Stuart Anderson recently graduated from CAT’s Graduate School for the Environment. We spoke to him about his dissertation research.
What did you set out to investigate?
Until I came to CAT, I’d never really been part of a social circle so environmentally minded all the time. I started spotting similarities – we all seemed to be mindful of the impacts our lifestyle choices were having. That’s where it began for me and it was a launchpad for the research.
The first hurdle was to define ‘mindfulness’ as there is a lot of debate about it. Initially, I had to decide whether I was looking at people who actively practise mindfulness, because in the areas of spirituality or the self-help movement there are other values attached.
If you look at dispositional mindfulness instead, then you’re looking at those aspects of someone’s life where mindfulness may be emerging and why. Are people who are sustaining pro-environmental behaviours over time acting mindfully? That’s a much more interesting question than whether people who are practising mindfulness think about the environment.
Previous research on mindfulness highlighted three relevant traits: present-centred awareness; sustained mindful intention; and non-judgement/non-reactivity. My research question became: Are dispositional mindfulness traits effective in sustaining pro-environmental behaviours?
Present-centred awareness is consciously thinking about the choices you make as you make them – awareness and attention to your thoughts as they relate to your actions. It is the opposite of habit and automaticity, where a lot of our un-environmental behaviours come from.
The second trait is mindful intention. You can make someone aware of their negative behaviours and their impacts, but that doesn’t mean they will change. Awareness is not sufficient, so in mindfulness there is also an intention to make and sustain positive changes.
The third trait is non-judgement (and non-reactivity), which is the ability to respond to the forces that shape our daily experience. The more mindful you are in this way, the more able you are to accept what’s happening without judging, overreacting or becoming overwhelmed by events beyond your control.
Figure 1: A visualisation of how pro-environmental ethics and mindfulness traits are interdependent and help re-enforce each other.
I seem to be the first person to do research around that third trait. The barriers to sustaining pro-environmental behaviour in our society are huge. I wondered, are we activating this non-judgement trait towards the self and others as a way of navigating barriers, setbacks, and instead focusing on sustaining pro-environmental behaviours?
How did you go about it?
Most research in this area uses self-report questionnaires and quantitative analysis, which has identified positive correlations e.g. people who give up smoking display a high dispositional mindful awareness of the dangers of smoking and use that to sustain the intention not to smoke.
But I was interested in sitting down with people who are sustaining pro-environmental behaviours to find out what it was like for them, so I took the social science route and used semi-structured interviews. To find the right people to talk to, I used a well-established pro-environmental behaviours questionnaire that focuses on 51 behaviours, and sent that out using social media. Of the respondents, nine had been sustaining at least 30 of the behaviours for 12 months or more. I interviewed all nine and then looked for repetitions and themes across the data (thematic analysis).
What did you find out?
The evidence was pretty strong that mindfulness traits were being activated.
Interestingly, the participants had gone through a remarkably similar process. Eight had completed a higher education course in some form of environmental education. That had crystallised their understanding of two key concepts: interconnectivity – my behaviours do not occur in a vacuum and have impacts that directly impact on the natural environment – and interdependence – we are reliant on this natural environment for our survival and flourishing as a species.
The one participant who did not do a higher education course had been working all her life in nature and had become involved in nature-based spirituality practices which had led her to the same conclusions.
All of the participants had developed a very clear understanding that we need the natural world and that our lifestyles are destroying it. Another key theme was the ongoing experience of very strong and positive nature connection experiences which was significant as it meant the participants not only understood but also cared deeply for the state of the natural world.
The next step for all of them was changing their behaviours. That process is very dependent on present-centred awareness. What was interesting was how they conceptualised and described it. I created the term ‘proximal awareness’ for the awareness that makes the connection between your behaviour, the inputs that enable it and the outputs that result from it. Present-centred awareness has enabled them to create this space in the moment where they are free to think about what they are doing, question it, change it, and sustain positive changes.
Figure 2: Participants intentionally enacted and sustained present-centred awareness to expand their proximal awareness to include the inputs and outputs that are causally linked to each behaviour we perform.
That leads on to the fact that they weren’t just aware of the impacts of their behaviours, but they were engaged in a long-term intention to change. That intention is fuelled by their education and their connection to nature, but also the ability to take those things and use them in the present, to regulate their behaviours.
The final element was that all the participants were adopting new skills to have more control over their behaviours and environment, such as food growing and learning to repair things.
They all felt compelled to ‘do the right thing’. They perceived that to be a collective responsibility and when they encountered situations where they failed themselves or where their friends and family weren’t changing their behaviours, that’s when non-judgement came into play. Over time, they’d learned to take a step back and say, you know what, I’m doing my best and beating myself up or being confrontational with others isn’t helping. Instead, all of them are now involved in community-focused education projects. They had come full circle and realised that the catalyst for them is something that is missing for other people – education, understanding, and caring.
What did you conclude?
I concluded that, yes, in the group I studied, dispositional mindfulness traits seem to be engaged in helping people to activate and sustain pro-environmental behaviours.
But I think equally as exciting and important is learning how they got to that point. It seems such common sense, that we need to become educated about the impacts of our behaviours and to care about the consequences.
I came away with a dream that everyone starting school could be learning mindfulness techniques and environmentalism, from day one. If we had an entire generation who had these skills and could combine them with a developed understanding of our relationship with the natural world, then we could have a very different society.
As told to Greta Hughson (@gretahughson)
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