|
Items in cart [0] |
Questions? Call 888-624-8373 |
PAPERBACK + PDF PAPERBACK PDF BOOK PDF CHAPTERS Free Resources |
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2009. National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. Terms of Use and Privacy Statement |
Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 124
5
Strategies for Setting Research Priorities
Paul C. Stern, Thomas Dietz, Vernon W. Ruttan
Robert H. Socolow, and fames L. Sweeney
The topic "environmental impacts of consumption" suggests a great
variety of possible research directions, a few of which are illustrated in
Chapters 3 and 4. Because of this variety and the persistent confusion
about definitions of consumption (see Chapter 2), it is useful to apply an
importance criterion in considering priorities for research on consump-
tion. The highest-priority research questions should be those that con-
cern aspects of consumption with major environmental effects.
This chapter discusses three strategies for setting research priorities
so as to direct attention to the most important links between consumption
and the environment that is, to the factors that account for the kinds of
consumption that have major deleterious effects on the environment or
that may have such effects in the future. It focuses especially on a re-
search strategy that first considers the major environmental effects of
consumption and then reasons from environmental effects to human
causes. It also discusses two other strategies: one that proceeds from
human causes to their environmental effects, and one that begins with
possible policy interventions and considers their effects.
ENVIRONMENT-FIRST STRATEGY FOR SETTING
RESEARCH PRIORITIES
Human activities that directly perturb key properties of the biophysi-
cal environment are important research topics under an importance crite-
rion. Such activities have been referred to as proximate causes of environ
124
OCR for page 125
STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
Sources of Change
Within and Between
Environmental Systems
Environmental
Sv~nm~
Human Proximate
Causes
~ ~: .
125
a.....
_ at'
Proximate Effects
on What
Humans Value
Human
Systems
I ..
Sources of Change
Within and Between
Human Systems
FIGURE 5-1 Interactions between human and environmental systems. SOURCE:
National Research Council (1992~.
mental change (see Figure 5-1), to distinguish them from other activities,
called driving forces, that have environmental effects only through their
influence on proximate causes (National Research Council, 1992~. Hu-
man beings proximately cause environmental change when they burn
fuel and thus release combustion products into the atmosphere; when
they irrigate land with river water, changing the composition of the water
and the height of the water table; when they cut trees or otherwise alter
land cover and the habitats of biota; and in countless other ways. The
immediate purposes for which they do these things (travel, crop produc-
tion, construction, etc.) and the deeper reasons behind those purposes
(subsistence, financial gain, self-expression, status seeking, etc.) cause
environmental change only indirectly.
This line of thinking, from environmental effects to proximate causes
to driving forces, suggests a promising and systematic strategy for select
OCR for page 126
26
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
ing research that is likely to have relatively large practical importance.
The strategy begins by identifying the proximate causes of an environ-
mental condition of concern (the human activities that have the greatest
direct effect on it) and then addresses, in a more or less logical order, the
following questions: Which actors are responsible for these activities?
What driving forces govern their behavior and how do these forces affect
each other? What are the trends in these activities and their driving forces
over time? How might the activities be changed, if change is desired?
The strategy has been described in detail in previous work on the causes
of global environmental change (National Research Council, 1992) and is
summarized here as it applies to questions of consumption.
Identifying Proximate Causes of Environmental Change
A logical first step in employing this strategy is to identify important
environmental properties that human activity may be changing. For ex-
ample, for climate change, the key environmental properties are atmo-
spheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and
the albedo of the earth. Information on such properties comes from re-
search in the relevant natural sciences, which helps set the agenda for
research on human activity by directing attention to those human activi-
ties that directly affect the important environmental systems.
