What is an ecological identity?
I just re-read a paper, ‘Constructing and Maintaining Ecological Identities: the Strategies of Deep Ecologists’ by Steve Zavetoski in a book entitled ‘Identity and the Natural Environment’. Steve contributed a comment to this site a while back.
The paper explores whether an ecological identity can be a meaningful concept, given that our [...]

I’ve just been reading The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Consumption, edited by Tim Jackson. Taken as a whole, the book makes a powerful case for the failings of our consumer society to make us happy (drawing attention even to evidence that “healthy psychological and social functioning may even be impaired by high levels of materialism”). [...]

I’ve talked to many people over the course of the last month or two about our ‘connection’ with nature, or our ‘embeddedness’ in nature. Many people have suggested to me that we would do better if we had a greater collective awareness of the fact that we are ‘part of nature’. What does this mean? [...]

Have a look at this excerpt from a speech last month by Rt Hon James Purnell MP, the new UK Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport. Given that it’s coming from a government minister, you may need to read it twice.
“There is something else that should be taken for granted: that the arts [...]

I asked Wesley Schultz to comment on the accuracy of my reflections on his work in an earlier post. Here is the subsequent email exchange that we had, which he is happy for me to post up.
Tom: Wes, I’d be interested to know whether you feel that the short post I wrote on your work [...]

We’ve just been given a copy of Mark Edwards and Lloyd Timberlake’s book ‘Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature‘, which sets the words of Bob Dylan’s song ‘Hard Rain’ to photographs. Michael Edwards writes, in the introduction:
“On the heath, Lear asks Gloucester how he sees the world. Gloucester, who is blind, answers: ‘I [...]

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change concluded that the costs of inaction on climate change could rise to 20 per cent of GDP, or more, each year. By contrast, “the costs of action… can be limited to around 1 per cent of global GDP each year”.
There was a widespread expectation that the [...]

Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction is a documentary film that “explores the mass extinction, its six main causes, the cultural myths and values that drive it, the psychology that underpins it, and the latest insights into natural systems that could help us turn back the tide”. There is a ten-minute teaser. The first [...]

Wesley Schultz, a psychologist at the University of California, who specialises in the psychology of sustainable development, suggests that there is a spectrum of approaches to getting people to change their behaviour.
At one end of the spectrum, Schultz suggests the rational choice model, which emphasises egoistic motives for sustainable behaviour. Accordingly, if you are going [...]

I was approached recently at the Bristol Festival of Nature by someone conducting a survey for the Environment Agency, on the occasion of World Environment Day (5th June, 2007). I was asked; “What is the number one thing you are doing to help tackle climate change?”, and “What one extra thing could you do to [...]