Richard Linning
President of WICMI
“What is the responsibility of the public relations industry in green communication, and why do you think it is important to reward public relations projects?”
Climate change was once the subject of communication between our ancestors and the deities they believed ruled their world. It was based on the belief that we humans can only influence the vagaries of nature by inviting their intersession.
The Romans, for example, had a ceremony called the aquaelicium (Latin: “calling the waters”) during which offerings were made to Jupiter petitioning for rain.
Omek Tannou is an ancient Tunisian rainmaking ritual: children paraded a wooden doll representing the goddess Tanit, singing supplications for rain.
Among the best-known examples of weather modification rituals are North American rain dances, historically performed by many Native American tribes.
All this changed with the realization that man himself bears some responsibility for climate change. For the hotter/colder, wetter/dryer world we are currently experiencing.
Its all down to the greenhouse effect, the result of man-made heat-trapping gases in a planet's atmosphere preventing the planet from losing heat to space, raising the planet’s surface temperature.
The existence of the greenhouse effect was proposed as early as 1824 by Joseph Fourier.
It was Svante Arrhenius, in 1896, who made the first quantitative prediction of global warming due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
If the Industrial Revolution lit the fuse, the mid-20th century witnessed the explosion.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre keeps track of what they call the “Great Acceleration,” the sharp surge post-1950 in nearly every indicator of human impact on the ecosystem: energy use, population, transportation, fertilizer consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions all rocketed upward simultaneously.
Why the history lesson in answer to the question? Because communication still plays an important role – not in persuading the gods to intercede, but by encouraging every man, woman and child to exercise their responsibility to help mitigate the impacts of climate change before it is too late.
