Toward a New Consciousness: Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities
Contact: Dave DeFusco, Director of Communications, 203-436-4842
Society needs a major shift in its core values to stave off an environmental crisis, warns a Yale report, Toward a New Consciousness: Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities.
“For a long, long time the environmental community has been running on the original fuel from the 1970s,” said Gus Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “We felt then that if we put in place a well-thought-out, well-planned, economically sound proposal for the private sector, accompanied by a little lobbying and litigating, we could get the end result we sought. Nothing major was required in terms of people’s values or lifestyles. What we have come to realize is that if we are going to deal with environmental challenges on the scale needed, we need a profound change of values leading to major behavioral change.”
The report, which includes a foreword by Speth, synthesizes the insights and recommendations from over 60 leaders in the natural and social sciences, philosophy, communications, education, religion, public policy, business, the creative arts and the humanities who participated in a conference organized by the environment school last fall in Aspen, Colo. The conference focused on examining the role of cultural values and worldviews in environmentally destructive behavior in modern, affluent societies.
The report argues that major changes are now required to stabilize and restore the functional integrity of natural systems around the world or else the global environment will fail in fundamental and irreversible ways as a result of global climate change, biodiversity extinctions, deforestation, water shortages and many other compounding stresses.
“Although these environmental facts have been extensively detailed by the scientific community and debated by some within policy and government,” write the report’s authors Anthony Leiserowitz and Lisa Fernandez of the Yale Project on Climate Change, “they have not yet captured the full attention of the public or sufficiently altered society’s behavior toward the natural world. A modest number of people know a great deal about these unfolding tragedies—the nature of the threat, what is driving it, what can be done to change course before the impacts become irreversible—but their messages have difficulty overcoming public apathy, political denial or entrenched opposition.”
The report includes proposals to:
- Develop new narratives about sustainable pathways of human development that raise questions about how societies measure success and happiness, depict the links between global environmental threats and lifestyle choices, and embed the human story in a deeper understanding of humankind’s relationship to nature and the origins of the universe.
- Conduct scientific research on the role of values in behavior and on human well-being to determine what barriers stand between declared values and actual behavior, the factors that drive human happiness and fulfillment and what these factors imply for ecological sustainability.
- Prepare leaders to take advantage of future crises to shift public priorities.
- Reconnect people with nature by encouraging the growing movement to bring agriculture and the land ethic back into urban settings.
The report can be obtained at environment.yale.edu/newconsciousness or here.
