BY RACHEL CERNANSKY, VOGUE BUSINESS

"A new campaign is targeting overconsumption by reminding us about nature — our responsibility to it, our dependence on it and our happiness in it.

“Girls Just Wanna Grow Plants” is a high-fashion advertising push targeting young women who feel the constant pressure to keep up with new trends or look Instagram-ready all the time and who feel generally stuck on the hamster wheel of consumption. The organisation behind it, Agency for Nature, was launched this week to channel the advertising industry’s creativity “towards supporting all life on earth”.

“We see 3,000 ads a day, on average, in the UK. It’s really influential as an industry, especially when it comes to influencing behaviour change. [What] if we pivot that towards bringing about the lifestyles and behaviours that make us happy and also move us more towards a sustainable future in ways that feel desirable?” says Aimee Brewerton, communications and engagement manager at Purpose Disruptors, a non-profit founded in 2018 to pressure the advertising industry to align with a 1.5 degree Celsius climate target.

Brewerton helped spearhead the campaign, which was designed by creative professionals Jas Nandoo and Georgette Fischer from global ad agency Leo Burnett, as well as Ina Levy, photographer and Vogue Poland editor-in-chief. Billboards and social and digital media spots are rolling out across the UK featuring models immersed in nature. “We all want a more nature-connected life, but we’ve sort of been led to believe that having more stuff is what we want.”

The campaign is the latest indication that the backlash against overconsumption is gaining steam, and that the advertising industry may be ready to do some soul-searching and figure out its own role in driving, and shifting, the larger consumption conversation.

On top of that, advertising and marketing teams are facing a reckoning over greenwashing and the growing regulatory crackdown on ads that make misleading claims about a product’s sustainability credentials. Just this week, Lululemon came under fresh scrutiny for its “Be Planet” slogan. Advocacy group Stand.earth requested the Canadian government to open an anti-competition investigation into the athleisure brand’s environmental claims, which it made even while its Scope 3 emissions — which account for 99.7 per cent of its total carbon footprint — nearly doubled between 2020 and 2022, according to the brand’s impact report.

Greenwashing is a problem in itself (and Purpose Disruptors offers a training to address it), but in the case of Agency for Nature, which doesn’t associate with any brands — or their commercial objectives — nature is the “client” and the work is about “shifting both the advertising industry and society at a mindset level”, says Brewerton. The mindset to tackle is one of “runaway consumption”: the result of what scholars have called demand engineering — making people want to buy things they don’t need and didn’t know they wanted. In 2022, Purpose Disruptors reported that the advertising industry was responsible for 208 million tonnes of “advertised emissions” — an 11 per cent jump since 2019 — meaning the greenhouse gases that result from the increase in sales generated by advertising.

The campaign may also be the first prominent example of people in “communicator” roles — in marketing, brand management, media, influencers and beyond — taking the kinds of steps that the UN Environment Programme and UN Fashion Charter called for in their Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook, launched last June. The guide aims to align fashion communication to global climate targets. Fashion “must harness its power, ingenuity and creativity to transform from today’s cycle of unsustainable production and consumption patterns towards inspiring and realising a positive fashion future aligned to the sustainability targets of the sector”, reads the playbook.

“It’s [important to] make sustainability the thing we all hanker after or aspire to.”

That’s where Rachel Arthur, who authored the playbook, sees promise in the Agency for Nature’s campaign. It taps an opportunity to use creativity towards a goal that people have largely relied on numbers and unrelatable scientific jargon to achieve, tactics that clearly haven’t resonated at scale.

“So much of this field of sustainability is completely intangible, especially when you start talking about a 1.5-degree lifestyle. It’s almost impossible for the everyday person to be able to imagine what that actually means,” says Arthur. “It’s [important to] make sustainability the thing we all hanker after or aspire to. And for that, we need to paint a picture for everyone. That’s what I think this is starting to do — it’s starting to say, look this is what needs to happen, and this is why it’s appealing.”

Centring nature, not sidelining it

The Girls Just Wanna Grow Plants campaign is one of five launched by the Agency for Nature. Its goal is to not only promote nature-connected lifestyles, but make them seem realistic and practical. Our mental and physical health depends on nature, yet modern society is increasingly disconnected from it — which feeds into a negative feedback loop, because the more disconnected people feel to nature, the less likely they are to engage in pro-environmental behaviours.

One campaign taps the gaming world: “Seed Saga” allows gamers to grow real-world plants from inside the online world of Guild Wars 2, and offers tips for bringing biodiversity into their own neighbourhoods. Another, “Nature’s a Trip”, is a psychedelic-themed film and billboard campaign that highlights nature as our ultimate medicine; “The Slow Brew” pitches the coffee break as a pocket of time not for “endless doomscrolling”, but as a chance to slow down and align with nature; and, just in time for Valentine’s Day, “The Ecokamasutra” offers a pocket guide for exploring the “eroticism in nature” that surrounds everyone, every day.

In addition to Leo Burnett, agencies Wieden+Kennedy, The&Partnership, Amplify and Oliver contributed to the Agency for Nature launch, which is grant-funded. Brewerton acknowledges that is not self-sustaining and that they will need to identify alternative financing models if the idea of campaigning on nature’s behalf is to have a real impact on the fashion, or other consumer-based, industries.

“We know we need to achieve a paradigm shift within the ad industry, but we’re sort of operating within the confines of the system that we’re in,” says Brewerton. “These sorts of projects are about inspiring what they should be using their creativity on — what does the future look like, and what are the kinds of things we could be doing as an advertising industry?”

There’s been a tendency in sustainability conversations to criticise companies, initiatives or ideas without offering alternatives, and many say the need to develop concrete solutions is long overdue. That’s what Brewerton hopes organisations like Purpose Disruptors and Agency for Nature can do, and she sees momentum building; the Irish government, for example, recently announced support and funding for one of the projects she’s involved in, Good Life 2030.

“To create change, you have to build the new, and you have to demonstrate interesting ways in which you can use your creativity for good. I think people get excited about seeing the possibility of the work they can do, as opposed to being told what they shouldn’t be doing,” she says. "