ABSTRACT
The last section of Psychology for Sustainability, 5th edition, titled Being the Change We Want to See, comprises two chapters that encourage readers to take what they have learned and apply it as changemakers in the world. This chapter concludes the book with ways to pursue a positive path to sustainability that will foster personal resilience and promote enduring happiness. One key is to harness hope and self-transcendent emotions such as awe, gratitude, and love. Channeling creativity to engineer solutions, artistically express concern, and revamp routines is a way to find beauty in the bad. Forming and maintaining social connections characterized by humor and civility prevents burnout and promotes community resilience, allowing for adaptation and “bouncing forward.” Social support in the form of mentors and role models can inspire and motivate. Several environmental champions are profiled as examples. Constructive coping involves mind management through meditation or other mindfulness practice. Ikigai, or a sense of purpose, can be found through a vocation or prosocial civic engagement, including volunteerism and activism. Positive psychology pioneer Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of happiness includes five ingredients that are attainable while working for sustainability: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. Negative feelings along the way are inevitable. Collaborative positive psychology (PP 2.0) emphasizes how even emotions such as guilt, grief, anger, and anxiety can be primary drivers of constructive collective responses to big shared problems. In sadness, we can find solidarity, and in outrage, empowerment.
