You Can’t Get People to Care About the Environment: The Struggle of Activism

Why Do People Care?

There is a greater question to be had regarding what makes an issue political in the first place, and while this question can seemingly be answered by bringing up money, there are hazy edges at which this answer falls apart. The environment, specifically climate change, is no doubt a “hot” topic in modern-day politics, which can be seen (with varying importance) in many countries across the globe. What becomes interesting to look at is the degree to which environmental activism has made actual, tangible change. People who care about climate change typically care because they have certain personal values and ideas, and align themselves with green issues because they see a bigger picture. They have looked toward the future, and through various means of gathering information, have deduced that what we, as a country or planet, are doing is truly harmful and will have adverse effects on our Earth in the future. However, not all people think this way. Some people don’t believe or trust the same sources of information as others; some are vehemently against environmental action as they don’t care about something that probably won’t happen in their lifetime; and some people are against it not because they are against making the Earth a better place, but because the people they are against the people who do believe in doing so.

Labels and Boxes

Here we see an issue with some facets of modern-day politics, the idea of labels, or more accurately, boxes that people create to put themselves and others into.

Countless political spectrums exist to place people on a simplistic 2D grid or line. A famous one is the “political compass” which consists of a set of two axes, the x-axis spanning “left” to “right” and the y-axis “liberal” to “authoritarian”. Of course, we also see political parties. In the United States, with only two main parties, many people identify with a vast majority of other ideologies and parties. All of these are only abstractions of real people and are largely unsuccessful in defining someone perfectly. The political compass can be considered flawed because it only has two axes, which are unable to accurately define everyone who wishes to be placed on it. Some people try and fix this issue by abstracting further, adding more axes, more groups, more labels. In the end, however, definition only has so much intrinsic value to us.

While it can be argued that the point of these graphics isn’t to perfectly define someone, there is a reason why these broad definitions are harmful. Some people try and find the perfect label to fit themselves, one that is closest to what they believe in, and others align themselves on the simplest scale of “left” and “right”. While it feels like definition is just that, definition, and doesn’t have any real influence in our world, we see that this isn’t really true. The vast majority of people do not spend their waking hours researching topics and engaging with articles and research. The common citizen aligns themselves to an ideology based on a few factors that relate to their political socialization, and then most of these people just take on the rest of the beliefs of their general group. What we see from this are people debating not with thought-out ideas, but with a box in their hand. Ideas get nowhere because if an idea becomes politicized, people define the idea on the same spectrum they use to define themselves. Climate change is a “liberal idea”, LGBTQ+ issues are “woke nonsense”, and taxing the rich is “communist”. Here, all reasoning and debate die. People find themselves against the labels rather than the actual issue itself.

This idea was brought to light in a study done in 2020 where people were given political issues, then were told whether or not such an issue was agreed with more or less by a certain party. What was found is that people who aligned with one party were more inclined to agree with an issue if they were given the context that an issue fell within their party, even if it didn’t. This goes both ways, even two groups who generally align themselves with more “leftist” talking points may be fully against each other. One group may see certain ideas as radical and idealistic, and the other group with these “radical” ideas might consider the first group as “performative” or “pandering”.

It is important to understand, however, that different people have different levels of care for political issues as a whole. The main idea here is that while not everyone uses these labels, what we see, especially among those who engage in reactionary politics, is that these labels are the path of least resistance to being correct. People become convinced that something is harmful to their way of life, or to some other personal value they have, and don’t ever wish to do their due diligence in “checking” themselves and changing their sentiment.

References:

NIH

Gallup