Environmental hiccoughs versus environmental catastrophes

From Why People Harm the Environment Although They Try to Treat It Well: An Evolutionary-Cognitive Perspective on Climate Compensation by Patrik Sörqvist and Linda Langeborg. Rich in argument and assertion and lighter on hard and robust evidence but interesting for all that.

Anthropogenic climate changes stress the importance of understanding why people harm the environment despite their attempts to behave in climate friendly ways. This paper argues that one reason behind why people do this is that people apply heuristics, originally shaped to handle social exchange, on the issues of environmental impact. Reciprocity and balance in social relations have been fundamental to social cooperation, and thus to survival, and therefore the human brain has become specialized by natural selection to compute and seek this balance. When the same reasoning is applied to environment-related behaviors, people tend to think in terms of a balance between “environmentally friendly” and “harmful” behaviors, and to morally account for the average of these components rather than the sum. This balancing heuristic leads to compensatory green beliefs and negative footprint illusions—the misconceptions that “green” choices can compensate for unsustainable ones. “Eco-guilt” from imbalance in the moral environmental account may promote pro-environmental acts, but also acts that are seemingly pro-environmental but in reality more harmful than doing nothing at all. Strategies for handling problems caused by this cognitive insufficiency are discussed.

Environment as an engineering problem to be solved.

Environment as a religion.

Environment as virtue signaling.

Environment as psychological self-deception.

I am inclined towards the first. Much what we see is of the rest.

Sörqvist and Langeborg prompt an internal dialogue, disputing some assertions and cognitively nodding the head to others. For instance:

Evolutionarily speaking, problems associated with climate change and the environmental impact of one’s own behavior are novel. Moreover, the relationship between behavior and consequence in the context of climate change and environmental impact is unclear because of the large temporal and geographical distances. Because of this, people are not adapted to the challenges of climate change (Griskevicius et al., 2012), and consequently there are plenty of evolutionary adaptions and cognitive heuristics which influence the way people fail to understand human-environmental interactions accurately (Gifford, 2011; van Vugt et al., 2014; Lewandowsky, 2016; Sörqvist, 2016). Hence, unsustainable behavior often has an evolutionary basis (Griskevicius et al., 2012; van Vugt et al., 2014). For example, people tend to value personal over collective rewards. Environmental problems are often global problems that have to be dealt with through collaboration, but this collaboration is difficult as long as people must give up personal gain in favor of collective rewards. Similarly, people tend to prefer immediate over delayed rewards, which inhibits the transformation to a more sustainable lifestyle among the general public, since the temporal distance between our behavior today and future environmental gains is stretched over generations.

That first sentence doesn't feel quite right. Perhaps they are novel. But I would put it differently. For the great balance of our existence we lived circumscribed lives - short, local, practical and tactical. Limited number of people, limited amount of time, limited scope of knowledge, and limited perspective.

We are evolved to deal routinely with fifteen people, not 150,000. We have a a hard time even conceiving of 150,000. We are evolved to solve immediate problems not strategic long term problems. We are evolved to make concrete trade-offs in the here and now, not trade-offs of remote possibilities in the distant future.

Sörqvist and Langeborg make many points but the heart of their argument is that we 1) anthropomorphize nature and thereby port an analytical problem in a social problem, 2) social problems always have a psychological dimension, and that that leads to 3) an attempt to seek a moral balance with nature which is counter to good ecological practice.

Because of the importance of social exchange during human evolution, natural selection has shaped human cognition to compute and seek balance in social exchange efficiently. Specifically, natural selection has made this kind of moral accounting important, and formed a balancing heuristic that simplifies cognition concerning interpersonal cooperation by calculating the balance in social transactions. This balancing heuristic still influences the way people think today. For example, people often take action to maintain balance between “good” and “bad” deeds – actions that can be observed in human moral decision-making (Sachdeva et al., 2009). Morally righteous and unrighteous decisions appear to be mentally accounted for as if they balance each other out. For example, prior good deeds can “license” latter choices of a more self-indulgent character (Khan and Dhar, 2006).

Moral accounting and balance seeking behavior not only apply to social relationships, they seem to apply to environmental issues as well. Some people are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing “eco-friendly” products (Mazar and Zhong, 2010), probably because they feel licensed to do so since they morally account the “eco-friendly” choice as a “good” deed. Moral licensing has also been observed in the context of cooperation for the good of the environment (Sachdeva et al., 2009). When people are reminded of deeds they have done that they know were harmful to the environment, they might be left with a feeling of “eco-guilt” (Mallett, 2012). People who experience eco-guilt seek pro-environmental actions to compensate for this guilt and restore balance. In their search for such a balance, people are inclined to believe in “quick-fixes,” because they want to re-establish the moral balance and escape the guilt as quickly and easily as possible. In the same way that cognitive dissonance may make people change their attitudes to reduce inconsistencies between attitudes and behavior, people may also change their evaluation of past environmentally burdening behaviors and future environmentally friendly behaviors to restore the balance in their relationship with the environment. For instance, people are more likely to sign a petition addressing environmental issues after viewing evidence of human-caused environmental damage (Rees et al., 2015). Hence, the balancing heuristic of the moral accounting seems to have been generalized to human-climate interactions although such interactions are evolutionary novel.

Hinted at but not directly observed is the underlying reality that is the hard rock of environmentalism.

Humans can engineer a lesser impact on environment through improved processes. However, the most direct and logical means of reducing human impact on the environment is to reduce the number of people and/or reduce the amount people consume.

This is why environmentalism so often feels like coercive totalitarianism or statism. Because, unless you are willing to make trade-offs, it is coercive totalitarianism or statism. Which is the ultimate irony. Those nations most committed to freedom for individuals and free markets are also those who have generated sufficient prosperity to lighten the burden on the environment. Free, prosperous democracies have environmental hiccoughs. Coercive states have environmental catastrophes.

Anyway, an interesting ruminative piece by Sörqvist and Langeborg.