UF Professor: Many Environmentalists Don’t ‘Walk The Walk’

April 18, 1996

GAINESVILLE — More than a quarter century after the first Earth Day, record numbers of Americans call themselves environmentalists, but few put their beliefs into action, says a University of Florida researcher.

“As many as four out of five people consider themselves environmentalists and one in 10 belongs to an environmental group,” said Leslie Thiele, a UF political science professor who is writing a book on the subject. “That is a sign that environmental values have been successfully incorporated into the mainstream of American life. But while the environmental movement is strong, it doesn’t necessarily mean the environment is doing well.”

The air in most cities is cleaner and easier to breathe, thanks to the landmark Clean Air Act, Thiele said. But legislation over the past 25 years has done little to restore the growing numbers of endangered species, and many lakes, rivers and streams remain unswimmable and unfishable, he said.

Except for recycling, which is often mandatory, the general public engages in few environmental practices at all. “Americans have adopted environmental values, but they haven’t adequately translated them into practice,” he said. “People talk the talk,’ but they don’t walk the walk.’”

Changing people’s attitudes at the grass roots level instead of simply passing new laws has become a major thrust of today’s environmental movement, a lesson it learned the hard way from its opponents. The well organized “wise use movement,” which contends environmentalists are extremists who want to destroy people’s ability to make good use of the land, inadvertently did environmentalists a favor by demonstrating the importance of organizing from the ground up, particularly in rural communities, Thiele said.

Many realized that the best way to preserve nature is to ensure that people have a decent standard of living so they don’t need to degrade the environment to make ends meet.

This focus on “sustainable development” is a defining feature of what Thiele calls the “fourth wave” of environmentalism, a period beginning in the early 1990s characterized by new resolutions to past conflicts.

The first wave of environmentalism in the United States began in the mid-1800s and was marked by efforts at conservation, primarily of wilderness and wildlife. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” sparked the second wave by propelling the expansion of this relatively small conservation effort into a mass movement aimed at containing pollution and other effects of an industrial lifestyle.

“Reaction to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 ushered in a third wave in that the movement became much more popular and widespread,” Thiele said. “Reagan’s appointment of James Watt, a radical anti-environmentalist, as Secretary of Interior was an ironic bit of good luck for environmentalists because the public was so outraged by the things he said that they flocked to the environmental movement.”

Strong backlashes against the environment, such as the one in the 1980s and current efforts by House Republicans to gut environmental legislation, have the unanticipated effect of galvanizing people in the opposite direction, he said.

“Republicans in Congress are beginning to realize that this doesn’t bode well for them in the November elections,” Thiele said. “They have retreated and even sent out memos suggesting ways they can engage in greenwashing’ — making themselves look green when they do anti-environmentalist things — such as holding tree planting ceremonies to win public favor when in fact they hide riders in bills that try to undermine the EPA.”

The environment is also an issue in Florida, listed by the Defenders of Wildlife organization as the state most threatened by species loss because of intense development. Generally, southern states have fewer environmentalists per capita than states in the Northeast or West, but Florida’s problems have generated strong concern, he said.

Florida’s other disadvantages are having a large aging population, which tends to be less pro-environment than young people, and a large immigrant population, which may not have cultivated the same attachment to the environment in Florida as residents of states with large percentages of native-borns, he said.

Studies show that personal experience with nature is the best predictor of whether or not values get translated into practice, Thiele said. “A key element to how successful environmentalism is in this country really comes down to how much people love and care for nature,” he said. “Because without that, they are not willing to fight for the environment.”