Matt Kahn and Eric Morris on Green Travel Behavior

Mat Kahn and Eric Morris, two of the very smart peoples at UCLA, have published a very cool paper on the coherence between attitudes and behavior among environmentalists. He discusses the paper and provides a link on his blog.

Kahn, Matt and E. Morris. 2009. Walking the Walk: The Association Between Community Environmentalism and Green Travel Behavior.

Forthcoming in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

Every time Matt publishes a paper, it’s a paper I wish I’d written. I have written about a group that is suspected to be indifferent to the environment–truckers–along with CJ Brodrick and Sue Spivey at James Madison University. You can find that manuscript here. The bottom line is that truckers have two major groups–employee truckers and owner-operators, and the employee truckers do have pro-environmental attitudes. Owner-operators are, unsurprisingly, more driven by costs, which in the case of idle reduction technology, aligns with environmental interests. But capital markets are imperfect and it takes some time for the technology in the owner operator fleet to change over.

Schweitzer,L., Brodrick, C-J, , and S.Spivey. 2008. “Truck Driver Environmental Attitudes and Behaviors: An Exploratory Analysis.” Transportation Research Part D. 13 (3): Available online at: doi:10.1016/j.trd.2007.11.001.

No hoping for the environment

I happened upon this article rather late, as they ran the feature in February, but here is an synopsis:

“Is hope a placebo, a distraction, merely sowing the seeds of disillusionment?” they ask, in an opinion piece titled “Abandon Hope.” The authors, co-founders and directors of the Conservation Ethics Group, an of environmental ethics consultancy, examine the proper role of hope in environmentalism. They suggest that hope’s alternative is not hopelessness or despair, but rather the inherent virtue of “doing the right thing.”

John Vucetich and Michael Nelson. Abandon Hope. The Ecologist, March 2009

I wonder about this. Much of the environmental discussion is conducted in terms of apocalypse: we’re doomed, we must save ourselves. Then when somebody like Bjorn Lomberg comes along and refutes that message, the reaction is histrionic, like the guy is a Holocaust denier or something, when all he is doing is shaking up the discussion and looking at the data. So there’s already a heavy moral component to the environment–for some people, it ties into longstanding western ethics associated with efficiency and frugality, for others it ties into obligations regarding stewardship and responsibility towards other life or for resources over which humans have control, and for yet another group it emanates from obligations towards other people, either their cohort, the next generation, or both. Anne Coulter–somebody so relentlessly self-promotional that she hardly needs me to link—maintains that environmentalism is the “religion of the left.”

So it’s not as though environmental values are not already bandied in terms of “right” and “wrong” already. When I say that I study sustainable transport, people get a pained look on their faces and say “I know I should take transit, but it just takes so long and it’s so hard to get anywhere and it’s…etc., etc., etc.” It’s not like people don’t know what they probably should be doing or should not be doing here. They don’t do “right” by the environment because they have other priorities, not because they don’t care and don’t see it as a matter of right and wrong, and you probably need better ethical imperatives to help them set their priorities than “the environment is more important than your other priorities because the environment is my priority.”

Animals and dogfighting in the sustainable society

“The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), History of England

One wonders if in this regard the Puritans weren’t right. To delight in cruelty, especially when the cruelty is enacted over those with less power than you, and who are dependent upon you, portends a degradation of the human spirit that transcends the Puritan’s godly distrust of ungodly pursuits . You wish to prove your mettle and courage? Go join a cage fight your own self, don’t send your charges into one for you. You can try all the “this is my culture” excuses you want: finding entertainment or profit in another’s pain is sociopathy, no matter how dressed up.

One of my favorite books on the subject of animal-nature ethics was edited by my former colleague Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel:

Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands. Published in 1998 by Verso.