The proximate causes of changes in greenhouse gas concentrations
are known to a good first approximation. The most important single one
by far is the burning of fossil fuels which, by releasing carbon dioxide and
methane, is currently responsible for about half of all anthropogenic
greenhouse gas emissions. Other important proximate causes include
cattle raising, certain land use changes, such as clearing forests and creat-
ing or eliminating wetlands, and the various activities that release chlo-
rofluorocarbons. (Some land use changes also affect global climate by
altering the earth's albedo.) The uncertainties in estimates of the impor-
tance of each of these causes can be reduced by further research on the
relevant biophysical processes. Nevertheless, the broad picture can be
summarized well enough for the purposes of setting initial priorities for
research on human activities. The summary is graphically represented in
Figure 5-2, which presents the proximate causes as the limbs of a tree,
with their thicknesses indicating their relative contributions to climate
change induced by greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions
provide a good illustration of the strategy of reasoning backward from
environmental conditions to their causes.
For many other major environmental changes, the relative impor-
tance of various human activities as proximate causes is not as well un-
derstood. For example, the proximate causes of species extinctions in
OCR for page 127
STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
127
Fossil Fuel )
.46 \\
Landfills
Other
.06
FIGURE 5-2 A representation of the relative contributions of human activities in
the late 1980s to global emissions of greenhouse gases. NOTE: CFC = chloro-
fluorocarbon. SOURCE: National Research Council (1992~.
etude a variety of human activities that directly reduce habitat for endan-
gered species. Many scientists believe that clearing of moist tropical for-
ests is the leading cause of species extinction because of the extent of
deforestation and because that blame is home to the greatest number of
species found nowhere else. But the global rate and distribution of extinc-
tions are still highly uncertain, as is the relative importance of different
kinds of land use changes. Still, the analytical strategy of reasoning back
from environmental effects to proximate causes remains viable. It will be
necessary to revise the research agenda, of course, as knowledge im-
proves about precisely which human activities are the major proximate
causes of particular environmental effects.
Estimating the magnitude of the main proximate causes may require
OCR for page 128
28
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
difficult conceptual, analytical, or empirical work. To estimate strato-
spheric ozone depletion, we need information on the ozone-depleting
potential of a fairly large number of chemical compounds and their by-
products over periods of time, as well as their rates of release. The most
important proximate causes are identified by conducting detailed calcula-
tions: they are those activities that directly result in releases with the
greatest total ozone-depleting potential for a time horizon of concern.
Analysis of the proximate causes of loss of biodiversity is much more
difficult. It requires developing acceptable definitions and measures of
biodiversity (e.g., should it be defined only as extinctions of species or
also in other ways, such as loss of ecological niches or of genetic diversity
within species; if the other concepts are important, how can they be mea-
sured?~. This analysis also requires studies of the effects of particular
kinds of human activities on each index of biodiversity. Classifying hu-
man activities for this purpose is not straightforward. For example, land
use conversion does not have a unitary effect on biodiversity. Its impact
depends on the ecosystem in which the land is converted, the new uses to
which it is put, and also on such factors as the size, shape, and geographic
relationships among unchanged parcels and those that are put to new
uses. Because of such complexities, it may be misleading or inappropriate
to measure threats to biodiversity in terms of a hypothetical average hect-
are of land conversion.
Determining which human activities have major proximate effects on
environmental systems can point social and behavioral researchers to the
broad types of activity that are likely to be most important in terms of a
particular environmental change. For example, once the ozone-depleting
potentials and the rates of emission of the various ozone-depleting com-
pounds were calculated, it became possible to calculate the overall impact
of each gas on ozone depletion, to consider the human activities that
release each gas, and thus to identify the most ozone-depleting activities.
This kind of analysis is important for choosing which kinds of consump-
tion to study. Without this sort of analysis, behavioral researchers have
often expended their efforts on studying human activities that are plausi-
bly environmentally relevant and that they could easily address with
concepts from their disciplines, but that did not contribute greatly to the
environmental problem at hand (Stern and Oskamp, 1987~.
