Tommy Gärling, Ph.D. Division
President
Professor of
Psychology
1. Appointment/election of officers to the Executive Board
We have implemented an adequate election
procedure. Anticipating the need to elect new division officers for the coming
term, Terry Hartig and I stimulated discussion among the members of the IAAP
executive committee regarding acceptable procedures for division elections. We
now have guidelines to follow in the future (you can see them at the IAAP
website).
Having concluded the election according to the
guidelines, for the first time the division has a complete complement of
division officers, consisting of the president (David Canter), the
president-elect (Robert Gifford), the past-president (myself), the secretary
and newsletter editor (Terry Hartig), and the treasurer (Einar Strumse).
2. Information Dissemination
The
executive committee (Terry Hartig, Einar Strumse and myself) has been engaged
in several activities to increase the division´s visibility, communication with
members, and communication with some other organizations. We now have an
excellent home page (http://www.psy.gu.se/iaap/envpsych.htm) that I believe not only division members but
also many others benefit from. For this to materialize, Mathias Gustafsson has
throughout the term assisted us in a very skillful and reliable way. We greatly
appreciate his efforts. With Terry and Einar, I have published in the IAAP Newsletter
a series of editorials on topics concerning relations between environmental
psychology and other areas of scientific and applied activity. You can find
these editorials posted on the division home page, together with comments that
we solicited from colleagues. We are grateful to Karen Cronick, Gary Evans,
Robert Gifford, Gabriel Moser, Henk Staats, David Uzzell, Charles Vlek, and Ge
Wu for their commentaries.
There are several
other organizations that count as members environment psychologists. These are
the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) in North America, the
International Association of People and their Surroundings (IAPS),
Man-Environment Relations Association (MERA) in Japan, and People and Physical
Environment Research (PAPER) in Australia. All of these are interdisciplinary
and a majority of their members come from disciplines other than psychology.
The division therefore fulfills a valuable function in providing a closer
connection to the mother discipline. It is also the case that economic
psychologists, health psychologists, social psychologists, and traffic
psychologists may want to be associated with the division, although not with
any of the other organizations. Still, increasing contacts with these other
organizations is desirable. Terry and I organized a division-sponsored
symposium at the IAPS conference in Paris, and David Uzzell, the current
president of IAPS, was asked to organize a symposium at the ICAP2002
(unfortunately cancelled). Many division members also attended the IUPS
Congress in Stockholm in the Summer of 2000, and we took the occasion to
organize a division meeting.
Through contacts with David Canter, the former
editor of Journal of Environmental
Psychology (JEP) and the next division president, we have made JEP the home
journal of the division. After negotiations with representatives of Academic
Press, division members are now offered subscriptions to JEP at discount rates.
Furthermore, through the executive committee, policy suggestions can be made to
the new journal editor, Robert Gifford (who in the capacity of president-elect
also will be a member of the division executive committee).
Although JEP has been and will continue to be
the flagship journal, we have consistently encouraged division members to publish
more in the official IAAP journal, Applied
Psychology: An International Review. This has resulted in several papers
being accepted for publication.
3. Membership Recruitment
By updating membership registers and matching
them against people we know are active in the field, we have tried to
contribute our share of membership recruitment by contacting non-members. In
addition, we have encouraged members of other divisions (e.g., health
psychology, the psychology of traffic and transportation, economic psychology)
to also register for the environmental psychology division. Unfortunately, we
have not been able to actually record the outcome of our efforts.
4. ICAP2002 Program
The past president Gary Evans has acted as the
chair of the program committee for the ICAP2002 conference. Other committee
members have been Mirilia Bonnes, Gabriel Mosel, and myself. The keynote
speaker will be president-elect Robert Gifford. Invited speakers include
Birgitta Berglund (Stockholm University, Sweden) and Barbara Tversky (Stanford
University, Palo Alto, USA). Invited symposia include Gary Evans (Cornell
University, Ithaca, USA): Environmental and developmental psychology;
Anders Biel (Göteborg University, Sweden) and John Thøgersen (Aarhus School of
Business, Denmark) (cosponsored with the Economic Psychology division): Promoting
cooperation in resource dilemmas; Terry Hartig (Uppsala University, Sweden)
(cosponsored with the Health Psychology division): New views on restoration
and restorative environments; Florian Kaiser (Eindhoven Technical
University, The Netherlands) (cosponsored with the Psychological Assessment
division): Conservation behavior: Perspectives, promoters, and approaches to
its measurement; and Osamu Iwata (University of Tokushima, Japan): Approaches
to proenvironmental behavior. Two additional symposia, 4 oral sessions, and
one poster session have been scheduled.