than at any time in history. The fact that this is built to an extent on the inequity, repression and violence in other parts of the world is part of this post so stay with me, I’m not finished.

A lot of the world isn’t in a mess. In fact in so-called-developed countries the thought of losing our pleasant lifestyle is part of what makes so many of us afraid of the future. Our lifestyle allows us sufficient leisure time to create and nurture fears and it’s these fears, often stoked by the media and manipulated by the institutions of power, that turn any ring of change into the clanging chimes of catastrophe. The world isn’t in a mess, but it seems there’s always a mess waiting for us just around the corner. There must be, the thinking goes, because it’s nothing less than we deserve for being so comfortable. Sod’s Law.

Climate change may well be upon us. A large majority of climate experts agree that it is, and it seems reasonable to accept that is the case. Regardless of whether the cause is part of a natural cycle or the fact that we left the lights on last night, there’s a probability of some large changes in the world in the next few decades as populations shift, and it’s up to us to figure out ways to accommodate these changes.

Some folks fear change, others embrace it, and these two camps break down in the climate debate into adaptation and mitigation. Change isn’t bad, it’s how the world works whether we like it or not, and large scale change can offer us chances to make things better for many more folks in the world… if we’re smart and can grasp them. In the face of the perceived threat of climate change there’s the potential for unprecedented cooperation between nations, the opportunity to scrutinise and pick apart the iniquitous and exploitative systems that the global economy is built upon (see, I said I'd come back to it), and a million chances to do things better individually, as a community, nationally and globally. And the great thing about making these changes is that, even if climate sceptics are right, the effort won’t have been wasted because our world will be a better place than it was before. Win win.

Now on to the belief that technology is evil. Technology is not to blame for climate change any more than language is to blame for bad diplomacy. Laying blame on abstract concepts like technology which have no inherent will, agenda or direction is woolly thinking at its finest. Merino thinking.

Damning technology as the cause of the world’s ills is as pointless as holding it up to be the saviour of our future. Technology will be with us for as long as we are here, and every new invention will bring associated benefits and costs. Witness sustainable power generation. Solar? Wind? Hydro?Tidal? Flooded valleys, noise pollution, high production costs… nothing is free, nothing is without consequence. It’s up to us to debate and decide which consequences we can live with.

Those who believe in technology as a saviour seek comfort in a consequence-free future of time travel, anti-matter and fusion reactors. Those railing against technology comfort themselves by feeling they are opposing the institutions, governments and corporations that shape the development and deployment of technology. However, railing against technology plays into the hands of the capitalist system, giving producers new avenues to diversify their market, producing so-called “green” or “environmentally friendly” versions of the same product. Put “Eco” in front of the name and you can shift another million units of pretty much any old crap.

Problem or solution, any debate about technology is a distraction from more important questions. Harder questions. We would be better to examine our use of technology. We could examine technology’s unholy relationship with the institutions of power that have shaped the direction technology has taken; we could examine the marketing of technology and the confection of wants. Then we could dig deeper. We could examine our needs and desires. We could question our greed, our sense of fulfilment, our need for status or power. We could ask ourselves which pieces of the technology story, good or bad, we are willing to ignore when we tell it.

It seems we have a talent for filtering self-examination out of issues. Many folks today misuse the Christian New Testament quote when they say “money is the root of all evil”, neatly scapegoating yet another non-deterministic concept. Add back “the love of” to the quote and we have a much more penetrating critique. Let’s do the same for our relationships with technology, with power structures and with each other. Then we can start a conversation that’s going somewhere.

When The Drugs Don't Work

A recent review [i] ordered by the Department of Health in the UK on the use of anti-psychotic drugs on dementia sufferers states that as many as 144,000 people are being given the drugs unnecessarily. The report, authored by Sube Banerjee, professor of mental health and ageing at the institute of psychiatry at King's College London, reveals that excessive use of the medication causes an estimated 1,800 deaths and almost as many strokes among older people every year.

