Environmental Ethics And Behavioural Change

Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change takes a practical approach to environmental ethics with a focus on its transformative potential for students, professionals, policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens. Proposed solutions to issues such as climate change, resource depletion and accelerating extinctions have included technological fixes, national and international regulation and social marketing. This volume examines the ethical features of a range of communication strategies and technological, political and economic methods for promoting ecologically responsible practice in the face of these crises. The central concern of the book is environmental behaviour change: inspiring, informing and catalysing reflective change in the reader, and in their ability to influence others. By making clear the forms of environmental ethics that exist, and what each implies in terms of individual and social change, the reader will be better able to formulate, commit to, articulate and promote a coherent position on how to understand and engage with environmental issues. This is an essential companion to environmental ethics and philosophy courses as well as a great resource for professionals interested in practical approaches to environmental ethics. It is also excellent supplementary reading for environmental studies, environmental politics and sustainable consumption courses.

In this collection of essays, leading social, cognitive and decision psychologists offer psychological theory and contemporary environmental and ethical issues.

As the destructive consequences of environmental problems such as global warming, water scarcity and resource and biodiversity destruction have been felt ever more heavily, people are becoming more aware of the importance of and their responsibilities towards environmental protection. The causes of our problems are anthropogenic. The number of people working in what might be termed "environmental industries" or with environmental responsibilities in their day-to-day work has mushroomed. In many cases, however, individuals charged with protecting the environment have a set of empirical priorities: what *is* done, rather than moral priorities which consider what *should* be done. The need to harmonize environmental knowledge with ethical behaviour and thus achieve behavioural change and the internalization of environmentally ethical values has never been more urgent. This book, developed as part of an EU programme to diffuse the application of environmental ethics to decision-making on pollution control, is a response to the need for a restatement of environmental ethics and for a code of behaviour and set of values that can be internalised and adopted to guide the actions by individuals at the sharp end of protecting the environment: decision-makers and environmental experts/executives/staff working in municipalities and public/government organisations throughout the EU and Turkey. It is nothing short of an ethical training manual that will guide environmental experts/decision-makers in making sound judgements and decisions and will act as a bridge between environmental knowledge and environmental behaviour. The book will be essential reading for decision-makers and experts working in local authorities and governmental organisations with responsibility for environmental protection: for both graduate and postgraduate students in environment-related disciplines and for vocational education teachers with a focus on the environment.

There is a broad consensus that climate change presents the international community with a formidable challenge. Yet progress on all fronts-prevention, mitigation, and adaptation-has been slow. Ved P. Nanda finds an explanation for this disparity in the sharp divide between the developed and developing countries. Developing countries demand that major industrialized nations provide the necessary resources and technology to address climate change, while many developed countries seek firm commitments and timetables on action from the developing countries. The result is a stalemate. Climate Change and Environmental Ethics contains first-rate research and thinking from scholars from multiple disciplines-ethics, ecology, philosophy, economics, political science, history, and international law. What distinguishes this volume from recent work on climate change are two of its special features. One is the multi-disciplinary backgrounds of the scholars, their stellar experiences, and the wisdom with which they express not simply their philosophy and theory but also their suggestions for concrete, specific action in practical terms. The second is the special niche this volume fills in its overarching theme of the need for a renewed environmental ethic that can bring together these disparate but interconnected views. This volume explores alternative ways of conceiving our relation to the natural world. A spirit of international cooperation and collaboration is needed to meet the challenge. The reader is complelled to think anew about our understanding of the scientific and technical issues, as well as our values and ethical responsibilities regarding climate change.

To comprehensively address the complexities of current socio-ecological problems involved in global environmental change, it is indispiseble to achieve an integration of ecological understanding and ethical values. Contemporary science proposes an inclusive ecosystem concept that recognizes humans as components. Contemporary environmental ethics includes eco-social justice and the realization that as important as biodiversity is cultural diversity, inter-cultural, inter-institutional, and international collaboration requiring a novel approach known as biocultural conservation. Right action in confronting the challenges of the 21st century requires science and ethics to be seamlessly integrated. This book resulted from the 14th Cary Conference that brought together leading scholars and practitioners in ecology and environmental philosophy to discuss core terminologies, methods, questions, and practical frameworks for long-term socio-ecological research, education, and decision making.

Social problems in many domains, including health, education, social relationships, and the workplace, have their origins in human behavior. The documented links between behavior and social problems have compelled governments and organizations to prioritize and mobilize efforts to develop effective, evidence-based means to promote adaptive behavior change. In recognition of this impetus, The Handbook of Behavior Change provides comprehensive coverage of contemporary theory, research, and practice on behavior change. It summarizes current evidence-based approaches to behavior change in chapters authored by leading theorists, researchers, and practitioners from multiple disciplines, including psychology, sociology, behavioral science, economics, philosophy, and implementation science. It is the go-to resource for researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers looking for current knowledge on behavior change and guidance on how to develop effective interventions to change behavior.

This volume fills the void created by the lack of a book-length, critical, and systematic treatment of ecological attitudes and behaviors. It emphasizes psychometrics and experimentation within a broad behavioral-cognitive framework focused on the natural world. Gray summarizes and integrates existing research and reviews major alternative approaches to measuring ecological attitudes, while presenting his own ecological attitude domain model. Russell Weigel and Richard Borden provide state-of-the-art reviews of the research on the relationship between ecological attitudes and actions and on the linkage between personality and ecological concern. Gray himself integrates the theoretical perspectives of social psychologists Milton Rokeach and Martin Fishbein in his construction of a paradigm for ecological change. Using this as background, he reviews existing behavioral studies, differentiating between those that rely on information and those that use reinforcement to produce a desired change in behavior. Finally, he suggests that the key to large-scale change is the creation of a true environmental ethic in our society.

This book examines from different perspectives the moral significance of non-human members of the biotic community and their omission from climate ethics literature. The complexity of life in an age of rapid climate change demands the development of moral frameworks that recognize and respect the dignity and agency of both human and non-human organisms. Despite decades of careful work in non-anthropocentric approaches to environmental ethics, recent anthologies on climate ethics have largely omitted non-anthropocentric approaches. This multidisciplinary volume of international scholars tackles this lacuna by presenting novel work on non-anthropocentric approaches to climate ethics. Written in an accessible style, the text incorporates sentiocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric perspectives on climate change. With diverse perspectives from both leading and emerging scholars of environmental ethics, geography, religious studies, conservation ecology, and environmental studies, this book will offer a valuable reading for students and scholars of these fields.