Joe Brewer is a policy analyst with Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle, and co-founder of DarwinSF. He is an energetic speaker who loves what he does and knows how to be serious and have fun at the same time. Recently Joe joined forces with a Hungarian colleague named Lazlo Karafiath to found the Climate Meme Project. He spoke about their groundbreaking work at a recent climate conference on Whidbey Island.
According to Joe, "Memes are the genetic code of culture. They generate ideas and thoughts. Memes are viruses that replicate and spread throughout society. They activate across social networks to change human behavior. Cultural evolution comes about through the generation of new memes."
The first photos of earth from space, for example, were powerful memes that redefined us as interconnected passengers on "spaceship earth", and helped launch the environmental movement. Memes often function beneath the radar of conscious awareness as they drive our thinking and behavior toward new forms of cultural expression and understanding.
While global warming is arguably the greatest threat to human well being of our era, it has remained a niche concern, and has so far refused to spread virally. Joe and Lazlo started the Climate Meme Project when they realized that “global warming is a really lousy meme. It does a terrible job of spreading. It is really hard to get people to think about it and act upon it, it is really hard to get people on their own to feel compelled to tell stories about it, or to bring it up at cochtail parties.” Their research shows that the global warming meme has infected the minds of at best 5% of the world's population. And given the scale of the actual thread posed to humanity by climate destabilization, this failure of the climate meme to infect our culture, and move us toward large-scale behavioral change, is a really big problem.
The Climate Meme Project is creating an ecological map of the memes that have arisen around climate change - both positive and negative. What Brewer and Karafiath have found is that "a gloomy outlook pervades the whole global warming meme landscape. Choosing between extinction and a long-shot at basic survival is not appealing to the masses." Memes that capture this feeling well include, "I don't want our pale blue dot to be a brown smudge.", and "Climate change is humanity's 'mission impossible'." We tend to develop a culturally immunity to memes that make us feel helpless or overwhelmed.
"The food of memes is human attention", and memes that are not nourishing to our sense of possibility and well-being starve from lack of attention.
Examples of more effective memes include those that elicit a sense of agency, personal power, and the capacity for joy; "We can change really fast when we want to." "There are so many solutions that we haven't even thought of yet, that could be game changers." "A fossil-free future is totally possible, here and now. And our lives will definitely be made better by it."
Joe and Lazlo have identified "symbiotic" memes as especially promising in this regard. These are memes that move our behavior in the same direction as climate memes, but without the baggage and negativity associated with gloomy climate thinking. These would include entrenpreneurial thinking around the new energy economy, social media that connect us in lively and joyful new ways, aiding the rapid spread of new social memes like the local food culture, the new bicycle culture, and new, more effective forms of political and activist engagement.
The Climate Meme Project helps underscore how deeply this crisis is rooted in human perception, and how important the science of perception will be in dislodging our culture from its fossil fuel addictions. A synopsis of the current climate meme landscape, and how we can change it for the better, is presented in their new report. Learn how you can help Joe and Lazlo build and spread new climate memes based on collaboration, creativity, innovation and love.
