More than 1 million species are on the verge of extinction due to climate change. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we only have twelve years to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. With these appalling statistics, why is it that only a handful of people rise up and protest against environmental issues?
According to an article published by Jim Logan of University of California Santa Barbara, there is a link between environmental activism and culture. The findings of The Department of Psychological and Brain Science suggest that changing beliefs, attitudes, and concerns about social issues, which is one of the most common ways to change behaviour, may not allow for a uniform change in all cultures. It is likely to be effective in encouraging human action to address environmental issues in independent cultural contexts. They gathered that both public discussions and research studies on environmental ethics tend to focus on people from Western countries. This is significant because Western countries tend to have cultural values that prioritize the attitudes and beliefs of individuals and encourage their expression.
Descriptive cultural programs shape the way people interpret climate change, and provide historical and cultural context in which impacts occur and responses are expressed.
However, these relationships may not be representative of people living in different communities, which puts more emphasis on social cohesion and harmony than self-expression.
An outstanding fact is that many societies view and control the environment through a prism depicted by traditional beliefs that have long held their society in place, sometimes for thousands of years. The challenge of environmental management is that, in a global environment some of these long-term factors can lead to ecosystem damage and others can not only play a key role in promoting conservation but also in helping communities to cope with the effects of climate change.
According to the researchers, data from respondents in the United States, a country with a high degree of autonomy, showed a strong correlation between the two. At the same time, data from participants in many countries showed that there was almost no link between environmental concerns and behavioural goals for the environment.
Further analysis, they say, has shown that the link between environmental concern and support for environmental action is associated with national-level autonomy: When society is self-sufficient, the link is stronger. This remained true even after researchers considered various cultural factors.