An alternative procedure for identifying important proximate causes
of environmental change is to focus first on major materials and energy
transformations and to estimate the environmental impacts of each. This
is the approach used by Wernick and Allen in their contributions to Chap-
ter 3. This approach is useful for studying the human causes of environ-
mental conditions that have been linked to particular transformations of
materials or energy. For example, Allen's approach can, in principle, be
OCR for page 129
STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
129
used to examine any environmental effect that has been attributed to a
class of chemical compounds by analyzing flows of the particular com-
pounds most strongly implicated in producing the effect. The difficulty
in practice is to identify all the compounds with important direct or indi-
rect effects. Analysis of the human activities that result in production of
the responsible chemicals may then identify the most important targets
for reducing the environmental effect. For ecological affects, such analy-
sis may need to look not just at the actions that introduce a chemical into
the biosphere but more specifically at the actions that introduce it in
bioavailable forms. For example, most of the lead that human activity in
the United States introduces into the environment is contained in motor
vehicle batteries, and the great majority of this is repeatedly recycled. The
far smaller amounts of lead in paint, gasoline, and shot have had more
serious impacts because of their bioavailability.
Disaggregating the Proximate Causes
When important proximate causes have been identified, the next ana-
lytic step is to disaggregate them to reflect the relative contribution of the
many actors and activities that are responsible. There may be many sen-
sible ways to disaggregate a particular proximate cause. Fossil fuel burn-
ing can be subdivided according to parts of the world (countries or re-
gions), economic sectors (transportation, industrial, commercial, etc.),
immediate purposes (space heating, moving people or freight, generating
electricity, etc.), types of actor (households, firms, government), or in other
ways, depending on the analytic purpose. For important proximate
causes, it may be useful to disaggregate in more than one way, creating
categories that involve several types of division (e.g., transportation to
work, commercial lighting). An impact criterion can help guide decisions
about how far to disaggregate. That is, it makes sense to use finer divi-
sions for types of actions or actors associated with major environmental
impacts. It follows that the appropriate disaggregation will depend on
the society being examined.
Disaggregation can be represented in a tree diagram, as Figure 5-2
shows for greenhouse gas emissions, or in a table. Table 5-1 disaggre-
gates carbon dioxide emissions in the United States by economic sector
and purpose within each sector. It shows why, from the standpoint of
climate change, much more analytic attention is warranted for under-
standing the purchase and use of automobiles and light trucks (i.e., per-
sonal transportation) than for understanding the purchase and use of
water heating systems for buildings.
It can be useful to disaggregate certain activities even further than
shown in the table, as a way to direct researchers' attention. For example,
OCR for page 130
130
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
TABLE 5-1 Disaggregation of Carbon Dioxide Emissions by Economic
Sector and End Use (percentages, United States, 1987)
Economic Sector (%)
End Use Industrial Buildings TransportationTotal (%)
Steam power, motors,
appliances 19 7 26
Personal transportation
(automobiles, light
trucks) 2020
Space heating 1a 16 17
Freight transport
(heavy truck, rail, ship,
other) 77
Heating for industrial
processes 6 6
Lighting 1a 5 6
Cooling oa 5 5
Air transporting 55
Water heating 3 3
Other 5 5
Total 32 36 32100
NOTE: U.S. data are unrepresentative of world energy use in various ways. However, the
United States is responsible for approximately 20 percent of global CO2 emissions.
aTwo percent in the single category of heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and lighting
was allocated 1 percent each to heating and lighting.
SOURCE: National Research Council (1992~.
psychological research on energy use in the late 1970s was mainly ad-
dressed to the study of daily behavior in residences, such as turning off
lights in unoccupied rooms and altering thermostat settings to save on
heating and cooling. An analysis that disaggregated residential energy
use according to the energy-saving potential of different household ac-
tivities showed, however, that infrequent purchase decisions, such as of
insulation, furnaces, and major appliances, had significantly greater in-
fluence on household energy use than the parallel daily behaviors involv-
ing thermostats and appliance use (Stern and Gardner, 1981~. The analy-
sis directed behavioral scientists toward the study of a major class of
environmentally significant household behavior.
