In this informative article by Robert Gifford in Psychology Today, read on to understand why man continues to destroy his environment. Increase in the carbon dioxide emission for the next 50 years starting in 2000; How people destroy the environment as they try to protect it; Ways in which people unconsciously hurt the environment.

On this millennial Earth Day, awareness of our depleting natural resources isat an all-time high, and yet, so is their destruction. A new field of research hopes to explain why we continue to damage the environment even as we think we're protecting it--and how we ca stop.

In November, nearly 80,000 people flocked to Seattle, Washington, to protest the disregard of the World Trade Organization (WTO) for environmental concerns. Impassioned demonstrators from San Diego to France inundated the streets of downtown Seattle for days, railing against the toll that free trade often exacts on endangered wildlife.

Unfortunately, the protestors' admirable pilgrimage to save the environment actually hurt it more than they knew. Consider how many well-intentioned individuals who normally would have stayed home flew across the country, sapping tons of energy and releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. According to the U.K.'s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, aircraft emissions of carbon dioxide could triple over the next 50 years, highly exacerbating global warming. This is just one of the ways we destroy the environment even as we're trying to protect it--a tragic irony that is one of the major themes of environmental psychology.

Many people, based perhaps on well-publicized disasters like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, believe that environmental problems are most often caused--and best solved--by government or big business. Most environmental damage, however, begins not with government or large companies, but with the cumulative actions of individuals. If there is a solution to this global crisis, it is to understand--and remedy--the decision-making of individual consumers of energy before nature pays the price.

For about 30 years, environmental psychologists have struggled to understand the way we treat our surroundings, which ultimately harms our own well-being, since environmental assault can wreak havoc on our health, even leading to illnesses such as cancer. Over 100 studies conducted in the last two decades have examined the ways individuals influence the environment--from deciding to have another child to turning on the air conditioner--and why they make such decisions. We know that some people do refrain from overusing nonrenewable resources, from forests and fish to less tangible resources such as clean air and physical space. Environmental psychologists are now examining the mind-set of such individuals, hoping eventually to encourage others to consider our resources in the same way.

More and more people are environmentally aware these days--curbside recycling, insulated homes and Woodsy Owl's slogan "Give a hoot, don't pollute" are now ingrained in our cultural consciousness. You might think that awareness would lead to environmentally friendly behavior, but it does not: Well-educated, middle-class North Americans, the people most likely to have high environmental awareness, use far more energy than Third World residents--and other North Americans too.
Why the discrepancy between words and deeds? So far, scientists have identified at least 30 different personal, social or structural influences that affect whether a given person uses natural resources wisely or takes more than their share. There are four overriding ways that people, mostly unconsciously, hurt the environment every day:

• Energy use. Perhaps our biggest priority is to curb our heavy use of fossil fuel energy sources, like oil. Burning these fuels produces greenhouse gases and ground-level pollutants, leading to global warming, a planetary danger no longer questioned by experts. A 1998 study in the journal Bioscience showed that 40% of deaths worldwide are caused by pollution and other environmental factors. Furthermore, energy use is growing: Dutch researcher Linda Steg, Ph.D., reports that in the Netherlands, a region typical of developed nations, consumers now use 25% more energy than they did just 14 years ago.

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