Summary – Techno-industrial societies face harsh biophysical limits and the negative consequences of disrupting Earth’s ecosystems. This new reality creates a new behavioral context with an unmistakable demand: Citizens of such societies must turn away from seeking new resources and new way to use those resources, toward the crafting of new living patterns that respond well to energy descent and which function well within finite ecosystems. This coming transition, even if unwelcome, is nonetheless inevitable. However, our response is not preordained. Indeed, given the complex, multi-decade-long context, the required pro-environmental behaviors cannot be fully known in advance. Furthermore, the urgency to respond will necessitate that whole clusters of behavior be adopted; our history of incremental and serial change will not suffice. Thus, a culture of small experiments must be nurtured.
This new reality and the process of social change needed to respond well, will seriously tax our individual and group psychological capacities (e.g., social, emotional, cognitive). Thus, priority must be placed on emotional stability and clear-headedness, maintaining social relationships while stressed, pro-actively managing behavior and a willingness to reskill. These aspects of coping share a common foundation: the maintenance of attentional vitality and psychological well-being. Changes also must occur in how pro-environmental behaviors are promoted. We must move beyond interventions that are expert-driven, modest in request, serial in implementation, and short-term in horizon. New interventions must create the conditions under which citizens become behavioral entrepreneurs, themselves creating, managing and sharing successful approaches to behavior change.
Highlights
- Resource limits and climate disruption have created a new biophysical context characterized by a long, drawn-out descent,
- An initial aspect of this is an unexpected and sudden decline in surplus energy,
- The result is a new behavioral context that the social sciences are only slowly coming to understand,
- One major challenge is that the environmental behaviors needed later this century cannot be fully known in advance, yet we must somehow begin to plan for them now. This apparent paradox requires a new approach to behavior change strategies,
- Attentional vitality and psychological equipoise are essential for the envisioning and behavioral planning needed now, and the behavior change that follows,
- Clusters of behavior must be adopted; the past focus on serial and incremental change will not suffice, and
- By understanding the conditions under which human’s envision, plan, and manage their behavior, then situations can be created whereby citizens become behavioral entrepreneurs.
Raymond De Young
School for Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Updated: May 5, 2021
Archived: June 13, 2019 at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/149468
Open Access: The original chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
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