Research to disaggregate the proximate causes has proceeded farthest
in the area of energy consumption (the contribution of Schipper in Chap-
ter 3 illustrates some of what can be learned). The strategy of disaggrega-
tion can also be applied to other environmentally significant consump
OCR for page 131
STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
131
lion. For instance, in the study of ozone depletion, the use of a particular
ozone-depleting gas, such as the chlorofluorocarbon CFC-12, can be dis-
aggregated to reflect its major uses in aerosols, refrigerants, and foams, as
well as across countries. If releases of all the ozone-depleting gases were
disaggregated in the same way, it would be possible to determine the
proportion of total ozone-depleting potential attributable to particular
activities such as refrigeration.
Identifying and Analyzing the Driving Forces
The next analytic step is to examine the major classes of environmen-
tally significant action to identify their driving forces. This kind of work
is part of the normal province of social and behavioral science, as its aim
is to understand the causes of human activity (in this instance, activities
that proximately change the environment). These driving forces may be
of many types, the main classes of which are human population growth,
levels of economic activity, technologies used in actions that affect the
environment, political and economic institutions affecting action, and in-
dividuals' attitudes and beliefs (National Research Council, 1992~. In
Chapter 4, Dietz and Rosa examine the first two of these and suggest that
the study of what these do not explain may reveal the roles of the other
driving forces.
Understanding the driving forces of an environmentally important
activity usually presents serious analytical challenges. One reason, as
noted in Chapter 1, is that the driving forces act together, often in nonad-
ditive and nonlinear ways. They can affect the proximate causes of envi-
ronmental change directly and also indirectly by acting on other driving
forces. For example, when new chlorofluorocarbon-based technology
made air conditioning practical for small commercial and residential uses
after 1930, the technological advance set numerous social processes in
motion, including large-scale population migrations to hotter climates in
the United States, which led to increased use of air conditioning in homes
far beyond what would have occurred without the migration. In this
way, migration multiplied the effect of technology. In addition, the mi-
gration increased fossil fuel consumption for transportation, as the new
settlements were less dense geographically than the ones from which
people migrated and therefore increased the demand for motorized travel
while making mass transit less feasible economically. The migration also
shifted the balance of representation in the U.S. Congress in favor of
regions more dependent on air conditioning and automobiles, a change
that may have made it more difficult to get political support for policies to
increase the cost of energy consumption (see National Research Council,
1992:54-60~. Thus, the environmental effect of technology was both direct
OCR for page 132
32
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
and indirect through such variables as population change and policy.
This example illustrates how the driving forces can influence each other:
any single factor that seems to explain anthropogenic environmental
change is likely to be affected by various other driving forces as well. This
is one reason it is difficult to disentangle the causation of environmentally
significant consumption.
A second analytic difficulty is that the forces that drive environmen-
tal change also respond dynamically to that change. For instance, intensi-
fied agricultural production can increase soil erosion or pest infestations,
which reduce agricultural productivity until effective changes are made
in managing the environmental changes that the agricultural practices
created.
A third difficulty is that the relationships among the driving forces
generally vary between places and over time. Deforestation has had a
different collection of causes in different countries and at different times
(Williams, 1990~. The long-term environmental effects of a technological
development can be very different from the short-term effects. The use of
chlorofluorocarbons for refrigeration, for example, was an environmental
and public health benefit at first because it replaced ammonia and other
toxic or explosive refrigerants. The negative effect on stratospheric ozone
became detectable only over a longer time scale and after the level of use
had greatly increased.
Although the task of untangling the causality of social phenomena
such as those of consumption is difficult, it is a familiar one to social
scientists. Experience suggests that the relative importance of the driving
forces is likely to be quite situation-specific, even for relatively well-un-
derstood activities like those involved in fossil energy use within a single
sector of a single economy. For example, the factors determining invest-
ment in energy-efficient technologies for the U.S. residential sector are
different for occupant-owned and rental housing, for lower- and upper-
income households, and probably also for investments in wall insulation
and in energy-efficient appliances (e.g., Socolow, 1978; Ruderman et al.,
1987; Stern et al., 1986~. Research that begins by building relatively nar-
row areas of knowledge about particular temporal and spatial scales is a
first step toward developing a body of contingent generalizations that can
make sense of broader bodies of data.
