Backs to the future: the psychosocial dynamics of the global emergency

There are positives in the current situation. Deep down, Australians want transformational change; they want to live in a different way. In a 2005 survey, Australians were asked which of two positive scenarios of the future they expected and preferred: one focused on individual wealth, economic growth and efficiency, and enjoying 'the good life'; the other on community, family, equality and environmental sustainability. Almost three quarters (73%) expected the former; 93% preferred the latter.

Political activism appears to be growing. In a few short years, AVAAZ, a global campaign network that 'works to ensure that the views and values of the world's people shape global decision-making' has attracted 20 million members. In Australia, GetUp!, an independent, not-for-profit, community campaigning group that aims 'to build a progressive Australia and bring participation back into our democracy', has gained 628,000 members.

The lessons from this analysis are that we need to pay more attention to the internal, psychosocial dynamics of our situation, not only to its external, biophysical and economic dimensions. To arouse and mobilise people, we need to relate the big, global and national threats and challenges more closely to our personal lives and concerns, perhaps especially to our children and grandchildren and their futures.

Our immediate, personal experiences count for more, psychologically, than abstract statistics and future uncertainties. People discount global threats for several reasons: a human bias towards optimism (we've overcome problems like this before), perceived uncertainty (there is a history of failed predictions of global collapse, experts disagree), and system justification (a tendency to believe in and justify the way things are, and to not want to change the familiar status quo).

It may be that we will have to wait for a growing accumulation of catastrophes and calamities to make more real and immediate the relationship between the global and the personal. Disasters can be revelatory, and potentially revolutionary. They can bring out the best in us, and connect and empower us; they can also lay bare the social conditions and choices that often give rise to them, delivering a societal shock that makes change possible.

In the meantime, the best strategy may be to keep trying to bring the global emergency, quite literally, 'closer to home': to convince people that even their more personal and immediate anxieties have the same root sources and causes as the 'megacrises' confronting us. A tipping point will surely occur - and better sooner than later.