Do We Care About the Environment?
Feb. 8, 2006 — -- Support for protecting the environment has declined precipitously since 2001, an alarming trend that could have profound implications for the United States in the years ahead.
For more than three decades, Michael Greenberg, associate dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, has tried to keep his finger on the environmental pulse of the nation, and what he has seen lately is disconcerting.
Greenberg has conducted surveys of his own, and has pored over surveys done by others, and he admits now that he was wrong when he postulated in the American Journal of Public Health in 2001 that environmental support was "really strong and not likely to change."
"Three years later it had changed a lot," Greenberg said. "That really shocked me."
What happened? Had the disastrous attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq forced Americans to rethink their priorities? Had the plunging economy left them so concerned about jobs that nothing else mattered?
Greenberg said he "needed to get to the root of it," so he turned to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which each year asks U.S. residents to rank national priorities from "top priority" to "should not be done." From 1999 to 2004, 3,688 people took part in the surveys.
The surveys were made available to Greenberg, and it didn't take long to find that the public's concern over the environment had taken a nose dive.
"In January 2001, 63 percent of respondents wanted environment to be a top priority," Greenberg wrote in a recent issue of the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management.
The survey is always conducted in January, and by January 2002 the world had become a very different place. Terrorism, which had always seemed to be somebody else's problem, had moved into the hearts of every American.
And concern over protecting the environment had dropped 19 points to 44 percent. The next year, it dropped to 39 percent, but it rose back up to 49 percent in 2004.
