Americans’ Level of Concern for Environmental Issues Can Change Very Quickly

Here’s a comment that a friend sent me in response to my post in which I lamented how little Americans know and care about environmental issues.  As you’ll see, my buddy doesn’t disagree, but he frames his thinking in a way that I thought readers would find interesting.

In 1947….

… After more than 80 years of the British Raj, the Brits vacated. Sociologists and historians later surveyed thousands of Indian people to determine how British rule had affected their culture. They were astonished to learn that a majority of Indians never knew the Brits had been there.

The obvious takeaway is that government officials overestimate their power to change cultures. Of course we might think that the American people today are different, in the era of TV, Internet, and widespread literacy. But surveys show that a majority aren’t listening; or if they hear, they don’t care; or don’t believe. Time after time, we see “man-on-the-street interviews” in which people know about Obama, but have never heard of Biden, Kerry, Reed, Pelosi or Boehner. They know about Jay-Z and Beyoncé, but have never heard of Climate Change.

Bay Area suburban homeowners are aware of solar energy systems and purchase them. But it’s doubtful that cliff-dwellers in Manhattan care, since their interest in electrical power ends at their duplex outlets.

Americans are far from homogeneous. The limited percentage of people that vote don’t spend any time understanding issues that don’t affect them personally.

The reason we have no energy policy is that the president doesn’t believe that energy issues help him or his party politically….I know you are very familiar with Occam’s razor. The simplest answer to all of this is that people don’t care about much beyond their own small, insular orbits.

It’s funny, I hear this all the time as a gentle rebuke to what environmentalists like me are doing.  I’m often told (to abbreviate the idea): “no one cares!”

I don’t dispute the basic point here.  In fact, I would say that it’s a statement of the precise challenge.  But please don’t think for a minute that it’s an insurmountable one.

In 1966, almost no one could point to Vietnam on a map.  Five years later, almost everyone had deep reservations (putting it mildly) about U.S. involvement there.  Obviously, this included essentially every college-age young person, but it grew quickly to include a skyrocketing number of middle-class, middle-aged Americans.  (Note the people in the picture above; the fellow in the foreground in particular doesn’t exactly look like a draft-card burning pot-smoker.)  In fact, historians tell us that this was the only reason we got out of there in 1973.

This is one of several precedents that show us something important:  given the right circumstances, the core pulse of the American people can change very quickly.  It’s the job of the admittedly few people who care about this now to tell the story such that it’s absorbed—just as quickly as anti-Vietnam sentiment was 45 years ago.  We just need to make it happen.