The drugs, used as “chemical restraints”, are given to people with dementia in care homes in order to reduce common behaviour patterns such as wandering, shouting and repeated questioning which make it difficult for staff to maintain an orderly and calm working environment. Anti-psychotics for older people? Like failed anti-histamines that made you too drowsy repositioned in the market as “sleep aids”, could this possibly be a re-branding of a drug based on a market gap rather than efficacy? Surely not! But wait, this isn’t a Big Pharma rant.

The care services minister, Phil Hope, accepted all the recommendations in the review and promised a fundamental change in the treatment of those suffering from dementia, however it seems that the focus will be on monitoring the use of the drugs, rather than real fundamental changes. This is unfortunate and a missed opportunity as the issue here is not more appropriate administration of chemical restraints.

Care homes are often places unlike anything that we have lived in before. Efficiently medical, the environment offers few cues to engagement, fewer clues to the activities we might perform as residents. Small wonder that folks are found to be shouting, questioning and wandering. Where’s the kitchen? Where’s my armchair? Why can't I make myself a cup of tea? The environments do not cause dementia, but I would like to see a study to plot the rate of deterioration in residents versus folks living “on the outside”. Morgan Spurlock, the maker of Super Size Me, should spend a month living in a care home as some residents do and measure his grip on reality. There has to be a movie in there somewhere.

The issue is that the environments we are forced into as we get older contain no emotional meaning for us. Why should that matter when the focus should be on medical care? Emotional meaning is held in a part of the brain that is one of the last to be damaged by dementia. Dr. John Zeisel who runs a care home network in the United States, writes that those living with dementia can still connect to the world around them, and those who love them, through art, music, touch and facial expression. According to Dr. Zeisel building care home environments that support a life with meaning has been proved to be at least as effective at reducing stress and anxiety as the anti-psychotic drugs.

Dr. Zeisel is one of the consultants on the Creative Spaces project. Run by Sensory Trust, the project brings people with dementia back together with members of their community to redesign the outdoor spaces in care homes run by Cornwall Care in the UK. This three year project seeks to create meaningful outdoor, semi-public spaces around care homes and to give residents the chance to reconnect emotionally both with the environments and with the community.

One in three of us will die with some form of dementia, and those with dementia live on average for four and a half years with the condition [ii]. If the creation of more meaningful environments can improve the quality of life for those with dementia, their families, carers and staff, surely that is the fundamental change we should see in care provision?

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[i] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/12/anti-psychotic-drugs-kill-dementia-patients

[ii]http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSL102289020080111

Sensory Trust's Creative Spaces project

I’m Still Here : A Breakthrough Approach to Understanding Someone Living with Alzheimer's

– John Zeisel

Inquiry by Design – John Zeisel

Alzheimer's statistics

Children, Violence and Pigs

I read recently that, according to the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Family Physicians and American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, media violence affects children’s behaviour, attitudes and values.

Well, I guess it does. All these heavyweight associations for our well-being agree that our children are exposed to images of violence more than at any time in our history. Apparently it makes them desensitized… but desensitized to what?

I was involved in a project to bring urban children out to farms to learn about where food comes from. These were exactly the sort of desensitized kids everyone imagines: vacant-eyed teenage skells straight out of a Porcupine Tree video, permanently hooked into their iPhones, iPods and X-Boxes. My experience was that when you put one of these desensitized fourteen year olds in front of a pig - in all its aromatic, hairy, snorty, slobbery, muscley, random, inquisitive pigginess – you see just how sensitive they really are. Pretty damn sensitive in my experience.

