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Advance reviews of Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity by Tom Crompton and Tim Kasser

“Never have environmental problems appeared [...]

I spent Saturday at a meeting on the psychological and political challenge of facing climate change at UWE.
George Marshall delivered the opening lecture – in witty and thought-provoking style. He guided us through the evidence for the deployment of ‘emotional management strategies’ or ‘psychological coping mechanisms’ that people use when confronted with a threat [...]

Stephen Hale, Director of the Green Alliance, published a report yesterday which calls for a new approach to the politics of climate change. It highlights the problem of the three-way stand-off between business, politicians and the public, and quite rightly identifies the primary role for government to address the problems we confront.
But, as Stephen argues, [...]

Ben Okri in today’s Times.
“[Our] only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past 30 years. It wouldn’t do just to improve the banking system - we need to redesign the whole edifice. There ought to be great cries in the land, great anger. But there [...]

I’ve spent the last two days at a conference for environmental communicators, Communicate 08. There was a recurrent issue which ran through the whole conference - about the strategies that the environment movement deploys to create change.
We heard disparate inputs from (on the one hand) Tesco’s (’Every Little Helps’ - let’s focus on successes in [...]

Here’s a Thought for the Day piece from Alastair McIntosh, reflecting on the “conundrum.. that we need more consumption to save the economy, but less to save the planet. Spending our way out of a recession”, he suggests, “is therefore only a stop-gap measure. It’s methadone for our planetary heroin addiction.”
The transcript follows, but you [...]

Jules Peck just sent me this link to a document produced by the Australian Psychological Society, offering “suggestions for dealing with distressing feelings when learning about environmental problems”.
Although environmental threats are real and can be frightening, remaining in a state of heightened distress is not helpful for ourselves or for others. We generally cope [...]

A couple from Hampshire cash in on Tesco’s offer to provide free air-miles in exchange for recycling: a particularly vivid example of rebound, when the use of the financial rewards from doing something ‘green’ totally undermines any environmental benefits of this. The irony is lost on the author of this piece in the [...]

Gurjit Singh, President of NUS Scotland, is participating in WWF’s ‘Natural Change’ project. He writes: So How do you explain dancing at the top of a mountain, laughing uncontrollably, roaring with anger and frustration?
I don’t know if you can - it’s something that just happens. I thought I was mad. I thought I was experiencing [...]

The assertion that we can achieve the emission reductions we need through pursuit of the ‘business-case for sustainable development’ cries out to be stared hard in the face, and a recent paper from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research seems to do just that.
First, ‘Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission [...]