ENVIRONMENT-FIRST STRATEGY
AND OTHER APPROACHES
The above discussion and several of the contributions to Chapters 3
and 4 illustrate the value of an environment-first strategy for directing
research. Because this strategy begins with important environmental
OCR for page 133
STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
133
changes and only later ventures into the social phenomena that may pro-
vide deeper explanations, following it has a high probability of yielding
results that meet a criterion of environmental importance. The environ-
ment-first strategy is also valuable because it can help direct social scien-
tists' attention toward human activities and choices that, from an envi-
ronmental standpoint, are particularly important to understand. As the
contributions to Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate, there are two variants of this
strategy. One works backward from transformations of materials and
energy to their proximate causes in human activity and then to their
driving forces. Wernick's analysis (Chapter 3) of materials transforma-
tions exemplifies this approach. The other begins with human activities,
assesses their importance for particular environmental conditions, and if
the activities are sufficiently important environmentally, proceeds to
analysis of the proximate causes. The work of Schipper (Chapter 3) on
travel and Lutzenhiser (Chapter 4) on home energy use are examples.
Despite the strengths of the environment-first research strategy, other
research strategies should also be pursued because they may be able to
develop environmentally important knowledge that is not likely to
emerge from environment-first research. One useful strategy is to begin
with possible policy interventions. This strategy is exemplified by re-
search on the effectiveness of price signals, information, and regulatory
constraints for reducing consumer demand for environmentally damag-
ing goods and services or for changing producers' behavior so as to re-
duce the environmental impact per unit of output. This strategy can have
great practical value: for policy purposes, importance is not determined
by which human activities do the most environmental damage but by the
ones that can yield the greatest environmental improvement in response
to practicable interventions. Research on intervention techniques helps
determine what is practicable and cost-effective, identifies the possible
secondary effects of interventions and the tradeoffs involved, and con-
tributes to general knowledge about how environmentally significant
human activities change. Because this strategy is most often employed to
evaluate ways to change consumption, most of its applications are out-
side the scope of this volume, and therefore no examples are included.
Another alternative to looking at environment first, and one that is
particularly relevant to the question of what drives environmentally im-
portant consumption, is to focus first on social processes and then exam-
ine their environmental effects. In Chapter 4, the reports by Wilk and by
Kempton and Payne are examples. Wilk asks whether emulation of West-
ern styles of consumption drives the styles adopted by people in develop-
ing countries. Although the evidence so far is inconclusive, the question
is environmentally important. Kempton and Payne consider the impacts
of grand transformations in human history both on the environment and
OCR for page 134
34
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
on the quality of human life. In doing this, they raise the question of what
might be accomplished by future major social transformations.
There are, of course, innumerable social processes that could be ex-
amined for their environmental impacts. The social-process-first research
strategy deserves special attention because it is the typical approach so-
cial scientists take when they begin to work on environmental problems.
Social researchers are likely first to try to understand anthropogenic envi-
ronmental changes as resulting from the social processes they understand
best. As the above examples suggest, this approach can identify some
potentially important driving forces of environmental change that the
environment-first strategy would be unlikely to uncover. However, the
results from research following this strategy should be carefully judged
against a criterion of environmental importance.
Experience suggests that although the society-first research strategy
can yield fresh insights, it is also likely to produce many findings of
limited or uncertain environmental importance. One reason is that the
environmental importance of a social phenomenon such as emulation,
international trade, economic inequality, or slow transformations of basic
social values cannot be estimated until careful analysis has been done.
