Having just read something on the degradations of the oceans I am inspired to get a little Wonka-ish to make a point.

It seems that how we consume life especially in, around and out of the oceans are going to return those oceans to the primordial soup we climbed out of but a few million years ago.

What we do and how we live affects the oceans and seas in some way or another immediately or eventually, chronically or acutely, directly or indirectly.

So, whoever we are: the lady in a diner in Boise Idaho chowing down on Big Lite Ceasar Salad with anchovies; the bloke in the Birmingham café eating pilchards on toast; the dad flushing cotton Buds down the loo; the farmer slooshing phosphates into the Yangtze; the African 8 year old re-skinning 2^nd hand rubber tyres; the skateboarder in Berlin dumping his cola bottle in the Spree; the turkish fisherman using dodgy nets – its our business.

But who’s going to tell us that. And more importantly who’s going to help us act upon our new-found responsibility even if we accept it.

We need to find a way to democratise the oceans – give even the deepest most distant point of them as much meaning to every one of those people as the small bit they might have paddled or swam through on their last holiday – give them meaning to every person in their everyday lives.

So I say hands up global brands.

According to CSIS’s 7 Revolutions & HBR – “A well-run businesses that applies its vast resources expertise and management talent to problems that it understands and in which it has a stake can have a greater impact on social good than any other institution or philanthropic organization”

Which in my world makes the Oceans every global brand and corporation’s business.

Global brands can help us in closing the gap and popularizing the plight of the oceans and seas but for them to do so we need to demonstrate the value to them; and the value and stickiness to their customers of any partnership.

The most important thing we need to do first is to make people feel the ‘pull of it’ and we need them to feel responsible for the health and vigour of that emotion and the source of it – we need to frame the oceans in such a way as to be both emotionally and physically relevant and important again to the people on our planet – especially those in the first world in a position to have the luxury of being to do something about it in so many simple ways. Global brands have the voice the reach and the channels to make those connections.

But which ones?  Again I have a childishly over simplified answer.

Take a photo of the trash washed up on an un-tended beach on the weather side of a pacific island and look at what’s on it.

Plastic bottles. Millions and millions of plastic bottles – so I say, if leadership goes to the biggest fish in this pond and we’re rummaging in the plastic bottle department – stand up the Happiness factory and join the mission. Because, even if those bottles aren’t the property of those busy teaching the world to sing out there and being an arms length from everyone on the planet, they are manufactured by ‘wannabee thems’. So biggest fish, step up.

And ooh look: Trainers – so we’re walking on water it seems. Again, I apply my biggest fish in the global pond metric here? Tick.  You’ve got it. Stand up Nike. Say nothing – just do it.

Oh, and a few car tyres. Fabulous. Bridgestone? Michelin? Continental? Who’s the real player here? Roll up roll up. Your name is on the boat.

Which brings me to my other super childish starter for ten. And this is in the ‘what do we ask those brands to do?’ department.

I say lets start with something big; big enough to be seen from space – the huge islands of plastic and debris floating in a couple of the oceans. (And, please; scientists, oceanographers, marine biologists and engineers; tell me the following idea is impossible because if it isn’t, that no one has started developing these already almost constitutes a global act of aggression against the human race.)

If we can build super tankers to traverse the oceans – and we can engineer deep sea wells and deep tide dredgers – how come it is so far beyond us to develop an open mouth surface dredger to start hoovering up these islands of crap?

Funding? Well I point us back to the logos on the debris on that weather-side beach.

We know that the Happiness Factory feels that a global CSR play has to be BIG! Nike are the Just Do It kids. And every tyre company is about mitigating risk in the wet

And right now, from where I’m standing, suffocating oceans and the death of the living seas will soon overtake fat kids, heart disease from lack of exercise and substandard stopping distances on the world agenda of “whoops this isn’t going to end well” biggies.

So I say, get in a room, get your cheque book out and, I don’t know, build a very big dredging boat or something; and at least start to do something.  I know that it is not the answer to the highly complex problems facing the oceans. But draw that kind of big brand attention to this kind of problem and the democratisation of the oceans will begin. Start the conversation and the journey. It will be worth it.

Part 2. Coming soon.

OK so we’ve had the Original greens – hard-core activists and connected liberators of all of us from the yoke of consumption destruction and overbearing human right of entitlement – dibs on everything that isn’t our rarified species.

Then we had the Blue Greens – sustainability experts and big brains born out of the smart set modelling living ecosystems and developing everything from clean tech, by-product life-cycling and social networks to those reframing CSR and doing the right thing as imperatives for a better total life – not just tree hugging. Suddenly we’re viewing the world holistically not only on environmental but economic social and cultural measures of wellbeing.

Then came the Greenback Greens – the money monster advocates of sustainability practice protecting future growth and profitability, stimulating qualitative growth and, at its very, very least, driving economies and efficiencies into the business through rigorous and inspired supply chain optimization – and who, if you tick those boxes and play nice, won’t short the crap out of your business.

But the green thing has warn thin, even in the early adopters – and there is certainly no green movement on a mass scale unless of course you include the twitter feeds and face books of Kermit, Yoda and Mike Wazowski

85% still aren’t listening to green living or any other colour of conscience driven consumption for that matter – they’re all working on a different tip on the other side of the chasm and we’re just not crossing yet.

So I’d like to inaugurate a new back to the future green strategy for tomorrow. One rooted in a primal powerful truth – that of the human gene pool imperative of climbing the procreation ladder and securing gene survival and immortality. And it is based on the purest and most human green behaviour of all.

Envy.

