Hi everybody! If you are a returning reader, I am glad that you have found interest in my blog’s topic and I would love to hear you opinions in the comments after you read this week’s post!

Firstly, let me address the elephant in the room. Why should we to turn towards psychology, when we are concerned with the environment? Wouldn’t geography, biology or the likes be the field of study we should focus on in order to better protect our earth?

While I admit that psychology does not directly translate to better understanding the inner workings and systems of our planet, it does however have everything to do with human behaviour. And just what is the true illness that plagues the earth? Humans.

Many environmental concerns arise due to human activities. Hence, rather than trying to isolate one problem and tackling it directly, it may be more beneficial to better understand human psychology and address the main culprit.

However, this is much easier said than done. Ironically, humans do not even fully comprehend how our own minds work.

What we do know however, is that the first step to better understanding the full scale of environmental issues is to adopt the “Systems thinking” mindset – our earth is a huge ecosystem after-all. This involves viewing our world as a system and understanding that an outcome is caused by various factors and actions (Arnold & Wade, 2015).

For example, I believe we can agree that obesity is not just due to a lack of exercise. It also involves other lifestyle habits such as diet and even that is influenced by income, food accessibility, etc. The problem is a complex “system” and therefore, a solution of “exercise more” is not able to fully address the issue.

The system gets much more complicated when it comes to our environmental crises. It is not as simple as telling countries “Hey, reduce your CO2 emissions to slow down global warming!”. In fact, we can see how this solution is not effective when the majority of the countries that signed the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement are not even near meeting their targeted reduction of CO2 emission levels, despite having capacity to do so (National Geographic, 2019).

It is my belief that these numerous small “unidentified gears” are psychological.

There is a significant association between adopting systems thinking and being more concerned about climate change (Lezak & Thibodeau, 2016), and perhaps this comes from awareness of the causes and clearer understanding of the consequences. This is interesting information, as I believe concern is the first step towards promoting eco-friendly behaviour.

So how do we improve our systems thinking? Well firstly, we need to establish connections between cause and effect by asking questions and learning more about the things we tend to gloss over.

In future blogs, I will be trying to ask questions that will help us develop this “systems thinking” and come to understand the fuller picture.