#Dignity, Desecration & Our Environment
What if fundamentally changing the way #environmentalists frame their thinking, talking and acting on “the environment” enabled conservative thinkers and activists (at least those not paid to be climate denialists), to help rescue #ourenvironment from #desecration by centering the billion+ children #UNICEF reports are today at deadly risk in the 33 most climate vulnerable countries due to the increasing frequency of formerly “once in a thousand year” floods, droughts, famines, wildfires and extreme weather — and what their fate means for their, and our, individual and collective #dignity?
In “Environment in the Balance; The Green Movement & The Supreme Court” 2010, professor Jonathan Cannon of UVA Law provides an insightful study of US Supreme Court jurispreduce on environmental matters. Cannon cites the organizing power of the 1978 study of sociologists Riley Dunlap and Kent Van Liere that found a recognizable set of assumptions about an ecological focused worldview had by 1978 coalesced into what they described as the “New Environmental Paradigm” (which they abbreviated as the “NEP”) and its was challenging the anthropocentric “Dominate Social Paradigm (which they abbreviated as “DSP”).
Jonathan Cannon asserted the NEP challenge to the DSP parrelled John Haidt’s (author “The Righteous Mind; Why Good People Are Divided by Politics & Religion” 2012) later work popularizing the notion of distinct conservative and liberal “moral foundations.” With conservatives demonstrably more concerned about “sanctity-degradation” framing that produced a “disgust” response to perceived violation of “purity” and the liberal “care-harm” framing with its cocern over an “eco crisis”. Regularly resulting in liberals more often perceiving environmental issues as “moral issues” than conservatives. Unless the environmental issues were framed in an athoroprocentric manner highlighting the impact on human beings and framed as a matter on the “sanctity-degradation” plane, then conservatives would see the pro-environmental issue as moral issues - ie as a moral need - as often as the liberals.
As UVA Law’s Jonathan Cannon noted, this was a finding supported by the work of Matthew Fienberg and Robb Willer in “The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes” published in 2013 in the journal of Psychological Science. Fienberg and Willler noted that they:
“ . . . found that reframing proenvironmental rhetoric in terms of purity, a moral value resonating primarily among conservatives, largely eliminated the difference between liberals' and conservatives' environmental attitudes (Study 3).”
For more on this possibility - see: