Environmental progress depends on seeing the people, not just the trees

World Environment Day is a day that draws attention to our natural world, so it makes sense that on this day we focus on the natural world and the threats it faces.

Even so, many of the issues impacting the environment – climate change, degradation of the Great Barrier Reef, deforestation and species loss, take your pick – are the result of human activity, and can be traced to human choices. It probably sounds counterintuitive, but perhaps on World Environment Day, we should be focusing more on people. It stands to reason after all, that if people are the problem they are also central to the solution.

Yet so often when we talk about solving environmental problems, people are treated as an inconvenient obstacle rather than participants in the change that needs to happen.

It can seem strange that the health of the environment continues to decline, when we are able to clearly diagnose the problems and offer solutions. Not to mention that so many are so passionately committed to protecting our natural world. But so often efforts go to waste, passionate people become jaded and everyone is left wondering what went wrong.

The fight to save the environment is regularly framed as a conflict between those who care about the environment and those intent on economic gain beyond all else. The images we associate with environmental protection are those of conflict - activists standing in front of bulldozers, communities fighting to save old-growth forests and campaigners trying to stop further damage before it is too late.

Environmental progress often falls foul of the deadlocks that arise when groups of people with competing interests cannot agree. But what if there are ways to navigate through conflict by engaging with people differently?

Watertrust Australia is an independent, philanthropically funded organisation set up to help achieve better and fairer water outcomes. Vital to the health of our natural environment, our communities and economy, there is no more hotly contested resource than water, especially on the driest continent on earth.

To make progress with water, Watertrust Australia works with people. Many of the solutions we pursue involve the deeply human activities of coming together and listening, using processes like deliberative practice and structured decision making.

In this arena, we have found that arriving at solutions almost always depends on whether people with different interests can work through difficult choices in a way they regard as fair. This isn’t a side issue, it’s often central to whether progress is possible.

Human beings understand fairness innately. It’s emotional, intuitive and fast. Different people have different concepts of what is fair, determined by what they care about and who they are. When different parties in a debate retreat to their respective corners, dig in their heels and refuse to budge, more often than not there is a perception of a lack of fairness.

At Watertrust Australia our role begins with helping people move through difficult choices in a process they understand is fair. Giving space to fairness in deliberations over natural resources, such as water, won’t remove every disagreement, but without it people are less likely to keep working through difficult choices.

Integrating fairness practices into our work at Watertrust Australia brings different interests together, helping people to better understand the choices in front of them. The trade-offs and impacts are clearer and more often than not better outcomes emerge. When people believe the decision-making process is fair, entrenched positions can shift despite not getting all of what they want.

These lessons are as relevant to the broader environmental movement as they are to issues of water. So much passion and energy gets expended in conservation efforts that end in stalemate. Too often we understand the problem, know what needs to be done, but can’t make progress because people are locked in conflict. This World Environment Day it’s worth taking the time to think about people. To make real progress on the environment, we need better ways of working with the people whose lives, choices and futures are bound up in it. We need to look beyond the trees to the people holding the axes or planting the seeds.