EcoLabs - Ecological Literacy Initiative

The Visual Communication of Ecological Literacy

ABTRACT. This paper describes how graphic design can support ecological literacy. Starting with a brief introduction to ecological literacy and a proposal that communication design must join the crisis disciplines in responding to predicaments in the earth science, the paper proposes that within an increasingly visual culture, visual intelligence can support the development of new perceptual capabilities potentially leading to relational ways of knowing. Graphic design can facilitate emergent ecological literacy and ecological perception by displaying context, causality and complexity. Images can foster whole systems understanding due to their unique ability to reveal relationships, dynamics and patterns. Graphic design can thus nurture the development of ecological manners of thought by strategically constructing visual resources to encourage ecological perception. Download // read more...

Reduce Carbon Emissions by 10% in 2010 at your University
Ten Steps Checklist PDF download here

1. Create your carbon reduction team. Identify and connect with a committed, passionate, and multifaceted team who will make it happen. Include academics, lecturers, staff, management, estates and students alike. There should be no rank, or distinction between these parties, but rather, each individual should be a stakeholder on a collective mission to succeed.
 
2. Set your first meeting. Agree at the meeting how you will establish the appropriate permissions, and carry out the carbon monitoring. Agree also on how often you will meet to feed back how you are getting on. Remember to aim for at least 10% reductions in carbon emission across each of the four categories: grid electric, on-site fossil fuel use, vehicle fuel use, and air travel. Create working groups for each of the energy categories.
 
3. Research methods for monitoring energy use at the university. Do not wait until you have the perfect method but start the process and work towards creating a more rigorous methodology as the project evolves. How will you establish systems to monitor all energy use? Electricity is the easiest area to monitor as it should be straightforward to check the meters.

READ THE REST OF THE 10 POINT CHECKLIST HERE.

By EcoLabs, T4Sustainability and Inheritable Futures Laboratory 

EcoMag is a magazine about art, design & sustainability. Each issue will focus on a theme while investigating issues lying at the root of the ecological crisis. The theme of the first issue is ‘Future Scenarios’. We are indebted to the authors: Mark Lynas, David Holmgren and Herman Daly for granting us permission to borrow freely and providing inspiration for the artists and designers who turned this work into pictures. EcoMag No.1 is available as a low resolution Pdf download here, a higher quality pdf is now available here (15M). 

Illustration can, and already is, fulfilling an important role in spreading awareness of global warming issues. Thanks to its ability to make ideas visible, illustration can play a part in making change happen. Furthermore illustration provides a means of communicating the complex emotional reactions that are naturally part of dealing with such loaded information as climate change. Illustration can work to communicate an immediate and a holistic representation. We need this ability of visual languages to help spread an awareness of not only the science behind global warming, but the measures that need to be taken to cut our energy consumption.

We have already warmed the climate by 0.8° over the past century, and we are told that anything above 2° will be catastrophic. Despite the danger, there exists a serious disconnect between scientific opinion and public awareness. False pundits in the media have succeeded in confusing us. A MORI poll found that one third of the population knows little or nothing about global warming. An IPM poll found half of people unwilling to change their lifestyle (ref: Lois Rogers, 'Climate Change: Why We Don't Believe It', New Statesman, 23 April 2007.) But would this be the case if the facts were better understood? The media, advertising and communication design have a vital role to play. The greatest danger comes from our own desire not to face facts.

Studies in collective psychology indicate that the greater the threat, the more people are inclined to ignore it. Obviously the subject of climate change is emotionally loaded. Extinction is not a nice subject. We prefer to avoid it, and if we thought about it at all it would make us angry- so denial is perhaps natural. Lois Rogers quotes John Elkington, of the communications firm SustainAbility, who describes a common psychological defense mechanism: 'people enjoy being confused about big issues as it gives them a chance to do nothing.' In an essay entitled Seeing is Believing: Information Visualization and the Debate Over Global Warming, the design writer David Womack observes, 'For an issue such as global warming, which requires millions of people to take action based not on observable phenomenon, but on scientific projections, this lack of certainty might be disastrous. After all, you don't have to believe the scientists that dispute global warming in order to do nothing' you just have to be confused enough to be complacent'.

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