Inspiration and the academic message

I’ve just watched three wonderful, inspiring videos – the links were sent to me by Aaron Packard of 350 Aotearoa. One was a music video/flash mob to promote 350 in Australia, another a short clip of a young Samoan woman and her efforts towards climate change prevention and the third showed three young New Zealanders each of whom were mobilising local communities towards action. Watch them!

I’ve included them in this blog about Psychology for a Better World, because they acted to reconnect me with why I wrote the book and what I hoped it would add to the sustainability movement. My message and the message of these videos is the same: do what you can given who you are, and do it in a way that is life-enriching for yourself and those around you. Watching the videos brought home to me that I add something different to this message by drawing on academic psychology to craft it. While I do not believe that academic psychology is a better way of understanding people than many other forms of knowledge, it does offer new insights and explanations for why we are as we are and how we can mobilise for change. I think this is why people have responded to my book, because I am affirming what they know with a different rationale, as well as giving them tools for fine-tuning their endeavours. As I’ve written before, I love books that provide me with a sense that the writer and I are the same, only he or she has taken my half-formed thought and put it in words.Very cool to hope I have managed to do that for readers.