So, media violence may well desensitize our children to media violence, but certainly not to real live farm animals in search of an apple.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that media violence does “affect children’s behaviour, attitudes and values” in a way that is permanent and undesirable. What should we do? The answer that we should somehow ban these images or prevent children from being exposed to them seems obvious. But here’s my argument: children today are not over-stimulated and desensitized. Children today are not more sophisticated than in the past. Compared to previous generations, children today - and I’m talking about western-urban children - live a thin, beige, flavourless existence where most of what they experience is vicarious and pre-packaged by media companies, global restaurant chains, and indoor leisure facilities. Their experience of the world outside their homes begins with the ballroom at Ikea and ends with the bus shelter opposite McDonalds. Their desensitization is not due to over-stimulation but to the terminal blandness of their immediate environment.

Children live an imprisoned life because of the fears their parents acquire from sensationalist media reportage. Perhaps desensitization to media violence is some sort of reaction to their parent’s fear. Perhaps it’s a preparation for going out into the world that they believe is just like the one the media report.

Creating communities and environments where children are free to roam outdoors, to experience things for themselves, to fall out of trees, to ride bikes, make mud pies, encounter strangers (shock!) and be home for dinner is the best antidote to media images of violence. And, because these images occur through television and the internet, if kids are outdoors finding out what the world is really like, they aren’t indoors watching them.

When I hear the word culture…

The sky is falling! The oceans are rising! We're doomed Captain Mannering! We urgently need to either:

1. Change our light bulbs

or

2. Give up everything and buy a goat and a gun

None of the visions offered by climate change enthusiasts is compelling because none of them offers us anything inspirational. I like goats, but even so there's just not enough va-va-voom to get me going. The goals are survivalist and the messages are the sort of apocalyptic ones that so many people get off on... the frisson of excitement that we're all stuffed.

What we need is an inspirational goal to work towards.

Culture is the only mechanism by which we can envision the future in any sort of positive way. It is also the glue which holds our society together. Cultural philosopher and writer Roger Scruton argues that absence of culture results in dysfunctional societies, citing as an example the collapse of Islamic culture and the corresponding rise of fundamentalism to fill the void.

In my experience folks sometimes bristle at the word “culture” ("when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun"*), and usually in those cases the word seems synonymous with “the ballet and the opera”, with its attendant whiff of elitism and pretention. Luckily we now avoid the issue by using the phrase “cultural capital” instead which gives culture the free-market seal of approval as something that can be weighed, measured, valued and sold.

It’s fashionable to dismiss high culture – Dead White Male culture – as irrelevant, as of no further use, as somehow anti-democratic. But works of culture can give us a collective insight into the sublime, the beautiful, the utopian. They imagine other ways of being and lay them out for us in stories, pictures and music. Culture presents alternatives; neither as something to vote for, nor as something to go to war for, but as something we’re free to take to our hearts or dismiss. Of course, the truth is that our reactions are usually somewhere in between, and culture accommodates this too. It is rarely black or white, and you can put an X in every box if you like. Culture understands and embraces duality.

Culture helps us ask the right questions. Tolstoy’s question, “what shall we do and how shall we live?” has been the touchstone for Russian literature for decades and remains the fundamental question for us all. At its best, culture strips away the flim-flam that obscures the basic questions we need to ask. One of the criticisms often levelled at culture is that it’s not part of the so-called real world. Far from being a weakness, this is its central strength. Culture dispenses with budgetary constraints and political policy, skips over contemporary mores, dodges fashion and gets to the heart of the matter.

The ability of cultural activity to illuminate fundamental questions and to propose answers might well be the sole measure of its value. Using this measure we can see that the community art project that asks questions about the future of our village and illuminates the past is of value. War and Peace is of value. Elegy to the Spanish Republic is of value. The open mic night at the local pub is of value. The latest Europop song, Strictly Come Dancing or CSI, while entertaining, are less so.

We cannot envision any sort of sustainable, enjoyable future for ourselves without understanding and supporting cultural activity. The great thing about culture is that it is a dialogue that has been going on for millennia. We are each free to make our own contributions to the dialogue, in whatever form we choose (even if we’re not old enough to vote, or live in a country where we can't vote). If we fail to acknowledge culture as central to how we move into the future then we will be forced to rely, as we have been in the past, on the reactionary visions of politicians, religious leaders, multinational corporations, and prophets of doom. Pick one.

