What can psychology teach us about environmental law? More than one might expect, as Rowell and Bilz demonstrate in The Psychology of Environmental Law. Their book presents a thoroughly researched and in-depth examination of the various, often overlooked, intersections between environmental law and psychology. As the authors demonstrate, engaging psychological insights and methodologies can provide a wealth of new learning on how people interact with environmental law and environmental issues more broadly. Building on a wide range of psychological and behavioural literature, Rowell and Bilz make a convincing case for further developing this emerging field of psychology of environmental law.

The structure of the book can be summarized as follows. In the Introduction and the subsequent Chapter 1, the authors explain why and how psychology can make an important contribution to the study of environmental law and policy. They discuss, for instance, how psychology may help to describe, explain, and predict people's mental processes, which in turn have an impact on how they behave in the real world. If we can better understand these mental processes, the authors argue, we can also better understand how best to design environmental laws and policies to meet intended effects. Also methodologically, psychology as a scholarly field offers a breadth of research tools to study the practical effects of environmental law and its interactions with human behaviour.Footnote ¹ All these elements can help to make environmental law more effective at achieving set goals – which is, of course, very welcome considering the dangerous cocktail of environmental and climatic challenges we are facing today.Footnote ²

Chapter 1 further sets several important parameters of this new field: namely, whose psyche are we studying? The Psychology of Environmental Law is concerned with both individuals interacting with environmental laws in various capacities (for example, as subjects of the law, as voters, as litigants), as well as legal institutions, composed of individuals (for example, negotiators of international agreements, legislators, judges). As individuals interact with environmental law in various ways, furthering our understanding of people's mental processes and decision-making mechanisms can help us to better understand and predict how law has an impact on people's behaviour, and how people's behaviour affects the law.

In Chapters 2, 3 and 4, the authors discuss three important elements that make our engagement with environmental issues challenging, or even problematic, from a psychological perspective: namely, the diffused nature of environmental problems across time and space, which makes them hard to oversee (Ch. 2); the complexity of environmental issues, which makes them hard for us to understand (Ch. 3); and the non-human nature of our environment (such as animals, ecosystems), which makes it difficult for humans to care (Ch. 4).Footnote ³ For each of these categories, the authors elaborate a range of psychological insights that can help to better understand people's complex relationship with environmental injuries.

Cognitive heuristics, discussed mostly in Chapter 2, may provide an interesting starting point here. This concept – first developed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s, and popularized in their more recent Thinking Fast and Slow – essentially means that people use a plethora of mental shortcuts when trying to solve problems or making decisions. There are many such heuristics, one of which is the ‘availability heuristic’. This heuristic causes people to overestimate the likelihood of the occurrence of something that is close to them. As the authors helpfully explain, for extreme-scenario climate change, people essentially have ‘no mental template for comparison’ (p. 37). Such mental unavailability makes it difficult for people to assess effectively the risks involved, specifically telling themselves that events like climate change and related extreme weather events are less likely to occur than in fact they are as they have not taken place ‘close’ to the individuals concerned in the past. With ecosystems increasingly visibly breaking down in various ways across the globe, the availability heuristic may increasingly move to the background, with another psychological mechanism coming into play: ‘the strategy of ignorance and denial’ (p. 88). By means of illustration, consider the example of flying, which is a type of behaviour that provides convenience and which people find hard to change. Under these conditions people are prone simply to dismissing unsettling facts regarding the pollutive nature of air travel, as opposed to changing their behaviour. This heuristic is reinforced by the fact that when we accept the validity of worrisome environmental facts, we often feel powerless to make meaningful changes, and may enter a state of ‘learned helplessness’ (p. 88), leading to inaction (e.g., ‘this one flight does not matter so much in the grand scheme of environmental collapse’).

