A pipeline of tweets: environmental movements’ use of Twitter in response to the Keystone XL pipeline

Social movements often amalgamate otherwise diffuse public political interests. In recent years, social media use has allowed both groups and individuals to engage with political issues both online and offline. How do organizations use Twitter to mobilize networked publics? To what extent do groups promote both ‘connective action’ online and traditional activism offline? How do their strategies differ according to whether they seek to promote or combat the status quo? And how do they balance encouraging and reinforcing individualized expression through group messaging? The ways pro-Keystone XL pipeline and anti-Keystone XL groups differed in their Keystone-related action on Twitter from January 2010 until October 2014 are analyzed. Boolean searching and Natural Language processing are used to analyze more than three million tweets. The results demonstrate that the frames within Twitter conversations have significant implications for how communities understand, develop, and mobilize around environmental issues.     

Beasts,Burgers, and Hummers: Meat and the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary Television Advertisements

This paper examines three recent television advertisements that symbolically link meat not only with masculinity, but specifically with the “crisis in masculinity.” Using an ecofeminist lens, I engage in an intersectional analysis of these advertisements to demonstrate how they articulate the eating of meat with primitive masculinities as a response to perceived threats to hegemonic masculinity. These advertisements demonstrate that scholars interested in the status of masculinity must pay attention to the “threats” to masculinity posed by environmental and animal rights movements, and that scholars interested in environmental movements must pay attention to the role of masculinity in resisting moves toward sustainability. This analysis demonstrates the utility of ecofeminism in understanding the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and environmentalism while also pointing to the need for ecofeminism to continue to explore the implications of intersectionality for ecofeminist theory and criticism.     

From Environmental Campaigns to Advancing the Public Dialog: Environmental Communication for Civic Engagement

This essay examines the claims of environmental identity campaigns regarding the issue of climate change. Identity campaigns are based on the idea that more effective environmental messages developed through the application of cognitive science by professional communications experts can favorably influence public opinion, and thus support legislative action to remedy this issue. Based on a review of the sociological and psychological literature regarding social change and mobilization, I argue that while this approach may offer short term advantages, it is most likely incapable of developing the large scale mobilization necessary to enact the massive social and economic changes necessary to address global warming. Specifically, theoretical and empirical research on the role of the public sphere, civil society and social movements shows that democratic civic engagement is core to successful social change efforts. However, identity campaigns focus on a communications process that centers on elite led one way communications, which falls to allow for any form of civic engagement and public dialogue. This undermines the creation of a democratic process of change and reinforces the professionalization of political discourse, leading to a weakening of the mobilization capacity over this issue of global warming. The essay concludes with the outlines of an environmental communication process that aims at enhancing civic engagement and democratic decision making.     

Climate Change Discourses and Citizen Participation: A Case Study of the Discursive Construction of Citizenship in Two Public Events

Citizen participation is a recurrent and democratically important issue in the ongoing debate about climate change. However, different meanings are ascribed to citizen participation in different contexts, ranging from top-down involvement to bottom-up engagement, thus creating tension between conflicting ideals. Focusing on public engagement and its construal in different situational contexts, we explore how citizens are discursively included or excluded from participation, as various climate change discourses unfold in two forums where local needs and global concerns interact. Furthermore, we address some opportunities and barriers regarding citizen participation in climate change issues.     

On the economics of energy labels in the housing market

Energy efficiency in the residential housing market can play an important role in the reduction of global carbon emissions. This paper reports the first evidence on the market adoption and economic implications of energy performance certificates implemented by the European Union. The results show that adoption rates are low and declining over time, coinciding with a negative sentiment regarding the label in the popular media. Labels are clustered among smaller, post-war homes in neighborhoods with more difficult selling conditions. We also document that geographic variation in the adoption rate of energy labels is positively related to the fraction of “green” voters during the 2006 national elections. Within the sample of labeled homes, the energy label creates transparency in the energy efficiency of dwellings. Our analysis shows that consumers capitalize this information into the price of their prospective homes.     

Personality and environmental concern

People vary considerably in their attitudes toward environmental issues. Although some individuals view the environment from a purely utilitarian perspective, others are concerned about environmental sustainability and maintaining an ecological balance. The current study examines the relationship between personality characteristics and environmental concern in a community sample of 2690 German adults. Structural equation modeling revealed that greater environmental concern was related to higher levels of Agreeableness and Openness, with smaller positive relationships emerging with Neuroticism and Conscientiousness.     

Hope in a hopeless age: environmentalism’s crisis

In this short essay it is argued that recent criticisms portraying the activist environmental movement as overly pessimistic are valid and that the communication of this pessimism to the public at large has been largely counterproductive to the objectives of environmentalists. It is argued that, in contrast to historic assumptions of a ‘progress paradigm’ that epitomized the widely held optimism of the past, the shock tactics and pessimistic media campaigns employed by the activist environmental movement, and the media that capitalizes upon those campaigns, have contributed to the creation of a figurative hopeless age. The key characterization of the hopeless age is the widely held assumption that the future will be worse than the present and that the lives of future generations will be diminished relative to our own. It is argued that the creation of this social-psychological phenomenon is counterproductive to the aims of the environmental movement and that the restoration of a collective vision and message of hope would be far more productive. Lastly, some reasons for a hopeful outlook are suggested.

Environmentalism and elitism: a conceptual and empirical analysis

The frequent charge that environmentalism is elitist is examined conceptually and empirically. First, the concept of elitism is analyzed by distinguishing between three types of accusations made against the environmental movement: (a)compositional elitism suggests that environmentalists are drawn from privileged socioeconomic strata, (b)ideological elitism suggests that environmental reforms are a subterfuge for distributing benefits to environmentalists and/or costs to others, and (c)impact elitism suggests that environmental reforms, whether intentionally or not, do in fact have regressive social impacts.The evidence bearing on each of the three types of elitism is examined in some detail, and the following conclusions are drawn: Compositional elitism is an exaggeration, for although environmentalists are typically above average in socioeconomic status (as are most sociopolitical activists), few belong to the upper class. Ideological elitism may hold in some instances, but environmentalists have shown increasing sensitivity to equity concerns and there is little evidence of consistent pursuit of self-interest. Impact elitism is the most important issue, and also the most difficult to assess. It appears that there has been a general tendency for environmental reforms to have regressive impacts. However, it is increasingly recognized that problems such as workplace pollution and toxic waste contamination disproportionately affect the lower socioeconomic strata, and thus reforms aimed at such problems will likely have more progressive impacts.This is Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station Journal article no. 11508.