14 ECOPSYCHOLOGY MARCH 2009 DOI: 10.1089/eco.2008.0005 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Mindfulness and Sustainable Behavior: Pondering Attention and Awareness as Means for Increasing Green Behavior Elise L. Amel, 1 Christie M. Manning, 2 and Britain A. Scott 1 1 Department of Psychology, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. 2 Department of Environmental Studies, Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota. Abstract Ecopsychologists have suggested that mindful awareness of our interdependence with nature may not only help us regain our lost, ecologically embedded identity (Roszak, 1992) but may also help us behave more sustainably, closing the documented gap between proenvironmental attitudes and behaviors. We suggest more speciically that, in contemporary consumer culture with its dearth of proenvironmental norms and cues, mindful attentive- ness may be necessary to develop sustainable habits. To explore the connection between mindfulness and sustainable behavior, we measured 100 adults attending a Midwestern sustainability expo on two mindfulness factors: acting with awareness and observing sensations. As predicted, acting with awareness was signiicantly positively correlated with self-reported sustainable behavior. This inding is consistent with the idea that, until sustainable deci- sions become the societal default, their enactment may depend on focused consideration of options and mindful behavior. In con- trast, observing sensations did not predict behavior. This calls into question the notion that feeling connected to the world out- side of ourselves is a precondition for sustainable action. We call for more research to further test the validity and generalizability of our indings. M odern lifestyles have us multitasking and racing from activity to activity, protected from the “ele- ments” by climate-controlled autos, transporting us from air-conditioned workplaces to heated homes, and getting away from it all with the help of the latest develop- ments in neoprene and gore-tex. We are constantly separated, even at the most basic sensory level, from the very systems we rely on, such that many of us do not even know we are in the middle of environmental crises. Could cultivating attention and gaining awareness of our context be key to increasing sustainable behavior? Ecopsychologists consider a connection between ourselves and the rest of nature to be essential to mental and, thus, ecological health. They suggest that the uniquely modern luxury of focusing on our inner experience to the exclusion of our external context, however, comes at the expense of our well-being. There seems to be a consensus among ecopsychologists that we need “a con- cept of self which is relational and inclusive” such as Roszak’s (1992) ecological self and Conn’s (1995) more-than-human-self (Scull, 1999). “If mind is all inside and nature is all outside, then psychology and ecology have nothing in common” (Fisher, 2002, p. 9). Therefore, to use Fisher’s conceptualization, the project of ecopsychology is to reconnect psychology and ecology largely by reestablishing the self as inextricable from nature. An expected result of this reconnection is that it will “awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious” (Roszak, 1992; as cited in Scull, 1999, p. 3). Given the current state of disconnect between our sense of self and nature, it is no surprise, then, that our eco- logical concern often does not translate into eco-friendly action