Meeting Environmental Challenges - The role of human identity

Summary

The 2009 WWF-UK report that proposed ‘identity campaigning’. Tom Crompton and Tim Kasser tie environmental harm to materialistic values, seeing nature as an out-group, and how we cope with fear. Society will always “make some aspects of human identity more prevalent than others”; campaigners should ask which, together, since many causes “stem from the same underlying aspects of human identity”.

Rationale

‘Iatrogenic effects’ is their term for campaigns that strengthen what they oppose, a risk we raise. They don’t spare themselves: environmentalists “certainly do not transcend” these aspects of identity.