Do you ever get that sense of hopelessness at what we are doing to the planet? Hopelessness at our societies’ apparent incapacity to grasp just how serious and irreversible the situation is? Despair that we are not taking the radical action to change the course we’ve set on a scale even approaching anything near what is needed?
It’s almost as if the glasses through which we view the world are tinted so that we can’t see the long-term reality of today’s actions and their future consequences. Instead skewing our vision so that we are more interested in maintaining the economic status quo, and our lifestyle, than maintaining a livable planet. Why is this? It seems insane for all of humanity not to be making superhuman efforts to change our course to a more sustainable one.
In relation to the influence and the environmental impact that we, as humans in affluent western industrialised nations have on the planet, there is one factor that is at the root of our behaviour, choices and attitudes. That factor is the thought that creates the action, or human psychology. Psychology underlies the very reasons we make the choices we make and is the main influence on all our decisions from the mundane to the life changing. Some of the main factors that influence the psychology of every individual include prevailing culture, childhood experiences, media, peer group pressure, and life experiences to name just a few.
In terms of attitudes and behaviour towards the environment, the way that we as individuals, groups, companies and societies think of, react to and behave towards the natural environment leads to either negative environmental impacts, or the positive outcomes that have begun to manifest in the last few decades. Hugely outweighing any positives outcomes though, are the negative and destructive decisions that are made by individuals, groups and governments on a daily basis, the negative decisions that chip away at the life support systems of this planet.
These decisions include simple things like driving the car for convenience and comfort, over catching the bus or riding a bike as an environmentally friendly alternative motivated by understanding and concern of the consequences of burning fossil fuels and an acceptance of personal responsibility to reduce one’s own impact. At the other end of the scale is the U.S. government’s decision to deregulate oil exploration and drilling off the U.S coast that will have dramatic consequences for years to come.
As it is the root cause of environmental destruction, it is becoming clear that understanding our psychological attitude towards the environment is one of the keys to restoring the long-term sustainability of the planet and human civilisation.
Humanities remaining connection with Nature
The decisions we make as individuals, groups, companies and a planetary community along with the thoughts, feelings and motivations behind those decisions, make US the main architect of the environmental problems created in industrialised nations, where extreme or mass poverty isn’t an all consuming issue.
A new and emerging field that studies our psychological relationship with the planet first emerged in the 1990′s. Ecopsychology explores the inbuilt and inherently deep connection that humanity has with the environment that is a core part of our evolutionary heritage.
Hunter gatherer origins
As a species, we have evolved to live in the natural environment over millions of years, with the civilising process only taking place in the past 10,000 years. Starting with the Agricultural revolution, the Bronze age, the Iron age, and continuing as the sophistication, planetary population explosion and technological advancement of humanity, the process is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace as we make our human environment more and more comfortable and safe against the unpredictability and violence of nature.
This civilising process has in effect, divorced us from interacting with the natural environment in our everyday lives. Living and surviving within the natural environment is not the norm for most of humanity today. So we no longer experience the reality that, as a species, we are in fact connected to all life as well as dependant upon the well being of the natural environment at a deep and organic level.
Primordial Minds
Technical and civic evolution is happening at a far faster rate than our psychological and physiological evolution so we are out of sync. Our primordial minds are still expecting to be surrounded by nature, while our drive for progress pushes away from nature and towards technological advancement that leads us further and further into psychologically alienating territory. Said another way, our surroundings are in the technical age but our psychological selfs are still expecting to inhabit a cave, a jungle or temperate forest.
In evolutionary terms 10,000 years is a mere drop in the ocean, and little significant evolutionary change, especially given our fundamentally nature-immersed psychology, could occur to allow us to accommodate our civilising technological advancement process. We have advanced so rapidly that the global human population, through advanced food production, medical care and resource availability, has exploded from just 1.5 million 2000 years ago to a world population of 6.85 billion today and growing at a rate of 204,000 people every day, roughly about one-seventh of the world’s population 2000 years ago.
The War on Nature
We still have the same psychological blue print that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had prior to the beginning of the civilising process. The only outward difference between us and them comes from our more complex and technologically advanced society and the technological benefits that these advancements give us. These advantages have led us to form societal paradigms that seemingly assert our superiority over nature and our perceived ability to create an existence independent from the unpredictability of nature.
Like the tortoise and the hare, our progressive mind is speeding ahead in the race of its own evolution against nature and against our relaxed natural state of being. However in this race the consequences and stakes are much higher than a simple competition to be first to the finish line.
The war on nature has intensified ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution where, in the name of progress, the quest for more and more resources to fuel the fledgling industrial juggernauts emerging around the world started to turn the industrialised world view more and more towards the commoditisation of the planet and human beings in the name of progress, growth and profit. Industrialisation pulled more and more people out of the natural environment where they had worked with their hands for generations, and placed them in alienating urban environments, working in mechanised factory settings. This process continues to today where 50 percent of people live in disconnected urban settings and have become purely units of production and consumption in an entirely economic-focused paradigm for life. This is a pattern of thinking and living that has, in the last 35 years, been recognised as grossly unsustainable both environmentally and socially and, from an Ecopsychological perspective, a pathologically insane path to follow.
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