Lets hear it for the power of envy to drive everyday people to drastically change their behavior sometimes inexplicably mid flow, and do audacious courageous and sometimes socially down right insane things in the name of ‘me-too’. Envy actually changes the way people are wired and not always for the worse. Recent studies have demonstrated that inciting envy actually changes cognitive function; boosting mental persistence and memory.^[7]

Bertrand Russell believed that envy was a driving force behind the movement towards democracy and must be endured to achieve a more just social system.

So perhaps, given that psychologists believe that there are two forms of envy – one toxic and one benign – could we not seize on the power of the benign form to shift the hearts and minds of that 85%?

Desire is the only true emotion that seems to be still missing in most of the communications and lifestyle framing around a more sustainable lifestyle for us all

But this is a clear brief: stimulate potent desire around something – products, actions and behaviours – that is a component part of a more sustainable world.

Find the dimensions in the story telling that make it ‘ping’ the bell in the mind of the 85% – set yourself to the real task of turning the gene pool purchaser green with envy

No more furtive apologetic or overly protective do the right thing mantras and less of this and much less of that.

Just feisty shiny confident “why woudn’t you? coudn’t you?” stuff – all built to trigger the green eyed but in this instance wholly constructive monster.

Using the same strategies that were applied to transform the post war American Industrial machine from destruction to consumption through the championing of the Consumer Citizen leads us to weald a very simple blunt tool – show people living a desirous life all around you – and in the end the gene pool rule applies.

Transforming what the mass find desirous in others around them when those things are cool, smart examples of lighter living makes the old toxic nature of keeping up with the Jones suddenly alright by me.

And if we get a decent number of people to go ‘ohhh yes please I like it’ – and use every tool in the box – feature the desirous life as a back drop – in soaps, films, magazines, and adverts: bingo. Yes, that’s the creak of populist desire you can hear.

In this way we start to re-imagine a new prosperity and sense of aspiration – a really attractive, sexy one underwritten by invisible sustainable truths to stop the wheels falling off of it – one built to endure.

But fulminating on the power of envy in trite terms denies its more academically and philosophically viewed immutable human truth.

Schoek sets out the power of envy as “a drive which lies at the core of man’s life as a social being…[an] urge to compare oneself invidiously with others.” And in turn “We need envy for our existence, though no society that hopes to endure can afford to raise it to a value principle or to an institution”.

Envy’s potency is the true and only social strategy – its power unmatched, if it can be harnessed the right way.

So perhaps knowing that when it comes to the human condition, Envy lies at the heart of why we consume life the way we do; and knowing that it is a standing condition of the human psyche; and accepting that it is one of the most powerful drivers of behaviour, perhaps there is some merit in boldly using the good version of envy; the envy of a smarter lighter lifestyle lived by others as a better and more honest way of transforming the bad social norms of consumption for better.

Just a thought.

If you’re done with looking up through the supply chain and the science at the challenge of how to make sustainability more engaging and attractive to the masses you may also have become equally bored with cajoling water up various degrees of incline and compressing mineral blocks until the viscera emanates!

So one suggestion – try taking a brands eye view on it – pop on your ‘caring about what people care about’ glasses and have a peek down through the human insight and the everyday. Have a gander at the whole thing through the weekly shop, the interiors magazine and the afternoon saturday shopping ritual – and there, laid bare, will be the base human first world need to pursue stuff – and quite a lot of it shiny!

Do that and you’ll quickly realise that to most everyday people the primary thing they wish to sustain is their best, shiniest, sexiest, gene-pool-consideration-ladder-climbing self and all that might come with it.

So the compelling reason for them to engage perhaps, in smarter lighter living and the brands products and services that help them do that, isn’t Climate Change or the end of the world or even those poor trees and little farmers – its the possible death of sexy – the killing of the killer heel; of shiny things – the disappearance of all that they believe make life bearable and worth living – the things that define and differentiate them from the rest of humanity’s heaving mass.

If we take every sustainability and CSR ambition, target, initiative, innovation and action, and use them to underwrite and add integrity to an aspirational life that is systemically constructed to go the distance and built to endure, that just might unlock the populist conversation. Brands using all of those processes commitments and systemic drivers to maintain their ability to delight, to serve, to entertain, connect and elevate our human existence would be far better placed to capture the value they have already created by instituting and committing to them in the first place.

So desirable and seductive storytelling needs to march in here. We need to transform desire based upon both the gene pool imperative and the deep rooted sustainability truth speaking in unison, and with one light human voice.

The old dark arts of creative storytelling to influence behaviour as used by Hollywood and Madison Avenue are deployed with one clear imperative – to create desire. Desire for something just out of reach – something that if captured would sprinkle some pixie dust in our everyday lives.

Now Id rather we used those dark arts to influence the early majority to buy smarter than just to buy less. Trigger the smart cool shopper reflex in them and allow them get on with filtering the more toxic degrees of their consumption themselves with a few top tips sprinkled in along the way.

Don’t show them your science project or your conscience: don’t sell them A Kind Shoe Range rendered from Net Positive wholly replenishable natural materials and reclaimed and up-cycled leather from accredited sources.

Sell them infinite sexy & cool – sell them the ability to keep wear killer bamboo louboutins with vintage leather uppers forever  – they want to, so you’ve sorted it and they can. Love you forever.

This brings me to the topic of lightness of touch generally.

Lightness of touch is essential when speaking to people who are struggling to still present themselves as thriving, vibrant individuals whilst struggling with income, household bills and credit crunching.

So glass half full storytelling is crucial in successfully shifting people towards a smarter more enduring model of prosperity that they can all still aspire to.

And involving the storytellers from the glass half full world in communicating the amazing things going on under the bonnet, we’ll engage far more people with far less pain and a lot more positive consequence than we are now.

Now: where did I put that gorgeous pair of Jimmy Choos? You know the ones – with the reclaimed-hemp uppers hand woven by tribeswomen – and the Maker-Made 3D Printed soles made out of recycled bottle plastic?