This analysis requires a long time series of multiple variables starting in
the past and is likely to reveal that some of the driving forces have only
limited environmental effects. Another reason is that it is difficult to
evaluate the environmental significance of a single driving force indepen-
dently of other driving forces. Because of the interactions of the driving
forces and their interplay over time, it is inherently difficult to demon-
strate the environmental importance of any indirect cause of environmen-
tal change, particularly one acting over long time periods.
Generally, it is easier to defend importance claims for driving forces
that are linked to environmental effects by relatively short causal chains.
For example, Schipper and his colleagues (1989) have argued that in-
creases in female labor force participation in affluent countries increase
fossil-energy consumption because they increase the proportion of women
holding drivers' licenses, the number of automobiles owned per capita,
and the distance traveled. He links changes in household size to residen-
tial energy consumption through number of households and per capita
volume of heated and cooled residential space. These are strongly plau-
sible claims, but even these require careful analysis to support them. For
example, the increased energy demand caused by the need to heat or cool
more space is offset (though only to a small extent) by savings resulting
from the space being unoccupied during working hours.
Other claims about driving forces involve longer and more debatable
causal chains. For instance, it has been claimed that increasing adoption
of so-called postmaterialist values (Inglehart, 1990) and proenvironmental
OCR for page 135
STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
135
worldviews (e.g., Dunlap and Scarce, 1991; Milbrath, 1984) are affecting
and will continue to affect human activity in proenvironmental ways.
This hypothesis depends on psychological links from values or world-
views to attitudes and from attitudes to behavior, as well as on the pre-
sumption that the specific behaviors that may flow from changed values
or worldviews will significantly alter the proximate causes of environ-
mental change. Each such link needs to be established to support the
hypothesis of environmental importance; the evidence so far suggests
that these relationships do exist, but that each of the links is loose (Gardner
and Stern, 1996~.
Still longer chains of causation are implicit in hypotheses about the
environmental importance of various global social changes, such as the
globalization of mass media (see Wilk's report in Chapter 4), increasing
worldwide urbanization, the emergence of global markets and global
communications, democratization, and the resurgence of expressions of
cultural identity (see National Research Council, 1992:156-160~. Some of
these broad social changes may indeed be critically important to long-
term environmental trends, but it is difficult to evaluate claims about
their importance because the lines of causation are so indirect and, in
many cases, because of the long time lags hypothesized between causes
and effects. The first step in evaluating the environmental relevance of
research into such claims is to make explicit the causal links and the
proximate causes that the social process is hypothesized to influence.
That done, it is useful to assess the plausibility and evidential base for
each link. For example, the emulation of U.S. consumption patterns in
developing countries that Wilk discusses, even if actually occurring, is
environmentally important only to the extent that particular kinds of con-
sumption that are environmentally destructive (e.g., home air condition-
ing) are copied.
The environment-first research strategy may converge with the soci-
ety-first strategy, and such convergence is usually a sign of research
progress. For example, Lutzenhiser's data on energy use identify accul-
turation of immigrants as a factor that affects energy use in a consistent
way, even controlling for other factors. This finding suggests a way of
improving energy-demand modeling by taking the effects of international
migration into account. Similarly, Schipper's findings on female labor
force participation and household size suggest some refinements in en-
ergy models. Lutzenhiser also finds racial and ethnic differences in con-
sumption, other factors held constant. This finding suggests that a closer
look at racial and ethnic subcultures of consumption might increase un-
derstanding of the ways attitudes, beliefs, and patterns of living affect the
links between affluence and environmental outcomes.
OCR for page 136
136
ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION
CONCLUSIONS
Research on the environmental impacts of consumption should in-
clude a mixture of investigations using environment-first, policy-oriented,
and society-first approaches. Because it is anchored to environmental
outcome variables of obvious importance, the environment-first strategy
is likely to lead to cumulative research that will, over time, continually
refine knowledge about the causes of significant anthropogenic environ-
mental changes. This strategy will also increasingly clarify the human
choices, actions, and actors that provide important targets for policy in-
tervention, and it will improve the ability of analysts to make projections
of anthropogenic inputs into biophysical systems.
