Offers psychological insights into how people perceive, respond to,
value, and make decisions about the environment
Environmental law may seem a strange space to seek insights from
psychology. Psychology, after all, seeks to illuminate the interior of
the human mind, while environmental law is fundamentally concerned with
the exterior surroundings--the environment--in which people live.
Yet psychology is a crucial, undervalued factor in how laws shape
people's interactions with the environment. Psychology can offer
environmental law a rich, empirically informed account of why, when, and
how people act in ways that affect the environment--which can then be
used to more effectively pursue specific policy goals. When
environmental law fails to incorporate insights from psychology, it
risks misunderstanding and mispredicting human behaviors that may injure
or otherwise affect the environment, and misprescribing legal tools to
shape or mitigate those behaviors.
The Psychology of Environmental Law provides key insights regarding
how psychology can inform, explain, and improve how environmental law
operates. It offers concrete analyses of the theoretical and practical
payoffs in pollution control, ecosystem management, and climate change
law and policy when psychological insights are taken into account.