*often wrongly (but compellingly) attributed to Goebbels. The actual quote is a line from the 1933 play Schlageter by Hanns Johst, a Nazi propagandist and Poet Laureat. "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" "Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety catch of my Browning!" Not quite as snappy, but then brevity is the soul of wit.

If I Can't Dance at your Revolution...

There are three programmes on TV worth watching. The World Cup (that’s the soccer world cup, my Antipodean chums), the UEFA Cup, and the Eurovision Song Contest.

If you have neither the time nor the interest to worry about the love lives of vampires, the inane ramblings of a house full of twentysomething media tarts, or which B list celeb has twisted their ankle dancing, these programmes are events worth tuning in for.

Eurovision is the television event to end television events. Every year. Unlike the football counterparts, Eurovision manages the razzmatazz and the ratings annually. Each May an estimated 100 million people watch pop stars in sparkly suits sing something that the majority find incomprehensible in Serbo-Croat or Hebrew. Countries can put aside their human rights records and forget their crumbling economies and dance it up. Eurovision is splendid, over the top, and completely and utter pointless. It is, in short, perfect television.

And this year it’s in Russia! Who would have thought twenty years ago that this could happen? Now, instead of those grim-faced generals saluting their nuclear missiles at the May Day parade, they’re up on stage singing their hearts out. Bless them. And backing those post-punk gone-to-seedy boppers Tatu too. Good grief. It left me speechless, as every good Eurovision should do. Having most of the Red Army on stage was a reminder to all that Russia is still far from cute and cuddly, and that their military might is still something to beware of, particularly if you’re in a satellite state where the good natured breeze from a song contest might fan the sparks of self determination. At the side of the stage was a MiG fighter jet. Well, what else would you put in an international song competition when you have an unlimited budget? The cameras kept skirting it, but it was there… is this the first example of high tech weaponry as part of a Eurovision stage show? As Boney M once said, "oh, those Russians".

What does all this have to do with the environment? Where’s the message? Well, only this: If we are all to act to make some changes to the way we live, then we can most effectively do this by collective, not individual, action. Eurovision is a reminder that there are still things that are fun, ridiculous and utterly pointless that can galvanise us into some sort of shared experience. It serves as a reminder that having our preferences catered for in ever-increasing detail isolates us from our fellows. So, while many individuals will be curled up alone with the latest DVD of Twilight or Madmen on Saturday night, don’t forget that 100 million of us will be partying together. Go find a friend who's watching it and join in!

Bring Back Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Hogan

On the Gruen Transfer (an Australian TV show dedicated to television advertising) last night the panel bemoaned the fact that Australian tourism would never come up with another ad as successful as the ones featuring Paul Hogan in the early eighties. They were described as having a charm and a lack of self-consciousness that we could never manage nowadays.

The blokey, sexist, knockabout "charm" was enough to give most of us a cultural cringe, but what the panel didn’t go on to talk about (and fair enough, because it was a programme about advertising, not society) was that the Australia of Paul Hogan has largely disappeared. Not long after those commercials were made Australians finally caved in to global pressure to accept that being wealthy was more fun than being happy. Since then we have become just another western capitalist state, albeit with earth a shade redder than parts of the US, and some interesting marsupials. With the recent Wall Street inspired financial meltdown we’ve seen precious little of the “no worries mate” attitude that Australia traded on during those halcyon Hogan days, and plenty of worried wannabes eyeing their stock portfolios and BMW repayment schedules with dismay. Plenty worries… and they’re no longer your mate unless you’re a potential customer.

