June 26, 1991 “environment is not flavor of the month any more”

On this day, June 26 in 1991, Australian journalist Maria Taylor gave a good example of how the wave of climate concern that had begun in 1988/9 was ending.(they always do).

STATE OF THE WORLD 1991. A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society. Allen and Unwin. $19.95.

Reviewer: MARIA TAYLOR

A SYDNEY marketing man and sometime advisor to the environmental movement told me recently that these days it’s hard to sell business on sponsoring environmental projects because “environment is not the flavour of the month any more”.

While sheer survival may top many a corporate agenda at the moment, it’s still a breathtakingly quaint notion to suppose that “the environment” is a media beat-up begun a year or so ago and now about run its course.

The implication is that just as soon as we can get the economy to behave again, it will be back to business as usual. A lot of people also believe in fairy tales….

Taylor, M. 1991. Heads in the sand over the environment. Canberra Times, 26 June, p.8.

Why this matters

The “Issue Attention Cycle” is a thing. You can think it is stupid, but that doesn’t change its thing-ness, and your need to think carefully about what you do within it to be able to keep doing things after it.

What happened next?

Maria Taylor wrote a PhD thesis. A good one It became this book: Global warming and climate change: what Australia knew and buried. You can read it here

She has a website here.