We learned that we need better green messaging, cities are where we’re going, and children should spend time in nature early and often.

The first annual SXSW Eco conference was a success by many measures. The number of attendees exceeded the organizers’ expectations, the sessions were lead by well-known industry pioneers and up-and-comers, and the discussion was informative and productive. Here were some of the highlights we found most applicable.

Senior Editor, Andrea Newell:

The green movement is losing the messaging war.

As Anna wrote earlier, the green movement is facing the sad truth that people aren’t moved to combat climate change when confronted with grim statistics, alarming graphs scolding and guilt. It isn’t working. We need a new way to connect with people and get them to care.

Knowing your audience is Business 101, yet green has promoted a generally one-size-fits-all rationale. Comedy Central’s Kelleigh Dulany, VP of Corporate Responsibility talked about how she narrowed the focus of the message to Comedy Central’s demographic, made it relevant to them, and, of course, delivered it with humor. Dulany said, “Make the change small, make the result big and make the impact local.”

Due to what many feel is alarmist green marketing, people get the idea that if they are not significantly changing their lifestyle to be green, they are not doing enough. So they do nothing. The truth is that if many people made small changes in their conservation habits, that would make a bigger impact than a few people making big changes. So, taking baby steps toward a greener lifestyle still helps.

Most of us will live in or near cities by mid-century.

As our population grows, it will naturally consume more space. By 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in or near cities. Cities will expand because that is where the jobs, education and resources are. The turning point will be how those cities react to their increasing size and population. Infrastructure is crucial. Sustainable cities in the future will include better public transportation, bike trails, child-friendly spaces and quality education, good jobs, and access to healthy food.

In addition to planning for better cities, many metropolitan areas need to plan for environmental changes. Melanie Nutter, Director of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, projects that sea level will rise nearly 55 inches by the end of this century. For San Francisco, surrounded by water on three sides, this is a serious issue. The airport will be underwater, as will 99 miles of roadways. These are eventualities that she knows she must start planning for now. Amongst many aggressive environmental initiatives employed by the city, currently it leads the country in waste disposal (more than 77 percent is composted, recycled or reused) and has set a goal of zero waste by 2020.

Robin Rather, CEO of Collective Strength, Inc. makes the argument that we’re all in this together – cities, suburbs and rural areas. Our current us-versus-them mentality works against progress and change. She contends that we all have to face this problem united, whether we live in super-hip cities like San Francisco, cities in dire straits like Detroit, a Rhode Island suburb or rural Nebraska.

The children are our (environmental) future.

Several speakers and organizations have identified a new, desirable demographic to target – children. (Relatively) free of cynicism and unswayed by complicated charts, children easily believe that the environment is precious and important simply by spending time outside.

Keynote speaker Mark Tercek (The Nature Conservancy) fell in love with nature when he wanted his children to develop an appreciation for the outdoors and they planned many exploratory family trips. TNC supports programs that help urban youth who would not otherwise get to spend time outdoors participate in nature activities. Keynote speaker Philippe Cousteau certainly was brought up to love the water, but his foundation, EarthEcho International focuses on encouraging children to appreciate oceans and their ecosystems. Disney reaches out to children through Iron Way Films using creativity and imagination, and Comedy Central speaks to teens and young adults through humor.

It’s fitting. Children will inherit our planet, so the idea that they should learn to care about it early on is the right one. If children hold so much sway over parental buying decisions, perhaps they can exert influence over some greener behavior, too.

Marketing Manager, Anna Brones:

It’s all about food.

What is the one thing that connects us? The one thing that can get anybody talking? Food. “We cherish our connections to food. We do not cherish our connections to turning off our lightbulbs,” said journalist Simran Sethi. If there is one thing that binds us, no matter what side of the political spectrum we are on, it’s what we eat, and when it comes to talking about the environment and our health, food is also one of the main common denominators.

We need to have uncomfortable conversations.

Population control, religion, race – these are all things that many of us steer clear of, but if we don’t bring these important issues to the table we are going to have serious missed opportunities. Roger-Mark De Souza of Population Action International made the connection between access to reproductive services and family planning and climate change; if we slow population growth we can limit carbon emissions. Here is an area with potential for significant impact, and yet it is one of the many important questions that won’t be on the table at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in 2012. If we continue to veer from the difficult questions, we can forget progress.

Listen before talking.

Action is needed, but to inspire action we have to know who we are talking to and how they will respond. This requires listening. Identify not only what communities need, but what they want. We live in an era that requires serious action, and we need it now, but if we continue to preach, we won’t effect real change. As Andrew Hutson of Environmental Defense Fund, pointed out, we cannot lead discussion “with ideas that threaten people’s core beliefs and values.”

Editor-in-Chief, Sara Ost:

Life, sustainability, and the pursuit of happiness.

