Introduction
The image that keeps coming to my mind is a nightmarish one inspired by Edgar Allen Poe. We are all in a room with four walls, a floor, a ceiling and no windows or door. The room is furnished and some of us are sitting comfortably, others most definitely are not. The walls are advancing inwards graduallyā¦ making us all more uncomfortable, advancing all the time, threatening to crush us to death. There are discussions within the room, but they are mostly about how to arrange the furniture. People do not seem to see the walls advancing. (Holloway 2010, p. 8)
āThe walls closing inā is in some sense an apt analogy for the contemporary convergence of ecological crises, and our seeming inability to avert our predicament. John Holloway uses the analogy, in the passage cited here, to convey the apparently āunstoppable advance of capitalā as it pushes us ever closer to ecological destruction (Holloway 2010, pp. 8ā9). It also captures the conjunction of a broader set of drivers of unfolding environmental crises, in evocative temporal and spatial dimensions. Global temperatures, peak oil predictions, species extinctions, deforestation, glacier melting, desertification and the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, for example, are often framed and animated in terms of what is already experienced as loss for some (Gupta 2011), and what further losses are to come, often with precise timescales, associated calculations of harms, multiple projected scenarios of scarcity and related problems for humanity. 1 For those lucky enough to be not, as yet, directly and detrimentally experiencing the effects of environmental crises, their reality, in other places or near futures, is communicated with mounting sophistication and urgencyāthe walls are closing in.
Consequently, there is a need for change and therefore action, commonly formulated as a need for āsustainable developmentā. Despite the extensive debate over the specific nature of unsustainable human behaviour, there is little doubt that consumption practices are central. As such, consumption is seen as a primary site of responsibilization and potential transformation. In line with this logic, āchange-agentsā combine information with attempts to persuade a significant proportion of the populations of wealthy nations to modify their consumption habits (Mazur 2011; Monroe 2003; Moser and Dilling 2006).
The first step in this process might reasonably be considered to be raising awareness and sharing concernāto get us to notice that the walls are closing in. This is the motivation behind information campaigns, the regular IPCC reports, increasingly sophisticated forms of communication, and to date, most policy approaches devoted to encouraging sustainable behaviour. But as the last two sentences of Hollowayās quote indicate, there is a common perception that our response to date has been wholly insufficient. Inaction tends to be formulated as resistance to significantly shift consumption habits, but we might add, following Norgaard, the lack of a broader and sustained āpublic responseā, that includes āsocial movement activity, behavioural changes, or public pressure on governmentsā (Norgaard 2006, p. 373).
The lack of change is articulated as unsurprising by an emerging ācritical consensusā in the social sciences (Adams 2012). Theory and research on sustainable behaviour in the social sciences increasingly questions individualistic models of behaviour change, emphasizing, for example, the causal role attitudes, motivations or norms play in behaviour (e.g. Webb 2012). The infamous āgapā between values and actions, or attitudes and behaviour, is the widely shared basis for this critique, here identified by Warde as the āpuzzleā¦ that, if asked, almost everyone is in favour of protecting and preserving the environment and slowing climate change... However, people do not act consistently on the basis of their declared values and best intentionsā (Warde 2013, p. 2) Despite the meaningful persistence of scepticism in some quarters, environmental destruction is increasingly accepted as a reality, as a consequence of human behaviour, and as a phenomena which is significantly impacting, and will have further impact on human and nonhuman life. 2 The salient feature of a range of critiques here is the claim āthat social context has been undertheorized and researched in psychological work on environmental problems and solutions, resulting in individualistic understanding of human practices and misguided policy interventions assuming people behave as rational agentsā (Adams 2012, p. 217; Szerszynski and Urry 2010; Uzzell and RƤthzel 2009; Webb 2010).
How we might productively cultivate this insight is more contested. Subsequent developments take off in various disciplinary directions, taking in psychology, social sciences and the humanities, anthropology and numerous interdisciplinary endeavours with arts and natural sciences. The focus of this book is a number of these strands, with a specific emphasis on the psychosocial. What does it mean to approach the issue of ecological crisis and sustainability psychosocially? The modest hope of this book is to bear witness to the ways in which human beings embody, and are embedded in, the social, material and cultural infrastructure at the heart of anthropogenic ecocide. To do so requires an interrogation of societal structures and their subjective dimensions, often lurking in the background as given in āweakā approaches sustainability (RƤthzel and Uzzell 2009).
In the chapters that follow, these dimensions intersect to the extent that they are often purposefully dissolvedāinto units of analysis that are conceptualized as hybrids of both, articulating the in between. This is the basis for what I consider to be a psychosocial approach, my understanding of which is indebted to Paul Stennerās work. He defines the psychosocial as āan approach which attends to experience as it unfolds in and informs those networks and regimes of social interactivity (practice and communication) that constitute concrete historical and cultural settingsā (2014, p. 205). Like Stenner, I adhere to an open, non-foundational definition of the psychosocial, and avoid collapsing it into a version of (social) psychoanalysis, which has sometimes been the case in the history of the termās use. I am interested in developing an account which emphasizes the āoften unrecognized, vague and fuzzy spaces inbetween forms of reality, knowledge and practiceā (Brown and Stenner 2009, p. 49). I am unapologetically drawn to those perspectives that recognize this vital dimension and avoid the more obvious traps of psychological reductionism and social determinism in doing so. Echoing Stenner again,
a psychosocial approach is valuable because questions of psychology can be very poorly posed when abstracted from their cultural, societal and historical settings, and likewise, because these settings are poorly understood in abstraction from the living, experiencing human beings whose actions make their reproduction and transformation possible. (Stenner 2014, p. 206)
Understanding human behaviour in an unprecedented era of anthropogenic ecological crisis demands this level of explanation. It is the only hope we have for making sense of how humans comprehend and respond to an ecological crisis that reflexively embeds them in it.
Chapter Guide
Chapter 2 first provides a brief overview of the ecological crisis as it is commonly understood by an international scientific consensus. It adopts a critical realist standpoint in relation to anthropogenic ecological degradation, and this position is explained, with reference to the geological concept of the Anthropocene. The second focus of this chapter is to reflect on how ecological degradation is communicated. A key element of this communication is of course information about the role of human behaviour in creating and maintaining ecological degradation. Science communicators have often worked on the basis of an information-deficit model, with the implication that more and better information is needed to provoke more sustainable behaviour. To date, however, the impact of information and its communication, whether measured in terms of changes in individual consumption patterns or a significant āpublic responseā, has been claimed to be negligible (Webb 2010). As a result, sociologists...