A particularly interesting insight related to transnational environmental law (TEL) is that of in-group/out-group dynamics. As the authors note, people are prone to creating and sustaining groups, and favour those within the group to the detriment of outsiders. Rowell and Bilz illustrate this through the example of a farmer using fertilizers on his land in Iowa, obtaining the in-group benefit of increased yields. Negative, out-group externalities, such as ‘nitrogen runoffs into the Mississippi watershed and the sprawling dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico’ (p. 54), are further away in time and space, making it unlikely that the farmer in question will ‘ever learn of those impacts or to be reminded of them if he does’ (p. 55). However, even if the impacts are clear, they are often underestimated and undervalued by the people causing the environmental problems, simply because those experiencing the harm are predominantly people outside their own group. Including such psychological insights into TEL scholarship may help in enhancing the effectiveness of environmental law as it unfolds across borders, and between state and non-state actors.

Besides discussing how psychological science might inform how we think about environmental law and environmental injury more broadly, in Chapter 5 the authors also note various ways in which general law and psychology insights can promote our understanding of environmental law. Although this chapter does provide further depth to various behavioural insights, integrating the findings of Chapter 5 within the preceding chapters would have avoided some repetition.

In Chapters 6, 7 and 8, the authors provide concrete case studies on the psychology of pollution control, ecosystem management, and climate change law and policy, respectively. These chapters, very effectively, bring together a range of psychological insights and concrete law and governance challenges relating to the said themes.

The book can be seen first and foremost as an invitation for (transnational) environmental law scholars to start to employ these building blocks for furthering and enriching their respective research domains. While offering various relevant thematic starting points, such as pollution or climate policy, it should be noted that the authors do not go into much detail on how the average legal scholar may go about applying psychological insights in their work. This is regrettable as many lawyers may lack the training to engage effectively with social science literature and corresponding methodologies.Footnote ⁴ An increased focus on the use of methods in legal research and education may help to mitigate such barriers,Footnote ⁵ but an approach I would like to add here is that of increased cooperation beyond scholarly fields. As a personal example, for a study on public participation in wind energy projects, I worked with law colleagues as well as environmental psychologists to compare Dutch legislation on public participation in decision making, with people's preferences concerning such participation. Based on survey research, we found that these two rarely match.Footnote ⁶ By combining law and psychology, we aimed to further understand how best to reconcile legal frameworks with public preferences, specifically by engaging different societal groups and representing different values in decision making.Footnote ⁷ While it may require stepping out of one's comfort zone, forming more unusual collaborations can be a very effective tool to promote mutual knowledge sharing and develop new methodological skills.

Many more examples of fruitful collaboration between psychology and legal research can be thought of, also in the TEL domain. How should environmental law respond, for instance, to cross-border, transnational environmental harm, and the bridging of political jurisdictional lines? Although this issue receives regular attention from a legal perspective,Footnote ⁸ connecting this with the psychological mechanisms underpinning cross-border environmental harm, such as in-group thinking and cognitive strategies to minimize one's responsibility, could provide new insights and help to find potential solutions.

One can also think of the potential of using psychology methodologies to test the effectiveness of legal solutions proposed in the literature. Consider, for instance, the granting of rights to nature and future generations – regularly advocated from more legal-philosophical perspectives in TEL scholarship.Footnote ⁹ One option would be to run surveys to measure whether granting rights to nature affects people's attitudes towards environmental issues and laws. Similarly, one could run experiments or serious games to assess whether including spokespersons for nature and/or future generations in decision making, or even judging contexts, may yield more pro-environmental results. Again, if such methodologies are outside the comfort zone of the legal researcher, connecting with fellow researchers from the psychology department could be a very promising approach.

To conclude, the authors have performed a tour de force in bundling the existing theoretical insights and practical suggestions, as well as avenues for further research, in this emerging field of psychology of environmental law. There is much more work to be done, but Rowell and Bilz have helpfully paved a way for new and exciting research in this domain. It will be very interesting to see how the field will develop from this point, and particularly the role that the TEL community can play here.