“We need a Rosetta Stone” for green messaging was Gary Lawrence’s quote retweeted round the conference room in “Let’s Stop Talking about Sustainability: How Our Green Vocabulary Is Failing Us.”

We need a ring decoder, someone else said. We need to know how to market and message for our target audiences, another panelist noted. Well, yes.

What are these words that will work? We know what they aren’t. Green, eco, sustainability, environmentalism, climate change, global warming, conservation, cutting back, recycling, reusing, reducing and worst of all: sacrifice. Green doesn’t just have a sex appeal problem (on the level of Christian rap; besides, who wants to be a color?), it has a happiness problem.

We environmentalists can argue about consumption, mitigation versus paradigm shift, and technology until the grass fed cows come home. The fundamental problem is that green, The Movement, asks for sacrifice and gets snippy when it doesn’t happen. If sacrifice were going to work, it would have already. We live in a nation where the grand directive from our President in the weeks after 9/11 was for us to shop. I don’t think we’re at a point as a culture anymore where we can be asked to sacrifice in the face of very real problems – at least not without government involvement (think enforced rations circa WWII).

I’d like to remind people that Obama was able to win an election on simple appeals to our common humanity, to the good in us: “Change” and “Yes we can.”

In this particular panel, Lawrence asked us to consider appealing to the core emotions we all share. These are fear, aspiration and nostalgia. He then said what I consider to be the most profound thing I heard at the entire conference: “We are forgetting about happiness.”

It strikes me that we live in a culture where happiness is not a value – despite the fact that it’s written right into our Declaration of Independence. What American doesn’t recall having to memorize “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in grade school? Yet we don’t take  vacations. Paternity leave? What’s that? Hell, we barely get outside. Take a look at infant mortality rates, the number of adults on antidepressants, the media we consume – it’s awful. On the flight in, I happened to sit next to a woman who counsels Fortune 50 executives on communication and negotiation. She had that glow that really present, grateful, active people have. I was riveted by the earful she gave me about high stakes negotiating, and equally moved when she said, after a pause: “People who live here don’t see just how self-loathing we are. Other cultures are blown away by it.”

Of course, I also couldn’t help but think about Steve Jobs and his impact on the world during all of this green discussion and debate. People love Apple because there’s an element of happiness to the products. Design is soul.

It’s simple, but green needs some soul.

Image: Kewl

The post Lessons From SXSW Eco #2: What Makes Us Think appeared first on EcoSalon.

Fried food, two-stepping, honky tonk music, cowboy boots, and environmentalists? It might sound like an odd combo, but that’s South by Southwest Eco for you.

Last week, the EcoSalon team descended upon Austin, Texas to join in as a media partner in the first ever SXSW Eco, a three-day conference bringing together an “international audience of executive level decision makers from the public and private sectors, and thought leaders from academia.”

Just as SXSW has become a launching pad for new creative content and ideas fueled by a dynamic and diverse audience, the goal for SXSW Eco is to apply the same innovative approach to discussing the most pressing issues of our time. From food issues to the global population explosion to exploring what neuroscience can teach us about human behavior, the panelists and keynote speakers of the conference tackled these topics from a variety of perspectives, providing plenty of intellectual space to grow the conversation.

It’s one thing to gather a bunch of green-minded people into one space and get them to talk about pressing issues, and quite another to engage people outside of our circles on the same issues. “I am here to reach the people outside of the room, and I hope you do the same,” said Simran Sethi, journalist and Associate Professor University of Kansas. One of the main themes that stood out to us during the conference was how exactly we go about doing that. We all, at this point, acknowledge and understand that the green conversation has failed to become the green conversion. Going green has been a bust. But why? And where do we go from here? One popular sentiment floated into the Twitterverse from a panel on how green vocabulary has failed us was “We need a Rosetta Stone of green.”

So, is it changing how we talk about climate and the environment in our marketing efforts? Or are we so wired to consume more and deplete our natural resources, we must begin with psychology and science? Is dissonance and debate between greens – “skirmishes,” as the Nature Conservancy president Mark Tercek much prefers (bristling a bit under repeated criticism in the Q&A) – a healthy way to create space for forward progress, or a dangerously short-sighted distraction from the goals we share? Can we find ever find common ground that doesn’t politicize the issue of the environment and brings people from all points of the spectrum together to save ourselves?

The short answer is: yes. But it’s going to take work. And it’s going to take thinking creatively about how we talk about things like “green” and how we get people rallied around the issues. And it’s going to take words that don’t start with “g,” “s,” or “e.” (Green, sustainable, environmental.)

