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Changing for ourselves, changing for one another
Posted by Claire Spencer (@thedancingflea)
Tuesday, 26th January 2010
Today, Ed Miliband posted an article on Twitter from the New York Times Magazine, entitled ‘Are Your Friends Making You Fat?’ Not, as it sounds, a quiz from Sugar, but a fascinating insight into how good (and bad) behaviour passes “from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.” The article considers a study into the causes of heart disease, which followed more than 15,000 people in the US town of Framingham, near Boston, since 1948. Their results were reinterpreted by a pair of social scientists, and the results are remarkable – social scientists have assumed for decades that behaviour passes from person to person in this way, but this is the first time that those social scientists haven’t engineered the situation among a small group of people, in a limited period of time. This was real life, a “moving picture” that spanned decades – and was therefore an important set of proofs as to how behaviour spreads among those with connected lives.
This is all too familiar, and I could name hundreds of occasions when I have done things because other people were doing them. Not overt, Grange Hill-esque spoken imperatives like “smoking is cool”, but more subtle and insinuating. For example, no-one at my school would entertain the idea of carrying their rucksack with the weight evenly distributed between two shoulders, but no-one really knew why. Nonetheless, this is why the power of community is so important when making positive change – communities are groups of people who feel that have something in common, bound together by a set of beliefs, a shared activity, or even a building. They already “fit in” with one another in some capacity, they subscribe to a shared identity – so successfully planting the seeds of change into a few members of a close-knit community will (or at least should) have a more tangible effect.
I’m interested in this in all sorts of ways, but especially because this concept of contagious behaviour is the basic premise of the community engagement aspect of Sustainable Moseley’s contribution to the Green Streets project, which is composed of a microgeneration aspect (photovoltaic arrays for St. Mary’s Church, Hamza Mosque and the MADAHAL allotment pavilion, and solar hot water for Moseley CofE school), and an energy efficiency/behavioural change aspect. The latter is very important – 20 homes will be receiving around £3000 each of energy saving measures based on individual evaluations of those properties – but a whole lot more needs to be done if we can justifiably say that the project is a community-wide success, never mind a template for how behavioural changes relating to sustainability and climate change should be instigated.
So what are we doing to put these observations into practice? Firstly, we’re taking our own advice literally. The local mosque is connected to Moseley’s Islamic community via short-wave radio, and we will be using that to broadcast tips for saving energy via behavioural changes to households. At the start of the project, households will bring their first meter readings to the mosque, and from then, we’ll take readings periodically. This and their bill history to ascertain how much energy (and money) people are saving by changing their behaviour – and more importantly, they’ll be doing it together, allowing them to compare, support and even compete. We will, of course, be encouraging a combination of all three.
More ambitiously, we’re trying to challenge the concept of community, by creating new ones – or exposing those which people may have been unaware of. Too often, we get hung up on the differences that divide us – but then you go into people’s homes, meet them and their families, look at the things that matter to them (like a warm, cosy house in winter that doesn’t cost the earth to heat) – and you see how absolutely ridiculous that is. Respect the differences, yes – but embrace the similarities! We are social creatures, and this makes us happy. So we chose the biggest microgeneration projects for the church and the mosque, who are working together. This has real resonance with people – something which the success of Birmingham’s Faith and Climate Change is testament to. It’s hard work. But people’s lives are connected, and we have to understand and work with those connections to make positive changes.
