Lean times ahead: Preparing for a resource-constrained future
Summary – Society soon will face significant biophysical limits to growth. Natural resource availability will slowly tighten and then begin a long drawn-out descent while expenditures rise to address the damage caused by past resource consumption. It is difficult to know when this scenario will begin to unfold but it clearly constitutes an entirely new behavioral context,
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The Role of Psychology in Preparing for Lean Times
Summary – A one-time era of vast energy and natural resources allowed modern civilization to emerge and flourish. This gift of abundant resources supported the building of industrial society’s urban settlements and physical infrastructure. The material richness also supported the creation of a consumerist society now characterized by a massive global flow of goods and services.
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Environmental Psychology
Summary – Environmental psychology is a field of study that examines the interrelationship between environments and human affect, cognition, and behavior (Bechtel & Churchman 2002; Gifford 2007; Stokols & Altman 1987). The field has always been concerned with both built and natural environments with early research emphasizing the former (Stokols 1995;
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Averting the Tragedy of the Commons
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Transitioning to a new normal
Summary – Like many environmentalists, the journal Ecopsychology undergoing periodic re-visioning. This paper imagines how practitioners might help people to prepare for the harder times ahead. It suggests that psychologists are well positioned to help people envision an alternative to our current relationship with resources,
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Motivating the process of localization with a conservation aesthetic
Summary – Encouraging people to transition to durable living might be done using a variety of psychological strategies. However, engaging people in ways that help them to flourish during what will likely be a long and challenging process is better accomplished by focusing their attention on an inner transition — one involving intrinsic satisfactions and behavioral aesthetics — rather than relying on bluster and coercion.
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Small experiments for the coming downshift
Summary – The circumstances being faced are urgent, some global, some personal, many overwhelming. It would seem that only large responses will suffice. But this is a version of the homeopathic delusion (Berry 2011): here that only large collective-action solutions can respond to large problems.
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