Environmental Psychology and Sustainable Development: Expansion, Maturation, and Challenges

In this summary article, some advances of, the potential for, and challenges faced by environmental psychology as a contributor to sustainability science are outlined. In its first 40 years, it has evolved from a discipline primarily—but never solely— concerned with proximate architecture to one that adds concern with larger-scale issues, particularly sustainability. This growth of interest has in turn led to increased interest within it in public policy, technology, cooperation with other disciplines, multilevel analyses of problems, the ingestion of new ideas, and concern with the health of the biotic and ecological world. Some challenges are that the central proponents of “sustainability science” itself have not acknowledged environmental psychology as a potential contributor, the field is comparatively young, that it needs to explore biotic and ecological issues more, needs to help discriminate facts from nonfacts about environmental problems, and needs to warn sustainability science about the daunting task of overcoming environmental numbness and self-interest in individuals. Nevertheless, there is hope: sustainability scientists, including environmental psychologists, may be Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”