WHY IS A MENTAL HEALTH NONPROFIT PROMOTING "ECO-DRAMA"?

The natural environment and human well being are intertwined. Eco-health goes beyond having uncontaminated air, water, food. Eco-health includes positive psychological developmental needs: identity formation, connection, inspiration, building competence and fostering care-eliciting experiences in natural environments. Benefits of natural environments for humans are stress reduction, restoration, and recreation. But, on the negative side, the experience of environmental degradation can lead to anxiety, guilt, anger, helplessness, and pessimism. We need to understand the neuro-mechanisms by which environmental toxins disrupt normal psychological development and functioning. This knowledge will give us ways to identify and utilize the multiple psychological and health benefits of natural ecosystem functioning.

Most people think of climate change as something that affects far-away people and places or lies in the distant future. Research findings show that only 13% of Americans are concerned about its impact on themselves, their families, or their communities. Their images of climate change tended to be distant, such as melting icebergs, or they were abstract, such as general global warming trends.

However, even for individuals who are not immediately and directly affected, the ecological challenge can seem overwhelming and impossible to control. A vision of harm to the natural world, from the endangerment of polar bears to the disappearance of glaciers, is one of the most powerful drivers of concern about climate change.

"Since people are causing global warming, they also have it in their power to prevent it from getting worse" (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2006). Human behavior is the main cause of today’s climate crisis. Understanding that behavior, and learning how to change it, is one of our best hopes for a solution. By itself, psychology cannot stop global warming or deal entirely with its consequences. What psychology can provide is an explanation for why people choose to install energy efficient appliances, reduce gasoline consumption or support government policies about climate change—and why, despite the best of intentions, they often do not.

Psychology is concerned with how people come to experience, understand, and behave in their physical and social environments. It also clarifies how people understand environmental justice, including their moral responsibility to people outside their own families, communities and nations. It asks: How do humans interact with other individuals and groups, as well as with their natural and human-made environments? Why do people care about nature? How do they connect their everyday behaviors to distant impacts? What benefits do they gain from access to natural environments?

Psychological research has shown that environmental behavior begins with values of altruism—whether one sets a high priority on helping other people. The next step toward pro-environmental behavior is belief—that nature is inherently fragile, interconnected, and threatened by human activity. The combination of altruistic values and an ecological worldview generates a sense of a moral obligation to act.

Psychological research provides insights into climate-change-related stress and coping that help individuals and communities deal with changing conditions in healthy, productive ways. Linkages between people and eco-problems are studied to find effective human solutions. Environmentally sustainable lifestyles and behaviors are encouraged. Adverse human behaviors are managed and mitigated. Through research, advocacy, education, counseling and therapy, mental health professionals aim to bring community to a more enlightened involvement and relationship with the natural world.

At the individual level, mental health professionals focus on behaviors, values, knowledge levels, attitudes, motivations, and decision-making. In the community, mental health professionals help us gain a better understanding of those factors which influence community and organizational appraisals and decision making which both may adversely impact or protect and conserve the natural environment. For both community and individuals, psychologists can help change awareness, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of responsibility towards the natural environment.

Education is provided about the local and global risks and threats, and what can be done, individually and collectively, to address such risks. Through this, sustainability is increased with better understanding, exploring and fostering human connections and involvements with natural environments and settings.

Most people endorse basic environmental values—they favor recycling, conserving energy, minimizing pollution and protecting endangered species. But they do not always manage to translate those values into action. Public service campaigns aimed at helping them to do so often fail. They tend to stress the cumulative negative consequences--environmental disasters tend to happen because large numbers of people act in the same way. While it is important to understand this, it might not create the most effective message.

Psychological studies identified far more effective ways to encourage effective environmental actions. Beliefs about how often one’s neighbors tried to conserve energy were the most powerful predictor of one’s own energy conservation efforts. Residents who were told that their neighbors often conserved energy used less electricity themselves in the following months than did residents who were told that conserving energy was good for the environment, for society or for their own pocketbooks. While people deny that beliefs about their neighbors mattered, in fact, those beliefs were the most powerful influence.

If the goal is to raise public concern about climate change, then these findings suggest that we should emphasize powerful images and near-term, local consequences. The Center of the World Festival is communitas theater, with residents providing localized interpretations of what climate change and ecological challenge means to our community. This approach will have greater impact on changing our local members’ attitudes towards conservation than any number of public advertising campaigns.

Values and beliefs tend to have stronger effects on low-cost behaviors than on major household changes, for which financial and technological constraints are more pressing. Reducing carbon emissions will be achieved through changes in high cost changes, such as vehicle or home choice or insulating walls and ceilings. For this greater success, we require an educated and motivated citizenship who will seek laws and financial aid for these changes from their elected governmental representatives.

And the first step towards this needed education is the participation of the people themselves. The Center of the World Festival provides an opportunity for a community to embrace the ecological challenge and conceive of local solutions.

In our local mountain community, the natural environment is a defining and formative part of our character and lifestyle; it is integral to our experience of ‘place’, and to our quality of life. Our forests and resources are an important part of community everyday lives. We are blessed with national forests and state parks and other natural environment-based amenities that provide many benefits for us, and are integral to our community well being and sustainability.

The Center of the World Festival also brings an awareness of our local cultural history. This connection embodies a traditional worldview that is premised on an understanding of the ‘natural’ environment as a living, breathing, sentient system of which humans are an integral part. Native American values, philosophy, and spirituality help us understand other ways in which humans can relate to nature in life sustaining ways. The Founding Director of California Family Counseling Network, Shelia Clark, of Native American descent, takes a special interest in this Festival component.

Help us think about the planet and nature rather than the "art of the play"; Provide new endings to our global conflicts, rather than "the end of everything" negativism; May be "playful eco-fables"; Bring together environmentalism and Readers Theater; Question our ideas about values, faith, and identity; Combine problem-stating with problem-solving; Not about "eco-warriors" but about ordinary people making up their own minds and doing what is ordinarily possible; See us recognizing our part in and responsibility to the natural world and see us working with nature and not against it; Connect the individual to the implications of their actions and their place in the world; Stimulate audiences towards the imaginative thinking necessary to understand a world dominated by environmental challenges; Are stories of almost anyone—the poorest of the poor—the richest of the rich—nature treats us equally; Tell a story—you hear it—it enchants you—you tell it to someone else—nature gets heard; Tell why we care most about what is closest to hand; Empower our environmental survival with cooperation across oceans and continents; Utter things that are not otherwise said.

Submissions accepted: Oct. 1, 2009 – April 30, 2010; Early submission encouraged. No electronic submission please. P.O. Box 1929, Frazier Park, Ca 93225-1929; 661-242-1583.