Environmentally Focused Psychologies

Thomas Doherty: Greetings. This discussion brings together a group of psychologists to discuss their work in the context of the evolving development of areas such as environmental, population, and conservation psychology, ecopsychology, and the psychology of fostering sustainability. The dialog serves as a useful introduction to the diversity of environmental psychology approaches and illustrates how subjects such as identity, human–nature relationships, wellbeing, conservation, sustainability, and other issues can benefit from a psychological perspective. Each participant was selected based on his or her involvement in this area, and all will be meeting again in the summer of 2011 at the American Psychological Association (APA) conference in Washington, DC.

Participants will speak briefly about their background, share some examples of their work, and discuss how they see their approach in terms of descriptors such as environmental, population, or conservation psychology, ecopsychology, or the psychology of fostering sustainability or other descriptors. After brief reports from all participants, the group will engage in a dialog on the similarities and differences between these endeavors, ways to promote interdisciplinary understanding and collaboration, and applications of these approaches in real-world context. We begin with Susan Clayton.

Susan Clayton: I think we all came through this area from very different directions, so I will start by talking about my background. I was trained in mainstream social psychology. I did my dissertation with Bob Abelson at Yale, and you cannot get much more theoretical, lab-based social psychology than that. This is very much an important part of my background.

But I was also fortunate while at Yale to work with Fay Crosby, who has been very instrumental in research on gender discrimination. Fay showed me that it was possible to take this social psychological theory and actually apply it to real-world problems. I had always been interested in environmental issues as well as injustice; and as I left graduate school and began to develop my own independent existence, I started to look at the ways people thought about environmental issues and environmental justice and began to sense that the domain of the natural environment was a distinctive one in many ways. People thought about it differently. It raised different ideas about justice. People tended to make different kinds of decisions, and ultimately, they thought about themselves differently—or at least the natural environment could affect the way they thought about themselves in a distinctive way.

I began to think about people's sense of self and their identity with regard to the natural environment, and I developed this environmental identity scale to try to get a sense of how people think of themselves in relation to the natural world. And I tried to take that work in a direction that was very appropriate for mainstream social psychology: looking to see that this is a valid construct and that it predicted the appropriate things. It does predict behavior, for example.

But I was always mindful of the idea that this could also have practical implications, increasingly so as my work went along. When I say practical implications, I mean both for people—their mental states and their well being—and also for the health of the natural environment. So with my environmental identity work, I have been doing work in zoos to look at the ways in which people might create or sustain an environmental identity for themselves. But moving even beyond that—to the idea of how the natural world becomes part not just of our personal identity but of our social identity and our social environment—I am currently very interested in looking at this work in a cross-cultural context. I have been working with and talking to people in Turkey, China, and Egypt to examine the way in which the natural identity is part of identity within those very different social environments.

What I also wanted to mention was how I would characterize my approach, particularly with regard to the label of conservation psychology. This was a label that was very deliberately developed not just by me but by a group of people, and the goal was never to mark a territory—that everything within this territory is conservation psychology and everything else is not conservation psychology—but to serve as a label that would help people identify work that is relevant to the question of what is the human relationship to the natural world. Conservation psychology, both the way I see it and the way I think it is constructed more generally, encompasses both basic and applied work. It encompasses multiple subdisciplinary perspectives of psychology. It is designed to be collaborative, to work with people from other disciplines, and it is primarily mission driven.

Even though for me, personally, I am very interested in the core psychological theory, there is always this sense of valuing a particular goal: to promote a healthy relationship between humans and the natural environment. What is the reason that people care for nature? What are the consequences of human relationships with nature? What are the forms those relationships take? And really how can a healthy relationship be encouraged?

Thomas Doherty: Thank you very much, Susan. This was an excellent lead-in. We are going to move on to Steven Handwerker.

Steven Handwerker: My background begins with an interest in consciousness, something in the fashion of William James, who said that atoms and consciousness have incredibly valid contributions to make in the field of truth and psychology. This interest began for me in my early childhood. Later, I went on to New York University, where I studied with Isidor Chein, who was a wonderful friend. Dr. Chein, a social justice activist, was one of the founders of The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). I attained a Ph.D. in clinical and community psychology from New York University and a postdoctoral degree from Hofstra University, and then I went further and got a doctor of divinity degree, all in pursuit of understanding the relationship between consciousness and the world.

Throughout the course of my studies and my life I have found that nature, the environment, and sustainability have been important elements in the contemplation of consciousness. I became a clinical psychologist, and through my work with patients I have learned that the attainment of a sustainable concept of self is not possible without the expansion of consciousness.

One of the things I worked to do after becoming a licensed and board-certified clinical psychologist was to establish a not-for-profit organization. The International Association for the Advancement of Human Welfare has as one of its foci of concern the issues of how resources and environment impact the lives of homeless children. As part of this particular focus, I began to work with various organizations and nongovernmental organizations in Latin America. The work led to the creation of two operational tools designed to further the integration of homeless children into the world of society.

I have also been involved in the APA, and I was the founder of the Peace and Spirituality Working Group, the intention of which has been issues of consciousness in relation to the world and the impact it has on sustainability and environmental concern. Through that working group and the work with homeless children, my efforts have evolved, and I attained a position of being a coordinator for an international crisis intervention team for Haiti—which started out as a sustainability team involved with coordinating students and leaders from industry, especially green industry—to create sustainable solutions for the Haitian peoples' survival needs as well as for the future of their community.

What I came to discover is that the three things I have focused my work on are consciousness; acceptance, or the Buddhist concept of tathata; and service.

What I have discovered through the Peace and Spirituality working group, which is part of APA Division 48 (The Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology Division), as well as the work I have done with homeless children is that it is the creation of arenas of education that promote a potential shift in consciousness. It is the shift in consciousness that translates into a great concern for ecology and a shift in social norms in communities, whether it be an impoverished area or a more developed area.

The paradigm that I am working with in Haiti is the creation of sustainable and humanitarian interventions. The intention is to bring together multidisciplinary crews of people from the different divisions of APA to contribute operational journals, which are effective on the ground for people in the community. These operational journals integrate the values and self-concept of the people who are participating and lead to the creation of sustainable community models. It is the local citizens who define their needs, and they are primarily responsible for creating changes. Once the model is created based on each community's specific needs, they are then given the opportunity to seek help from experts in various disciplines to help make that sustainable and humanitarian shift in their condition. This is the relevant work that I have been developing, and I continue as a clinical psychologist in private practice as well as coordinate the international advisory team for Haiti.

Thomas Doherty: Steven, could you speak for a moment about the descriptors that you use to describe your work?

Dr. Handwerker: We are interested in building sustainable self-concepts, creating a shift of awareness in the people who we are working with, and being of service—all of this work is pro bono—as experts for the people on the ground so that they can create their own sustainable paradigm. Then, we use these paradigms in different areas of this country and abroad.

Thomas Doherty: Thank you very much, Steven. I am going to move us on to Christie Manning.

Christie Manning: I had an engineering degree, so I started out pretty far from psychology, although I always had a strong personal interest in environmental sustainability issues. I went on to get a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, and like Susan, I was trained in a traditional cognitive and experimental program. It was only later that I realized that with cognitive and experimental training, I could combine my work with the things I did when I got home from work, which were environmental activism sorts of things.

As a postdoc living in Germany, I discovered the field called Umweltpsychologie that is not like classical environmental psychology—in Germany it was more specifically about the psychology of fostering conservation and fostering sustainability. When I returned to the United States and my hometown of St. Paul, MN, I discovered that there were two other psychologists in the area doing similar work to what I had begun to do in Germany—which I think is both conservation psychology and the psychology of fostering sustainability, so those are the two fields that I identify with.

The psychologists that I met were Britain Scott and Elise Amel, both at University of St. Thomas. Britain is a social psychologist like Susan, and Elise is an industrial organizational psychologist. The three of us have been working together for the past 7 years. Our work is research oriented and applied. We do a lot of work with local nonprofits and also with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. We take research findings in psychology and our own findings, and we help these nonprofits and the Pollution Control Agency work on their efforts to educate the community or to have effective behavior change campaigns around issues such as clean water. As part of that work, I created a handbook of psychological findings that are relevant to creating sustainability campaigns. It is called The Psychology of Sustainable Behavior. People can download it from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Web site.

