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Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,058
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Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things (Paperback)
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No one sets out to intentionally cause environmental problems. All
things being equal, we are happy to protect environmental
resources; in fact, we tend to prefer our air cleaner and our
species protected. But despite not wanting to create environmental
problems, we all do so regularly in the course of living our
everyday lives. Why do we behave in ways that cause environmental
harm? It is often easy and inexpensive to behave in ways with bad
environmental consequences, but more difficult and costly to take
environmentally friendly actions. The incentives we face, some
created by the nature of environmental resources, some by social
and political structures, often do not make environmentally
beneficial behavior the most likely choice. Furthermore, our
behavior is conditioned by habits and social norms that fail to
take environmental protection into consideration. In this book,
Elizabeth R. DeSombre integrates research from political science,
sociology, psychology, and economics to understand why bad
environmental behavior makes perfect sense. As she notes, there is
little evidence that having more information about environmental
problems or the way an individual's actions contribute to them
changes behavior in meaningful ways, and lack of information is
rarely the underlying cause that connects behavior to harm. In some
cases such knowledge may even backfire, as people come to see
themselves as powerless to address huge global problems and respond
by pushing these issues out of their minds. The fact that causing
environmental problems is never anyone's primary goal means that
people are happy to stop causing them if the alternative behavior
still accomplishes their underlying goals. If we can figure out why
those problems are caused, when no one intends to cause them, we
can develop strategies that work to shift behavior in a positive
direction. Over the course of this book, DeSombre considers the
role of structure, incentives, information, habit, and norms on
behavior in order to formulate lessons about how these factors lead
to environmentally problematic behavior, and what understanding
their effects can tell us about ways to change behavior. To prevent
or address environmental problems, we have to understand why even
good people do bad environmental things.
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