Environment | Matthew Adams 1 If citing, please reference final published version: Adams, M. (2017). Environment: Critical social psychology in the Anthropocene. In B. Gough (ed.) Handbook of Critical Social Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pages 621-641. NOTE: Page numbers of final version are in [squared brackets]. Environment: Critical social psychology in the Anthropocene Matthew Adams, University of Brighton, UK ‘The environmental challenges that confront society are unprecedented and staggering in their scope, pace and complexity. Unless we reframe and examine them through a social lens, societal responses will be too little, too late and potentially blind to negative consequences’ (Hackmann, Moser and Asuncion, 2014, p. 653). Introduction [p. 621] Although ‘environment’ can refer to the surroundings or conditions in which something exists, its more specific meaning, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (3 rd edition, 2011), is widespread: ‘The natural world or physical surroundings in general, either as a whole or within a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity’. Critical social psychology has many potential points of entry into the issue of the ‘environment’. However, a contemporary approach to this notoriously broad and ill-defined topic cannot, in my opinion, escape the overarching context of the relationship between human beings and their ‘environment’ as one marked by crisis. Incorporating relationships into our understanding of environment leads us to the concept of ‘ecology’. This is defined, sticking with the OED, as the scientific study of ‘the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings’ and ‘the study of or concern for the effect of human activity on the environment… (also) a political movement dedicated to this’. Ecology therefore incorporates the dispassionate observation of interrelatedness in general, and a more focused analysis of, and concern over, what human activity brings [p. 622] to the party. In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of contemporary understandings of ecological crisis. I then describe how psychology has been co-opted into addressing this crisis, particularly in terms of trying to understand what factors determine more ‘sustainable behaviour’. This is followed by what some may consider a surprising ‘social turn’ in literature concerned with climate change mitigation and adaptation hinted at in our opening quotation. Subsequent sections critically consider the conception of the social therein, before exploring critical currents that might be of interest to critical social psychologists.