The Psycho-Spatial Dimension of Global Environmental Problems

There has been little research on the differential aspects of local/global dichotomy, yet there is every suggestion that such a distinction could be crucially important in terms of understanding the public’s perception and attitudes towards environmental problems as well as understanding their subsequent behaviour. This research sought to address three questions. First, are people only able to relate to environmental issues if they are concrete, immediate and local? Second, do people consider environmental problems to be more serious at a global or a local level? Third, what is the effect of the public’s perceptions of the seriousness of environmental problems on their sense of responsibility for taking action? Three studies were undertaken in Australia, England, Ireland and Slovakia. The results of each study consistently demonstrate that respondents are not only able to conceptualise problems at a global level, but an inverse distance effect is found such that environmental problems are perceived to be more serious the farther away they are from the perceiver. An inverse relationship was also found between a sense of responsibility for environmental problems and spatial scale resulting in feelings of powerlessness at the global level. The paper concludes with a discussion of various psychological theories and perspectives which informs our analysis and understanding of what might seen as environmental hyperopia. 1 Published in Uzzell, DL (2000) The Psycho-Spatial Dimension to Global Environmental Problems, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20, 4, 307 -318 Introduction One had to look no farther than across our sitting rooms to the televised millennium celebrations from the capital cities of the world and remote islands in the Pacific Ocean on 31 st December 1999 to realise that this was party time in the global village. Entering the 21 st century, feelings of one-worldness and a new global neighbourliness by the West are fuelled by an increasing concern about Third World debt and unfair trade