ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Mike Tidwell’s recent piece at Gristmill, “Consider using the N-word less,” implies that voluntary behavior change and policy change are mutually exclusive options, and that the only personal behavior that matters for the environment is political action. A group of social scientists, mostly psychologists, strongly disagrees. They point out that fighting global warming will require both individual and institutional behavioral change, whether the change is produced by voluntary action or mandated by legislation.

Dismissing the importance of small personal behavior choices in favor of a sole focus on policy changes is a big mistake. Small behaviors are important not only for the direct environmental impact they have, but because they often lead to more and more pro-environmental behaviors over time. Research shows that personal action and political action to protect the environment go hand in hand, rather than undermining each other. When people do something like buy a more expensive and perhaps less aesthetically pleasing compact fluorescent lightbulb, they justify it to themselves and others. This tends to result in changes in their self-perceptions (I am a person who cares about fighting global warming), their beliefs (global warming is a really important problem), and how others see them (they really care about the environment).

The more people voluntarily engage in pro-environmental behaviors and justify it themselves and others, the more it creates social pressure to do good things for the environment. Numerous psychological studies have shown that people are more likely to agree to take a big action if they’ve previously agreed to smaller, similar actions. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Bray at Land Use Watch has been wondering when the Oregonians in Action anti-Measure 49 campaign would kick in—and notes that it has been kicked off by the filing of a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the ballot title, explanatory statement, and fiscal impact statement as “factually inaccurate, unfair, and underhanded.” Read the rest of this entry »

A new study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) says that ethical consumption is most likely to happen when it is approached as a political or societal goal rather than encouraging individual changes in lifestyle. Read the rest of this entry »

Humans are planning animals, which may be a successful evolutionary adaptation. Read the rest of this entry »

Drew Westen in his new book, “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” points out that political strategists often start from an 18th-century vision of the mind as dispassionate, making decisions by rationally weighing evidence and balancing pros and cons. Read the rest of this entry »

Proponents “happiness economics” assert that, contrary to the guiding principle of a century of economists, income is a poor measure of happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

In discussions about the impacts of Peak Oil, it is sometimes implicitly assumed that we NEED to replace the energy lost from the coming liquid fuels decline with other energy sources in order to maintain our way of life and our happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Read the rest of this entry »

Kurt Cobb writes that the peak oil movement has been focused mainly on selling a new narrative to the public without first dislodging the existing one. Read the rest of this entry »

New studies of the human brain show that when people place the interests of others before their own, the generosity activates a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Read the rest of this entry »

James Kunstler writes that the longing for “solutions” is a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth’s ecosystems (and human civilization with it). Read the rest of this entry »

Motorized transport is a form of time travel. Read the rest of this entry »

In his new book “Whose Freedom?,” George Lakoff argues that connecting the emotional and visceral with the rational is of utmost importance in the battle of ideas—and one that progressives often resist, classifying framing and metaphor as a scurrilous bastard cousin of loathed marketing, manipulation, spin and sloganeering. Read the rest of this entry »

American society, by its very energy-intense design, is inclined toward blindness of certain stimuli in its environment. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week in Eugene, at a meeting of the land use activist community discussing a response to the proposed “fix” of M37, I expressed how despairing I felt at the seemingly hopeless situation we find ourselves in. Read the rest of this entry »

At its core, peak oil is a human problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Miller’s reflects that George Lakoff sees the “Well-being As Wealth” metamoral metaphor as so fundamental and so ubiquitous to our moral reasoning that it is barely recognized as metaphorical. Read the rest of this entry »

Our present situation is ultimately a religious crisis. Read the rest of this entry »