Environmentalism in Asia

Martin Lloyd

The dominance of a new middle class in India and China presents a challenge for environmental organisations. As billions of Asians set their sights on a Western lifestyle, how can an organisation like Greenpeace break through and convince them that there are better paths to prosperity? 

Whether it’s addressing overfishing, climate change, the release of toxic chemicals or the devastation of rainforests, sooner or later every global environmental campaign runs up against the challenge posed by China and India. “We’d be happy to modify our behaviour,” say the Western powers, “but unless China and India do the same, we’re just harming our own businesses and not addressing the problem.”

There’s a dual challenge for environmentalists here. Recalcitrant Western governments can’t let themselves off the hook because Asian nations are following their bad example. But neither can the world afford for Asia’s masses to pollute on the same scale as their Western counterparts. As a global organisation, Greenpeace has to work both sides of this challenge and bring the message of personal and national environmental responsibility to Asia.

Greenpeace China opened its doors in 1997, and in 2000 we established ourselves in India. In both countries, our arrival has coincided with a surge in GDP, living standards and consumption. It’s long been a cliché to talk about China and India’s rising middle class, but now it’s also become a mistake.

India and China
The middle classes of China and India are not rising. They have risen. Chinese and Indian society are now dominated by the same values that drove the rise of US and European consumerism. The idea of these nations as societies grounded in Hindu spiritualism or Confucian wisdom has become outdated – if it ever made sense at all.

Using a model based on Shalom Schwarz’s work on cultural values, Greenpeace and the research agency Cultural Dynamics mapped the values in urban Indian and Chinese society.

In both India and China, we found a desire for material wealth, control over others, visible success and visible ability to be the values most embraced by the urban population. In other words, both Indian and Chinese urban populations display (following the lines of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) a huge skew toward externally motivated individuals. Three out of four urban Chinese and nearly seven out of 10 urban Indians were externally motivated. Acquiring and displaying symbols of success and enjoying public social esteem are now the driving forces in Indian and Chinese society. Internally motivated individuals, for whom self-improvement or making a difference are driving needs, are much thinner on the ground. In contrast, in the USA, we found a similar desire for visible success and ability but also a strong espousal of the values of openness, justice, novelty and adventure. That is to say, there is a higher proportion of internally motivated people in the USA.

What’s an environmentalist to do?
So what can the environmental movement do? Even if our natural base is small in proportional terms, there’s still a potential audience in the tens of millions. But in nations where the population is over a billion, that isn’t enough.

In the West, Greenpeace was able to ride demographic changes that began in the 1960s and played out over the next 50 years. The founders of Greenpeace were a mix of Quakers and hippies, and the values of universalism and benevolence they subscribed to have become both more widely held and more influential over the last four decades. Other environmental groups benefited from the same dynamic, as did those working for human rights, development and related causes.

We cannot wait for – and perhaps should not expect – the same dynamic to play out in Asia. To secure breakthroughs in public policy in the Asian giants, an appeal with broad support will be needed today. We see this as being grounded in a number of approaches

Focus on visible problems
A focus on visible problems: campaigns for clean air and clean rivers drove early Western environmentalism. Smog, water pollution and the problems associated with them are visible and universal, as much a threat to individual prosperity as environmental health. In contrast, appeals to save far-off rainforests or deal with invisible threats are unlikely to resonate.

In late 2012, Greenpeace’s Detox campaign focused on exposing the connection between the global fashion industry and water pollution in China. The resulting juxtaposition of immediate, visible pollution and high-profile fashion brands proved extremely potent. Facing potential damage to their reputations within a very broad section of Chinese society, brands including Zara, Mango, C&A, Nike, Adidas and Puma have committed to detoxing their supply chains.

In a similar way, focus group research in China showed that issues like air pollution are seen as social levellers. It doesn’t matter how rich or well connected a person is – no-one believes he or she can avoid the negative effects of smog.

Doing things differently
New routes to prosperity: the industrialisation of Asia needn’t continue to follow the destructive pathway it took in the West. As an example, the electrification of rural India could be accomplished more quickly, more cleanly and more cheaply using local solar energy than by waiting for the development of a centralised grid.

In 2008, Indian politician Rahul Gandhi made the village of Kalavati a high profile part of his election campaign, promising that nuclear energy would supply power to the village and thousands of others like it. When it emerged that this might take decades to materialise, Greenpeace India travelled to Kalavati to install solar panels, delivering a meaningful and reliable power supply in just three days. That campaign helped convince India’s government of the need to invest aggressively in solar power. It demonstrated that achieving Western prosperity need not require cloning Western approaches, opening up new, cleaner possibilities for development.

Pollution as a threat to prosperity
Even in simple fiscal terms, the problems associated with rapid industrialisation and the over-exploitation of natural resources can outweigh the benefits. In China, the true cost of coal – factoring in the price of the negative externalities – amounts to some 7.1% of GDP, an impossible-sounding sum until you realise that, even as I’m writing this, Beijing airport has been closed by smog, and levels of pollution in China’s largest city have been at harmful levels for weeks.

For years, Greenpeace has been publicising impacts like these within China to stimulate debate around the future of China’s energy policy. And while it’s hard to know for sure, we think the case that clean energy is economically desirable is making good headway within the Chinese government.

Where to next?
These arguments against visible pollution, the threat posed by pollution to prosperity and the need for new approaches to ensure continued prosperity have obvious resonance beyond Asia. Today, it is rare in developed countries for environmental crimes to be as obvious as dumping toxic chemicals into rivers. But images of extreme weather are pushing climate change up the agenda, making visible the damage done by carbon pollution.

The audience that is critical to success in Asia – in search of status and success, driven by prosperity and achievement – remains important in the West. The need to connect with it in India and China has sparked Greenpeace to try to broaden our appeal in other countries. We won’t be the first organisation to take home lessons learned from new markets.

Martin Lloyd is marketing communications manager at Greenpeace International in the Netherlands