In addressing environmental challenges like climate change, governments, charities and business tend to focus either on changing policy or business practice, or on urging individuals to adopt different behaviour. The role of human identity is largely absent from the debate. And yet, our identities who we see ourselves as being have a profound impact in shaping the responses we make to environmental challenges.
This provocative book will rattle the cages of many environmentalists, green-minded business-people and policy makers. In it, Crompton and Kasser suggest that many current approaches to addressing problems like climate change may actually inadvertently serve to reinforce those aspects of identity that drive us towards unsustainable behaviour in first place. They suggest that it will only be by re-shaping political debate and social institutions in order to promote more helpful aspects of identity that we can have any hope of meeting environmental challenges.
The book closes by highlighting the opportunities that this perspective presents for building new alliances between people working not just on environmental issues, but also on a range of social and developmental concerns: Many of those aspects of human identity that frustrate progress on the environmental agenda also frustrate progress on meeting other challenges.
- ISBN13 9781900322645
- Publish Date 30 July 2009
- Publish Status Transferred
- Out of Print 15 June 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Green Books
- Edition 1st
- Format Paperback
- Pages 96
- Language English