All posts by Elena:

New Publications Common Cause for Nature Values and frames in conservation

Creating and maintaining a sustainable, wildlife-rich world requires active, concerned citizens and a political system capable of rising to the challenge. Governments, businesses and the public will need the space and motivation to make the right choices. The UK conservation sector is large and well-resourced yet, as the recent State of Nature report attests, biodiversityRead more

Values in education

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. – Ludwig Wittgenstein What we learn and how we are taught are key to shaping the people we become. The heated debates around the UK’s National Curriculum in recent months attest to a general recognition of this: with the fight-back against the proposal toRead more

Talking about consumption

If our carbon emissions are falling, it means we’re on the right track, right? And we’ve done it without needing to drastically change our economics (or even our lifestyles). But what if our accounting systems are wrong? Last week, we launched our brand new animation exposing three lies we are told consistently by our government about our emissions.Read more

Blue valuing green? Public engagement with climate change on the centre-right

This guest blog is by Valerie Mocker, who recently com­pleted her post­graduate degree in Environmental Policy at Oxford University. Here, she describes find­ings from her dis­ser­ta­tion research. They sug­gest that framing cli­mate change as an ‘eco­nomic’ chal­lenge may not be the best way to engage con­ser­vative audi­ences, leading people to exter­n­alise respons­ib­ility of cli­mate changeRead more

Vision, experience, evidence – a response to Tony Juniper

In the wake of Tony Juniper’s recent Independent blog on the role of values in environmental and social change campaigning, a number of people in the Common Cause network sent reflections on the points he raises about the “Values Modes” approach – which seeks to accommodate existing values, whatever they may be – and the fundamentalRead more

Public engagement & climate change 2

It is the beliefs and values that our citizens bring to such difficult debates which puts breath into the inanimate skeleton of scientific knowledge. Censor or mock beliefs, and we are nothing: our knowledge counts for naught. – Mike Hulme ((In Andy Revkin’s discussion on whether scientists are from Mars and the public are fromRead more