Earth Day and peace (Stories of engagement)

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison:  Today we welcome guest contributor Abbie Jenks, who founded the Peace, Justice and Environmental Studies program at Greenfield Community College (GCC) in Massachusetts.]

Earth as seen from Apollo 17It is hard to believe that 41 years have passed since the first Earth Day celebrations. Reading an article from Look magazine, published on April 21, 1970, I recognized it could have been written today. We might be saddened and burdened by that knowledge, yet it is becoming increasingly clear that fundamental social change is taking place.

More people are recognizing the need to change behavior in order for our world to sustain itself, now and for future generations. Facing such challenges as global climate change, environmental degradation due to wars, harmful corporate practice, personal consumer habits, and resource depletion, we must learn how to work together collaboratively instead of competitively.

The Peace, Justice and Environmental Studies program at GCC is an example of approaching these issues from a systems or ecological perspective. We strive to understand the social and cultural forces that work in conjunction with science and technology, and to create an integrated path to positive social change through nonviolent means.

With so much ambiguity, anxiety and denial about our future, we must engage in fundamental change, change that will create sustainable systems to meet our collective needs, without causing harm. We must learn that no one or no living thing has more value than another. We must learn how to share power to solve our problems.

Until we see ourselves as fully interconnected, we will continue to cause harm. Our world and our people are traumatized and we need to heal and consider how to prevent the damage done through violence towards others, the Earth, and ourselves.

If we understand that what we do affects everyone, and nurture an ecological perspective, we will be able to create a just and stable world.

Abbie Jenks, MSW, creator and advisor for the Peace, Justice and Environmental Studies program at Greenfield Community College

Ecological approach to studying peace and war

It is unlikely that the human capacity for inhumanity can ever be adequately explained by any one theory. We believe that all behavior is multi-determined—that is, many forces at a variety of levels contribute to any one type of behavior, including aggression.

We subscribe to what has been called an ecological approach to understanding complex behaviors. This approach involves constructs reflecting different contexts that influence individuals and are in turn influenced by those individuals. That set of constructs includes: the macrosystem, the exosystem, the microsystem, and the individual.

For example, an individual’s concerns about “national security” are influenced by:

  • The values and mass media positions of the society at large (the macrosystem)
  • The views expressed in places of worship, neighborhood, and more local media (the exosystem)
  • Lessons promulgated within the home and family (the microsystem)

Moreover, individuals bring to all of their interactions their own genetic heritage and the results of their personal experiences, beginning in the womb. Sometimes that heritage and those experiences can lead individuals to behave in ways that change the microsystem, or the exosystem, or the macrosystem. Think of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King.

Consider also your own views on national security, on torture, on terrorism. How many influences on those views, at what levels of experience, can you identify?

In our next post, we start considering psychological theories that focus on thoughts and emotions that individuals bring to their interactions, as well as the thoughts and emotions they carry away from those interactions.

Individuals’ tendencies to incorporate ideas from the different environments in which they grow and to which they adapt can lead to a great deal of ingroup and outgroup thinking that can provide a basis for enduring conflict.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology