Community psychology and climate change – how can it help?
The conclusion is now inescapable that the environment is going critical
on us. According to the most coherent sources we need to look at a
reduction of some 80-90% in greenhouse gas emissions to avert a runaway
warming process that could end human life on earth. Meanwhile governments
are acknowledging the problem, pretending to take action, while doing
precisely nothing that will have any real effect on the problem.
There are a number of problems to be addressed in mobilising for effective
change:-
• Building a popular movement that keeps the real issues on the agenda and
builds a dominant consensus for radical action.
• As part of this, communicating effectively on a grand scale about the
nature of the problem, effective versus ineffective actions and the
benefits to be attained.
• Dealing with enemy(1) propaganda that suggests either that the problem
isn’t real, or that it can be dealt with by minimalist action.
• Demonstrating the positive benefits for people and communities of an
alternative way of living that lives within ecological limits.
• Finding ways to manage the transition – where there will be winners and
losers.
A quick internet search finds little or no engagement of community
psychology with the problem. This may be because attention is elsewhere.
For too long, community psychology has pursued a policy of quietism behind
the attractive slogan, ‘think globally, act locally’. It is now time to
use what know how community and social psychology can lay its hands on in
furtherance of this great struggle.
How?
Community psychologists need to
1. Get up to speed with the problem (2).
2. Intervene publicly in relation to each of the tasks above.
3. Draw on or raid psychology’s knowledge base, together with real world
experience to identify effective and ineffective strategies, particularly
for communication and mobilisation.
4. Create spaces in which ideas, experience, contacts, information etc.
can be exchanged.
In other words, think globally and locally, act locally and globally.
Sorry, it isn’t so catchy, but it is far more appropriate to the scale of
the problem and the nature of politics today.
So here is the bit that you have to write: first of all, where are you
going to engage in the political struggle? Second, what can you lay your
hands on in the cannon of community psychology that will assist in this
giant task? Third, how will you communicate what you are doing?
Mark Burton
August, 2007
1 No apology for this term – the deniers and the apologists are directly
threatening the livelihoods and lives of people in the majority worlds,
our own lives, and certainly those of our children and grandchildren. We
know who they are – the paid agents of capital, of the oil, motor car and
aviation industries in particular, and the military industrial complex in
general. See for example
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html
2 Try George Monbiot, Heat, 2006 for a quick start.
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141026626,00.html
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