The policy-oriented strategy is likely to result in a different sort of
cumulative knowledge, leading to increased understanding of the poten-
tial for shaping the forces that drive environmental change. It will im-
prove understanding of the conditions under which various kinds and
combinations of policy interventions are effective and the extent to which
an intervention that works with one kind of behavior or in one social
context may be transferable elsewhere. In addition, it is likely to increase
basic knowledge about change in individuals and social systems and thus
contribute to social science generally as well as to policy analysis.
The society-first strategy is much less likely to generate cumulative
research on environmental conditions, but it has compensating advan-
tages. It will occasionally reveal unsuspected but important anthropo-
genic influences on the environment, especially indirect and long-term
ones. Emulation may turn out to be such an influence. Another may be
an apparent trend in some wealthy countries toward occupying leisure
time by shopping. Yet another, with the potential to alter the environ-
mental impact of human activity, is a trend in the United States for the
management of local resources such a parklands and riverbanks to de-
volve from centralized institutions to local ones a change that may shift
management priorities.
Identifying such indirect or unsuspected influences on environmen-
tal quality may help researchers who are following the environment-first
strategy to reconsider and improve their conceptual models. Society-first
research may also identify possibilities for interventions that long-range
planners can use and that may be more socially acceptable than short-
term interventions that appear to some people as drastic action to avert a
projected emergency that they doubt will ever arise. Changes in the rules
governing resource-management institutions could be such an example.
The society-first approach is also likely to lead to insights of great
value for constructing scenarios and projections of future human-envi-
ronment interactions. In addition, it may help interest more social scien
OCR for page 137
STRATEGIES FOR SETTING RESEARCH PRIORITIES
137
fists in environmental issues by showing them clear connections between
their normal research concerns and an important public policy issue. In-
volvement by a greater variety of social scientists and collaboration with
natural scientists can not only improve research on environment and con-
sumption but also enrich the social science disciplines by bringing them
into contact with new sets of phenomena.
REFERENCES
Dunlap, R.E., and R. Scarce
1991 The polls/poll trends: Environmental problems and protection. Public Opinion
Quarterly 55:713-734.
Gardner, G.T., and P.C. Stern
1996 Environmental Problems and Human Behavior. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn
and Bacon.
Inglehart, R.
lsso Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
Milbrath, L.
1984 Environmentalists: Vanguard for a New Society. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
National Research Council
1992 Global Environmental Change: Understanding the Human Dimensions. P.C. Stern,
O.R. Young, and D. Druckman, eds. Committee on the Human Dimensions of
Global Change. Washington: National Academy Press.
Ruderman, H., M.D. Levine, and J.E. McMahon
1987 The behavior of the market for energy efficiency in residential appliances includ-
ing heating and cooling equipment. The Energy Journal 8:101-124.
Schipper, L., S. Bartlett, D. Hawk, and E. Vine
1989 Linking life-styles and energy use: A matter of time? Annual Review of Energy
14:273-320.
Socolow, R.H.
1978 The Twin Rivers program on energy conservation in housing: Highlights and
conclusions. Energy and Buildings 1:313-324.
Stern, P.C., E. Aronson, J.M. Darley, D.H. Hill, E. Hirst, W. Kempton, and T.J. Wilbanks
1986 The effectiveness of incentives for residential energy conservation. Evaluation
Review 10:147-176.
Stern, P.C., and G.T. Gardner
1981 Psychological research and energy policy. American Psychologist 36:329-342.
Stern, P.C., and S. Oskamp
1987 Managing scarce environmental resources. Pp. 1043-1088 in I. Altman and D.
Stokols, eds., Handbook of Environmental Psychology. New York: Wiley-
Interscience.
Williams, M.
1990 Forests. Pp. 179-201 in B.L. Turner II, W.C. Clark, R.W. Kales, J.F. Richards, J.T.
Mathers, and W.B. Meyer, eds., The Earth as Transformed by Human Action. Cam-
bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
driving forces
