How do you get the balance between hammering home the message yet still keeping the audience with you? Jonathon Porritt talks to Wallace Heim.

WH : You've tried many approaches to communicating environmental issues: education, activism, writing, and now your work with Forum for the Future. You posed the question many years ago, "Why is there no environmental drama?" Looking at theatre as means of communication, how would you answer that question now?

That type of very preachy approach is extremely unattractive to people. And it doesn't work. Actually.

Why doesn't it work?

I once had an amazing discussion with John Boorman who directed a film called The Emerald Forest. I just happened to end up sitting next to him at something. He's passionate about the environment, absolutely passionate about it, and deeply imbued with an understanding of the relationship between human-kind and the natural world and lives it in his own life.

For him this film was very precious because it was the first time where he'd been able to go after an explicit environmental theme. He said it had actually been incredibly difficult for him, one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do because he found himself all the time using the camera in what would have been seen as a potentially didactic, if not indoctrinating way. He had to coax himself out of this notion of using the medium to communicate in that way.

He found that very hard because all his instincts were pushing him to do that, whereas he knew aesthetically if he did that the thing would die because it just wouldn't work. There was this tension between the very "in-your-face" campaigning and the more oblique line that he sometimes took, that didn't quite force messages on people but left them to reflect more for themselves.

John Boorman

It's difficult because a lot of these things are - some people would say - "pretty black-and-white frankly. What's the point of leaving people to make up their own minds. It's obviously bloody wrong!"

This campaigning fervour doesn't work terribly well in great set piece films, or maybe not even in plays.

Could this also be part of the expectation that environmental ideas are communicated through documentaries or by activism, and not really appreciating that theatre is something else. You enter an imaginative world. It may be other qualities to our relations to the environment which can be brought out by theatre.

Yes, exactly. I really do feel that very strongly and that's the power of it in a way - that it isn't by forcing things onto people, it is by this lateral approach, very often evocative rather than didactic, that you can make such powerful messages available to people.

And to touch people in a different way?

Jonathon Porritt’s latest book Capitalism: As If The World Matters is published in London by Earthscan.

In those days, that was fine. It would be quite a difficult thing to do now funnily enough. It would jar a bit because there wouldn't be the same convening power around the concept of "You must do more for the environment" because everybody knows we must do more for the environment. There's nothing to prove in that respect.

Throughout the late '80s, it ran a series of events - performances involving poetry readings, art auctions, exhibitions. It did bring in wondrous examples of the more inspirational up-beat side of the environmental world-view which is often lacking. One of the reasons why we got The Arts for The Earth going was specifically to try and communicate not just the awful despair about collapsing ecosystems but also to remind people of the power of that joyful relationship which is such an important part.

What, ‘the environment?’

Yes. It really does. Not a lot of life and not a lot of joy and all the rest of it and so, you've got to keep working away at that.

NOP did a wonderful survey. It was an extraordinary thing. They went out into the street - this was quite a long time ago - and they just said to people, "Okay, we're going to say a number of words to you. When you hear these words do your energy levels go up or do your energy levels go down. Just instant responses, okay. Don't think about it."

Then they gave them all these words like "love" or "television," or whatever else it might be and in the middle they stuck in the word "environment" and the horrible, horrible conclusion of this survey of people in the street - it was seriously done, it was a thousand people - was that for the vast majority of people the mere mention of the word "environment" turned their energy levels plummeting downwards.

You know, if you're working with that kind of psychological backdrop to promoting solutions to these problems, you're on a hiding to nothing. This is a big issue.

And a big issue for environmental drama.

It really is. A lot of this can disempower as much as empower. You can go along to the most powerful presentation in the world about different environmental issues, and it is quite likely that a lot of people would leave feeling less empowered to do something about it than they were before they went in.

We have a real dilemma with this in the Forum for the Future because our whole way of working is around solutions, around positive energy, around getting people to trigger different bits of their psyche to this whole matrix of concerns. It sometimes means we have to hunt out what we call our "Pollyanna-ish tendency" - which is when the world is actually falling to pieces around you, it just isn't any good sitting there saying "Oh, well, it's going to be okay." It just won't work.

But if you rub people's noses too much in the imminent apocalypse model then it's not terribly surprising that many of them leave that kind of encounter by saying "Well, if it's really gone that far, there obviously isn't any point worrying about it and there's certainly nothing I can do and so I shall just carry on as usual."

They don't say it but that's how they rationalise no change in behaviour.

There's nothing to engage their emotions? Nothing to make that link between themselves and the world?

Exactly.

Jonathon Porritt is a Founder and Director of Forum for the Future, and as the UK government's key advisor on sustainable development, is Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission .

Forum for the Future is a charitable organisation with the mission to accelerate the building of a sustainable way of life, taking a positive, solutions-oriented approach.
For more information on the Forum, visit: www.forumforthefuture.org.uk

The photograph of John Boorman is © Columbia Pictures, Inc.