In a click bate

Yesterday I was copied into a family email.

My aunt (in rural Warwickshire) was asking my sister (near #Lewes in Sussex) to sign an online petition to "oppose the plans for the wholesale felling of mature trees in Lewes".

She likes trees and “wholesale felling” of them sounds awful.

So my aunt clicked.

She knows we like trees - my dad’s a chartered forester and we lived in a woodland for years.

And she clocked the reference to our family hometown Lewes.

So she forwarded the petition to my sister and my parents, thinking they’d like to click too.

The petition’s aiming to get 150,000 signatures (ok - clicks) so let’s all get behind this!

But there’s a catch: the petition’s opposing tree felling on a #sustainable development project my husband and I run with our company Human Nature .

Awkward!

When my sister pointed this out my aunt was mortified.

She’d not read the details – just seen ‘trees’ and ‘Lewes’.

And clicked.

Where she lives there’s an issue with billionaires buying or building vast houses and felling ancient trees without planning then paying the fine.

She’d assumed this would be more of the same.

She wanted to do something.

So she clicked and forwarded to friends and family to get 150,000 clicks quick.

If she had read the details, she’d have discovered our sustainable development project is a new neighbourhood (the Phoenix Project ) on a former industrial site in Lewes.

If she had read the details, she’d have found yes unfortunately we’ll need to remove a small number trees (some of which are unhealthy / unstable) to make room for an access ramp to keep construction vehicles away from the town’s narrow streets. And to build a co-mobility hub with a zero-emission vehicle hire service to reduce the traffic and air pollution in town and slash carbon.?

But / and we’re planting 250 additional trees (many semi-mature) and landscaping to increase net biodiversity on the site?by 39% (compared to the national planning target of 10%).

But / and the impact on trees beyond the confines of the site will be huge – the Phoenix will be the largest ever timber construction project in the UK, with corresponding benefits to woodland management and woodland economy across Sussex and well beyond.

But / and, as well as supporting trees and biodiversity, the project is providing much-needed homes, workplaces, community facilities, public spaces and services for the town – all designed to support a radically more sustainable way of life (with a goal of 2.3 tonnes CO2 per person).

I’m not going to do the whole schtick but you can read more here if you’re interested.

But she didn’t read the details, and she clicked.

She’s sorry to have inadvertently caused upset.

And tbh I was upset (for an hour or so).

I walked up the South Downs out of Lewes double speed with some very loud house music and no clear plan to come back.

Because spending your entire career working in #sustainability – trying to find better ways of living, doing business, running society that give people a decent quality of life and treat the planet as if we’re actually intending to stay on it – is exhausting.

And building a business that puts these principles into practice in your own town is even more exhausting.

(NIMBYs are thriving in our part of the world…).

An online petition clocking up thousands of clicks of opposition and comments of indignation makes you wonder why bother.

And then when your own family joins in, it’s REALLY why bother!

But then I saw the irony.

82,000 people have signed the darn petition.

Only 18,000 people live in Lewes.

So I’d been thinking lots of people from elsewhere, who probably don’t know the site, the town or much about the project must have pressed click.

And then my dear aunt – informed, articulate, passionate about sustainability – clicks to prove my point!

And I get it.

Most of us feel sad or mad about the ecological and social crises unfolding around us.

And most of us feel powerless to make a difference.

So the chance to have a say on something you care about is a gift.

Click and share while the kettle boils and we change.org the world!

And the world is complex, interconnected and unpredictable.

So single issue campaigns that champion one pure thing are beacons of hope and clarity.

Yes. Trees are absolutely brilliant things.

And designing and running the places where we all live, work and play has always been a mashup of conflicting needs, tastes and freedoms – even before the climate and nature crises. And mainstream UK developers and planners have spent decades churning out shit-holes that lock us into unsustainable ways of living, so it’s easy to assume all developers are lying c****s (ref nextdoor/facebook/twitter).

Good development is about minimising negative impacts while maximising benefits -including but not limited to retaining and enhancing biodiversity. But there are pitifully few examples of that in the UK.

So I accept my aunt’s apology and wonder what to do next.

A counter petition is tricky.

“Click here to support the creation of places that genuinely make a healthier, happier and more sustainable way of life easy and attractive, with a focus on addressing the climate and nature crises” isn’t going to catch many people on their tea break.

So instead of click here on all the single issue campaigns that clutter up your inbox maybe pause here.

Maybe take time to dig a little deeper to find out the story behind the headline.

Maybe get into conversation about what, why and how we might do things differently.

Maybe invest that energy, frustration, fear, desire into proposition rather than opposition.

Single issue clickbait petitions aren’t the change we need to see in the world.