There’s hope, because when it comes to the environmental movement, we are talking about issues that affect everyone, which means that there’s plenty of room to improve and expand. We just have to rally around the right things, and become as sophisticated in our approach as Coca-Cola is at selling sugar water. As Roger-Mark De Souza, Vice President of Research Population Action International, said on a panel about pressing questions that won’t be on the Rio agenda in 2012, we have to make sure that we don’t have “missed opportunities.”

If we don’t want missed opportunities, we must start with communication. Facts and figures don’t work; relationships are everything. “We need to know our audience,” emphasized Brooke Buchanan, Director of Communications for Sustainability, Walmart. On the same panel, Jeff Nesbit, Executive Director of Climate Nexus, added “We have to learn other ways to communicate about these things so people actually care.” That means thinking creatively about how we frame environmental issues and how we communicate them to the larger public.

But it also means finding new ways to connect with people; focusing on the elements that transcend ideologies and political parties. One of those is food. In her presentation, Sethi presented a Wendell Berry quote:

Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

As Sethi put it, “we cherish our connections to food… we do not cherish our connections to turning off our lightbulbs.”

Change, as it turns out, is about inspiring and moving people to do, not only better, but to connect, and the more we separate ourselves from others – be it through messages or actions or lexicons – the more we risk failure.

But there is hope. And in a post-Austin recharge, we’re donning our new cowboy boots and feeling inspired to do good, and we hope you do, too. Just how do we go about this? And what were points of consensus and criticism at the first ever SXSW Eco? Look for that and more in parts 2 and 3 this week from EIC Sara Ost and News Editor Andrea Newell.

We’ll have more on SXSW Eco throughout the week, so check back!

Images: Anna Brones

Main image: Chris Tackett, social media editor of Treehugger, Alex Steffen, environmental thought leader and keynote speaker, Sara Ost, EIC of EcoSalon, Andrea Newell, News Editor of EcoSalon, and others gather at the joint Treehugger/EcoSalon/Triple Pundit happy hour in Austin, Texas.

The post Lessons from SXSW Eco #1: Changing How We Communicate appeared first on EcoSalon.

EcoSalon joins the first SXSW Eco as a media partner.

What do you get when you bring an ocean conservationist, the president of a major environmental nonprofit and a progressive author together in a city known for its food, flair and funk? South by Southwest (SXSW) Eco, of course.

This year, the organizers of SXSW, which every year brings musicians, artists and the technocrati to converge upon Austin, Texas, are taking the festival to a new level and launching an exclusive green-focused conference.

EcoSalon is excited to be an official media sponsor of the event, which will feature keynote speakers Philippe Cousteau, Jr, CEO of EarthEcho International, Mark Tercek, the President and CEO of The Nature Conservancy and Alex Steffen, author and planetary futurist.

SXSW Eco will provide an open and creative space for experienced, passionate and pragmatic professionals to network with a diverse group of influential organizations and individuals, while contributing to cutting-edge discussion. The conference will feature a mix of sessions, including panels and core-conversations.

“The foundational concept of SXSW – dynamic, diverse minds coming together to discuss innovation and creativity – is exactly the kind of exciting and holistic approach that appeals to us at EcoSalon. The addition of a green conference is an encouraging marker of the sustainability movement’s progress, and couldn’t be more timely. We’re thrilled to be taking part and engaging in the conversations that are really going to push for creative progress in the sustainability movement and share those conversations with a larger audience,” says Sara Ost, Editor in Chief of EcoSalon.

We couldn’t be more pleased to be taking part! And we’re in good green company, as fellow new media leaders Treehugger and Triple Pundit are also SXSW Eco partners. Here’s what they had to say about taking part.

“Having been a long time attendee of SXSW interactive, which otherwise rocks, I’ve always felt that a conversation on sustainability was a major theme that seemed to be underrepresented. SXSW has such huge influence in new media the opportunity is ripe to use their power to advance green thinking in the popular culture. We’re thrilled to be a part of the first ever SXSW Eco and I hope to see a lot of new voices lending their input on sustainable solutions to the world’s problems, right from the heart of Texas,” says Nicholas Aster of Triple Pundit.

“Often when thinking about the challenge of sustainability, I’ll think, ‘if only we could get everyone together in a room to work this out!’ Maybe SXSW Eco can be that room! Of course, stopping climate change or solving the myriad other issues related to sustainability won’t be that easy, but we think by bringing together thought-leaders and the technology- and business-savvy attendees already familiar with SXSW, events like SXSW Eco can serve a role in moving the discussion forward. We’re excited to be a media partner so we can be on the scene and bring the most interesting and inspiring ideas to our readers around the world that won’t be able to attend in-person!” says Chris Tackett of Treehugger.

Stay tuned for live updates from SXSW Eco next week!

The post Announcing EcoSalon’s Official Media Partnership with SXSW Eco appeared first on EcoSalon.