But let’s not despair, for despair is the weapon of the state and the lifeblood of the media. There are still pockets of resistance to the idea that wealth and happiness are the same thing, and these pockets are getting fuller. One day they will burst open and the social experiment that was Global Capitalism will join its nerdy older brother Communism on history’s scrap heap. When enough of us decide that we’d prefer to be governed by accountable, democratically elected representatives that have our interests at heart rather than the apparatchiks of free market dogma, then things will change, just as they changed in the Soviet Union.

The 75kg Mobile Phone

What does your mobile phone say about you? Is it the stylish, hot, latest touch-screen PDA model or do you cringe with embarrassment when forced to answer in public your three year old brick that’s held together with parcel tape and still plays that factory ringtone because you never figured out how to change it? Or do you not cringe with embarrassment? Do you wear your parcel tape and tinkly ring tone with pride, a sign that you are apart from the herd; that you know that all phones are, at bottom, just phones.

Mobile phones are slimmer and lighter than ever before, and yet every mobile phone weighs a whopping 75kg. That’s 165lbs in Roman numerals. How can we possibly carry this sort of burden around with us every day?

Every product we buy has what is known in the naturally lit corridors of eco-world as an "ecological rucksack", the amount of waste generated in producing one unit of a product. According to the guide The Management of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) the manufacture of a computer uses up nearly 1,500 kg of resources, a laptop 400 kg, and a mobile phone 75 kg. Add together all the mobile phones you've ever owned for an even more impressive figure!

That chic new upgrade has just used up 75kg of resources; some of them rare, some hazardous, and many extracted in countries where labour conditions are suspect and environmental degradation unpoliced. Did we really need that new phone, or did we just want it... really, really badly? Maybe the upgrade was just part of the contract and our provider was almost threatening to take us to court if we didn’t upgrade (know the feeling)? This is why, up against global marketing and the need of business to keep selling us stuff, knitting our own shopping bags doesn’t even begin to cut it when it comes to making a difference to our environment. One decision to NOT upgrade our mobile phone and we have, at a stroke, performed the equivalent of a year’s domestic recycling, a lifetime’s reusable bag carrying or probably a thousand years’ worth of “not printing out this blog”.

This is the nub of the Envirobitch argument. The global capitalist system works by selling us stuff. In order to sustain itself it must sell us more the following year, and the year after that. The mobile phone market is an obvious example of how we are sold and sold again more or less the same product. There have been useful developments such as SMS, but many other extras are more about creating the want than fulfilling any real need. I know… I’m back to wants and needs again, but if we’re really serious about tackling climate change, helping the environment or whatever we want to call it, we could do worse than look at our purchasing decisions. Not the “shall I stump up the extra for the conscience-salving so-called-green version” buying decision, but the “do I really need that” non-buying decision. To buy nothing is also a choice.

Sure, we can recycle our “old” mobile phone, and that’ll go a small way to offsetting the impact of our decision, but it won’t stop the demand that encourages the manufacture of more phones. And hey, if we hadn't ordered the new phone in the first place, there'd be no impact to offset. Come to that we can recycle the box it comes in too… but we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought that compensates in any way for our decision to buy.

So, before we “upgrade” our perfectly functional phone (to one with more stuff we’ll use approximately once, and a shorter battery life) we should consider just why we reckon we need it. Remember, even if your phone is old, even if it's not one of a range of fashion colours, even if the ring tone is something by 50 Cent that your teenage son installed and you've no idea how to remove it, we still love you, okay?

A few folks need the functionality of a Blackberry in order to do their jobs (although how their job has been shaped by this technology in the first place is worthy of another post at some point), but most of us don't, even if we're pretending to ourselves that we do so that we can feel like a captain of industry with all that control at our fingertips. If you want a new phone because you have a lurking desire to place it conspicuously on the table in the pub next to your BMW key ring; if you think the polyphonic ringtone’s a conversation starter; or that folks on the tram will be envious or impressed, you need to ask yourself some serious questions, and they’re not environmental ones.