My own personal interests are in the psychological aspects of environmental communication. So the projects that I spearhead tend to be about framing the science of environmental issues, how scientists communicate issues, and how environmental discourses are invoked by media portrayals of global climate change. I look at how the information and presentation can facilitate or prevent people from engaging with an issue. Most recently, I have been interested in psychological distance and applying some of the work on psychological distance to people's reaction to global climate change.

The research that I do with Britain and Elise is broad considering that we come from three fairly different backgrounds. Some of our work looks at goal setting and how you can frame different personal goals toward lowering your carbon footprint. Britain, Elise, and I have also done some work on mindfulness and whether it takes a level of mindfulness to engage in issues of sustainability or personal lifestyle changes. The last thing that we have been working on together is developing a scale for people's participation in nature and to what extent people engage in activities such as outdoor camping or foraging for food, and whether that participation in nature affects the level at which people engage in other sorts of behaviors such as intentionally choosing a lower-impact lifestyle.

Thomas Doherty: Thank you very much, Christie. This is great. I am going to move on to Gregory Wilmoth.

Gregory Wilmoth: My initial undergraduate and graduate training was in anthropology, and anthropology has continued to influence my thinking deeply. I subsequently went on and got a Ph.D. in social psychology, in a traditional social psychology approach, but my interest is always in applications of social psychology. While I was doing my graduate training in social psychology, I was in a combined social and community program. I got involved in doing volunteer family planning work with Planned Parenthood, which was part of my interest in population psychology. But my training, my dissertation research, was actually in environmental psychology in terms of privacy and crowding. It was only later, when I went as a policy fellow to APA in the late 1980s and early 1990s and did work on the psychological sequelae of abortion, which is a population topic, that I was welcomed into the population psychology community. Even though I have not done population research since the mid-1990s, I have continued to stay involved with that community and am interested in their topics.

Population psychology covers a wide range of topics, and I just want to acknowledge the diversity of research that is done. A lot of it is focused on family planning decisions, including number of children, timing of children, gender preferences—as well as who has influence in decisions about those topics, whether it is the male or the female spouse—choice of birth control methods, teenage pregnancy, sexual behavior, sexually transmitted diseases, adoption, abortion, single-child families, and precursors of deciding to migrate and psychological effects of migrating.

There are population psychologists who specialize in all of those different topics, but my approach to population is my own. My comments are my own, and they do not necessarily reflect the prevailing views of other population psychologists. For me, I focus on the intersection between population psychology and environment. At the last APA convention, former Division 34 President Joe Rogers gave an invited address on that topic. I want to expand on that, and I want to begin by saying that I think it is critically important to recognize that population is neither an independent nor a dependent variable. Population is the result of human beliefs and actions, and population itself impacts human beliefs and actions through other kinds of mediated processes.

The context for me is that it is new technology more than birth rates that cause the population explosion that we experience today. It is fewer people dying, especially during childhood, that drove population growth in the last century. It takes at least a generation, often more, for the birth rates to adjust to the new death rates. This gap, if you will, between the birth rates and death rates causes tremendous population growth.

The rise in the human population over the last 5000 years is the result of many technological advances such as domestication of plants and animals, irrigation, medicine such as vaccines and antibiotics, transportation to be able to move food to where the people are, advancements in public health such as sewage treatment and water purification, and chemical fertilizers—lots of different technologies.

The control of population growth depends upon technology, such as birth control pills and other devices. Psychology is critical in helping us to determine the reasons why people use it and how they use it. A lot of population psychologists focus on those topics. Religious beliefs and cultural beliefs are important, but other things such as increasing the education level of women and providing economic equality for women have dramatic effects on birth rates.

These effects of population, as I said earlier, are mediated by human decisions and actions. The examples that I am going to focus on primarily are going to deal with water. Turkmenistan uses about 5000 m³ per person of water per year, whereas Uzbekistan, Turkistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan are all withdrawing 2000 m³ or more of water per year. This is 10 times more than the amount of water used per capita by the people in Great Britain. The 62 million residents of Great Britain use less water than the 5 million residents of Turkmenistan.

