Healthy Influence – Persuasion Blog

I found a great news story that illustrates a very different way of thinking about energy and enviromental policy.  We start, surprisingly enough, with Green Christians.

Green Christians are like secular Greens.  Both want to save the planet, but they tend to think about that goal with different approaches.  The Green movement usually has a strong scientific basis using theory and research to explain and measure both the problem and the solution.  They organize large political movements and seek government change in laws, regulation, and taxation.  They organize big splashy PR events and use media campaigns to influence folks.

Green Christians take a much smaller approach and think about things an individual can do to go Green.  The news article details several great examples.  Green Christians are selling their second cars and using bicycles.  They put in large gardens, grow a variety of crops, put them up, and save hundreds of dollars.  They hang out their laundry rather than use a clothes dryer.  They spend less time with computer driven entertainment and more time on family and community sports and recreation.

Now, this article is informative for three reasons.

First, if you are not particularly religious, it gives you a friendly and noncontroversial look at the daily activity of plain, just-folks Believers.  You don’t have to fight about abortion or evolution or school prayer and see the common bonds that unite all of us as people being people.

Second, it demonstrates a great example of self-reliant Green rather than the Big Brother Green of government regulation, taxation, and nagging.  None of the folks described in this article are marching in the streets, organizing community groups, or trying to get a law passed.  They are going Green all by themselves.  It gives you another way to think and act Green and it does not require either a secular or a sacred commitment.

Third, and to the main persuasion point of all of this:  I cannot help but note the healthy lifestyle effects of Christian Green.  Imagine if you and your family:  Stopped driving and started biking; stopped throwing clothes in the dryer, but hauled them out to a line for drying; and dug up a 50 X 100 foot plot of dirt, planted crops, weeded by hand and without pesticides, pulled ripe vegetables from the ground or vine or bush, then canned them for winter; unplugged the TV, computer, and iPod and went out in the yard and played catch or croquet.

If you did this, how much weight would you lose?  Forget the Green, save the Planet, hype.  Just think about the physical lifestyle.  If everyone engaged in what I’m calling Lean Green, the US would not have an obesity problem.  Everyone would look the way they did back in the 1950s when I was a kid growing up in rural, small town Missouri.  Everybody would be walking, running, lifting, carrying, digging, dragging, stretching . . . just plain moving around.

Lean Green largely unplugs from technology and makes the human body do more of the functions of life rather than using a human made machine.  And that would massively and favorably change the lifestyle problems that plague the health so many people today.

Now, contrast this simple, unplugged, and obviously effective Lean Green with all the science that drives lifestyle interventions for the obesity problem.  They involve pills or government mandated, taxpayer financed plans or computer workstations on treadmills or plans to make people just fidget more often or massive media persuasion campaigns or calorie counts on menus, banned foods like trans fats in New York City, and hotline phone numbers sewn into plus sized new clothes.

Just compare the common sense effect of Lean Green to the scientific effect of all the NIH funded research on lifestyle interventions.  You do not need to a randomized controlled trial to see that our use of technology overwhelmingly causes the negative health effects of our lifestyle and that all the taxpayer funded science from the Federal government amounts to a piddling spit in the wind of change.

Yet, I’ve wasted a lot of my time and skill as a persuasion agent trying to do “scientific” interventions on lifestyle.  And the reason it was a waste was because the science of lifestyle completely misses the major factors that drive the current obesity problem.  It focuses upon incredibly baroque, nuanced, and subtle effects that requires millions of dollars of effort to produce virtually no change.

And, related to this scientific failure, consider how little weight the Green movement gives to the lifestyle implications of a Green approach.  We should not think about this as a Green thing, but as a Lean thing.  Sure, there are energy and environment implications.  The less carbon we burn in machines, the less damage we do to the planet.  The less carbon we burn, the less dependent we become on other countries energy resources.  All that’s great, but the real selling point of Green is Lean.