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If you suffer from insomnia, or you're an enviro-nerd have a browse through The Management of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) for more information.

The Third Place

There’s a commercial on at the moment advertising a coffee machine. Not that it’s called a coffee machine. No no. This is a “hot beverage system” and appears to be styled on the inside of an Audi TT. Although it could be said that the inside of an Audi TT already looks like an expensive coffee machine. Whatever the case, the machine is being sold on the strength that the group of twenty-something women featured in the commercial will no longer have to make the laborious trek to Antonio’s coffee bar and suffer his suggestive inanities as they can now get proper coffee in their own homes! Hooray for progress!

Now, where am I going to start with this? I’ll set aside the fact that the commercial is a product of the Soho advertising machine, a place alive with coffee bars which I’m willing to bet are stuffed to the gunwales with “creative” [sic] media types. I'll also leave the unsustainable packaging aside. No, the thing that riles me most is that this is another example of big business trying to muscle in on our Third Places.

We all need a Third Place. A place like the mythical Antonio's that isn’t work and isn’t home. A place where we have a set of social contacts who are more than strangers but not quite friends. A place where we can just be ourselves – read a book, drink a coffee, chat, play chess, watch people or what ever.

The recipe for successful Third Places continually evades replication by multinationals. Third Places grow organically where people need them. Cafés and pubs, garden centres and community centres, parks and allotments. They defy multinational copycats largely because their profits and turnover are too low or non-existent. They simply don’t make enough money. Many third places are cafés, but the cafés owned by multinationals are rarely third places, no matter how much they wish they were or tell us they are.

Despite aggressive marketing and land-grab tactics, the greatest threat to third places comes not from the chains of pseudo-cafés but from our own homes. They’re more comfortable and, if you have enough mains sockets in your living room, entertaining than they have ever been before. There was an advertising campaign a few years ago for a video game console with the hook line “welcome to the Third Place”. It’s a moot point whether many of the target market understood what the Third Place was, but the message was familiar enough. Why get rained on, mugged or have a pint of Irish cider (with ice) spilled down your back when you can get movies on demand, get better views at the football match, race cars and shoot aliens, have dinner delivered and make a hot beverage at the flick of a stylishly curved aluminium switch?

Two words: cabin fever. We all need to go out. Spending too much time indoors can lead to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, depression and a disconnection from society. Home cinemas and coffee machines give a glossy veneer to the experience but they are little compensation for a loss of real contact with people and with the natural world. The non-profit that I work for, the Sensory Trust, spends a considerable amount of effort making it possible for people who have difficulty going out to do so. And while we’re doing this multinationals are spending the equivalent of decades (perhaps centuries) of Sensory Trust budget advertising products that will keep more of us stuck in our homes for longer.

The fact is that we rarely go to Antonio’s coffee bar just for the coffee. In fact there are third places where the awfulness of the coffee is something that unites everyone who goes there. We go to see other people, to step out of our home or work lives and remember who we are when we’re just being ourselves.

The television commercial tells us not only that we should buy the hot beverage system but that we should rejoice that Antonio’s will be empty and be forced to close, presumably so that it can be replaced by a multinational franchise who is also a client of the advertising company. Then of course we can look forward to spending more time in our homes, watching television commercials… It's not only Antonio that suffers: public space budgets are the first in the firing line when no one goes to the park.

With any luck this won’t be yet another kick in the teeth for Third Places. The hot beverage system will join the toastie maker on eBay before the year is out. Hopefully Antonio will still be there when it does.

See also:

• Celebrating the 3rd Place by Ray Oldenburg
• The Church of Life After Shopping
• Starbucks Investor Relations

The Astronaut's Guide to Interpretation

How do you feel about water? There was a time not so long ago when water was just something that came out of our taps, that we were more or less grateful for depending on our mindfulness of people for whom clean water is a rarity. Water was something we drank because we were thirsty. We boiled vegetables in it, made soup and tea, and sometimes used it to wash the car, the floor and the dog.

