The Environmental Protection and Justice Action Committee works to advance peace and social justice by promoting sustainable use of resources, healthy habitats, and environmental justice. Human activities on a global scale are clearly threatening ecological systems, putting our collective global security at risk. Global environmental devastation is driven by desperation of the world’s poor, and over-consumption by the world’s rich. Unprecedented rises in human population and consumption patterns stress the planet’s carrying capacity. Pollution of water and air, deteriorating fish stocks, damaged coral reefs, global warming, soil erosion, species extinction, depleting supplies of fossil fuels, and vanishing forests are a few examples of ecological decline. And because environmental problems are not equally distributed, but are experienced more frequently and severely by the poor, environmental degradation intersects with injustice, sowing seeds for conflict.
An ecologically healthy environment is central to the psychological as well as the physiological functioning of human individuals, groups, and communities. It can hardly be disputed that people have primary needs for clean air, water, and healthy habitat. Human security requires safety, stability and consistency in the environment, as well as in human interactions. As the recent UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg illuminated, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights requires protection of the habitats of all human beings as basic human rights.
When human beings cannot depend on stable, consistent, nurturing environments, their emotional and mental functioning is impaired. Air pollution, for example, not only causes physical illness, but also causes stress responses, fear, lack of trust, and interpersonal conflict. Even seemingly small environmental losses (relative to the scope of global problems), such as the loss of wilderness and green space to urban dwellers, have significant consequences on psychological functioning.
On a global scale, the planet is experiencing a clash of cultures brought on by the growing divide between the world’s haves and have-nots. Afflicted groups commonly experience their unfair treatment as an attack on their group identity. When group identity is threatened, people suffer group polarization, they blame out-groups, and they increase their hostility and resentment. Violent conflict is frequently the outcome. Populations rapidly increasing in size and desperation endure economic and ecological injustice, and are easily recruited to violent means of response. Frustration and hatred become especially dangerous when coupled with an unbridled arms trade, promoting accessibility to weapons, from small arms to nuclear bombs. Armed conflict also leads to further environmental depletion, as chemical weapons, land mines, bombs, and other tools of warfare damage ecosystems and prevent their utilization for agriculture and human communities.
Thus long term peace and justice depend on environmentally sustainable cultures and policies that promote them. As psychologists, our work is to make psychologically informed recommendations about environmental policies, describe the psychological processes underlying current trends, and educate others on the psychological implications of assumptions, procedures, laws and treaties regarding resource use, pollution control, sustainable technologies, environmental justice, and ecologically appropriate human practices. Although policy about environmental protection and justice is frequently framed at both national and international levels, we also recognize that some of the most important work we can do is to participate in promoting sustainable practices in local communities.