SO, what exactly is Conservation Psychology?

Conservation Psychology is a pretty new field in psychology.  It is sometimes referred to as Environmental psychology, however the original environmental psychology is about how environments influence people and such; sort of like office space layouts.  So conservation psychology is trying to move away from the environmental moniker in order to differentiate itself.

The gist of conservation psychology is looking at the relationship between humans and the environment.  Some of the applications are getting people to be more sustainable using psychological principles. 

From, http://www.conservationpsychology.org/

The area of research that I am working on with my professor is the social norms & disclosures part.  My professor is a social psychologist.  One of the projects that we are currently working on is the thesis of the current grad student.  We are looking at energy and water consumption and recycling behavior.  and providing feedback based on usage, along with the aggregate usage of the neighborhood.  I cant provide more details now because the study is ongoing.

One example of a study that was successful is in the realm of energy consumption.  My professor worked on studies that provided people in neighborhoods information about their energy consumption along with normative feedback about other people in the neighborhood, like "77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer."  The following week after getting this type of message the households who got the normative message used 10% less energy that the control. 

It is the social part of conservation psychology that I am most interested in.  I often get the question, well what are you going to do with that?  I would ideally like to work with businesses who have environmental programs implemented and get those programs to be more successful using these psychological techniques. 

More Information:
Conservation Psychology
Wikipedia