Why our environmental message isn't working

History offers a simple lesson that we keep forgetting: nothing meaningful changes unless people first understand one another. Most conflicts, from small quarrels to full-scale wars, begin not with malice but with miscommunication. A single careless word can hollow out a sentence. A poorly framed idea can weaken an entire argument. Sometimes even peace treaties collapse because of an avoidable misunderstanding. If communication can fail so catastrophically at the highest levels, it is hardly surprising that it stumbles in everyday public life as well.

The challenge becomes far greater when the goal is not just to inform, but to persuade people to act. Some crises announce themselves so loudly that no explanation is needed. During Covid-19, no one had to be convinced to buy masks. Fear and urgency did the work. But many problems do not arrive with sirens. They grow slowly and quietly, and by the time their effects become visible, habits are already entrenched. Pollution is one of those problems, and after more than three decades of warnings, it is fair to ask why our message still seems to fall on deaf ears.

We have been telling people for years that pollution is harmful and urging them to change their behaviour. Yet the air grows heavier, the water dirtier, and the landscape more degraded. Somewhere along the way, the message has stopped being a call to action and turned into a ritual complaint. Every seminar, every speech, every campaign sounds the same: who is failing, what is going wrong, and why nothing is improving. When communicators start to sound like walking complaint boxes, it is usually a sign that the problem lies not only in reality, but also in the way reality is being explained.

Consider the mismatch between message and audience. What is the point of lecturing a community of labourers about industrial pollution when they have no control over factory emissions and not even the means to shield themselves from them? They cannot shut down smokestacks or redesign production lines. At best, they can stay home, which is hardly a solution. This disconnect appears in almost every sector and for nearly every type of pollution. We often speak to those who have the least power to change what we are criticising.

Our awareness campaigns follow a familiar and tired script. A hall is booked. An audience is invited. A panel of experts delivers long speeches. And hovering over the entire event is a "chief guest," usually someone whose influence matters more than their understanding of the issue. The speakers, instead of engaging the audience, keep directing their words toward this VIP. The audience sits quietly, feeling like seat-fillers rather than participants. When the chief guest finally speaks, they attempt to revive the room after hours of exhaustion. By then, whatever message was supposed to be delivered has already been diluted. This can be called many things, but a purposeful awareness activity is not one of them.

This obsession with the chief guest is not accidental. It is a habit we have inherited, a leftover from a colonial mindset in which importance was measured by proximity to power. Organisers fear that if no prominent figure is invited, the event itself will not be taken seriously. So, everything becomes centred on the VIP, and the real target, the public, becomes secondary. The result is predictable. The message, already weakened by its complaint-like tone, fails again because it is being delivered to the wrong people in the wrong way.

There is another, deeper flaw in our approach. We often behave as if everything else in the system is working perfectly and only the public needs to be corrected. We rarely admit that environmental laws are poorly enforced, or that governments struggle with limited budgets and countless administrative hurdles. We do not tell people that many community-level environmental improvements are simply not feasible without structural support. Instead, we keep repeating lists of dos and don'ts, as if moral reminders alone could compensate for missing clean water, safe air, and fully-enforced regulation. In effect, we ask people to play their part without guaranteeing their most basic green rights. With such a lopsided model, expecting real change is more wishful thinking than serious policy.

None of this means that awareness efforts should stop. It means they should change. People do not only need to be told how to reduce their own footprint. They also need to be shown how to influence those who contribute most to the problem and those who have the authority to regulate it. In any serious discussion about pollution, the main actors are businesses and governments, one as the potential polluter, the other as the supposed watchdog.

This is where communication, real communication, becomes crucial. Instead of teaching people to merely repeat demands, we should be teaching them how to engage, how to question, how to use every available channel to press for compliance and accountability. A few speeches in front of a decorated stage will not do that. What will help is training citizens to argue their case clearly, persistently, and strategically.

If we want environmental awareness to mean something, we must stop treating it like a ceremony and start treating it like a tool. Otherwise, we will keep talking, keep complaining, and keep wondering why nothing changes, while the air grows thicker and the silence more expensive.