Civilisation ‘collapse’ is relative to normative judgements of system identity and scale of analysis. Collapse often brings significant population decline, adaptations in ways of living and movement of settlement. However, communities and cultures do not ‘collapse’, they find new ways of surviving, often with positive medium-term effects (e.g increase in average wage).
We must focus on the output side (nature as a sink) over input side (resource depletion until run-out), when it comes to battling climate change. This is because “humanity will not risk crossing planetary thresholds by exhausting non-renewable resources but rather by excessively using nature as a sink, thereby diminishing social-ecological resilience on all scales”.
For example — say non-renewables never ran out, the implications of their use would not go away or change.
3 components to increase planned behaviour: “the attitudes towards a specific behaviour; perception of societal pressure (subjective norms) to perform that behaviour; the individual’s perceptions of control towards a behaviour.
People must believe their actions are meaningful, feel they have ownership/control/influence.
Individuals don’t want to change unless others are, therefore “policy change is the fastest route to individual behaviour change (Manning 2009), as policies should strive to affect all individuals equally.”
Positive emotions contribute to increased planned decision-making, they are shown to “expand cognition, inspire creativity, exploration and the development of future behavioural options”.
Positivity and humour help incite pro-environmental decisions, although this is never enough alone, “effective behaviour changes require a consistent set of simultaneous interventions on different levels” (i.e individual, community and population level).
Transparency in campaigns creates a feeling of everyone being ‘in it together’. This aids collective action and equity which have a huge role in behaviour change response.
The idea is to ‘plant seeds of a good anthropocene’, in other words show well-articulated solutions that will create a more positive future.