Abstract
Almost thirty years ago, Harold Proshansky argued that if environmental psychology was to survive, it needed to “strengthen itself as a social institution”. While we can find much evidence to suggest that environmental psychology has achieved this, in so doing it has tended to concentrate on changes to individual consumption behaviours and lifestyles, rather than focusing on the everyday lives and conditions which frame the actions of individuals and communities. People live, work, and act in cooperation with others and this cooperation is shaped by and shapes individual and collective identities and actions. One of the central places where people act collectively is the workplace. Two case studies are presented. The first employed backcasting scenarios to explore employees’ visions for an alternative, sustainable future and involved scenario development by creating visions for the future, defining strategic pathways to reach them, providing feedback on how policy measures would function in a simulated environment and asking participants to suggest corrections to their initial proposals and the model design. The second case study reports on an international study of the role of trade unions in contributing to environmentally sustainable production and curbing the damaging effects of climate change. It sets this in a global context, because the causes and consequences of climate change have to be seen in such terms. This then leads to the final part of the chapter, which raises important issues about the ‘production’ of environmental psychology and North-South relationships.