Some of the reasons for that are that these former Soviet countries are in an arid climate, and Great Britain is not, so they require more irrigation. But the irrigation systems are very inefficient, with high rates of water loss. And they grow cotton for export, which is a very water-intensive crop. So, as these examples suggest, countries with large agricultural exports use more water.

But the other way of thinking about it, another way of flipping it, is to look at the water usage in terms of the water footprint of a country. The water footprint takes into account the water used to produce the food and goods imported into the country. For example, every cup of coffee that is imported into a country requires about 140 L of water to produce. The water used to produce that coffee shows up in the country where the coffee is raised. The water footprint of the country where the coffee is consumed would show that water being used in that country for the coffee that they import.

The Netherlands is the fifth highest per capita coffee-consuming country in the world. Their footprint would show the effect of the coffee that they import on their water consumption. The Netherlands is also a good example for water usage in other ways. The household water usage in The Netherlands fell by 7% between 1990 and 2006 because of better technology and changes in behavior. But because the population of The Netherlands has increased by 9.5% during that same time period, the overall household water went up, even though the rate went down, because the population increased more than the reduction in the water usage per person. To maintain current water usage rates, countries need to improve their technology and change behaviors enough to offset the population increases.

Lots of government policies, consumer preferences, and individual behaviors affect how much water is used. It is not directly the effect of population on water usage as it is all of these individual and group decisions and preferences and beliefs and behaviors. I will end right there for now.

Thomas Doherty: Thank you very much, Greg. Now, I will talk a little bit about my background. I approach this area from the perspective of my training in clinical psychology and see myself as a generalist in terms of the various sorts of environmental psychologies. In terms of my clinical psychology background, I have a number of interests within psychology, including professional practice, group leadership, and health psychology, and some of the theoretical orientations within clinical practice, such as cognitive-behavioral and existential-humanistic perspectives.

My focus tends to be in the area of ecopsychology, which is a broad term that describes ecological worldviews or social movements that recognize the synergies between human mental health and the health and integrity of the natural environment. I see ecopsychology as overlapping with other content areas, such as the environmental, conservation, and population psychology and sustainability work that has been described earlier in this discussion.

I am pleased to hear the different, unique stories described in our conversation, and my story is unique is well. My undergraduate training was in English literature, and an early interest in teaching led me to work with young people. But I chose to work with adjudicated youth in outdoor programs. So partly by interest and partly by chance I was thrust into the world of outdoor rehabilitation programs, what would be called wilderness therapy or outdoor behavioral healthcare, and did that work for a number of years—both as a field staff leading those trips, including leading extended backcountry expeditions, and then later as a supervisor helping to coordinate the family therapy that went along with these trips. These are sort of Outward Bound–style programs that have an explicitly therapeutic focus.

Counseling training led on to further training in clinical psychology and eventually a doctorate degree in clinical psychology. My doctoral research was in the area of health psychology and behavioral medicine—mind–body health—researching effects of anxiety and depression, for example, on individuals recovering from heart disease or cardiac surgery.

Following my degree, I began to integrate an environmental focus and the lessons I had learned from wilderness therapy into my work with clients and in the teaching of counseling students. This led to my current focus, working to develop the interest area of ecopsychology and bringing it into alignment with the other existing research and practice within psychology, editing the journal Ecopsychology, which is in its third year, and working on initiatives with the APA.

I was very lucky to be a part of the recent APA Task Force on Climate Change. As an example of how my clinical psychology background interfaces with that work, I was able to collaborate with Susan Clayton in describing the psychological impacts of climate change, an area that has received less focus than the biophysical and the structural impacts of climate change. This is an area where I see psychologists coming from areas outside of the population, environmental, or conservation areas that can contribute.

Most recently, I have been helping to develop an Ecopsychology in Counseling training program at Lewis & Clark College, where master's level students can get a counseling degree—in marriage and family therapy, for example—that will prepare them to become a licensed professional counselor, and can also study empirically supported work in environmentally focused psychology. This will be one of the first programs in the country that allows you to study this area in an accredited, licensing track, counseling program. This is very exciting.

Part of my joy of working in this field is that there is so much to learn, as you can see from the discussion. Recently, I have developed and taught an environmental psychology class for undergraduates at Lewis & Clark, which allowed me to really get into that work and use texts like Gifford's Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice. Recently, I have been working with individuals like Carol Saunders and Wesley Schultz on developing conservation psychology training. In particular, my interest is reaching conservation professionals working in the field, say in government agencies or environmental nonprofits, who really could benefit from some of the psychological know-how that exists in this field.

That is a little bit about my background. In terms of descriptors, I lead with ecopsychology because I think that it is a very interesting area, and it has a lot to contribute to this overall community of environmentally focused psychologies. But again, I see myself as a bit of a generalist. It makes me, I think, a stronger practitioner to try and understand these different specialty areas. I do not think it is possible to actually be an expert in all of these things. It is much too broad. But I do think it is important for some of us to try to work as generalists.

I would like to talk a little bit about what people see as some of the key similarities and differences between these different endeavors, some ways to promote interdisciplinary understanding and collaboration within the broader field of environmentally focused psychologies, possibly ways to describe this to students and individuals working in other areas or other disciplines, and potential synergies people see in the work we are talking about today.

Steven Handwerker: Thank you, Thomas. In terms of the psychology of fostering sustainability but also in terms of common denominators, I see that what every one of us has contributed seems to encompass five pillars of concern or concentration. One is the whole idea of humanitarian concern or intervention. This includes medical needs, survival needs, and even sustainability needs. The second pillar or variable I see is the whole idea of limited resources and growing population, the reality of that, and sustainability issues in themselves and the need for green technology, period, no matter how we look at it.

Also there is the issue of infrastructure. It seems that without dealing with our infrastructure and the cultural norms, nothing is going to change and we are just going to be slowly eating up the precious resources. Another issue I see is human rights and the need for human rights education. Last but not least, there is the issue of economic development. I just wanted to mention that I see these as common denominators of concern for all of us.

Susan Clayton: I very much like the pillars that Steve just identified. I would just add a couple that are more general. I think we all are very much committed to the relevance of theory to practice, the importance of developing our more general understandings of human behavior and human psychology but then of applying them to make a difference. We are all also very conscious of the interdependence between human and environmental wellbeing. As an aside, I think part of our cultural history in the United States has been too great a distinction between humans and the natural environment. The recognition that humans are part of the ecosystem is really, I think, what we are all trying to confront in different ways.

I also want to speak to Thomas' question of how to encourage all of these different perspectives to work together, or at least benefit from each other. This conversation is a great start, and we need more opportunities to not defend our turf in terms of saying, “This is my area, and these are different areas,” but to come together in ways that recognize similarities. I will be editing a handbook of environmental and conservation psychology that is an attempt to include some of the more mainstream, traditional areas of environmental psychology and make the connection to some of the newer areas of conservation psychology. This is another forum in which we can encourage links between different perspectives as opposed to isolating our different communities.

Just to be a bit provocative, I think one difference that may have emerged from our perspectives is whether we describe the situation in terms of human health and consciousness versus behavior. It would be interesting to hear what other people have to say about that. It is not that I think any of us would say one or the other is not important, but the question is which comes first. I think those of us with training in social psychology might tend to focus on behavior first, and those with training in clinical psychology might tend to focus on mental health first. Others may disagree with that characterization.

Gregory Wilmoth: I would like to add to the conversation by saying that I think in addition to the cognitive part and the behavioral part, there is also an important broader social and political part that we need to look at. That is, governments—whether they are state, local, or national—have policies. Those policies affect the way resources are used and the way people behave. Our impact can be made much broader by focusing on political decision-making rather than on individual decision-making, whether it be land use planning for smart growth or requiring low-energy usage light bulbs or low-flush toilets. Policies have very large impacts as soon as they are adopted by a particular governmental unit.

Steven Handwerker: I want to echo what Greg is saying in terms of the significance of political and governmental issues. But also I see that as an interaction with consciousness, issues of consciousness, awareness and values. For example, in my community, I started an environmental awareness program. It is a 3500-family community. I just started writing about recycling, and I am publishing in the local newspaper. I noticed that making people aware of the fact that the environment exists and that it is not something that is unlimited, or to be taken for granted, has a political consequence as well.