H₂O hasn’t changed, but our perceptions of it have. Water is now something that is privately owned, talked about in headlines either because there’s not enough of it, or too much of it, or it’s in the wrong place such as your living room in Gloucestershire. Despite its best attempts, petrol is still cheaper than water on UK forecourts. We pay a premium for water that comes with a message on the bottle. This is not just water, this is water with marketing: it’ll make us perform like top athletes, or even a volcano. Stand back!

It’s nonsense of course, and most of us know it’s nonsense, yet we are so used to everything being packaged, rebranded and marketed to us that we take the marketing of water in our collective stride. Since the 1940’s industry has changed from manufacturing articles that fulfilled genuine needs to creating, then catering for, an expanding range of confected wants. These wants are created by a marketing industry specifically designed to make us feel dissatisfied with what we have. A satisfied customer, contrary to popular myth, is no use at all to the capitalist system. Western countries now spend trillions of dollars a year delivering increasingly sophisticated and pervasive messages through channels that invade every aspect of our waking lives.

“The average American adult is exposed to over 600 advertising messages in a single 24-hour period.” -- Managing Business to Business Marketing Communications, De Bonis and Peterson.”

Perhaps we have become inured to marketing messages. We no longer think about them, but are we resistant to them, or do we simply absorb them without thinking in the doctor’s surgery, the bus stop, our kitchen... everywhere?

It seems almost as though any item, water for example, no longer has a value unless it is marketed at us. The innate meaning of things has been subverted by marketing hype which has no other meaning than to make you want them. Water which, if you live in a fortunate part of the world falls freely from the sky, which once meant life, growth, survival, now means, amongst other things, health (drink two litres per day!), status (“The official water of Wimbledon”) or nothing at all (“Gives you Volcanicity!”). With this white noise of pseudo-meaning obfuscating the real meaning of something as fundamental as water, it’s not hard to imagine that perhaps this happens with other things that we might have expected to be free of marketing messages. If something doesn’t have a label that tells us it’ll make us healthier, sexier or free then it seems we are thought to be unable to judge its value for ourselves.

That’s where interpretation comes in. Interpretation is the natural and heritage world’s marketing hype. It seems we cannot be trusted to appreciate a woodland, a meadow or a piece of coastline on our own terms. We must be told why it matters, we must have the “brand relevance” forced down our throats for fear that we might miss the significance of what we are experiencing. To walk through a flower-filled meadow on a sunny early summer day means nothing unless you are aware that three hundred years ago women from the village used to bleach linen here and it is now home to a rare form of slime mould. And of course you should also know who owns, manages and protects it.

Fifty years ago it might have been enough to fall in love with a place because of the light through the trees, the sound of the river, or the laugh of the person you were with. Nowadays your stroll needs “added value” to compete in an aggressive marketplace desperate to sell you experiences.

The motivations of much interpretation are worthy. We can all benefit from a bit of extra connection with our environment and our history. Often, however, the proliferation of interpretation panels sets up a barrier to any real connection. In the same way as many gallery goers spend more time reading the labels than looking at the Monets, interpretation sets up a layer of experience between us and the direct experience of the environment. As soon as it’s interpreted, it’s packaged.

Interpretation hopes to explain the meaning of a place, but this meaning is someone else’s no matter how artfully constructed. Is laughing with your lover in a sunny field full of poppies wrong? Chances are it will feel, if not wrong then inappropriate, if you come to an interpretation panel that tells you of the bloody carnage that once occurred where you now stand. Your personal story has no chance against a pitched battle. The more interpretation that is present, the less space we have to imbue a place with our own meanings as individuals and as communities. New meanings, personal meanings, meanings relevant to now and to the future. And if we are prevented from creating our own meanings, we will never feel ownership of a place. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe an interpretation panel in a meadow is like the US flag on the moon, it’s more about who owns it than anything else.