Contemporary popular and scholarly environmental thought involves many shades of green. Yet the taxonomies we have inherited from classic environmental thought are quite limited, in part because th…
Source: Environmental Typologies*
One month ago I launched a new website called EcoTypes…and you haven’t heard from me since! It’s been a rich month adding content to the site. I’ll publish excerpts here in upcoming weeks, as much of the content is password restricted: if interested, go ahead and take the EcoTypes survey, then you’ll get both a personalized report and a password to view other pages on the site. (You don’t have to be a college student to take the survey!…that’s just our primary audience.)
The excerpt for today was written by me, with contributions from Jenn Bernstein, my EcoTypes collaborator. This typologies page provides a quick review of the ways scholars have measured environmental attitudes among people—but its unabashed intent is to provide a rationale for EcoTypes. We wanted to move beyond the simple, green-vs-brown notions that too often are found in environmental typologies, as theory and empirical evidence suggest that there are many ways of caring for the nonhuman world. Some may look “environmentalist,” while others may not, but all need to be a part of the conversation as we collectively discuss and debate our place on Earth. Okay, here’s that excerpt!:
Contemporary popular and scholarly environmental thought involves many shades of green. Yet the taxonomies we have inherited from classic environmental thought are quite limited, in part because theirs was a Crayola box limited to two colors: green vs. brown. We need a more diverse and rigorously grounded space in which to explore our environmental ideas; this is the typological imperative of EcoTypes.…
In spite of its theoretical shortcomings, the two-box assumption behind the NEP taxonomy persists in popular thought: look at the preponderance of eco-, green, earth-friendly, natural, sustainable, and other marketing modifiers suggesting that the only choice is to support the environmental alternative—not which environmental alternative to support. Even when shades of green arose in classic environmentalism, they were typically pejorative binaries, such as radical vs. reformist or anthropocentric vs. biocentric approaches (e.g., Naess 1973).
More recent approaches, thankfully, have expanded these shades of green, but they have limitations. Nadasdy’s spectrum of environmentalism (2005) simply includes “brown,” “light green,” and “dark green” alternatives. Steffen (2009) added one (“bright green”), but his typology is more of a thought exercise than an empirically validated schema. Dryzek (2013) suggested, again without extensive empirical validation, a two-dimensional typology of four basic approaches, differentiated by “prosaic vs. imaginative” and “reformist vs. radical” axes.…
Single binaries appear to be overly simplified ways to situate the contemporary spectrum of environmental thought; yet binaries offer both conceptually clear distinction and possibilities for empirical validation. Multiple sets of binaries, then, may preserve their strengths while defining a higher-dimensioned space in which to situate contemporary environmental approaches. This is what we do here via EcoTypes axes.
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