When there is more awareness and more consciousness about the values of environment and nature, and the limited resources that are so precious—animal, human, and material—it does impact politics. Then it extends to people calling up their legislators and people petitioning. There is an interaction effect, I think, between the forces of consciousness, social norms, and political and governmental policies.

I noticed over the years when I involve people from other disciplines—nurses or doctors, social workers, and people in industry—I have journals from each of those which are being contributed to the people of Haiti; when there are more disciplines involved, the possibility of raising consciousness and changing values and impacting government becomes greater.

Thomas Doherty: I want to follow-up on a few things, particularly Susan's distinction between health and behavior. I think that is very interesting, and I think that could prompt a longer conversation. What it also reminded me of was a more basic distinction in philosophy between nomothetic and ideographic forms of knowledge—or objective and subjective forms of knowledge. I see some of the communication gaps stemming from pursuit of objective knowledge, including behavior, and potentially policy, on the one hand, and addressing the more subjective concerns of individual health, consciousness, and emotions. I think we are working with some basic philosophical distinctions here, and as long as they are recognized, I think they contribute to the dialog. But when they are missed, I think we can miss each other.

I do see synergies here. There are initiatives such as “Just Sustainability”—the integration of environmental justice and sustainability—and some of the work we are doing is also an example of this “joined up” thinking.

Christie Manning: Following up on that, I have a hard time seeing these as distinctions as opposed to it being on a spectrum. Perhaps some of us end up on one end or the other of the spectrum, but all of the work that I do falls somewhere in the middle. As an example, when we talk, I look at communication and framing; and there has been work coming out, Ed Maibach's work, for example, looking at how environmental issues should be framed as issues of public health and personal health. And so talking about the neurological or developmental health issues associated with toxins, for example, is a way of taking a cognitive or a social approach to behavior change but also looking at those emotional, mental health, and human health issues. And it is not just to frame it that way but it is also to bring attention to the fact that those health implications exist.

I work in a team that is interdisciplinary within psychology, and I hope that this discussion can be the beginning of raising awareness among psychologists of different backgrounds, the relevance of these issues to their own work, and the relevance of their work to these issues. Every single lens through which we view psychology can inform what we are doing here.

The third point that I wanted to make is that people out there in the field working on issues of ecology, sustainability, and environmental justice are really hungry for this information. So it is also a form of “giving psychology away,” as I remember reading in one of Susan's articles. Our research findings make intuitive sense when we talk about them with the public. But people communicating about environmental issues, for example, when they are writing an article or putting together a brochure, do not think about the psychological implications. So it is psychology as public service for us to get our information out there in a practical form to people who want it.

Susan Clayton: I would like to pick up on that. One of the things that I think we have all thought about but did not emerge explicitly in our conversation is the perception of what psychology is and what psychology can do. Several people talked about how important it is for us to consider the political context, the importance of influencing policy as a way of having a greater impact, for example. But, as part of considering the political context, we also need to consider the sociopolitical perception of what psychology is and what psychology can do.

I think maybe the elephant in the room is the general perception that what psychologists focus on is individual wellbeing and making people feel better about themselves and something that is completely irrelevant to the natural environment. All of our work I think has tried to explicitly or implicitly address that perception and remind people what psychology can contribute to promoting sustainability.

It is not just true for the general public but, as Christie pointed out, it is also true for psychologists—you know, many psychologists were not trained to think of their work in a physical or political context. It is kind of that leap for people to say, “Oh yes, all of these things that I have been learning over the years, they actually have relevance to these social issues, and perhaps I should be thinking about how I can get involved in giving away the information that I have acquired, making it useful.”

Steven Handwerker: I have noticed that when I come forward as a human being in relation to our shared environment and our shared circumstances, even though I am a psychologist, relating as human being to human being transcends all dimensions of resistance. When I am able to use the psychological knowledge that I have and come across as a human being serving a global community, serving a bigger interest, a lot of the barriers and a lot of the resistance break down. It just does not exist anymore. I wanted to share that.

Thomas Doherty: That is a great point to end our discussion on, Steven. Thank you all. I hope that our conversation will be helpful to readers. I hope it will help inform work in professional organizations such as Division 34 of the APA, help inform education in the various areas we have described, help identify funding and support for this kind of work, and help to lead to practices that promote health and understanding in a broader ecological context.