All the sustainable bloggy folk are reporting on a new poll in the Wall Street Journal.
On the bright side, "nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults agree that protecting the environment is important and standards cannot be too high."
Then again, "Only 12% of U.S. adults describe themselves as active environmentalists."
There's a lot to be unpacked in this, but I gotta skeedaddle home. Read the whole thing. I'll just say: greens are rather obsessed with the idea that if they just get the facts out there, people will want action. (This is particularly true on global warming.)
But the facts are already out there. People already want action. But there's a difference between wanting action in the "I'd say so on a poll" way and wanting action on the "I'd make it a voting priority" way.
We don't need more facts and studies and "proof." We need to figure out how to motivate people. Those are separate undertakings, and it's the latter greens are failing at.
Comments
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Michael Boydston Posted 2:42 pm
13 Oct 2005
Specious "balance" taints coverage of global warming and other scientific issues, and many stories are ignored altogether. Consider these items from Project Censored's list of Top 25 under-covered stories for 2005:
#5: The Wholesale Giveaway of Our Natural Resources
#8: Cheney's Energy Task Force and The Energy Policy
#10: New Nuke Plants: Taxpayers Support, Industry Profits
#18: Media and Government Ignore Dwindling Oil Supplies
#19: Global Food Cartel Fast Becoming the World's Supermarket
#20: Extreme Weather Prompts New Warning from UN
#21: Forcing a World Market for GMOs
not to mention
#10: Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy (2006 list)
I think that at least in part, people aren't motivated because the media aren't raising the issues. Remember how, in the course of three Kerry-Bush debates and one Edwards-Cheney debate, the moderators asked exactly zero questions on environmental issues? (An audience member, bless her, asked one.) I was throwing things at my TV by the time Bob Schieffer asked Bush and Kerry what was the most important thing they had learned from their wives.
Beyond the media: in Congress and the executive branch, measures weakening major environmental protections and giving away public resources have been tucked into appropriations bills or enacted as agency policy changes without benefit of public notice and comment. When there is public notice, it can be deeply flawed, as with Richard Pombo's task force seeking to gut the National Environmental Policy Act -- it's conducting poorly-advertised show trials in out-of-the-way spots in order to collect anti-NEPA testimony.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, "beauty strips" still mask clearcuts from passing motorists, factory farms are in rural areas where relatively few people see and smell them, and extractive industries are working their way across public lands out of sight of almost everyone.
All of this ignorance-by-design has to be having an impact. Robert Kennedy forcefully made the get-the-facts-out case in an interview on E&E TV:
[T]he problem is that the public doesn't know what President Bush is doing to the environment. I always say that 80 percent of Republicans are Democrats who don't know what's going on. I don't believe that there's a big, philosophical gap between the red states and the blue states, because I speak in the red states all the time, and I think the values are the same. And all the data shows that the values are the same among Americans. . . . The problem is that the information of Bush's stealth attack on the environment is not getting through to the people who live in the red states, because they're getting their news from FOXNews, from talk radio. And then the corporate broadcasts, those are not publishing the news anymore. . . . And people in this country know more about Laci Peterson today, than they do about the mercury that is in their fish, and in the bodies of one out of every six American women, and the wombs of one out of every six American women, at levels so high they're endangering their children. People don't know that in this country, and they don't know the connection between the mercury in our fish, the mercury in our women's bodies and our children's brains. And the policies of this president, who took $100 million from mercury polluters, and got rid of the laws that . . . were meant to discourage them from putting mercury in our environment. . . . The problem is not that the American people are not interested in this issue. All the polling shows that 81 percent of Republicans want stronger environmental laws and want them strictly enforced. But if you ask those same Republicans . . . what do you think Bush is doing on this issue, they all think he's doing fine, because the press has let down the American people through negligence and indolence. The American press has devolved over the past 20 years, since the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine. So they're no longer giving us the news we need to make rational choices in a democracy.I disagree with Kennedy to the extent he's suggesting that the Fairness Doctrine, or for that matter any form of (hypothetical) accurate and attentive Fourth Estate, would in itself solve our environmental problems. I agree with you: motivating people is hugely important -- at least as important as informing them.
So we have to do both.
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David Roberts Posted 2:27 am
14 Oct 2005
I just worry that progressives in general, and environmentalists in particular, have a somewhat naive sense of connection between fact, motivation, and action. To hear many greens tell it, they are enlightened, know the Truth, and their job is to get the truth out to the benighted masses. But this ignores the possibility that the same facts can mean different things to different people operating in different contexts. Facts do not dictate a course of action.
The psychology and sociology of mass movements are complicated and chaotic. It's tempting, but not effective, to simplify them into a matter of facts and figures. This poll shows that almost 75% highly value the environment but only 12% are environmentalists. Something's out of whack.
www.grist.org
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jdhlax Posted 7:02 am
17 Oct 2005
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