Activity 4.2 Environmental Policy Frameworks
My Five-Point Environmental Policy Framework
Identity - How an individual’s beliefs about themselves influences decision making. “Who am I?”
Characterization - How people understand others… “Who are they?”
Demographic - The demographics of an affected population affect decision making.
Fact-finding - How technical information influences decision making.
Views of nature - How individuals perceive the effect of human activity on the environment.
The first frame I selected is Identity. A person’s identity can be deeply influenced, consciously and unconsciously, by factors such as where they live, what type of media they consume, their hobbies, their profession, etc., and all of those factors have a profound impact on a person’s decision making. For example, someone who lives in a rural area and has to go to great lengths just to meet their basic needs (like driving miles to the grocery store for flour or eggs) would likely have a much different attitude about grocery stores than someone who lives in the heart of a major metropolitan area that can get sushi and a macchiato at 2 AM if they wanted to. In this scenario, the former lives with scarcity of resources, whereas the latter has an abundance of resources. At face value, you could assert that the city dweller overall is likely less concerned with conserving resources than the rural person.
The second frame I want to highlight is Characterization. People have the tendency to characterize others that are not within their social circle and use that characterization for their own belief system, whether good or bad. Since the invention of social media, it seems this has become infinitely more pronounced; it is virtually impossible to escape the constant onslaught of opinions on social and other forms of media now that literally anyone can use these platforms to share their opinions across the globe in real time. No matter what your worldview is, you are guaranteed to be able to find an echochamber on the internet that allows you to double down on your opinions rather than face anything that challenges them which can exacerbate “us vs. them” thinking. Characterization isn’t bad on its own, but can be abused in this way, and it’s important to recognize when it is affecting decision making.
The third frame I selected is Demographics. This goes hand-in-hand with Identity, but is a little more clinical. Demographics look at the statistics of a person or group of people rather than individual characteristics, such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, etc. It’s crucial to consider the demographics of an affected population when making a decision because although they may be in the same geographic area, they could have totally different priorities. For example, a 20 year old single male resident of a city might not have very strong opinions on what playground equipment the city is going to install at the local park, but a 38 year old mother of three school aged kids would.
The fourth frame, Fact-finding, is a messy one. This frame is concerned with the use and interpretation of technical information. Technical information can be used for or against any given issue, but it can also be misinterpreted, skewed, and abused. In recent years it has become more common to dispute facts or rely on “alternative facts” if the actual facts do not align with your worldview due to rampant misinformation on the internet. To further complicate the issue, technical information is presented to - and frequently by - non-experts who don’t have the background or meaningful context with which to interpret the information. The internet contains millions of hours of videos featuring non-experts giving very strong opinions about issues they only have bits and pieces of information about which then influences the opinions of other non-experts causing a lot of damage.
The final frame I selected is Views of nature. This is one that I think is closely related to Identity. We’ve all heard terms like “outdoorsy” or “city slicker” and (participating in characterization myself for a moment) people who are - very generally speaking - described by either of those terms tend to show the amount of value they place in nature based on their choice of residency. Paradoxically though, in my experience, rural areas generally consist of more conservative leaning people who historically are less concerned with environmental issues and tend to try to minimize the discussion around the human impact on the environment. I think this is partly because rural areas have fewer resources so the residents of these areas are more economically driven, and being exposed to nature every day can in some ways make it feel as if there is an abundance of natural resources and there is no threat to them.
Works cited
Bryan, T. (2003). Context in environmental conflicts: Where you stand depends on where you sit. Environmental Practice, 5(3), 256-264.
Davis, C. B., & Lewicki, R. J. (2003). Environmental conflict resolution: Framing and intractability--an introduction. Environmental Practice, 5(3), 200-206.
Environmental Framing Consortium. (2005). Framing choices. Understanding Environmental Problems. Retrieved from http://www.intractableconflict.org/environmentalframing/framing_choices.shtml
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