To think I inspired such an awesome blog post! Make sure you check it out in full.
My friend is heading to the UN in Durban later this week for climate change negotiations there, and it got me thinking about climate change and the psychology of such a world-changing issue. Conveniently, a recent edition of the BPS research digest had the perfect report!
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The interesting bit is this - when asked to justify their decisions about the environmental problems, 74% of answers were ”biocentric” - e.g ‘the tree is alive and they have hurt it’, with 26% being ”anthropocentric” - e.g ‘without trees we’d have no oxygen’.
So the first line of this article was ‘children in NE USA see harms to the environment as worse morally than bad manners’, but psychologeek’s conclusion is this - why is harming the environment seen as actively more ok than harming another human being? And then contrastingly, why is harming the environment viewed only by a minority as a wrongdoing to humanity?
I know my friend heading out to the UN views climate change as a very human issue. And I think I’ve got to agree. The likelihood is the earth will survive whatever we throw at it. It will warm, and cool, and carry on turning. We won’t. Humans won’t survive flash flooding, tsunamis, hurricanes and drought. So while it’s great that children acknowledge harming the environment as a bad thing, it doesn’t seem to have gone far enough. Harming the environment is synonymous with harming another human, in fact worse - it’s harming humanity as a whole.
